Prescott doubted ‘tittle-tattle’ in Iraq invasion intelligence

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk

The former deputy prime minister, Lord Prescott, has described how he had doubted intelligence reports about Iraq before the invasion but dismissed what he called “fashionable” criticism of Tony Blair for taking the country to war.

Offering fresh insights into the run-up to the invasion, he told the Chilcot inquiry: “When I kept reading them [intelligence reports], I kept saying to myself, ‘Is this intelligence?’ It was not very substantiated but clearly was robust.”

Joint Intelligence Committee assessments contained conclusions “based too much on too little evidence, that was my impression at the time,” he said. There was “a bit of tittle tatttle there, and a bit of judgment here”.

Prescott said he felt “nervous” about the notorious claim in the government’s September 2002 dossier that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. He said he adopted a sceptical approach but was not in a position to say to intelligence chiefs: “You are wrong.”

He had asked Robin Cook, former foreign secretary then leader of the Commons, not to resign but said: “In the end of the day he was right.” He admitted that Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, warned after the invasion in 2003 of the increased danger of a terrorist attack, but suggested she was simply trying to obtain additional funding for MI5.

He did not see private letters Tony Blair wrote to President George Bush at the time, but said the Labour prime minister persuaded the US administration to go down the UN route of diplomacy. The inquiry panel reminded Prescott he had written there was “no alternative but to stick by America”. “If you look at the Falklands we could not have done that without American assistance,” Prescott replied, referring to US satellite intelligence during the 1982 conflict.

It had been wrong for the government to blame French president Jacques Chirac for the breakdown of negotiations in the UN. “The French easily come to mind in the Brits’ mind when we want to blame people,” he said. “There is a lot of history for that.”

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Aunt Aggie’s Farm: State Tells Niece To Back Off 100-Year-Old Woman Facing Foreclosure

A few months back, thousands of people rallied around a 100-year-old Will County woman who was facing foreclosure.

Agnes Albinger, or “Aunt Aggie” has lived on a 70-acre patch of farmland in Will County for nearly five decades and raised 40 foster children there. Though the farm was debt-free for much of that time, Albinger allegedly took out a $100,000 mortgage on the farm in 2000 and “then began to sign over parcels of land to a trust and also to a company called Phoenix Horizon LLC, which according to state records was formed by Albinger’s niece, Bridget Gruzdis,” the Chicago Tribune reported in April.

Albinger said she remembers signing some papers–but had no knowledge of the mortgage debt. Police have been investigating whether the elderly woman had full knowledge of the papers she was signing, though Gruzdis claims she did. Police are also investigating how Albinger’s niece was able to borrow $700,000 against the property. Gruzdis, who has already presented Albinger with at least one eviction notice, has continued her efforts to sell the property–which will be put to an end this week.

On Friday, the Southtown Star reported that Gruzdis has been representing herself as a commercial real estate agent–but does not have a real estate license.

“Buying and selling real estate require extensive knowledge, good judgement and unquestionable honestly. When someone practices this profession without the necessary license, they are demonstrating they don’t have those assets,” Donald Seasock, of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, told the Southtown Star. A cease and desist order has been issued against Bridget Gruzdis and her firm, Phoenix Horizon LLC.

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By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?

Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.

He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country’s deficit that alongside the cuts, he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.

That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.

This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.

The simple truth is that the wealthy in the United States—the people who have made almost all the income gains in recent years—are undertaxed compared with everyone else.

Consider two reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One, issued last month, highlighted findings from the Congressional Budget Office showing that “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007,” the period for which figures are available.

The other, from February, used Internal Revenue Service data to show that the effective federal income tax rate for the 400 taxpayers with the very highest incomes declined by nearly half in just over a decade, even as their pre-tax incomes have grown five times larger.

The study found that the top 400 households “paid 16.6 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2007, down from 30 percent in 1995.” We are talking here about truly rich people: Using 2007 dollars, it took an adjusted gross income of at least $35 million to get into the top 400 in 1992, and $139 million in 2007.

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Charles Kaiser

Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist—even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.

What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans…The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.

