I Was Just Thinking...

Rod Blagojevich looks like he dropped out of a '90s amateur Hungarian porno movie.

He wouldn't have to change his first name either.

The moments before his inauguration is awfully early in his presidency for Barack Obama to be pandering to Jesus freaks who wanna deny GLBT civil rights.

You'd think our first African-American President would not be completely tone deaf on this one.

I still miss Joe Strummer terribly but worse so this month.

Likewise John Lennon.

"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"? - Best. Christmas song. Ever.

Rahm Emmanuel is a badass.

John Stewart too -- ask Huckabee.

George Tenet is most decidely not.

What's with the Bush Administration's mad flurry to screw us all some more before he's kicked out the door? Hasn't he fucked us enough already?

The Red Sox really don't need Mark Teixiera next year.

The seven following years following that are another story altogether.

Dunno how I feel about Bill Clinton's donor list. If this is the way any of the money we've thrown at Blackwater winds up doing some good, it ain't all a bad thing.

The mainstream media is so fucked for thinking that Pastor Rick Warren is offensive solely to "gay groups."

Color million of us straight folks offended as well.

I always liked Coldplay better back when they were called Radiohead. Not so much now.

Now that we've learned Chrysler execs will still get paid while the plants shut down, I'd really like to see breakouts of total salaries for Chrysler's white collar workers versus the same for Chrysler's rank and file.

For tens of thousands of people across the Northeast to still be without power after more than a week is completely unacceptable.

At least our Republican Congress folks are predictable.

Elvis Costello has become mellow, even playful, as he's aged.

Dick Cheney has not.

Can we legalize pot already? Now that would boost the economy.

Go Franken go!

Rachel Maddow is on fire.

George Bush's recent address to the War College was downright strange and patently false. Why change now George, right?

-AF
**12/19/08: Updated with additional links where appropriate.

He Flat-Out Sucked Less Than The Alternative

This week Italians recycled billionaire Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister. We'll see how long that lasts especially if Italy's ex-SISDE chief's defense lawyers are granted their request to call Silvio as a witness in the upcoming CIA extraordinary renditions trial. 25 Americans we're pretty sure are CIA agents are also being tried in absentia. Apparently some Italians have a problem with the Bush Administration completely circumventing Italy's legal system in the 2003 CIA Milan street grab of terror suspect Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

-AF

HT: Laura Rozen

++Laura has more on the resumption of the CIA rendition trial at MoJo's blog here.

The VA Won't Register Wounded Vet Voters

More Republican politicization of the Federal Government... The GOP can't take the chance that the majority of the tens of thousands of our wounded would vote against John "100 years" McCain. Their excuse is a whopper.


Raw has the story:

VA remains opposed to becoming a voter registration agency pursuant to the National Voter Registration Act, as this designation would divert substantial resources from our primary mission.

Just what is the VA's primary mission?

Our goal is to provide excellence in patient care, veterans' benefits and customer satisfaction. We have reformed our department internally and are striving for high quality, prompt and seamless service to veterans. Our department's employees continue to offer their dedication and commitment to help veterans get the services they have earned. Our nation's veterans deserve no less.

Apparently ensuring our wounded vets' right to vote is not amongst those "services they've earned." More Bush Administration lies and misdirection via Raw Story:

(Secretary of Veterans Affairs James ) Peake defends the decision by saying that a court recently ruled the VA's limits on "partisan political activities" "does not on its face violate [veterans'] First Amendment' rights," Rosenfeld notes, without articulating how registering veterans is a partisan activity.

"Partisan political activities"? That's rich. The level of contempt these Republican "Support Our Troops"- car-magnet-sporting-lapel-flag-pin-wearing-assholes have for our military continues to astonish.

-AF

Bush Prosecuted Mississippi Democratic Judge

It's a Raw Story.

The cast of characters includes some familiar faces. with from former Democratic Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's case: Karl Rove, Republican "consultant" William Canary, Bill's wife US Attorney Leura Canary, current Republican Alabama Republican Governor Bob Riley, etc., plus Justice Antonin Scalia and the Choctaws (Doesn't Antonin Scalia and the Choctaws sound like a cheesy Jersey bar band from the early '70s?)

