From PR Newswire:

^{President Bush Boosts Porn Industry With Economic Stimulus Plan, According to AIMRCo}

An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.

According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, "Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market."

Jillian Fox, spokeswoman for LSGmodels.com, one of the sites reporting figures to AIMRCo, added, "In a June 15, 2008 survey to our members, thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or renew an existing membership."

(h/t to Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend)

Thank you, House Democrats.

That is, thank you to the 151 House Democrats (and, oh yeah, four Republicans) who voted Thursday against continuing to fund the occupation of Iraq. As opposed to the 80 who voted for it. In other words, thanks to the majority.

I know that a handful of you don't really deserve thanks. You voted "nay" with the full knowledge that this funding was going to pass anyway. If you had seen that the vote was going to be a little closer, had there actually been the possibility that the nays would have constituted the House majority, you would have voted "aye" for fear of being labeled, come November - or on the upcoming Fourth of July - as an unpatriotic terrorist-sympathizer who doesn't "support the troops." So maybe that thanks is really only due to 147 of you. Or 143. Who knows? No way to parse out all the ulterior motive possibilities.

Nearly six years ago, 126 House Democrats voted against the Iraq War Resolution, officially known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. You weren't properly thanked for that. Eighty-one Democrats voted for the AUMF.

If you happen to be one of those who voted against the funding today and also voted against the AUMF in 2002, a double huzzah.

And if you're a visitor to this site whose Representative is one of the folks listed below, drop her or him a thank-you by e-mail or a phone call.

Neil Abercrombie, Gary Ackerman, Thomas H. Allen, Jason Andrews, Michael Arcuri, Joe Baca, Tammy Baldwin, Xavier Becerra, Sanford Bishop, Timothy Bishop, Earl Blumenauer, Leonard Boswell, Robert Brady, Bruce Braley, G.K. Butterfield, Lois Capps, Michael E. Capuano, Dennis A. Cardoza, Russ Carnahan, Christopher P. Carson, Andre Castor, Yvette E. Clarke, Wm. Lacy Clay, Emanuel Cleaver, Steve Cohen, John Conyers Jr., Jerry F. Costello, Joe Courtney, Joseph Crowley, Elijah E. Cummings.

Danny K. Davis, Peter A. DeFazio, Diana DeGette, William D. Delahunt, Rosa L. DeLauro, John D. Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Michael F. Doyle, Donna F. Edwards, Keith Ellison, Eliot Engel, Anna G. Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Al Green, Raul M. Grijalva, Luis V. Gutierrez, John J. Hall, Phil Hare, Jane Harman, Alcee L. Hastings, Brian Higgins, Maurice D. Hinchey, Mazie K. Hirono, Paul Hodes, Rush Holt, Michael M. Honda, Darlene Hooley

Jay Inslee, Steve Israel, Jesse L Jackson Jr., Sheila Jackson-Lee, William J. Jefferson, Henry C. Johnson, E.B. Johnson, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Steve Kagen, Marcy Kaptur, Patrick J. Kennedy, Carolyn C. Kilpatrick, Ron Klein, Dennis Kucinich, James R. Langevin, John B. Larson, Barbara Lee, John Lewis, David Loebsack, Zoe Lofgren, Nita M. Lowey, Stephen Lynch

Carolyn Maloney, Edward J. Markey, Doris O. Matsui, Carolyn McCarthy, Betty McCollum, Jim McDermott, James P. McGovern, Jerry McNerney, Michael R. McNulty, Kendrick B. Meek, Gregory W. Meeks, Michael H. Michaud, Brad Miller, George Miller, Gwen Moore, James P. Moran, Christopher S. Murphy, Patrick Murphy, Jerrold Nadler, Grace F. Napolitano, Richard E. Neal, James L. Oberstar, David R. Obey, John W. Olver, Frank Pallone Jr., Bill Pascrell Jr., Ed Pastor, Donald M. Payne, Nancy Pelosi, David E. Price

Nick J. Rahall II, Charles B. Rangel, Laura Richardson, Steve R. Rothman, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Linda T. Sánchez, Loretta Sanchez, John P. Sarbanes, Janice D. Schakowsky, Adam B. Schiff, Robert C. Scott, Jose E. Serrano, Carol Shea-Porter, Brad Sherman, Albio Sires, Louise Slaughter, Adam Smith, Hilda Solis, Jackie Speier, Bart Stupak, Betty Sutton, Ellen Tauscher, Mike Thompson, Bennie G. Thompson, John F. Tierney, Edolphus Towns, Nicki Tsongas

Tom Udall, Chris Van Hollen, Nydia Velázquez, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Melvin L. Watt, Henry Waxman, Anthony D. Weiner, Peter Welch, Robert Wexler, Lynn Woolsey, David Wu, John A. Yarmuth.