— Keith Olbermann’s special comment [2] on the Sherrod debacle

It has become fashionable to dismiss Keith Olbermann as an over-the-top ranter—or as the MSNBC host put it himself, “a mirror image of that which I assail.” But there was nothing over-the-top about his special comment about Shirley Sherrod. Every word he spoke was true. And the only thing that made his stance so remarkable is the abject failure of the mainstream media—especially this week—to accurately describe the source of the allegation against Sherrod, or to chronicle the long-term impact of the “complete perversion of journalism” practiced 365 days a year by Fox News (and the right-wing bloggers and radio hosts that make up the rest of this wackosphere).

The “enabling” Olbermann so accurately describes consists of a nonchalant attitude among most media swells toward Rupert Murdoch’s main propaganda machine—”oh, that’s just Fox”—melded with an inculcation by these same writers of the main “value” informing almost every judgment made in America today: if it makes a lot of money, it must be a wonderful thing.

The perversion of journalism produced by the fusion of these two attitudes has led us directly to the perversion of society we witnessed this week, when a Democratic White House and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization both behaved in a precipitous, craven, and disgusting fashion, purely out of fear of how they would be treated by a band of vicious charlatans—men and women who are inexplicably treated by everyone from the New York Times to the Today show as if they were actual journalists.

Here are some of the media choices, each of them chronicled by Full Court Press over the last two years, that have pushed us to this terrible place.

* A gushing page-one profile [3] of Glenn Beck in the New York Times by Brian Stelter and Bill Carter, which celebrated his impressive ratings soon after his arrival at Fox: “Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land.… Mr. Beck’s emotions are never far from the surface. ‘That’s good dramatic television,’ said Phil Griffin, the president of a Fox rival, MSNBC. ‘That’s who Glenn Beck is.’”

* Time magazine’s decision to ask Glenn Beck to assess Rush Limbaugh’s importance in America for the 2009 Time 100 [4]: “His consistency, insight and honesty have earned him a level of trust with his listeners that politicians can only dream of.”

* A decision by the editors of washingtonpost.com to allow Beck to host a chat there to promote one of his books.

* This hard-hitting assessment [5] of Beck by Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, who gurgled on, “Sure, he may be selling a sensationalistic message of paranoia and social breakdown. But politics, or basic responsibility, aside, he has an entertainer’s sense of play with the medium of TV that O’Reilly, or perpetual sourpuss Neil Cavuto, don’t.” And why would anybody care about a basic sense of responsibility, anyway?

* A worshipful 1,943-word profile [6] of Fox News founder and president Roger Ailes by David Carr and Tim Arango on the front page of the New York Times—which included this perfectly amoral quote from David Gergen, a perfectly amoral man:

“Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.” And what a wonderful conversation it is.

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Richard Kim

It goes without saying that Andrew Breitbart did not viciously smear Shirley Sherrod because of her all-powerful role as a mid-level appointee in the US Department of Agriculture. This invented controversy isn’t about farming, and it’s not even about taking shots at the NAACP, which recently called out the Tea Party’s racism before rushing to repudiate Sherrod–only to later admit that they’d been “snookered.” At the end of the day, the fiasco is not even really about Obama.

Sure, in the Tea Party universe the caricature of “Shirley Sherrod, Racist” stands in for the quasi-Black Panther, secretly-Communist president. She’s Obama’s willing bureaucrat, an ordinary black civil servant who uses an arm of the mighty federal leviathan to discriminate against white farmers and to redistribute taxpayer wealth to fellow blacks. She then has the gall to brag about it in front of a black audience, who hoot in approval, on camera. Like the mythical recording of Michelle Obama railing against “whitey,” the Sherrod video is a hoax, 2 minutes and 36 seconds of sliced and diced footage that should be totally implausible to anyone who thought about it for a cool moment. But for the Tea Party crowd, it proved irresistible. “She too perfectly personifies the bureaucracy staffing the federal behemoth not to have a brilliant future in ‘government service’ ahead of her,” wrote one Tea Party blogger [1]. “Next stop, Zimbabwe,” concluded another [2].