This story also details something I've been interested in since last year: How the US Chamber of Commerce became an implement of Republican power. The Chamber is our country's largest trade organization. In the past decade since Republican BBF Tom Donohue took charge, has spent $369,914,680 topping opensecrets' lobbyist spending chart. The organization also spent $60 million during the last presidential election.

Three months ago The LA Times took a closer look after Donohue pledged to "punish" populist "ani-business" candidates:

Under Donohue, the organization has also frequently aligned itself with GOP priorities.

Since he took over the chamber, contributions by businesses have soared, often to pay for political advertising known as "issue ads," which are exempt from many of the Federal Election Commission limits.

Under a system Donohue pioneered, corporations contribute money to the chamber, which then finances attack ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the name of the businesses involved in the ads.

In 2000, drug companies paid the chamber to run advertisements in Michigan to help elect then-Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham. Pharmaceutical companies that year gave the chamber additional millions to run issue ads attacking mostly Democratic House candidates. And large corporations paid $1 million or more to support advertising campaigns against judges deemed too friendly to plaintiffs.

There has been pressure from lawsuits and government activist groups to require the chamber to reveal the source of its political funds and more details on its spending.

Donohue is not inclined to do so.

"I will disclose any funds I am legally required to disclose -- and not disclose any others," Donohue said. "We are exercising our constitutional right to petition the government and we will continue to do so."

If by "petitioning the government" Donohue means accepting big money from big business to run blind "issue" ads attacking primarily Democratic candidates, then he's stretching the definition pretty damn far. More proof that we'll never have "free" elections in this country until we get meaningful election reform.

Workers make less due to inflation, health care and cost of living increases. Big business makes more and more money. Big business spreads some of that profit around under the radar to the Tom Donohues to keep things headed in this "right" direction. As it stands right now, this game is fixed.

-AF

Iraqis Speak On Our Invasion's Fifth Anniversay

This is powerful stuff. The normally unflappable Charlie Rose gets flapped.











Glenn Greenwald on What can and cannot be spoken on television:

The significance of the interview lies as much in what it says about the American occupation of Iraq as it what it illustrates about the American media. In the American media's discussions of Iraq, when are the perspectives expressed here about our ongoing occupation -- views extremely common among Iraqis of all types and grounded in clear, indisputable facts -- ever heard by the average American news consumer? The answer is: "virtually never."

Rose was as adversarial and argumentative -- angry, even -- as he ever gets with anyone, because he plainly did not anticipate, and did not like, that he was being exposed to such hostility towards our Freedom-spreading, Liberty-loving Liberation of the grateful, lucky (dead and displaced) Iraqi people.

Crooks And Liars has the Charlie Rose footage here. Note that previously for his Fifth Anniversary "celebration," Rose touted that he would have "conversations to find out how both critics and supporters of the war effort see the current situation." Chuckle's concept of Iraq War "critics" is seriously warped. Earlier this week, Greenwald ripped Rose's "panel of experts":

The two alleged "war critics" were the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lesley Gelb, and The New Yorker's George Packer. As Rose put it: "To get the other side's perspective, I talked to Richard Perle and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute." And therein one finds a perfect expression of how limited, distorted and propagandistic the debate over Iraq in the establishment press continues to be.

In no meaningful sense are Gelb and Packer on "the other side" from Perle and Kagan. Both Gelb and Packer were, albeit to different degrees, among the most influential enablers of the invasion of Iraq.

In February, 2003, Gelb went on Fox News with Brit Hume and attacked the French for impeding our invasion, telling Hume (via LEXIS): "But frankly, except for The Cuban Missile Crisis, I don't think more has been at stake than today. Our country really is at risk in a way we've never been at risk before." Three days before the invasion, he told The Associated Press: "I'm in favor of this . . . . It's the best medicine for anti-Americanism around the world I can imagine." To this day, Gelb continues to insist that the invasion was the right thing to do, but that we just should have executed it more effectively. So that's one of Rose's "war critics."