Total fatalities of American military in Iraq since March 2003: 4101

Total fatalities of coalition military: 4414

Total Iraqi fatalities as a result of the invasion and occupation: Unknown, but as many as 1.4 million

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Andrew Kramer at The New York Times writes:

^{Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back}

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat. ...

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

The United States government played no role whatsoever in this matter. Having oil men in the Presidency and Vice Presidency at the time of these no-bid contracts is just a cowinkydance.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

You may wish to check out Troutfishing's Diary, Bush Slanders Troops, Blaming Them For His Own Torture Policy.

On February 12, 2004, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, two activists who had been together for 51 years, married each other after San Franciso declared same-sex marriages legal. The California Supreme Court subsequently nullified their marriage and some 4000 others in a ruling saying the city had no authority to approve the marriages in defiance of state law. Last month, the same court ended the state's ban on gay marriage. So, Monday night, Martin, 87, and Lyon, 83, got married again. Once again, as in 2004, they were the first couple to take advantage of the legal change.

^{Same-sex weddings start with union of elderly San Francisco couple}

Mayor Gavin Newsom, who officiated the ceremony in the reception area of his office, said it was a fitting way to memorialize last month's state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in California, which took effect at 5:01 p.m. ...

The couple made their way out of the office and onto the balcony area where a cake - and large crowd- was waiting. Rose petals fluttered down from the ceiling as the crowd cheered and cameras flashed.

"This is an extraordinary moment in history and extraordinary moment in time" Newsom said to the crowd. "They are extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives and spent half a century fighting for justice and equality."

Lyon drew laughter with her comments.

"When we first got together, we were not really thinking about getting married, we were thinking about getting together," she said. "I think it's a wonderful day."

"Ditto," Martin said.

Martin and Lyon have lived in the same house in San Francisco since 1955. That same year, at a time of flourishing McCarthyism, which hunted not only communists, but also gays, the pair helped found, with six other women, the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation's first lesbian rights organization. They risked everything. Martin was elected president and Lyon secretary. "DOB went on to define its purpose as bringing lesbians into the public discourse through education, encouraging responsible research studies, and advocating for changes in the penal code."

The organization held its first national convention in 1960, in downtown San Francisco.

Highlights included discussions on psychosexual behavior, status of gay bars, religious attitudes, legal problems of lesbian couples and entertainment. Phyllis and Del hosted a pre-convention reception at their home. Their address and phone number were printed in the program. From that point on there was no turning back for DOB or the couple who brought it out of the closet.

Unfortunately, in 1969 the National Organization for Women (NOW) President Betty Friedan labeled lesbians "The Lavender Menace." Again entering unfriendly territory, Del and Phyllis were two of the first out lesbians to join NOW, insisting on the couple's membership rate. At the 1971 and 1973 NOW conventions, the oppression of lesbians as a feminist issue was acknowledged in resolutions that Del and Phyllis were instrumental in getting adopted.

In 1972, they were also instrumental in setting up the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. That year their book Lesbian/Woman, depicting lesbian lives in a positive way, was published. The book was chosen in the 1990s by Publishers Weekly as one of the 20 most  influential women's books of the '70s and '80s).

In 1976, Martin wrote Battered Wives, a catalyst for establishing a network of battered women's shelters. Lyon became co-director of the National Sex Forum, which initiated the use of explicitly sexual films as a teaching tool, and subsequently became a member of The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, which grants doctoral and other degrees in sexology.

Activists for life. Spouses forever. Congratulations!

+ + +

Tuesday is the 1875th day since Mission Accomplished.

There are 216 days left of the Cheney-Bush regime.

The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases.

Tom Teicholz at the Los Angeles Times writes:

The pariah loophole
^{Former Nazis remain free because no country will accept them.}

John Demjanjuk's last appeal to avoid deportation was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 19. The 88-year-old accused Nazi concentration camp guard was stripped of his citizenship and ordered sent to Ukraine, his birthplace; Poland, the locus of the crimes; or Germany, the heir to the Nazi regime under which he served.

Yet, as it now stands, he is still in the United States. Why? He can't be exiled unless another country agrees to accept him. For the time being, he remains free.

In this, Demjanjuk is not alone. There are five other former Nazi criminals against whom the U.S. Justice Department successfully completed deportation proceedings but whom no country has been willing to accept. Romanian-born Johann Leprich, a guard at Mauthausen camp in Austria, is one; his deportation was finalized in 2006. Another is Jakiw Palij, born in a region of Poland that is now in Ukraine. He was a guard at Poland's Trawniki labor camp (where in a single day in 1943, 6,000 prisoners were murdered), and his deportation was finalized in January 2006. Mykola Wasylyk, another Trawniki guard also found to be at the Budzyn camp, had his final appeal denied in 2004.