In a way, we should be grateful to Breitbart. His hack job provided us with a perfect visual condensation of the racial paranoia that has animated the Tea Party since its inception. It’s the logic behind the equally fabricated Breitbart smear against ACORN; it’s what drives Glenn Beck to say [3] that healthcare reform amounts to the “beginning of reparations” and what Rush Limbaugh signals [4] when he accuses Obama of inflicting economic pain as a form of “payback.” And it’s the sentiment found in polls of Tea Party activists, 52 percent [5] of whom say that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people.”

But this story is older than the Tea Party, older than the current drove of right-wing demagogues. It’s the story that has been told to white middle and working class voters by the right since the Reagan administration in order to explain their dwindling paychecks and prospects: Racism is over; it is minorities who now have too much power; they are stealing your jobs, your future. And with that insidious whisper (now a shout), the specter of reverse racism chases away the all-too-real and yet all-too-abstract forces of neoliberal economic policy. Who can focus on the workings of contemporary global capitalism when the Zimbabwe-fication of America is nigh! Obama, of course, crystalizes this narrative, giving it agency, power, motive, a face to deface. But it existed before him too; it litters, for example, civil rights case law since the ’70s, in Bakke v Regents, in Gratz v Bollinger and in Ricci v DeStefano, the New Haven affirmative action case that got Sonia Sotomayor into so much hot water with the right.

That the base of Tea Party activists eagerly believed the Sherrod hoax is not surprising. What is upsetting is that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack fell for it too, so much so that he was willing to trust Andrew Breitbart’s account (!) even before he heard Shirley Sherrod’s side of the story or initiated even the most cursory of reviews. Perhaps more disturbing still is that the NAACP itself readily accepted that a lifelong civil rights activist had confessed to racial discrimination in a public speech in front of an approving audience of its own members, an incident that went entirely unreported until Breitbart apparently exposed it.

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By BOB HERBERT

The Shirley Sherrod story tells us so much about ourselves, and none of it is pretty. The most obvious and shameful fact is that the Obama administration, which runs from race issues the way thoroughbreds bolt from the starting gate, did not offer this woman anything resembling fair or respectful treatment before firing and publicly humiliating her.

Moving with the swiftness of fanatics on a hanging jury, big shots in the administration and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News came to exactly the same conclusion: Shirley Sherrod had to go — immediately! No time for facts. No time for justice.

What we have here is power run amok. Ms. Sherrod was not even called into an office to be fired face to face. She got the shocking news in her car. “They called me twice,” she told The Associated Press. “The last time, they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and submit my resignation on my BlackBerry, and that’s what I did.”

This woman was thrown to the wolves without even the courtesy of a conversation. Her side of the story? The truth? The administration wasn’t interested.

And the blame for that falls squarely on the people at the very top in the White House. Why didn’t President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden or Rahm (call me Rahmbo) Emanuel, or somebody somewhere in the upper echelon say, “Hey, what the heck are you doing? You can’t fire a person without hearing her side of the story. This is not the Kremlin. Are you nuts?”

And then, of course, there’s the media, and not just the wing nuts at Fox and the crazies in the right-wing blogosphere. A large segment of the mainstream crowd stampeded to condemn this woman solely on the basis of a grainy video clip, just two-and-a-half minutes long, that was trumpeted by a source whose track record should have set alarm bells ringing in the head of any responsible journalist.

This sorry episode shows the extent to which we’ve lost sight of the most basic elements of fair play, responsible reporting and common decency in this society. And we’ve turned the race issue entirely on its head. While racial discrimination is overwhelmingly directed against black people in the U.S., much of the nation and the media are poised to go berserk over the most specious allegations of racism against whites. Even the N.A.A.C.P. rushed to condemn Ms. Sherrod, calling her actions “shameful,” without bothering to seek out the facts — which, incredibly, had unfolded at an N.A.A.C.P. event!

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The Associated Press received records of S.C. Senate candidate Alvin Greene’s military records on Thursday.

MEG KINNARD |  

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Surprise U.S. Senate nominee Alvin Greene frequently mentions his 13 years of military service, but records obtained Thursday by The Associated Press show that the veteran who has called himself an “American hero” was considered a lackluster service member at best.