While much more nuanced and cautious than Gelb, Packer was one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called "liberal hawk" movement. He wrote a highly influential December, 2002 New York Times article proclaiming "The Liberal Quandry over Iraq," touting the views of so-called "liberal hawks." The next month, he demanded "a clean break" with what he scorned as "doctrinaire leftists, who know what they think about American foreign policy -- they're against it," and rejected "an antiwar movement with little to say to Americans' fears for their own safety."

Packer never endorsed Bush's specific invasion plan, but he certainly never opposed it, and -- like most "liberal hawks" -- endorsed the concept itself ("the wrong people are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons"). Packer perfectly exemplified the Tom-Friedman-esque "liberal hawk" enabling behavior back then of advocating American interventionism of the type contemplated in Iraq (while wishing it would be better executed) and attacking those who were genuinely opposed to the war ("Until liberals show that they will make the world safe for democracy -- for their fellow citizens, and for citizens around the world -- the American people won't give them the chance").

No wonder Rose was completely unprepared for the Iraqi side of the story. The phrase Rose-coloured glasses comes immediately to mind.

-AF

Hornswoggles & Dervishes

I cannot recommend Scott Horton's stellar blog enough.

No Comment is topical, poetical, insightful and literate. Today Mr. Horton breaks down Bush's Judicial Bamboozlement. To briefly take your mind off this mess we live in, he also has posted the genius Persian philosopher Rumi's "Dervish At The Door." It's inspired me to dig out my copy of The Illuminated Rumi. Almost ten years ago I was turned on to Rumi by my dear, spiritually minded friend, Abdi Assadi.

-AF

Bush's Abstinence-Only Crusade=Big Money For Religious Right

In Bush's Abstinence-Only Crusade=1/4 Of Teenage Girls Get STDs, I connected Bush's abstinence-only crusade to the high rate of STDs among America's teenage girls. Today I delve into the real motivation behind yet another harmful Bush policy.

What makes the abstinence-only mob's objection to sex ed truly sickening is that it is not all about "morality." As per usual, it's mostly about M-O-N-E-Y. (Natch).

Abstinence-only programs have become big business. Big Republican campaign contributor business. Under the leadership of a Republican Congress and as escalated by George Bush, abstinence-only has swelled to a $1 billion boondoggle.

Ten months ago The Nation exposed this industry for what it is in The Abstinence Gluttons:

Over the past six years George W. Bush's faith-based Administration and a conservative Republican Congress transformed the small-time abstinence-only business into a billion-dollar industry. These dangerously ineffective sexual health enterprises flourish not because they spread "family values" but because of generous helpings of the same pork-heavy gumbo Bush & Co. brought to war-blighted Iraq and Katrina-hammered New Orleans--a mix of back-scratching cronyism, hefty partisan campaign donations, high-dollar lobbyists, a revolving door for political appointees and a lack of concern for results.

One of the chief cooks is a media-shy 63-year-old Catholic multimillionaire, welfare privatizer and Republican donor named Raymond Ruddy. With close ties to the White House, federal health officials and Republican power brokers that date back to W.'s days as Texas governor, Ruddy has leveraged his generous wallet and insider muscle to push an ultraconservative social agenda, enrich a preferred network of abstinence-only and antiabortion groups, boost profits for his company and line the pockets of his cronies--all with taxpayer dollars.

Following the money swirling around Ruddy offers an eye-opening glimpse into the squalor at the heart of the abstinence-only project. One top Bush adviser left to take a job at Ruddy's charity, Gerard Health Foundation, and a senior officer at Ruddy's for-profit company, Maximus, left to take a top-level position at the Department of Health and Human Services. Leaders of Christian-right organizations that are Gerard grantees have gained advisory HHS positions--and their organizations have in turn received AIDS and abstinence grants to the tune of at least $25 million. Maximus itself has raked in more than $100 million in federal contracts during the Bush era...