Theodor Szehinskyj, also born in a part of Ukraine that used to be Poland, was in the SS unit called the Death's Head Brigade and was a guard at the Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and the Warsaw concentration camps. His deportation litigation was completed in March 2006.

Finally, there is Anton Tittjung. Tittjung was born in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. He was a Waffen SS member and a guard at Mauthausen.

Should any of these criminals worry that deportation is imminent, they might take comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court declined to hear Tittjung's final appeal way back in 2000. He still remains free in the United States. In addition, in recent years, four of their denaturalized Nazi peers died before they were ever deported.

Demanjuk was first charged in 1977 at age 57 for falsifying his 1952 applications to enter the U.S. and to get his citizenship in 1958. His citizenship was revoked in 1981, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986. Convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, Demjanjuk later had his sentence overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court on the grounds of reasonable doubt. In 1993, when he was 73, a U.S. Appeals Court overturned the 1981 ruling. In 1998, Demjanjuk regained his U.S. citizenship. But it was revoked again in 2002, when Demjanjuk was 82, after a new trial. An appeals court upheld the revocation in 2004. Late in 2005, an immigration judge ordered him deported. In 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. In January, the Sixth Circuit Court refused to review the order. Last month, the Supreme Court did the same.

Now 88, Demjanjuk, like the other war criminals still alive, has two goals in mind: stay free and run out the clock.  

Demjanjuk is one of the Nazis the anti-Semite Pat Buchanan chose to defend in the 1980s. For instance, in a 1982 interview with Allan Ryan Jr., then head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, Buchanan said: "You've got a great atrocity that occurred 35-45 years ago, okay? Why continue to invest...put millions of dollars into investigating that. I mean, why keep a special office to investigate Nazi war crimes. ...why not abolish your office?"

One of the camps where Demjanjuk has been accused of being a guard was the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. Some 800,000 people were murdered in the camp's gas chambers. Today on the site, 17,000 stones stand in a symbolic cemetery. It is said that 17,000 is the largest number of Jews gassed in a single day at the camp. More than 130 of the stones are inscribed with the names of the cities from where victims were deported to Treblinka.

Should aged Nazi war criminals, those who helped put the 800,000 into mass graves at Treblinka and the ashes of millions of others into the ground at other camps be left in peace to live out their dotage? What should be the statute of limitations on war crimes?

The Overnight News Digest is posted,  and includes a story that puts the lie to Senator Lindsey Graham's comment Thursday: "They said an al Qaeda member has a constitutional right to go to a federal court of their choosing and say, 'Judge, let me go,' The Nazis never had that right."

John Demjanjuk would beg to differ, Senator.

Margaret Talev at McClatchy Newspapers writes about Boumediene v. Bush [Caution: 70-page pdf].

^{McCain rebuffed, Obama vindicated by court's Guantanamo ruling}

Obama applauded the ruling, saying it was a repudiation of "yet another failed policy supported by John McCain."

Although both senators have opposed the use of torture in military interrogations of detainees and advocated closing the Guantanamo Bay facility, they've taken different stances when it comes to detainees' legal rights.

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who survived torture, helped shape the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It established a military-commission trial system as an alternative to civilian courts and said that federal courts couldn't consider habeas corpus petitions of detainees at Guantanamo; that is, detainees couldn't challenge in U.S. civilian courts the grounds on which they were being held.

McCain voted for it and Obama voted against it. ...

One of Obama's campaign-speech lines has been that if he's elected president, "I will restore habeas corpus" to detainees.

Obama, who has a law degree and taught constitutional law, said Thursday's opinion undercut President Bush's views on executive power, raised questions about McCain's judgment and was "an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."

"Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy," he said. ...

McCain noted at a press conference in Boston that he had not yet read the decision but that Chief Justice John G. Roberts' dissent was worthy of attention. Having not read the decision, he knew this how?

Three times in four years, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Cheney-Bush administration's shameless detention of terrorist suspects at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, the 45-square-mile area wrenched from Spain in 1898 and effectively stolen from Cuba in 1903 with a coerced treaty. From the White House's point of view, Guantánamo was perfect, neither Cuba nor the United States, a jurisdictionless no-man's-land where the rule of law could be ignored and the precepts of civilized behavior violated on a daily basis without the prying eyes of bleeding-heart terror-symps or the other two branches of government that the Founders chose to provide as limiters of executive power.

This third decision, like the previous ones - Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld - doesn't mean Gitmo will be shut down or the prisoners there (who haven't been already released or transferred to places like Bagram in Afghanistan) will go free any time soon. But the ruling is another major smackdown for the royalist approach Mister Bush and his legal theorists have tried to impose on the nation at the point of a bayonet labeled "9/11."

