In Let Our Allies Contemplate What Life Will Be Without Us, ex-Mayor Ed Koch says

But I am concerned with the even more shocking statement made by Colin Powell on "Face the Nation," that the U.S. army was "about broken." No one, to the best of my knowledge, has used that kind of expression before. Imagine the satisfaction it must have given to the leaders of al-Qaeda, the leaders of the insurrection in Iraq and particularly the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his supporters who have constantly inveighed against the U.S. and predicted the disappearance of America, as well as the elimination of Israel.

Your knowledge need supplementing. 

"You can go and find a list of suspected terrorists held in Iraqi prisons. You will definitely find out that no Iranian is among them," Kazemi-Qomi said, adding that few of them are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, which are on Iran's eastern border. "I regret to tell you that the majority of these suspects come from Arab countries."

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: COLD SHOULDER FOR U.S.
Iran forging ahead in Iraq without U.S.
Tehran's ambassador in Baghdad sees no need to talk with Americans about how to stabilize the war-torn nation.
By Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writer
December 22, 2006

BAGHDAD — Tehran's top envoy here said there was no need for contacts with the United States aimed at stabilizing Iraq, saying that Iranians already were pursuing channels to help secure their embattled neighbor.

Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi brushed aside recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, that the Bush administration speak to Tehran about the chaos in Iraq.

"We don't need a Mr. Baker-style proposal calling for Iran to talk with the United States about Iraq," Kazemi-Qomi said in an interview this week. "We have our own well-defined policies about Iraq. We have never waited for a Mr. Baker or someone else to offer talks."

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Assn., said he was delighted with the revenue from "War on Christmas" merchandise, which supplemented the ministry's $13-million annual budget. All 500,000 buttons and 125,000 magnets were sold out by early December. "It was very successful for us," Wildmon said.

'War on Christmas' has a new jingle: money
Christian groups raise funds as they sell items to counter a perceived assault on the holiday. By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer
4:16 AM PST, December 23, 2006

The "War on Christmas" has never been so profitable.

Just what the holy foreskin was doing in the priest's house—in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, no less—and why and how it disappeared has been debated ever since the relic vanished.

Fore Shame
Did the Vatican steal Jesus' foreskin so people would shut up about the savior's penis?
By David Farley
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006, at 12:32 PM ET

In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. "This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata's beloved curio is different.

This wasn't just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior's penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth.

School Entrepreneur Named to Be a Deputy Chancellor
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein yesterday appointed the former president of Edison Schools Inc., the world’s largest for-profit operator of public schools, as a deputy chancellor, perhaps the boldest move yet in the Bloomberg administration’s effort to increase the role of the private sector in managing city public schools.

The former Edison president, Chris Cerf, is a longtime friend of Mr. Klein and has been a consultant to the city’s Education Department since early this year, paid with private donations. He is part of a team that has been re-evaluating virtually every aspect of the overhaul of the school system in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s first term.

You know about Edison Schools?

Edison's Failing Grade
Investors and school districts are ditching the country's leading public education privatizer
by Tali Woodward, Special to CorpWatch
June 20th, 2002

Edison Schools Failing?

A year ago, Edison Schools Inc. was flying high. With 133 schools under its control, Edison had quickly become the nation's largest for-profit manager of public schools. And the public education funding that the company was tapping into seemed to provide a potentially limitless revenue stream. Founder Chris Whittle had predicted that, by 2020, Edison would run one in ten public schools in the United States. The company was a hit with Wall Street: shares were trading at $38, up from $18 when Edison went public just over two years earlier.

Now shares of Edison are changing hands for about a dollar, the minimum price required to stay listed on NASDAQ. Edison has racked up $250 million in losses since it began. The company announced June 3 that it had secured the $40 million investment it needs to open school in the fall. But the futures of 74,000 kids in Edison schools from Maryland to California remain tied to a company that is financially unstable. Edison's economic troubles raise renewed questions about the wisdom of turning public schools over to for-profit corporations -- and could pose a major setback for the school privatization movement.

Sorry. That's how I see it; when you're ranting against a particular religion you can't make exceptions.

Peace Hopes Fade in Somalia as Fighting Rages
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania, Dec. 22 — Any hope of a quick peace in Somalia vanished in a burst of artillery shells today, as fighting raged between rival governments of the country for a third day straight.

Residents in Baidoa, the seat of the internationally-recognized transitional government of Somalia, reported seeing columns of Ethiopian tanks rumbling toward the front lines, raising worries that Somalia’s internal problems could become regional ones.

If so, hit this link and subscribe to NPR: African-American Roundtable.

Roundtable: Victimization, Bush on Iraq and Politics

News & Notes, December 21, 2006 · Today's roundtable panel discusses victimization, President Bush's latest public remarks about Iraq, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) leadership of the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Election Commission's prediction that the 2008 presidential race could cost candidates $1 billion.