"I can't think of another federal program where so much money was spent without any oversight and to such little effect," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a national organization that promotes comprehensive sexual health policies. "It wasn't that policy-makers didn't know that abstinence-only didn't work. In 2000 the Institute of Medicine issued a scathing report on these programs. But they went full steam ahead despite the warning. It's beyond naïve. It's immoral."

If you haven't already (and even if you have), please read the rest for a stunning tale spanning America, Africa and soon China. The featured cast of unsavory characters includes wingnut heroes James Dobson, Ruddy lobbyist and former RNC Chair Haley Barbour, former HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary/Medicaid fraud/all-around quack Eric Keroack and more.

It details how the the Bush Administration knowingly spends hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on harmful programs to further enrich fat cat Republican donors and their uber-conservative causes i.e. The Federalist Society, Americans for Tax Reform (we knew Grover would get a cut), Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council as well as the anti-Kerry Your Catholic Voice, sleazy 527 Common Sense Ohio and old school anti-choice Life, Liberty and Family. A generous tithe of these funds are plowed back into the Republican Party in campaign contributions and Conservative GOTV resources. Also well documented is the revolving door between these various conservative groups and the Bush Administration especially, and most dangerously, the Department of Health and Human Services.

Because of Bush's aggressive, immoral and unconscionable abstinence-only policy, a decade of teenagers are spectacularly misinformed. Earlier this week the Chicago Tribune's troubling story, Teens have sex but don't have the facts, vividly illustrates the pitfalls of this stick-your-head-in-the-sand mentality:

In a co-ed forum, the teens pondered contraception. One well-meaning young man stood and said aluminum foil could be used in lieu of a condom. Other teens offered up myths such as the efficacy of plastic baggies, having sex while standing and bathing right after sex.

Aluminum foil?!?! WTF? In this age, where using a condom could literally be the difference between life and death, we're all too squeamish and puritanical to tell kids considering sex how to best protect themselves. The message sent to today's youth: Sex is dirty, dangerous and bad. No wonder they are so confused. If these they should make it through adolescence without contracting an STD, our kids have a lifetime of psychoanalysis to look forward to. It will probably take at least that long to pay for and undo the harm caused by abstinence-only "education."

-AF

In the finale: Bush's Abstinence-Only Crusade Exported=Death.
(We're lucky our kids aren't African).

How's That Terrorwatch List Working Out?

Not so well.







McClatchy has the bottom line:

The government's terror watchlist includes inaccurate and outdated information, increasing the risk that innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists while terrorists are overlooked, a government audit reported Monday.

Whodda thunk that giving control over this important task to a new unproven FBI department (created by Bush in 2003), The Terrorist Screening Center, would be prove so troublesome? Yes, the FBI's struggles to join the modern computer age have been legion (the $170 million-ish plus six years wasted on SAIC's* VCF software program, its well-documented inability to quickly share & disseminate info before & after 9/11, etc.) Surely they can run Filemaker Pro, right?

I'm being facetious. It's far more complicated. But if there's a special department dedicated to maintaining this list, why are we still having problems five years on? McClatchy offers this clue:

The Terrorist Screening Center oversees the watchlist, while the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI recommend or "nominate" names for it.

Oh boy. We have "nominations" supplied by another new unproven department (also created by Bush in 2003), the NCTC, along with the FBI whose problems managing data I already touched on. To make matters worse, the NCTC falls under the purview of DNI Mike McConnell. Four other separate departments do too including The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, the National Intelligence Council, the DNI Special Security Center and the ungodly named Center for Security Evaluation (CSE)/National Intelligence Emergency Management Activity (NIEMA). The ODNI's organizational chart is so unwieldy that they tout themselves as an Information Sharing Environment -- a positively Orwellian moniker if there ever was one.

Chalk it up as another concept urgently needed to protect the American people completely cocked up by President Bush. Another fiasco to remember the next time Republicans claim theirs is the "security party."

-AF

++Tuesday update: The LA Times sez

"the FBI provided the government-wide terrorism watch list with incomplete, inaccurate and outdated information about suspects for almost three years.