The records, which document his superiors’ decisions to pass over Greene for promotion, cite mistakes as severe as improperly uploading sensitive intelligence information to a military server, and as basic as an overall inability to clearly express his thoughts and perform basic tasks.

Greene, 32, won a surprise victory in the June 8 Democratic primary. Greene handily defeated Vic Rawl, a former lawmaker and judge who had been considered an easy win by the party establishment.

Up to that point, Greene had done no visible campaigning and had no website, fundraising or staff.

In the weeks since, Greene has given a series of awkward interviews to reporters clamoring for more information on the unemployed man who lives in Manning with his ailing father. In one interview, he suggested that the state’s economy could be improved by making and selling action figures depicting him in his uniform. On Sunday, Greene gave his first public speech, a 6 1/2-minute recitation of his previous comments and commitment to jobs and education. He now has a website and says he has raised less than $1,000.

Greene has often mentioned his military service, saying he first came up with the idea to seek political office while serving in Korea. But the veteran has also refused to go into detail about his service, merely saying he won numerous decorations and left the military honorably but involuntarily.

At his home in Manning on Thursday, Greene told an AP reporter who reviewed the documents with him that the evaluations show he was discriminated against by military supervisors but he did not explain what that meant.

“I’m telling you who they promote: the terrorists and the communists,” said Greene, wearing a blue U.S. Air Force T-shirt. “This is why we need to overhaul the military and get these people out.”

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Media Matters has documented a timeline of Andrew Breitbart’s smear of Shirley Sherrod, from Breitbart’s initial posting of his deceptively edited clip of Sherrod — which was amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media — through the release of the full video of Sherrod’s comments, which made clear the context of her remarks.

Monday

11:18 a.m.*: Breitbart posts Sherrod video, calls her “racist,” claims “Context is everything.” Breitbart posted the heavily edited video of Sherrod and falsely suggested that Sherrod discriminated against a white farmer in her capacity as the Agriculture Department’s Georgia Director of Rural Development:

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

Fox News amplifies Breitbart’s deceptively edited video. On July 19, FoxNews.com reported: “Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy.” The FoxNews.com article further reported that “[t]he video clip was first posted by BigGovernment.com” and that “FoxNews.com is seeking a response from both the NAACP and the USDA.” The article is no longer available on FoxNews.com but was republished on another website:

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Alarms and safety mechanisms on gulf disaster oil rig were disabled, chief technician at Transocean reveals

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk

Transocean is under scrutiny after it emerged that Deepwater Horizon’s safety systems were off when it exploded. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/APVital warning systems on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were switched off at the time of the explosion in order to spare workers being woken by false alarms, a federal investigation has heard.

The revelation that alarm systems on the rig at the centre of the disaster were disabled – and that key safety mechanisms had also consciously been switched off – came in testimony by a chief technician working for Transocean, the drilling company that owned the rig.

Mike Williams, who was in charge of maintaining the rig’s electronic systems, was giving evidence to the federal panel in New Orleans that is investigating the cause of the disaster on 20 April, which killed 11 people.

Williams told the hearing today that no alarms went off on the day of the explosion because they had been “inhibited”. Sensors monitoring conditions on the rig and in the Macondo oil well beneath it were still working, but the computer had been instructed not to trigger any alarms in case of adverse readings.

Both visual and sound alarms should have gone off in the case of sensors detecting fire or dangerous levels of combustible or toxic gases.

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By Ezra Klein

When people think of deficit reduction, they tend to think about spending cuts and tax increases. They don’t think as much about saving money by putting more effective policies into place. But as the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of a new public option proposal from Pete Stark suggests, maybe they should.

Stark wants to add a public option to the exchanges that would start by paying doctors the rates Medicare pays plus 5 percent, and then grow with the cost of physicians’ services. According to the CBO, this plan’s premiums “would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges.” But that’s not all!

“The proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion,” CBO says. And because the public plan is saving more money as time goes on, if you extend that out to 2020, the savings to the government are $68 billion. That implies a savings of $200 billion or so in the second decade. That’s a lot of money, and it’s in addition to the savings for consumers.