As Human Rights Watch's Legal and Policy Director James Ross writes in Salon:

^{Supreme Court to Bush: You're not above the law}

In the end, Boumediene says that the U.S. president cannot be a law unto himself. It says that anyone held in what is de facto U.S. territory -- no matter what crimes he may have committed or where he is from -- is entitled to challenge his detention. And that's something really worth celebrating.

From Italy, President Bush said Thursday that he disagreed with the ruling but "we will abide by the court's decision" -- as if he believes the administration has a choice in the matter. In the past, the administration has shown an incredible tenacity for seeking to undermine the rule of law. But then again, maybe President Bush will come to realize that his Guantánamo approach hasn't worked. That detaining hundreds of people who were later released without charge causes more harm than good. That trying people before ad hoc military commissions is a doomed process -- and that the federal courts can competently prosecute people for acts of terrorism, as they already do regularly. And that making the U.S. safe against acts of terrorism can be achieved with the help of the law, rather than by riding roughshod over it.

Don't hold your breath.

Indeed. Don't hold your breath. There are still 220 days until January 20.

Tonight, a tidbit from the early days of Daily Kos, June 11, 2002, to be precise. More proof that some things never change, even if the press secretary does.

It wasn't "The Little Caterpillar"

Last week, Bush surprised people by rejecting a report issued by the EPA admitting global warming was a scientific certainty. When asked about the report, Bush dismissively said "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy." I was shocked. What, Bush read a 268-page report? That would require some sort of adult attention span!

Well, Ari Fleischer finally admitted that Dubya lied: "Whenever presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed." That may be the case with Shrub and Reagan, but competent presidents do their own reading.

Of course had President Gore made this lie, it would be all over Fox news for weeks ...

The Overnight News Digest is posted and informs us that Norway legalizes gay marriage.

A month ago, Kathy G., who ought to be on everybody's daily must-read list, wrote a fine piece at her blog, The G Spot, called The Hillary-ization of Michelle Obama, in which she pounded on Christopher Hitchens's May 5 screed in Slate. But she dug a good deal deeper, and I am going to quote her at considerable length.

The Hitchens piece, contemptible piece o' shite though it is, a surefire sign that, now that it's clear Hillary's presidential campaign is all but over, the right is proceeding apace with its attempt to Hillary-ize Michelle Obama. We have, of course, all heard about how "unpatriotic" she is. Maureen Dowd has already cattily attacked her for not being sufficiently deferential to her husband. And now we're being treated to Hitchens' exegesis of how her college term papers prove she's really Stokely Carmichael in drag. Delightful! But hey . . . radical, unfeminine, unpatriotic -- remind you of any other right-wing caricatures of a certain prominent Democratic woman with a famous husband?    

It's not surprising that they're doing this to Michelle, because it's one of the most basic moves in the wingnut playbook. All Democrats are radicals who hate America, of course; in addition, all female Democrats are ballbusting beeyotches (just as all male Democrats are girly-men). The gender crap, sadly, is probably still going to be an issue for any Democratic first lady. The only first ladies who seem to  be noncontroversial and enjoy wide popularity are the ones who, like Pickles, resemble Stepford wives. But overwhelmingly, it seems to be Republicans, not Democrats, who marry that sort of woman.

The role of first lady tends to be a poor fit for today's Democratic wives, many of whom have been outspoken women with significant careers of their own. Though, of course, virtually any modern woman would chafe against the ridiculous 19th century-style confines of the role. Even the title itself -- "first lady" -- has the musty odor of an antique about it. It's a term that sounds like it's straight out of the 19th cult of true womanhood.

And speaking of the cult of true womanhood -- here is the classic article on the subject, by the historian Barbara Welter (I took her undergrad course in the history of American women, more years ago than I'd care to remember). This is the opening paragraph of that article:

   

The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women's magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

I always did love that phrase about the true woman holding up "the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand." "First lady" is a term which originated in the 19th century, and the role of first lady was very much part and parcel of the cult of true womanhood. But, as we see, the cult of true womanhood was very much a racial construct -- that was (a lot of) the point. So if Michelle Obama ascends to the role which is the apotheosis of the cult of true womanhood -- the role of First Lady of the United States -- I predict that wingnut heads will explode throughout the land. And there will be a whole other layer of bullshit Michelle will have to deal with. In addition to the anti-Democrat bullshit, and the sexist bullshit, there will be, of course, the racist bullshit.