Still, there's several interesting things to consider here. Consider it background material...assuming you have a choice in the matter.

At that point, the old French proverb “to understand all is to forgive all” will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

Liberalism and neurology
Free to choose?
Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Thousands More Dead In Continuing Iraq Victory
December 18, 2006 | Issue 42•51

Statistics released by the Department Of Defense estimated that 2,937 U.S. troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the ongoing American military victory in Iraq.

"Victory deaths are at a higher level than we had anticipated, yes," Gen. George Casey, Jr. said at a press conference shortly after the figures were released. "But one of the crucial lessons of our Vietnam experience is that a victory, in order to remain victorious, can't be abandoned halfway through, or in the case of Iraq, one-eighth of the way through."

"And significantly more troops may be required if we are to continue to enjoy that victory, especially if this turns into an all-out civil war," Casey added, stressing that it was still too early to deem the victory a "quagmire."

Coretta Scott King's Wiretap Ends
December 18, 2006 | Issue 42•51

January saw the passing of 78-year-old Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and with it, the end of the FBI's around-the-clock phone surveillance of Mrs. King.

"After Mrs. King's death, the Bureau determined that the threat she posed to American security was significantly minimized to the point that the wiretapping should not continue," said Charles Torcello, special agent in charge of the FBI's Coretta Scott King surveillance unit.

The FBI had monitored King since 1955, when her husband, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., first gained the attention of law-enforcement officials by leading the Montgomery bus boycott against segregation in public mass transit.

I don't know if you remember, but before the actual start of the "Shock and Awe" campaign, while Bush was moving folks into position, people started talking more about the timing than the possibility of invasion. Several commentators said once you have all those guys and machines in play you almost have to invade or you lose face.

Keep that in mind as you watch this clip.

The Interior Department study, commissioned to analyze the costs of royalty incentives and their effectiveness at increasing energy supplies, was completed in fall 2005. But the study was not released until last month because senior officials said they considered it incomplete.

After repeated requests, the department provided a copy to The New York Times with a “note to readers” that said the report did not show the “actual effects” of incentives. Indeed, Interior officials contended that the cost of the incentives would turn out to be far less than the study concluded....

But industry analysts who compare oil policies around the world said the United States was much more generous to oil companies than most other countries, demanding a smaller share of revenues than others that let private companies drill on public lands and in public waters. In addition, they said, the United States has sweetened some of its incentives in recent years, while dozens of other countries demanded a bigger share of revenue.

Incentives on Oil Barely Help U.S., Study Suggests
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 — The United States offers some of the most lucrative incentives in the world to companies that drill for oil in publicly owned coastal waters, but a newly released study suggests that the government is getting very little for its money.

Media experts worry that the charges against the girls for distributing images of the fight could be used to stem legitimate journalism, particularly as media organizations increasingly call for contributions from everyday citizens.

It could have implications for media organizations that record video of something on the street or publish or broadcast images submitted by people with cellphones, said Guy Baehr, assistant director of Rutgers University's Journalism Resources Institute.

"It just seems like kind of a stretch," he said. "If you follow that reasoning, you could infringe on a person's First Amendment rights."

Girls Who Recorded Fight Are Charged
Police Say Teenagers Put Attack on Web
By Beth DeFalco
Associated Press
Friday, December 22, 2006; A08

TRENTON, N.J., Dec. 21 -- Not only was a teenage girl the victim of a planned attack outside a high school gymnasium, the attacker also arranged to have it recorded and put on the Internet for her classmates to see, authorities say.

As a result, authorities have charged two teenage girls with harassment. One was already facing an assault charge for allegedly starting the fight at South Brunswick High School.

[W]hen managers distort market forces by rigging the legal environment, that is a different matter. An entire industry of consultants exists to advise companies on how to avoid recognizing a union; a second industry of consultants exists to legitimize super-sized executive pay. Until this changes, the growing material inequality in the nation will be compounded by the corrosive perception that the rules are unequal, too.

Just Capitalism
Not all attacks on business are crazy. Here is the sane version.
Friday, December 22, 2006; A32

THIS SERIES has described ways to address inequality: Increase tax progressivity; invest more in education; reform health care. But there's pressure to reach beyond that: to tackle inequality where it apparently originates, meaning the workplace. This pressure can be dangerous. Companies are not instruments of social policy; their first duty is to make money by serving customers, and they can provide for their workers only so long as they do that. Nevertheless, two sorts of corporate reform are warranted. It should be easier for labor unions to organize. And it should be harder for top executives to pay themselves outlandish sums.

For the last six years the Bush Republican government has wielded the Justice Department like a rapier.