In theory, this town is going to have a serious conversation about deficits pretty soon. And a lot of it will focus on how we can reduce services or raise taxes. That’s going to be ugly. So the few opportunities we have to save large amounts of money while also making life better for people shouldn’t be missed.

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By Dan Froomkin
froomkin@niemanwatchdog.org

The mainstream media have always been easily distracted and beguiled — but never more than now, when the next diversion is always just one click away.

This makes us particularly fortunate to have a few relentless souls like Tom Engelhardt around, using the Internet not to chase the latest chatter but to tenaciously chronicle, explore and illuminate the unspoken realities that shape our political discourse.

Foremost among those realities is the extraordinary militarization of this nation in the post-9/11 era, and the skewing of public debate such that options that don’t involve massive uses of force are essentially disregarded — actually dismissed as dangerous, when in fact it is war that is dangerous. This goes a long way to explaining so many of the poor decisions made by our leaders that individually, but only briefly, get the attention of the mass media.

Engelhardt, a longtime book editor, is the creator and editor of the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute. He is the finder and cultivator of important progressive voices, and contributors to his site include Bill McKibben, Mike Davis, Karen Greenberg, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild and Elizabeth de la Vega.

But at the heart of Tomdispatch.com is Englehardt’s own work and his relentless thesis that America is a modern empire that has become addicted to the wars that are hastening its decline.

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Andrew Breitbart sure picked the wrong people to symbolize black “racism.” Taylor Branch and Clay Carson weigh in

By Joan Walsh

People who care about civil rights and racial reconciliation may eventually thank Andrew Breitbart for bringing Shirley Sherrod the global attention she deserves. Really. Her message of racial healing, her insight that the forces of wealth and injustice have always pit “the haves and the have-nots” against each other, whatever their race, is exactly what’s missing in today’s Beltway debates about race. What’s even more amazing, but almost completely unexplored in this controversy, is the historic civil rights leadership role of her husband, Charles Sherrod, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who served on the front lines of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

Despite Breitbart’s attempt to cast Shirley Sherrod as The, um, Man (“The Woman” doesn’t have the same ring), out to keep oppressed white folk down, under our first black racist president, she turned out to be the opposite, an advocate of justice for everybody. Given that history, it’s fascinating to learn more about her husband, an early SNCC leader known for being willing to work with white volunteers even after tension developed over the role of whites in the organization. Charles Sherrod is important for much more than the fairness with which he treated whites, but given Breitbart’s attempt to make his wife the poster woman for black “racism,” that footnote to his leadership history is particularly noteworthy. If there’s anyone more clueless about our civil rights history than Breitbart, as well as more abusive to it, I’m challenged to think of who it might be. He tests my commitment to nonviolent social change, but I’ll share the work of Charles Sherrod to remember my values.

Sherrod was SNCC’s first field secretary, and he co-founded the Albany movement after a student sit-in at the local bus station (to test a recently enacted desegregation law) led to a years-long campaign that ultimately involved Martin Luther King Jr. and the intervention of President John F. Kennedy. He traveled to the historic (and almost all-white) 1964 Democratic National Convention, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought for more black representation. He was jailed several times and stayed with SNCC until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael became chair and whites were expelled, but he’d already become more focused on his work in southwest Georgia than SNCC politics. Sherrod got his doctor of divinity degree from New York’s Union Theological Seminary, then returned to Albany to found the Southwest Georgia Independent Voters Project, then the agricultural cooperative New Communities Inc. He served 14 years on the Albany City Council, and he still lives there, known to civil rights movement veterans but obscure to the wider world, until his wife was attacked by the ignorant bullies of the right.

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Willie Nelson
Singer/Songwriter, President of Farm Aid

Shirley Sherrod has been a great friend to me, Farm Aid and family farmers for 25 years. She has always worked to improve economic opportunities for family farmers in the South, going back to when I first met her as the director of the Georgia Field Office for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. Like Ms. Sherrod herself has said, she’s always tried to help those who don’t have so that they can have a little more.