My heart goes out to her. The road she will be traveling on will be a difficult one, in particular because there is no one in the history of America who has trod that particular path before. She is an exceedingly courageous person to have chosen such a public role. Just by sheer virtue of being black and female, and daring to live a public life, she will be highly controversial. She will attract a hell of a lot of ugly hatred. Even for a person as strong as I am sure she is, there are sure to be times when that will be very, very hard to take.  

What I'm wondering right now is, what can we - as Democrats, as feminists, as people who are deeply committed to racial equality -- do to help and support her?

This isn't the last time Kathy G has focused on the intersection of racism and sexism as regards Michelle Obama and this campaign, and you can count on her to do it again as the inevitable slurs and smears emerge. Some folks here and elsewhere in wwwLand have repeatedly argued that we should get past racism and sexism and move on. I couldn't agree more. But anybody who thinks we as a nation can move on without talking about it, and talking about it again, and again, and actually doing something about it, are confused over how change actually occurs.

Total U.S. military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4094

Total coalition fatalities in the same period: 4407

Total number of U.S. military suicides as a result of the Iraq invasion and occupation: Unknown, hundreds at least

Total number of Iraqi deaths because of the invasion and occupation: Unknown. As many as 1.4 million, possibly more

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

Glenn Hurowitz over at Grist, the on-line environmental magazine, interviews Scott Kleeb, the 32-year-old, highly photogenic, Yale Ph.D who is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska.

The hot rancher speaks

^{U.S. Senate candidate Scott Kleeb and the clean energy roundup}

Question: Where do you see Nebraska's economic future, and what role do you think clean energy will play in it?

Answer: We've got to transform the way we produce and consume energy. There's a failure of leadership we've seen at all levels of government. We've got to figure out how to do more with less. That's true of our elected officials and true of ourselves as individuals. This is a generations-long process. We are on the cusp of it right now. Biofuels and wind energy and solar energy and algae-based energy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Nebraska's economy is going to be transformed by that revolution. Farmers will find new ways of feeding or, once we get to cellulosic ethanol, fueling the world.

Question: Recent studies have suggested that devoting American land to growing biofuels instead of food is causing massive deforestation in carbon-rich tropical forests. How can switchgrass and cellulosic ethanol be viable if it's just causing food to be grown in these highly sensitive ecosystems thousands of miles away?

Answer: The rainforests are the world's largest carbon sink. The impact [of deforestation] there is much more important than what we're talking about in this country. You saw it in the farm debate on what we do about Conservation Reserve Program land [agricultural land that's set aside for conservation purposes]. You're even seeing an internal battle. Many farmers are members of the Farm Bureau or the Farmers Union, but are also members of Ducks Unlimited or Pheasants Forever. On one side, they're being lobbied by their farm organizations who talk about $5 [a bushel] corn or $6 corn and talk about how great it is and how we should produce more of it. On the other side, they're being lobbied by the organizations they're members of like Ducks Unlimited talking about increasing the CRP acreage. Farmers are personally conflicted about it. That's only going to get bigger. These are not easy questions that we're trying to deal with.

The advantage of switching to switchgrass is that you can do it because you don't harvest it the same way you harvest soybeans or corn or other row crops. You don't have to plough up the ground or disrupt the soil. With switchgrass, it's a little bit like mowing your yard. You never actually dig the roots out of the system. You never actually turn over the soil in any way, you just sort of mow off the top part of it. You don't actually disrupt the soil underneath it. You can raise switchgrass in areas we now consider marginal lands, low water lands so that it would not be competing with the river systems like the Mississippi or the Platte or some of the Corn Belt states where they do have a lot of rain or wherever it might be. You're competing on a different set of areas than you would be for food production.

Click on. There's lots more.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Normally, I'd rather eat Friskies than excerpt William Kristol and Bob Novak in the same week, much less in the same post. But for once the pair provide a good way to start Monday.

William Kristol writes:

In any case, with the battle against Hillary Clinton behind him, everything seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign dog-paddles along. And almost every Republican I’ve talked to is alarmed that the McCain campaign doesn’t seem up to the task of electing John McCain.

Robert Novak writes:

Shortcomings by John McCain's campaign in the art of politics are alienating two organizations of Christian conservatives. James Dobson's Focus on the Family is estranged following the failure of Dobson and McCain to talk out their differences. Evangelicals who follow the Rev. John Hagee resent McCain's disavowal of him.

The evangelicals are not an isolated problem for the Arizona senator. Enthusiasm for McCain inside the Republican coalition is in short supply. During the four months since McCain clinched the nomination, he has not satisfied conservatives opposed to his positions on global warming, campaign finance reform, immigration, domestic oil drilling and how to ban same-sex marriages.

It's not all doom and gloom for McCain from these two, but you don't have to peer between the lines to perceive their wrinkled brows.

