Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

By Paul Krugman

The New York Times

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily
life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual:
we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent,
but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others –
above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real
rationale has never been explained – the nightmare has been all too concrete.

So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea
whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments
in the Plame affair. In any case, I don’t share fantasies that Dick Cheney will
be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the
Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential
fraudulence stands exposed, and it’s hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration
with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political
dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.

The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if
President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch
– from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage
to the pursuit of Osama – turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn
out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but
real wages are down.

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Today President Bush caved to pressure from the far right and nominated the notoriously radical judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Today we’re joining the campaign to stop him by aiming to collect 250,000 signatures in 48 hours. Can you sign today?

For quick facts on Judge Alito, please see the fact sheets from

The American Progress Action Fund or People For the American Way

This morning, with his administration growing weaker by the day, President Bush
caved to pressure from the radical fringe of the Republican Party and nominated Samuel
Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Alito is a notoriously
right-wing judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He has consistently ruled
to strip basic protections from workers, women, minorities and the disabled in favor
of unchecked power for corporations and special interests.

That’s why today we’re joining the fight with an emergency petition to the Senate,
calling on them to stand up for ordinary Americans and reject Alito’s nomination.
We’re aiming to gather a quarter million signatures
and comments in the next 48 hours.

Can you sign today?

http://www.moveonpac.org/stopalito/?t=2

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Hurdles Rise on Trade Pacts, Nuclear Threats, Bringing Shift to Seeking Out Allies

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Willie Nelson Hosts Kinky Friedman Fundraiser

By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer

Willie Nelson opened up his central Texas ranch and private golf course Sunday, raising an estimated $170,000 for his friend Kinky Friedman, an independent candidate for Texas governor.

Friedman, an author and entertainer, will need up to $5 million just to get his name on next year’s ballot, managers say.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who was elected as member of the Reform Party, joined supporters for lunch and golf. Friedman cited Ventura’s success as proof that he become the first Texas independent governor since Sam Houston.

“Jesse is a virtual gold mine of information,” Friedman said. “He’s been through the fire. He knows what works and doesn’t work.”

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Willie Nelson Hosts Kinky Friedman Fundraiser

By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer

Willie Nelson opened up his central Texas ranch and private golf course Sunday, raising an estimated $170,000 for his friend Kinky Friedman, an independent candidate for Texas governor.

Friedman, an author and entertainer, will need up to $5 million just to get his name on next year’s ballot, managers say.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who was elected as member of the Reform Party, joined supporters for lunch and golf. Friedman cited Ventura’s success as proof that he become the first Texas independent governor since Sam Houston.

“Jesse is a virtual gold mine of information,” Friedman said. “He’s been through the fire. He knows what works and doesn’t work.”

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By Dana Milbank and Carol D. Leonnig
The Washington Post

Further details sought on Cheney’s involvement in Plame leak.

Democrats demanded yesterday that President Bush fire Deputy Chief of Staff
Karl Rove and that the White House fully account for Vice President Cheney’s
role in the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame, as Republicans acted to
limit the political damage from Friday’s indictment of Cheney’s chief of staff.

Using the forum of the Sunday television talk shows, Senate Minority Leader
Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and other Democrats sought to portray the indictment of
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on Friday as part of a broader pattern of
unethical – if not illegal – conduct by the administration. Republicans, while
not defending Libby, asserted that the lack of other indictments indicated there
was no conspiracy in the White House to punish an administration critic by identifying
his wife as a CIA operative.

Reid, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” called for apologies from Bush
and Cheney, and sought Rove’s resignation because of Bush’s vow to dismiss anybody
involved in the leak. Later, on CNN’s “Late Edition,” Reid repeated
his call for Rove’s dismissal four times.

“The president said anyone involved would be gone,” Reid said. “And
we now know that Official A is Karl Rove. He’s still around. He should be let
go.” Reid added that if Bush “is a man of his word, Rove should be
history.”

In the indictment, “Official A” is a senior White House official
who discussed with syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak the identity of administration
critic and former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s wife as a CIA covert agent;
that person has been identified as Rove by senior administration officials.

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While you were, ah, distracted, Congress was quietly renewing every major provision of the Patriot Act.

By Rachel Neumann

Most of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act, including access to library records, were supposed to “sunset” this month, five years after the law’s passing. Instead, both the House and the Senate have already voted to renew the entire act, with only minor revisions. While they’re at it, they’d like to add some decidedly unpatriotic amendments to expand the death penalty.

These new amendments would let prosecutors shop around for another jury if the one they have is deadlocked on the death penalty; triple the number of terrorism-related crimes eligible for the death penalty; and authorize the death penalty for a person who gives money to an organization whose members kill someone, even if the contributor did not know that the organization or its members were planning to kill.

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Large quantities of chemical weapons were dumped off the state’s coast. Watermen and environmentalists are fearful and demand answers.

BY JOHN M.R. BULL

Lurking off Virginia are tens of thousands of mustard gas shells and hundreds of tons of radioactive waste in at least five ocean dump zones created by the Army decades ago.

Newly released Army records show that four dumpsites containing a hodgepodge of deadly ordnance are in deep water off Chincoteague, near the Maryland state line on the Eastern Shore.

A fifth is in very deep water off Virginia Beach.

A sixth might – or might not – exist. A former ammunition inspector at Nansemond Ordnance Depot in Suffolk told Army investigators in 1970 that “some” chemical weapons had been dumped in the Atlantic off Norfolk after an “incident at port” during World War II.

The Army says no records exist to verify whether that was, indeed, done; where they were dumped; or whether the weapons are in dangerously shallow water.