This case will be used to legitimize Bushista intrusions into anything less trivial than the question, "Did Barry Bonds do something that wasn't illegal or against the rules of baseball at the time in question?"

Media-Sourcing Debate on Deck at Capitol
Congress Is Likely to Revisit
Calls for Federal Shield Law
As Baseball Case Culminates
By JESS BRAVIN and SARAH ELLISON
December 22, 2006; Page B3

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is increasingly at odds with some Republicans over its efforts to make journalists reveal confidential sources.

These are the references The NY Times provides

• “Iran’s Leader Condemns Saudi Attacks,” The Washington Post, May 15, 2003
  (Articles on The Washington Post are preview only. Full versions require purchase.)
• “Time to Deal With Iran,” The Washington Post, May 6, 2004
• “Foreign Minister Briefs MP’s on Talks With the United States,” BBC Monitoring, May 20, 2003
• “In 2003, U.S. Spurned Iran’s Offer of Dialogue: Some Officials Lament Lost Opportunity,” The Washington Post, June 18, 2006
• “U.S. Ready to Resume Talks With Iran, Armitage Says,” The Washington Post, Oct. 29, 2003
• “U.S. Eyes Pressing Uprising in Iran: Officials Cite Al Qaeda’s Link, Nuclear Program,” The Washington Post, May 25, 2003
• “Iran, Afghanistan Juggle Hot Potato Hekmatyar,” Time, Feb. 23, 2002
• “The Gulf Between Us,” The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2006
• “Dealing with Tehran: Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options Toward Iran,” (PDF) Century Foundation, Dec. 4, 2006
• “Iran, U.S. Holding Talks in Geneva,” USA Today, May 11, 2003
• “Mutual Terror Accusations Halt U.S.-Iran Talks,” USA Today, May 21, 2003
• “Press Briefing on Board Plane, En Route Moscow,” State Department Web site, Dec. 9, 2001

...with this op-ed.

What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran
By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN
Washington

HERE is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.

These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board. We provided the following citations to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves.

Me, I got video of Mr. Leverett explaining what's going on.

Court Overturns Limits on Political Ads, Part of the Campaign Finance Law

...This case has been closely watched for several reasons. For one, organizations with quite disparate interests, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association, the Chamber of Commerce and the conservative Club for Growth, have argued that they have a right to petition the government.

But political advertisements do not petition the government.

You want to know the truth, I'd like to see two new TV channels exclusively for political ads...one for national campaigns, one for state and local campaigns. Maybe one especially for issues advertising. We need some easily reversible way of isolating the crap.

Iraqi Prime Minister Tells Gates He'll Let U.S. Decide on Troop 'Surge'
By Thomas E. Ricks and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 22, 2006; A23

BAGHDAD, Dec. 21 -- Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told visiting Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that he would let U.S. generals decide whether there is a need for a "surge" in U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, according to Iraqi officials with knowledge of the meeting.

In a news conference, Gates said his conversation with the Iraqi prime minister and defense minister included "no numbers. . . . We were really talking in broader terms."

Another concern is that the program can have unintended results. The waste gas to be incinerated here is emitted during the production of a refrigerant that will soon be banned in the United States and other industrial nations because it depletes the ozone layer that protects the earth from ultraviolet rays.

Handsome payments to clean up the waste gas have helped chemical companies to expand existing factories that make the old refrigerant and even build new factories, said Michael Wara, a carbon-trading lawyer at Holland & Knight in San Francisco.

Moreover, air-conditioners using this Freon-like refrigerant are much less efficient users of electricity than newer models. The expansion of large middle classes in India and China has led to soaring sales of cheap, inefficient air-conditioners, along with the building of coal-fired plants to power them, further contributing to global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer.

Outsize Profits, and Questions, in Effort to Cut Warming Gases
By KEITH BRADSHER

QUZHOU, China — Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.

U.S. to Declassify Secrets at Age 25
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — It will be a Cinderella moment for the band of researchers who study the hidden history of American government.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

In fact the situation in Pakistan's border areas is starting to look a lot like eastern Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001....

...According to multiple independent reports, Waziristan has been thoroughly Talibanized, and the fundamentalists are spreading their influence through adjacent border districts. Cross-border attacks and the deaths of American soldiers that they cause are up significantly. Al-Qaeda is reliably reported to be operating training camps in North Waziristan with the help of scores of foreign militants who are schooling recruits in suicide bombing and the use of improvised explosive devices. According to a stunning report in the current edition of Newsweek, they are also preparing Western citizens who could carry out major terrorist attacks in Britain or the United States.