As a result, many innocent people stayed on the terrorism watch list long after they were cleared of any wrongdoing, and real threats to national security were sometimes left off the list or not added in a timely manner..."

It boggles the mind.

*SAIC was allowed to walk away with $170 million even tho' they never provided anything close to a working product. Unsurprisingly, SAIC founder John Robert Beyster is a big time Republican contributor. His company employs an army of lobbyists.

Download Your Very Own...

...Redacted Institute for Defense Analyses Report once and for all exploding the al Qaeda->Saddam Hussein link that our government doesn't want you see here.

The Bush Administration has added a diabolical new info suppressing mechanism to their already overloaded arsenal: Snail Mail only!

Via ABC News:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. Military Study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online. Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."
(emphasis added)

So exactly how long will it take a request to Joint Forces Command to receive, process and post a report the Commander-in-Chief doesn't want us to see? I've seen how long it takes for MRAPs to be ordered. Plus it's not like the military loses things unless you count $12 billion shrink-wrapped and stacked on pallets (you can't tell me the military was not involved in moving that quantity so quickly) or thousands of guns, $1 billion in equipment, etc. The US Postal Service loses millions of pieces of mail each year. And if the mail I received yesterday is any indication, the USPS cracks a few CDs too.

ABC News on the report's methodology:

The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

I saved the best for last -- the key graph on conclusion and implications:

Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.

Now that is big.

AF

(h/t TPM Muckraker)

Update: McClatchy pieces on the study here and its canceled release there.

Set Up? Not!

Raw Story mauls yet another important story with an unfortunate and inaccurate headline: Lawyer questions whether Spitzer was set up, noting political prosecutions. Scott Horton's story says nothing about a "set up." Set up is defined as "something done by deceit or trickery in order to compromise or frame someone." Elliot Spitzer wasn't framed. He committed a crime. He may be a huge hypocrite and disappointment but he wasn't "set up.".

By falsely crying "Set Up!", Raw aids the right wing noise machine's attempts to obscure the extremely disconcerting Ken Starr-like aspect of this story: the US government was apparently investigating Spitzer, the once rising star of the Democratic party, not because they had any evidence that he had ever committed any crime but to see if they could find any evidence that he had ever committed a crime.

This is not a minor distinction. As Scott Horton puts it more clearly:

All of these facts are consistent with a process which is not the investigation of a crime, but rather an attempt to target and build a case against an individual.

The contrast between a swift politically motivated investigation of Spitzer to determine if there was evidence (plus the accompanying leak) and the many stalled and undisclosed or reluctantly disclosed investigation of Republicans couldn't be more distinct.

I guarantee that if you devote enough resources to investigate anyone, you will find them guilty of some crime large or small. (This is doubly so when combing through someone's financials). Ken Starr spent $40 million+ and seven years to find Bill Clinton guilty not for murdering Vince Foster, the alleged Whitewater swindle, Travelgate et al but lying about his infidelity. I'm not absolving Bill Clinton or Spitzer of their guilt. Even smart people do very stupid things. Eliot Spitzer was very, very stupid.

It will be interesting to see how the Bush Administration attempts to justify this one.

AF

Kill For Cash

My boys Kraut with a prime slice of vintage NYHC.

"KFC" dedicated to KBR whose Q4 earnings are up 65%. 'Cuz there's no more potent profit pairing than crime and war.

-AF

(HT: Raw Story)

Intel Hurt W/O Telecom Immunity?

WH sez "Um, No."







White House Backtracks On Claims...:

A day after warning that potentially critical terrorism intelligence was being lost because Congress had not finished work on a controversial espionage law, the U.S. attorney general and the national intelligence director said Saturday that the government was receiving the information -- at least temporarily.

"Temporarily" is a White House weasel word if I ever heard one.

FISA has served this country well for 30 years. The only true weakness in FISA lies with those who administer the programs and those who read the results. Bush doesn't want us to focus on that. Their failure to anticipate and stop the 9/11 attacks had nothing to do with our intelligence services being handcuffed by faulty legislation. This failure occurred, as we have learned from the August 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing Memo to Sibel Edmonds, because the Bush administration wasn't listening!