The real story of Shirley Sherrod deserved to be told a long time ago. She has had an amazing impact on the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of families and communities throughout the South. Farmers of every race have struggled with the income inequities that have persisted for generations, and advocates like Ms. Sherrod have moved mountains to ensure that families can remain in their homes and on their farms.

While all family farmers in our country face an uphill battle to stay on their land, growing good food for rest of us, black farmers have lost their land at an alarming rate, faster than any other family farmers. Lending discrimination and inequities in agriculture programs are largely responsible for the shrinking number of black farmers. Farm Aid began supporting the Federation in 1985, where Shirley worked at the time, because of the group’s unique ability to reach out and help struggling farm families in the South. Many had owned their land for generations and were, and continue to be, under constant threat. We continue to support the Federation’s work to this day, and hundreds of farmers are still on their land because of Ms. Sherrod’s efforts.

During her time at the Federation, she fought to make sure that family farmers got what they needed to stay on their land. She has been a national leader for family farmers and a compassionate, courageous advocate for all struggling family farmers. Shirley Sherrod has dedicated her life to working on behalf of family farmers, civil rights and the alleviation of poverty and it’s up to Secretary Vilsack to right this wrong immediately.

This country desperately needs more farm advocates with Ms. Sherrod’s expertise. But this is not just about a job — it’s about ensuring that Shirley Sherrod has the opportunity to continue to support family farmers and the rural poor, something she has spent her life doing.

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Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco late Saturday night with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to “start a revolution” with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

But before he made it to the city, Williams was stopped at early Sunday by California Highway Patrol officers for speeding and driving erratically on westbound Interstate 580 west of Grand Avenue in Oakland.

Police say he then initiated a chaotic, 12-minute gunbattle with officers, firing a 9mm handgun, a .308-caliber rifle and a shotgun. He reloaded his weapons when he ran out of ammunition and stopped only after officers shot him in areas of his body not covered by his bullet-resistant vest, authorities said.

On Tuesday, Williams, 45, of Groveland (Tuolumne County) appeared in an Oakland courtroom on charges that he tried to murder four CHP officers. Authorities described him as a heavily armed man determined not to return to prison. Bullets from the suspect’s rifle could penetrate ballistic body armor and vehicles, police said.

‘Start a revolution’

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Rep. Alan Grayson
U.S. Congressman from Florida’s 8th District

They may not have a health plan. Or a jobs plan. Or a peace plan. But they do have a plan.

Here is the Republican plan:

“I’ll give $100 to first Rep. who punches smary [sic] idiot Alan Grayson in nose.”

That incitement to violence was tweeted by Dan Gainor. Who is Dan Gainor? The Vice President of the Media Research Center (MRC). MRC is a right-wing Washington slur tank that glorifies Big Business in its “Business and Media Institute.” It is a $6 million lie factory, blessed by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

And in case you missed the point, Gainor later tweeted, “I’d love to see the video.”

Why is the D.C. Republican establishment so angry at me? Because I stood up on the Floor of the House, and demanded that the Republicans release unemployment insurance. I demanded that the Republicans stop pushing people out of their homes to live in their cars, and that they stop taking food out of the mouths of children.

I’m not going to give up fighting just because they want to punch me, but I’ve got a tough race, and I need your help fighting back. I went on Ed Schultz’s show on MSNBC to talk about all this.

This is their response. This is how the right wing does it. They pay people to clean for them, to cook for them, to drive for them, and now:

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Dan Froomkin
froomkin@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

At a rare congressional hearing Tuesday morning about how to spend less — not more — on defense, panelists raised a question that has barely ever been asked on Capitol Hill.

Namely: What lesson have we learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it that we should prepare for similar conflicts in the future, or that we should avoid them like the plague?

Over the past nine years, it’s gradually become accepted that our military’s duties include not just deterrence and conventional warfare but counterinsurgency, nation-building, counterterrorism and propping up fragile governments.

A recent Congressional Research Service report determined that the more than $1 trillion that’s been spent on Afghanistan and Iraq make the “war on terror” the second most expensive U.S. military action, in constant dollars, after World War II.

So when it comes to making substantial cuts in the country’s enormously expanded military budget, said Gordon Adams, a professor of international relations at American University, “the key is going to be in mission discipline.”

