From the past week

I've been in and out of town recently, and that's likely to continue for a bit. Blogging's going to run hot and cold for a while.

* "The real scandal of the Downing Street Memos," writes Thom Hartmann, "with the greatest potential to leave the Bush presidency in permanent disgrace, is their implication that lies may have been put forward to help Bush, Republicans, and Blair politically. If Bush lied to gain and keep political power, precedent suggests he and his collaborators in the administration may even be vulnerable to impeachment." See also: Mark Danner and Tom Engelhardt on "Why the Memo Matters."

* If you missed the Conyers hearing on the DSMs, you can watch it here. The gathering on Capitol Hill triggered some unbelievably snide remarks from Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, too.

* Partly in response to the Post's reaction to the DSM, David Swanson asks, "Remember When Bush's Lies Weren't 'Old News'?"

* After reading a recent Lexington Herald-Leader profile of Gold Star Families for Peace's Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in the Iraq war, Ned Stafford wonders, "Would these honest, hard-hitting words appear in one of the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or USA Today?"

* "The gap between tactical victories on the one hand, and few tangible improvements in the overall Iraqi security situation on the other, is creating a widening disagreement over whether the US is winning or losing the war in Iraq," reports the CS Monitor's Dan Murphy, bringing back memories of Vietnam.

* Confirming yet again that Iraq has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, the NY Times' Douglas Jehl reports, "A new, classified assessment by the CIA says that Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it provides a new laboratory for militants to hone their skills in urban combat."

* House Republicans Walter Jones (NC) and Ron Paul (TX) have teamed up with Democrats Dennis Kucinich (OH) and Neil Abercrombie (HI) on legislation that would require the US to begin withdrawals from Iraq by October 2006. Jones' involvement in this is somewhat remarkable. Justin Raimondo profiles the Congressman best known for leading the "Freedom Fries" brigade and Tom Engelhardt has more on the withdrawal meme that is popping its head up in political discussions, ever so slowly.

* Is the US military covering up the deaths of thousands of troops who served in Iraq? Michael Ewens takes a look.

* The London Times' Michael Smith has led the way with coverage of the Downing Street Memo. He sat down for a revealing online chat on the Washington Post's website last week. Worth reading.

* Smith has again been leaked notes about the prewar bombing of Iraq, which the British legal office acknowledged was "illegal."

* Pointing to the recent Jeremy Scahill piece on the prewar bombing, Paul Rogat Loeb notes that while the Downing Street Memo has started to receive mainstream attention, "we've heard almost nothing about the degree to which this administration began actively fighting the Iraq war well in advance of the March 2003 official attack -- before both the October 2002 US Congressional authorization and the November United Nations resolution requiring that Saddam Hussein open the country up to inspectors."

* Just as the Iraq war did not initiate in March 2003, Scott Ritter argues, "history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran."

* Jim Lobe describes the preemptive strike on the Iranian elections; Norman Solomon opines that even while "some Americans are exposing the deception for the latest war," the warmongers are laying the "groundwork for the next one" in Iran; and Roger Howard has a novel idea: "leave Iranian politics to the Iranians."

* The son of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, whose assassination touched off the wave of protests in Beirut a few months ago, has emerged victorious in Lebanon's contentious elections.

* The US has started rapping Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov on the knuckles for obstructing the probe into the killings in Andizhan on May 13. It's unclear whether or not this was because or in spite of the recent restrictions Uzbekistan placed on US access to its K-2 military base.

* Bolivia's new president has sworn in a new cabinet and is promising to prep the country for future elections in a move to satiate some of the demands of the protesters. In a related piece for The Nation, Christian Parenti tells the back story about the uprisings in the South American country.

* A new Christian Aid survey suggests that "Africa is a massive $272 billion worse off as a result of ‘free’ trade policies forced on the continent as a condition for receiving aid and debt relief" over the past 20 years.

* Recalling some of the issues raised in his July 2004 NYRB essay, Anthony Lewis observes in the NY Times, "We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy." Plus: American Leftist asks, Is another shoe about to drop?

* Dave Neiwert notes more eliminationist rhetoric emanating from the right-wing echo chambers over undue references (in their minds) to any misdeeds by the good ol' US of A.

* Matthew Clark: "If we know where bin Laden is, why don't we get him?"

* "A Senate panel is probing allegations that FBI agents in Saudi Arabia sat on leads in the Sept. 11 investigation and then destroyed piles of secret documents related to the case," reports the NY Daily News. Sibel Edmonds also rewinds the clock to other "missed opportunities."

* The House of Representatives trimmed back some of the PATRIOT Act provisions relating to library and bookstore snooping, according to the Washington Post.

* CNet News reports, "The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities."

* While the Bush administration goes out of its way to scuttle plans to address global warming, Henry Porter writes in the Guardian, "The great lie in the climate debate is that there is still a debate worth having. Opponents of change insist that the human factors in global warming are not proven and that we must wait until we have hard evidence before taking drastic action, which is as about as silly as saying there are two equally valid views on the issue of whether paedophilia damages children."

* The Free Press group is excerpting the introduction to its new book, Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Check it out.

* Rehashing some of Robert Higgs' calculations, Jurgen Brauer and Nicholas Anglewicz contend, "Many Americans believe that 19 cents on defense for every 81 cents on non-defense is a reasonable way to spend a tax dollar. But by another calculation, the tax dollar splits 68 cents for defense and 32 cents on everything else."

* "The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself," observes the CS Monitor's Peter Grier. "Is that a liberal's talking point? Sure. But it's also a line from the recent public testimony of a champion of the free market: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan."

* "Barely five years into the 21st century, with a globalized neo-liberal trade regime firmly in place in a world where market economy has become the norm, trade protectionism appears to be fast re-emerging and developing into a new global trade war of complex dimensions," warns Henry C K Liu. "The rich nations need to recognize that their efforts to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of already unfair trade will only plunge the world into deep depression. History has shown that while the poor suffer more in economic depressions, the rich, even as they are financially cushioned by their wealth, are hurt by political repercussions in the form of either war or revolution, or both."

* Doug Ireland has penned a nice tribute to the recently-deceased left journalist James Weinstein.