I'll keep screaming it until I'm blue in the face (not a pretty sight): Retroactive telecom immunity has nothing to do with improving US intelligence capabilities. Under the current program, the telecoms have no choice but to comply with lawful requests. The FISA courts allow our intelligence services enough latitude to avoid constraining in any way needed surveillance. Saturday's WH statement confirms this point. They simply want us to believe otherwise.

To that end lil' Georgie caps off his month-long super-tantrum with a "We're all gonna die 'cos there ain't no retra 'munity" rant. Mukasey & McConnell's Friday night letter to Congress was naught but a great gnashing of teeth. Bush put the GOP Reps up to their silly kabuki theatre House walk out stunt. The House GOP release a scary web ad too.

This renewed bonding between this most unpopular of Republican Presidents and GOP Representatives (during an election year no less) isn't about national security. There would be no need for retroactive immunity if both our government and the telecoms hadn't broken the law. Telecoms would not fear liability from class action lawsuits from those citizens whose Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights they violated.

This is pragmatic politics for our new age. Retroactive immunity for their telecom campaign contributors is immunity for the Bush administration. Retroactive immunity for the Bush administration immunizes the Republican Party from further damage caused by full disclosure of this illegal wiretapping program's extent. Like tomato juice and the skunk-sprayed cat, immunity would clear up much of the stink but still leave you with ugly looking animal.

Retroactive immunity is a win-win-win strategy for the GOP. It's a losing proposition for the Constitution, the American people and all that we hold dear. Please take the time right now to write or call your Representative to let them know you support the continued efforts to keep retroactive telecom immunity out of the intelligence bill.

It's the American thing to do.

-AF

More Bad News About The US Economy

Economist Jared Bernstein has this post up at TPM Cafe. It's well worth reading. Here's the first few paragraphs:

Based on inflation data released this morning, a combination of slower wage growth and faster price growth has led to falling real hourly and weekly earnings for most workers.

The Figure shows the yearly change in real earnings for the approximately 80% of the workforce that are non-managers in services or blue-collar factory workers. After handily beating inflation last year, wage growth began to slow as the economy lost speed in the last quarter of 2007. A year ago, annual hourly wage growth before inflation was 4.3%; this year—Jan07-Jan08—it was 3.7%.

Inflation, conversely, driven up by higher energy prices, is growing about twice as fast as was the case one year ago.

Bernstein is the very same economist quoted by McClatchy News in Monday's story about chronic unemployment that I referenced in A Closer Look At Bush's BS Job Stats... yesterday.

-AF

A Closer Look At Bush's BS Job Stats & The Economy

Whenever he issues denials of our country's economic troubles, President Bush invariably points to the latest unemployment and/or job creation figures as proof of his policies' efficacy. McClatchy's Kevin G.Hall crunches the numbers and uncovers what blue collar and middle class America has known for a couple of years now, the low unemployment rate hides rise in long-term jobless. (All emphasis is mine):

The latest employment figures, released in late January, showed a 52-month streak of job creation ending with a loss of 17,000 jobs in January. The Bush administration acknowledged the contraction, but pointed to the national unemployment rate of 4.9 percent to say that the labor market wasn't a harbinger of recession.

Right. No recession to see here, people. Look straight ahead and keep on truckin'.

A closer look at unemployment data by McClatchy, however, found that jobless Americans are spending more time looking for work and that those who can't find work now make up a greater share of the unemployed.

Several measures of unemployment, in fact, show that the workforce is under the kind of stress not seen since March 2001, when the U.S. economy entered a nine-month recession, followed by a so-called jobless recovery.

The White House hauled out its biggest gun, Ed Lazear, to rebut this analysis. Lazear is notable as one of the fathers of personnel economics -- a field Lazear and others seek to explain (I prefer justify), among other things, wage gaps due to gender, sociological and other differences. Predictably, Mr. Lazear has a different read on the numbers:

The Bush administration points out that the percentage of workers unable to find work for 27 weeks or longer was only 0.9 percent of the overall workforce in January.