And then there's staff writer Peter Wallsten's piece in the Los Angeles Times, John McCain's Ohio disconnect:

CINCINNATI -- As the architect of Ohio's ballot measure against gay marriage, Phil Burress helped draw thousands of conservative voters to the polls in 2004, most of whom also cast ballots to reelect President Bush. So Burress was not surprised when two high-level staffers from John McCain's campaign dropped by his office, asking for his help this fall.

What surprised Burress was how badly the meeting went. He says he tried but failed to make the McCain team understand how much work remained to overcome the skepticism of social conservatives. Burress ended up cutting off the campaign officials as they spoke. "He doesn't want to associate with us," Burress now says of McCain, "and we don't want to associate with him."

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

I've just watched for the second time the good parts of the exquisite video put up in Alyosha Popovich's Diary, Don't mess with Bill Moyers (vs. O'Reilly Factor). You shouldn't miss it.

But now I'm torn between wanting so very much for Bill-O to accept Moyers's invitation to spend an entire hour on his show and not wanting Moyers to waste even 60 seconds on the loofah-man. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. Because there is no way that Mr. Bill fuck-it-let's-do-it-live O'Reilly is going to let somebody else be in charge of interruptions. No way will he accept his inability to slip away to a commercial, to get in the last word, to place himself in a position where being a bully will do him not one ounce of good, to sit down in a chair where he'll get no slack for throwing another of his high-decibel tantrums.

Bill-O just isn't that kind of guy. He's a fool and a tool and a coward and a liar, but he's shrewd enough not to let Moyers dissect his whole bile-shrouded schtick with a few well-placed questions.

So I can rest easy about my guilty desire to see him, as one commenter on Popovich's Diary puts it, pwned, schooled and pwned and schooled again for a delicious hour. Ain't gonna happen. Moyers will have to cover something substantive instead.

Update: Here's a 39-minute video of Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform Saturday before he spoke to the guy from Fox. Thanks to SarahLee.

In 1966 and early 1967, I served under the tutelage of Tom Hayden (and others) as a third-tier "outside agitator," helping to set up and give advice to campus chapters of Students for a Democratic Society in the days when community organizing was one of the group's key efforts. Hayden went on to become famous, or infamous in the view of some people, but he never lost his love for up-from-the-bottom politics.

On the anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's murder, Hayden wrote at Huffington Post:

Bobby and Barack:

[In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968], I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick's Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision -- a movement-driven progressive government -- was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.

"Dad, don't you recognize anything of yourself in this movement?", asked an angry email from my son Troy, nearly forty years later. He was working 24/7 with his [now] wife Simone, for Barack Obama, spreading the boundless energy of the young and an artist's flair for silk-screens. How could I share your giddy utopianism, I wanted to respond, after the murders of the Sixties icons -- John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, all of whom I had known as a young man? If those killings were not enough, we suffered the Nixon and Reagan eras of counter-revolution aimed at what our generation had achieved. Then the war and sanctions and war again for control of the Persian Gulf. During the coming decades, I was limited every day by the sordid realities, as well as the occasional modest achievements, of electoral politics.

I didn't see him coming. When I heard of the young state senator with a background in community organizing who wanted to be president, I was at least sentient enough to be interested. When I read Dreams of My Father, I was taken aback by its depth. This young man apparently gave his first public speech, against South African apartheid, at an Occidental College rally organized by Students for Economic Democracy, the student branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy [CED] which I chaired in 1979-82. The buds of curiosity quickened. Soon I was receiving emails from David Peck, an organizer of the Occidental rally, who now is coordinating Americans in Spain for Barack Obama.

One of Bobby Kennedy's qualities, or perhaps it was a quality of the times, was an easy and growing familiarity with the New Left. He evolved from 1961 to 1963 from viewing the Freedom Riders as a dangerous nuisance to a prophetic minority. By 1967, he even wanted to copy SDS community organizing projects -- a forerunner of Barack Obama's path -- as a template for a national war on poverty.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

As was widely commented upon throughout wwwLand Thursday, Patrick Cockburn at The Independent writes:

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
^{Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors}

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. ...

But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal. ...

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation. ...

The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.

David Stout at The New York Times writes:

U.S. Not Seeking Permanent Iraq Bases, Ambassador Says

The United States ambassador to Iraq dismissed any suggestion on Thursday that the Bush administration was maneuvering to set up permanent military bases in Iraq.

"I’m very comfortable saying to you, to the Iraqis, to anyone who asks, that, no indeed, we are not seeking permanent bases, either explicitly or implicitly," the ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, said at a State Department news briefing. ...

Mr. Crocker turned to humor in parrying a question on whom the Iraqis would like to see in the White House next year.

"Well, I haven’t really had any detailed discussions with the Iraqis on that," he said. "Were they to bring it up, I would probably accuse them of outrageous interference in our domestic affairs."