Years of records about dumping after World War II are missing. The Army has never reviewed records of World War I-era dumping, when chemical weapons were routinely tossed into relatively shallow water.

As a result, more dumpsites likely exist off the country’s shoreline, the Army says.

Could they be waiting to be found in shallow water off Virginia?

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The right wing demanded the withdrawal of Harriet Miers so she could be replaced with a judge who met their rigid, ideological litmus test. This morning, the conservatives got what they wanted. President Bush will nominate Third Circuite Appeal Court Judge Samuel Alito as the replacement for swing-voter Sandra Day O’Connor. (In contrast, John Roberts replaced the very conservative William Rehnquist.) On NBC’s Today Show, law professor Jonathan Turley said there “will be no one to the right of Sam Alito” on the Supreme Court. Alito’s record supports Turley’s view. His history of right-wing judicial activism will be a key issue during his hearings.

ALITO WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE: In his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito concurred with the majority in supporting the restrictive abortion-related measures passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in the late 1980s. Alito went further, however, saying the majority was wrong to strike down a requirement that women notify their spouses before having an abortion. The Supreme Court later rejected Alito’s view and also voted to reaffirm Roe v. Wade. [Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1991]

ALITO WOULD ALLOW RACE-BASED DISCRIMINATION: Alito dissented from a decision in favor of a Marriott Hotel manager who said she had been discriminated against on the basis of race. The majority explained that Alito would have protected racist employers by “immuniz[ing] an employer from the reach of Title VII if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was the result of conscious racial bias.” [Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 1997]

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Was President Bush or Vice President Cheney involved in the disclosure of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative?
1.0% Bush, yes.	0.3% Bush, no.
9.2% Cheney, yes.	0.2% Cheney, no.
77.4% Both.	9.9% Neither.
2.0% It doesn’t matter.
Total Votes: 4395

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By BRENT STAPLES

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name – and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we’ve found – Richard Staples – was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved.

The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just after Emancipation – and became the stepfather of her children – could easily have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children fathered by white slave masters.

I’ve known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa – common for people who regard themselves as black – with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.

The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, “This has got to be a mistake.”

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Do Ed Burtynsky’s Photos Glorify Industry or Vilify It?

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer

The photographs of Edward Burtynsky put you in an awkward spot. Take “Shipbreaking #4,” an image of a couple dozen Bangladeshis dismantling a tanker. You’ve read the stories or heard the lore, so you know you’re looking at one of the most dangerous work sites in the world, a place where men are regularly killed by falling metal, or explosions from leftover diesel and methane.

The landscapes of Canadian-based photographer Edward Burtynsky examine the transformation of nature through industrialization. His works are the subject of a new retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art., on view through January 15, 2006. Photos Edward Burtynsky: Landscapes The landscapes of Canadian-based photographer Edward Burtynsky examine the transformation of nature through industrialization. His works are the subject of a new retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art., on view through January 15, 2006.

But dang, it’s lovely. The colors are seductively warm, the vessel looks less like a threat than a luminous monument. The details are so crisp and the image so large — it’s 60 inches by 48 inches — that you sense those guys would wave if you said “hello.”

Ravishing, meet hazardous. Hazardous, this is ravishing. You can marvel at the beauty of “Shipbreaking #4,” or you can wonder how many men in this gorgeous tableau are still among the living. Take your pick. Or switch back and forth.

Burtynsky leaves it up to you. For more than 20 years, he’s been lugging his large-format camera to the mostly hidden places where the global economy and mass consumption have left their most indelible impressions: to mines, to oil refineries, to a dump where 25 million tires have created a mountain of vulcanized rubber. One of his photos depicts used oil filters in a mound large and dense enough to seem both alarming and kind of grand.

“There’s a tension in his photographs between the sheer beauty of the object and the terror of the subject matter,” says Sarah Kennel, a curator in the photography department of the National Gallery, which owns one of the “Shipbreaking” photos.

“He’s related to people like Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan who were doing work about the sublime in nature. Those photographers had an ideology that was propelled by a sense of manifest destiny. Burtynsky is very much in that tradition, but instead of being interested in manifest destiny he’s interested in its consequences.”

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His second term was already floundering when, on Friday, a top aide was charged with perjury. Sarah Baxter, in Washington, reports on a bad few days for the president

Nerves were jangling at the White House last week. President George W Bush, never the easiest character to work for, was growing tetchy and was lashing out at junior staff. When he was re-elected last November he said that he had political capital and was going to spend it. A year later the coffers of goodwill and trust were near-empty and he was angry.

“This is not some manager at McDonald’s chewing out the staff,” said one source. “This is the president of the United States and it is not a pretty sight.”

Bush’s mood had already soured during Hurricane Katrina, when he was accused of being indifferent to the misery of New Orleans. It darkened further when Harriet Miers, his White House legal adviser and nominee for the Supreme Court, was scorned by his own conservative supporters as a hapless crony, forcing her to withdraw her candidature last week.

“Why wouldn’t he be irritable?” said Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. Everything for Bush had gone from bad to worse and, as fate would have it, the number of American deaths in Iraq passed 2,000 on Tuesday, promoting yet another media blitz on his performance in that country.

“He is like the lion in winter,” said an ally. “He’s frustrated. He remains quite confident in the decisions he has made, but this is a guy who wanted to do big things in his second term. Given his nature, there is no way he would be happy about the way things have gone.”

Things were about to get worse. Having promised to restore “dignity” to the White House after the bimbo eruptions of the Clinton era, on Friday Bush became the first American president in more than 30 years to see one of his most senior aides indicted on criminal charges.

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