Al-Qaeda's Sanctuary
Pakistan's tribal areas look a lot like Afghanistan in 2001 -- and the Bush administration is tolerating it.
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A28

THREE MONTHS ago the Pakistani government struck a deal with pro-Taliban leaders in the district of North Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan: It agreed to abandon military operations, withdraw the army and release prisoners in exchange for promises that the militants would cease cross-border attacks and disarm the foreign terrorists in their midst. That the extremists would not respect the accord, and that attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan would increase rather than decline, obviously seemed likely at the time. Yet President Bush, ever indulgent of Pakistan's autocratic ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, accepted his promises. "When the president looks me in the eye and says the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanization of the people, and that there won't be a Taliban and won't be al-Qaeda, I believe him," Mr. Bush declared when he met Gen. Musharraf at the White House on Sept. 22.

The report lays much of the blame for the funding gap on states. In 26 states, the highest-poverty districts receive less state and local funding than the wealthiest ones; in 28 states, the districts with the most minority students receive less money than those with the fewest.

Program Widens School Funding Gap, Report Says
Rich States Are Found to Get More Than Poor Ones in $13 Billion Effort to Aid Low-Income Students
By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A04

A $13 billion federal program to help students from low-income families has actually widened an education funding gap between rich and poor states, according to a study released yesterday.

"We have told the Sudanese that we have to move along to our own strategic process in the United States government and we will do that beginning in the new year if we do not see some kind of progress . . . between now and the end of the year," Natsios told reporters.

U.S. Threatens Action on Darfur
Reuters
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A25

Sudan must allow a team of U.N. personnel into Darfur and formally accept an international force for the area by year's end or face unspecified U.S. steps next year, a U.S. special envoy said yesterday.

Andrew Natsios, President Bush's special envoy for Sudan, told reporters he delivered the message to Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, during a visit to Khartoum this month.

This Michel guy must be related to Dubya.

Michel said he had "noted" the fighting. "I'm in favor of the optimism of the will, and not the pessimism of reality," he said.

No place or date has been set for the talks, which would be a resumption of negotiations held in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, that fell apart after each side accused the other of violating agreements.

Somali Government, Islamic Militias Agree To Resume Peace Talks
Announcement Comes as Fighting Flares
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 21, 2006; A20

NAIROBI, Dec. 20 -- Somalia's Council of Islamic Courts and the country's transitional government agreed Wednesday to resume peace talks without any preconditions, as fighting broke out between the two sides.

Adolph Giuliani figured out how to get Confederate types to vote for a Yankee.

On Rudy Giuliani's new exploratory committee website you can find a bio of the former Mayor and current frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination. The bio describes his current marriage as follows: "In May of 2003, Rudy married Judith S. Nathan. Mrs. Giuliani is a registered nurse with an extensive medical and scientific background."

...needless to say, the bio makes no mention of his first marriage to Regina Peruggi, which was annulled after he discovered she was actually his second cousin.)

This is the first question from today's year end press conference.

Check the body language. And check when he reads from the teleprompter. It's all Bushit.

If I can't get justice, seeing a little public humiliation makes me feel better for a little while.

I saw this headline

Bush Concedes Iraq War More Difficult Than He Expected

and thought it's like each truth has to be dragged screaming from between his clenched teeth and bloody lips. And I wondered if he actually used those words.

You know what's really foul? It's that his word selection is important news.

Anyway, I went for the transcript and his answer to the very first question must be noted.

QUESTION: Mr. President, less than two months ago, at the end of one of the bloodiest months in the war, you said: Absolutely, we're winning.

See this headline?

Rice Stands Firm, Embarks on New Push

It's total nonsense. I'm going to rewrite it to be accurate.

Rice Keeps Job, Does as She's Told
Diplomat Counters Doubt Diplomat Ignores Doubt
Over Bush Iraq Policy, Bush Head Up Ass
Says No Sudden Shifts Loom (um, that one works...)
By NEIL KING JR.
December 20, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- This should be Condoleezza Rice's moment.

The secretary of state's longtime rival, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is gone. Her ties to President Bush appear as strong as ever. Her popularity remains high, even as support for the president ebbs. And voices on all sides are calling for more diplomacy, more outreach -- core strengths of the department she heads.

Yet, as she moves into her third year as the nation's top diplomat, she faces doubt over the administration's Iraq strategy and finds herself embattled and increasingly defensive. Criticism of the administration's foreign policy is on the rise, not only among Democrats, but from Republican stalwarts such as former Secretary of State James Baker, and even from close ally Britain.

Obviously being on fucking drugs is no bar to serving as Secretary of State.

Rice Stresses the Positive Amid Mideast Setbacks
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; A19

What many Americans may see as chaos and turmoil in the Middle East is partly the result of the Bush administration hastening historical forces that are destined to reshape the region, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday. She added that the results will not be known for decades.

"The old Middle East was not going to stay," Rice said. "Let's stop mourning the old Middle East. It was not so great, and it was not going to survive anyway. [P6: 'You see, we decided to kill it.']"