Total military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4092

Total coalition fatalities in the same period: 4405

Iraqi fatalities as a consequence of the war: Unknown, as many as 1.4 million

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

While we ponder whether she really means it this time, whether her advisers and friends and colleagues and maybe even her daughter and husband have persuaded her that, yes, 2187 delegates is more than 2117, perhaps it's time to take a momentary breather from the politics of the past 16 months and go after each other tooth and nail on another subject, the movies. Or as some of my high-falutin' friends prefer to say: film.

In this arena, Harry Brighouse and other folks over at Crooked Timber have been having fun with a thread called: 101 Movies to avoid watching before you die.

Harry particularly hates The House of Sand and Fog, about which - in the most charitable section of his excoriation - he says:

I rarely dislike a movie enough to warn people against it, but this is one of the worst, and most unpleasant, movies I’ve watched. (I see that someone has vandalised the wikipedia entry on this one, saying, hilariously, that it and some of its actors were nominated for awards!)

In the past three days, more than 400 commenters have dropped in with their personal unfavorites, or, as a poster named Wilson labels them, decommendations, including: The Lake House, My Dinner with Andre, Boxing Helena, The Golden Compass, Eyes Wide Shut, Dogma, Star Wars (any of them), Van Helsing, Ghost Dog, Kingdom of Heaven, Leaving Las Vegas, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial, Dead Poets Society,
Wolf Creek ...

You get the idea.

Commenter ck dexter , who I suspect, says film, not movies, opines:

This is an embarrassing and disheartening thread. Like a first year undergrad discussion. "Plato sucks! He’s hard and boring!"

I note two surprising and particularly saddening trends:

1. The tendency to list arguably mediocre films that made an effort to be good, but that are thought by many knowledgeable people to be very good. And, at the same time, a tendency to defend choices (e.g., You’ve Got Mail) that are equally mediocre, but try not to be more.

2. To equate sad or depressing with "don’t watch it." Have I got a Disney library to sell you people.

At the very least, it’s a good argument in favor of respect for specialized expertise in knowledge, since clearly the high level of general intelligence doesn’t make its opinions about film any better than the average.

OK, specialists and movie fans alike, what do you decommend we avoid before we die?

My personal unfavorite: The Searchers.

+ + +

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

Bill Beutler at The Nation writes:

^{Byron Dorgan’s Contracting Fraud Crusade}

The North Dakota senator has made investigating contractor corruption his mission, but will he succeed in creating a congressional committee devoted to it?

While Congress has launched sporadic inquiries into contracting fraud, one legislator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has made it his mission to investigate contractor corruption.

Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, a Senate entity tasked with gathering and distributing policy, strategy, and oversight information to congressional staff and other Democratic officials. (There is also a Republican Policy Committee.) Since 2003, the DPC has held 14 hearings dedicated to exposing the corruption of the Iraq reconstruction effort, and last month the committee released an encyclopedic report detailing major examples of fraud.

When the war in Iraq began, says Dorgan, "no one really [decided] to say, ‘All right, now we’re going to be an investigative committee so there’s accountability.’"
... since 2005 Dorgan has attempted to establish a congressional committee with full oversight clout to oversee military contracting. Dubbed the Special Committee on War and Reconstruction Contracting, the proposed panel is modeled on the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (commonly known as the Truman committee), which was charged with investigating the waste and corruption of billions of dollars of World War II-era defense contracts. ...

If Dorgan gets his way, it could substantially bolster the Democrats’ efforts to uncover and deter acts of fraud and corruption in war contracting.

The Overnight News Digest has been posted.

Ullrich Fichtner at Der Spiegel writes:

^{Why NATO Troops Can't Deliver Peace in Afghanistan}

Good days are in short supply in Afghanistan, a country at war -- or involved in several wars, to be exact. There is constant fighting on many fronts, hard and soft. The newspapers, and there are many of them in Kabul now, serve up pages of chaotic images every day. Their reports are about bombs and drinking water, holy warriors and wheat prices, NATO air attacks and schoolbooks, kidnapped children, refugees and bandits.

Almost seven years have passed since the overthrow of the Taliban regime, and in those seven years half of the world has tried to bring a better future and, most of all, peace to this new country, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. As part of the NATO military operation known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 40 nations have 60,000 soldiers deployed in the country. There are 26 United Nations organizations in Afghanistan, and hundreds of private and government agencies are pumping money, materials and know-how into the country's 34 provinces. But anyone seeking success stories or asking about failures will encounter reports that do not seem to be coming from the same country.

According to the speeches and statements Western military officials, diplomats and politicians are constantly churning out, the security situation has improved substantially, the military successes are obvious and the Taliban are as good as defeated. But peace and Afghanistan, say the Afghanis when speaking to a domestic audience, are still two incompatible words.