"So in terms of proportion of individuals who are facing long-term unemployment, it's about the same as it was in the mid-1990s and actually lower than throughout most of the past few years," said Edward Lazear, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

There's a reason why the White House studiously avoids counting people still looking for work 26 weeks after they cash that first unemployment check. If you know anyone who's lost a job in the past coupla years, 4 1/2 months is not a very long time to be unemployed. Lazear uncovered an equation where "Clinton" numbers are "about the same" as these current "Bush" numbers. Too bad it's a crap equation:

But when Americans unemployed for 27 weeks or longer are measured as a share of the total number of unemployed, the story is very different.

The long-term unemployed amounted to 18.3 percent of all the unemployed in January. That means that while overall unemployment is low, almost one in five unemployed workers has been jobless for six months or more.

It's no small wonder that Bush, Lazear and friends want to bury this trend. Chronic unemployment stats contradict everything they've been selling us about American jobs:

"Long-term unemployment is really very interesting and in some ways a more telling indicator," said Jared Bernstein, a labor economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "It basically says that given the particularly low level of unemployment, you'd expect a much lower share (of long-term unemployed) on the jobless rolls. Job creation has been anything but robust."

Here's how the stats compare to other periods in Bush's reign two terms:

When the U.S. economy last went into recession, in March 2001, the unemployment rate was 5.7 percent and the long-term unemployed made up 11.1 percent of all unemployed. That number reached the 18 percent range 14 months later and peaked at 23.4 percent during a single month in both 2004 and 2005.

These statistics suggest that if the United States is in a recession — still a subject of debate among economists — the nation is entering an economic contraction with a much higher rate of chronically unemployed than it did during the nine-month recession in 2001.

In other words, we're fucked. Really, really fucked. In the grand scheme of things the labor market affects the economy thusly:

It's a critically important linchpin because, although we get excited about every bip and bop in the stock market, it's the labor market that matters most to most people. They're depending on their paycheck, not their stock portfolios," Bernstein said. "If the labor market is not producing enough jobs or hours of work, that's going to show up as diminished income growth and less consumption."

This chronic unemployment (and underemployment) combined with the sub-prime crisis, inflation, higher gas & heating oil prices, the real estate crash et al. Without bankruptcy protection and with property values plummeting, people default on their mortgages to pay their credit cards. Consumer confidence erodes. While the average citizen was suffering, Bush and his Lazear-led bean-counters couldn't have cared less. It took Corporate America to feel the pinch and start screaming for Bush to ask Lazear to dial up his new "stimulus package."

Hell, we'll be lucky if Bush's package doesn't make things even worse. You know it's a bad plan when libertarian think tank the Cato Institute can rip it as "a disappointing re-run of the misguided policies of Jimmy Carter." Ouch!

Add our fucked up economy to the long list of Bush Administration legacy land mines left for the next up to negotiate.

-AF

(h/t Think Progress)

If The Army Ain't Broken...

Then why are we buying houses to fix it? US taxpayers are laying out $40,000 for a down payment on new recruits houses or to fronting them with seed money to set up their own gig. From August 2004 to April 2005, Army bonuses doubled maxing out at around $20,000. This and other incentives coupled with declining re-enlistment couldn't keep pace with the Army's needs. Especially when the DOD kept lowering quotas to avoid the public embarrassment that comes with consistently missing recruitment goals.

The solution? The Army Advantage Fund^TMnow being test marketed in Albany, Montgomery (AL), Cleveland, Seattle and San Antonio. (Bad news for residents of these five towns as they are clearly well ahead of the recession curve, no?). The Boston Globe has the deets on the DOD's sales pitch :

Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, who was in Albany Wednesday promoting the pilot program, said it will help the Army compete for high school graduates and recognize soldiers in a time of conflict.

"The Army Advantage Fund will ensure that the quality of life of our soldiers and their families equals the substantial quality of service that they give to the nation," said Freakley, who is responsible for recruiting.