“We are at a point in American history where a serious, baseline discussion of strategy and mission is essential,” Adams told a House oversight subcommittee for national security and foreign affairs.

Congress needs to do a “hard scrub” when it comes to what missions it considers appropriate for the armed forces going forward, he said. “Which ones are most important to the security of the U.S.?” Is the chief takeaway from Afghanistan and Iraq “that our national security is engaged every time there is a terrorist attack, every time there is a insurgency,” and so on?

Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, noted that defense spending is now at levels significantly above the peaks of the Cold War, and is up 96 percent in constant dollars since 1998.

“We need to look at this budget with new eyes,” he said.

“The fabulous cost, slow progress, and uncertain outcome of recent efforts at regime change, armed nation-building, and large-scale counter-insurgency make them a poor strategic choice, when other approaches are available for fighting terrorism and countering proliferation,” Connetta said in his written testimony.

Even among supporters of the wars, “few seem eager to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the future,” he wrote. “Can we draw a broader lesson from this?”

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Shahien Nasiripour

Elizabeth Warren could lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without ever having to face a Senate confirmation hearing.

The Harvard Law professor and bailout watchdog, beloved by the left and reviled by big banks, is one of three candidates the White House identified Friday as potential picks to lead the new consumer agency. Created as part of the financial reform bill President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law on Wednesday, the agency is supposed to protect borrowers from predatory lenders and centralize the federal government’s role when it comes to extending credit to consumers. Warren conceived of the agency in 2007 and since last year has served as the public face of the campaign to enact it into law.

But some have speculated Warren may face an uphill battle to become its inaugural chief. Lenders fear her — particularly given her strong advocacy on behalf of the debt-strapped middle class — and are furiously fighting her potential nomination as she’s viewed as the most consumer-friendly of the candidates. Their friends in the Senate may take up their cause.

Proponents and critics agree that the first director will have a lasting impact on the agency, from the hiring of staff to the general attitude it takes towards consumer protection. Some are expected to prepare a Supreme Court-style campaign when Obama names his nominee.

During a radio interview Monday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said there’s a “serious question” over whether she, as Obama’s nominee, could be confirmed by the Senate.

“We are confident she is confirmable,” White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said.

The administration, though, could bypass the Senate entirely — without engendering the ill-will that would result from a recess appointment.

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Byron Williams and a scene from the Oakland shootout.

By Justin Elliott

On Sunday, a heavily-armed Groveland, California, man named Byron Williams allegedly opened fire at police after they pulled over his truck in Oakland. After a dramatic shootout, two officers sustained injuries from flying  shards of glass and Williams — who had a shotgun, a handgun, a rifle, and was wearing a bulletproof vest — was in the hospital in serious condition.

Williams’ mother Janice told a local ABC affiliate her son often became angry watching TV news and “[h]e feels the people of this country are being raped by our government and politicians.” She told the San Francisco Chronicle that Byron Williams was also upset at “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News quotes unnamed law enforcement sources saying that Williams, 45, “has a history showing he is anti-government, anti-corporation and against liberal causes.

If Williams was indeed motivated by anger at the government — and it’s important to note that police still haven’t commented on motive — then this is, by our count, the third recent case of people angry at the government or the Obama Administration opening fire on police.

The other two cases share some strands with the Williams case (bullet-proof vests, lots of guns, traffic stops), but they resulted in the deaths of several police officers.

In April 2009, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly opened fire on police who responded to a 911 call from Poplawski’s mother. Poplawski, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest and was armed with an assault rifle and two other guns, survived the ensuing four-hour gun battle — but three police officers were killed. His friends said he feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.”

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By Glenn Greenwald

The Washington Post’s Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she’s easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation — if not the best — with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government:  what the article calls “Top Secret America.”  To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents:  the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this “hidden world, growing beyond control” — as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively.   But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration’s escalating war on whistle blowers:

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.

Virtually every fact Priest and Arkin disclose underscores this point.   Here is their first sentence:  ”The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”  This all “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.”  We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government:  functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle.  Consider this:  ”Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.”  To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case.  Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State.  Here’s but one flavoring anecdote:

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