Note to prospective recruits: If an officer named "Freakley" ever comes a calling...RUN! Run until you cannot run no more.

Listen, I'm all for giving active duty soldiers the best this country has to offer: the best health care, the best education options, the best future. I'm also all about not talking advantage of people and needlessly putting them in harm's way.

I can't help but wonder how many of these "newbies" will make it back in enough of one piece to enjoy the hard won fruits of their labor.

-AF

**Update: Bush gives with one hand and takes away with the other: No Funds in Bush Budget For Troop-Benefits Plan?

Accidents Will Happen

F.B.I. Gained Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

-AF

A Friendly Reminder: We Can't Believe Anything These Fuckers Say

Ever.

Not when our government continues to hold prisoners at Guantanamo for no reason other than to postpone the embarrassment of releasing the innocent (and to set up the next preznit for Republican attacks upon their release i.e. "He's making US unsafe by letting Gitmo prisoners go").

Not when our government tortures to death innocent taxi drivers.

The Bush Administration is so hock full of pathological liars there's at least one new lie every day. While their lies flying too fast and furious to catolog here, Biggest Bush Lies has a nice big list.

-AF

LA Times OP-ED Hammers Bush State Secrets Dodge

Shielded by Secrecy:

"The Bush administration has misused the state secrets privilege to stifle legal oversight of its anti-terror policies. Congress must intervene."

That sez it all.

-AF

Immunity...Schmunity

While Bush & company try to scare us into supporting an immunity that benefits no one else but themselves, the telecoms flex their considerable monetary muscles by twisting Congressional arms. According to Opensecrets.org, the telecom/electronics lobby ranks #4 w/$2 billion+ spent since 1998. That’s a heckuva lotta of campaign contributions, free dinners and scotches. My guess it that that a majority of this went to Bush, Boehner, DeLay, “Duke”, Blunt, Stevens, Doolittle, Lewis et al.

No small wonder the Republican Representatives walked en masse yesterday. They had been already paid by the telecoms for their day's work to ignore their sworn duty to serve the American people. Inquiring minds want to know how many Dems voting for this bill also received some sort of past or renewed "support" from the telecom lobby.

Glenn Greenwald examines this fandango's latest developments here. In it he snags the following killer Mike McConnell quote from NPR this morning:

"We can't do this mission without their help," he said."Currently there is no retroactive liability protection for them. They're being sued for billions of dollars."

Yes, McConnell cannot "do this mission without their help." But the telecoms also cannot fail to cooperate in any lawful information gathering activity. Glenn fells this strawiest of the eavesdropping straw man arguments:

The claim that telecoms will cease to cooperate without retroactive immunity is deeply dishonest on multiple levels, but the dishonesty is most easily understood when one realizes that, under the law, telecoms are required to cooperate with legal requests from the government. They don't have the option to "refuse." Without amnesty, telecoms will be reluctant in the future to break the law again, which we should want. But there is no risk that they will refuse requests to cooperate with legal surveillance, particularly since they are legally obligated to cooperate in those circumstances. The claim the telecoms will cease to cooperate with surveillance requests is pure fear-mongering, and is purely dishonest.

If the telecoms committed no wrongdoing, what are they so worried about? After all, the telecoms can afford the very best lawyers. And once one suit is dismissed, the rest will soon follow. Its the complete lack of debate over whether any law has been broken that is conspicuous by its absence. (This from an administration still arguing that water boarding is not torture!)

This urgent need for retroactive immunity stems from the fact that all involved in warrantless wiretapping know that their crimes are completely indefensible. If they succeed in giving the telecoms retroactive immunity, the Bush Administration also immunizes themselves from any related prosecution. That is more important to Bush & Co. than protecting the asses of their generous telecommunications industry campaign contributors or, for that matter, the American people.

That is a talking point worthy of wider dissemination.

Meanwhile the clock keeps a tickin' on Bush's shot at scoring hisself sum immunities.

-AF

The Ultimate Republican Playbook or The Great Republican Perpetual Power Ploy

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