Last year, 1,469 bombs exploded along Afghan roads, a number almost five times as high as in 2004. There were 8,950 armed attacks on troops and civilian support personnel, 10 times more than only three years earlier. One hundred and thirty suicide bombers blew themselves up in 2007. There were three suicide bombings in 2004.

See Brandon Friedman's Sunday Diary on this subject here.

Total American military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4083

Total coalition fatalities in that period: 4397

Total American military fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001: 513.

Total coalition fatalities in that period: 837

Total war-related Afghan fatalities in that period: Unknown

Total suicides among men and women who have served in Iraq since then: Uncertain. The Army reported Thursday that the suicide rate has increased this year, just as it increased in 2007 over 2006.

Total Iraqi fatalities because of the invasion and occupation: Uncertain - 200,000 to 1.4 million

General Motors lost $38 billion last year. And another $3.3 billion in the first quarter. By the end of this year, it’s going to lose a fourth of its U.S. workers.

John D. Stoll at The Wall Street Journal writes:

GM Sheds 19,000 Jobs Through Buyout Program

General Motors Corp. said about 19,000 hourly workers have accepted buyout or early-retirement offers from the company and most will leave its payroll by July 1.

The move will cut the auto maker's U.S. hourly work force by about 24%, and it comes as GM is preparing a number of additional cost-cutting moves to be announced next week at its annual shareholder meeting. The 19,000 acceptances met the company's expectations, a person familiar with the numbers said.

The new round of buyouts and early retirements means about 53,000 workers -- roughly half its hourly work force -- have agreed to leave the company since the beginning of 2006. ...

... GM hopes this latest attrition plan will help it save as much as an additional $5 billion in costs by 2011. The plan helps GM cut costs not only by removing workers who take home about $78 an hour in total compensation but by opening the door for new workers who will earn about one-third of what the departing workers made.

GM has earmarked about 16,000 of its factory jobs as eligible for this so-called second-tier wage rate.

An endangered American species – the unionized worker with a high school diploma and middle-class income – takes yet another hit. It surely won’t be the last.

Not all of GM’s woes can be chalked up to myopic company policies. Some can be laid squarely at the feet of consumers who until rather recently loved themselves the fuel-gulping Behemoths and Leviathans and Autosauruses turned out by GM and its brother companies Ford and Chrysler. And then, of course, there was Japan, Inc. in the shape of Toyota and Honda.

GM’s predicament would certainly be less dramatic if the United States weren’t the only country in the developed world without health coverage for all. But when Bob Lutz – the vice chairman and product development chief hired in 2002 to spark some new life into GM and help dig it out of its hole – spouts lines such as global warming is a "total crock of shit," and, in 2005, declared that diesel autos were no good for the U.S. market and the hybrid vehicles being made by Toyota "make no economic sense," you gotta wonder how many of those second-tier workers are going to have a job in a decade.

This is, you’ll remember, the company that killed the electric car, the EV1, with the help of a self-sabotaging marketing and leasing program. But there could be some hope. Lutz appears to be in love with the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid unveiled in January 2007. GM’s marketers don’t call it a hybrid, but rather an electric car with a "range extender," perhaps out of deference to Lutz’s previous trashing of the breed. But its engineers know that a hybrid is what the Volt is since its range is extended by an internal combustion engine. It runs 40 miles on a lithion-ion battery and another 600 on 12 gallons of gasoline.

When the concept Volt was unwrapped in Detroit and four months later in Shanghai, the price tag was supposedly $30,000. Now it’s $48,000, or maybe, Lutz has said, $40,000. Originally, there were going to be 60,000 produced in the first year, slated for 2010. Now GM is talking 10,000.

If GM is serious this time – and $38 billion in the hole can make you very serious – perhaps it won’t after a few years of sly gaming wind up crushing the Volt the way it did all the EV1s. Given GM’s record over the past couple of decades, however, it would be foolish to count on this.

UPDATE: Some readers have assumed that GM workers are making $78 a hour. As the WSJ article notes, that is total compensation, which includes wages, health insurance, pension contributions and other items. Wages are well under half the total.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

It ought to be good news, wonderful news, in fact. The BBC reports that more than 100 of the world's countries have agreed to ban the current designs of cluster bombs.

Just one problem. The United States, Russia and China are opposed. No surprise. They are the biggest producers of these weapons. Indeed, they didn't even show up at the 10-day conference in Dublin to make their case. Just thumbed their noses at the whole affair. The three prefer voluntary (read: laughable) controls as well as voluntary efforts to clean up millions of these bomblets, which kill or maim civilians from Cambodia to Lebanon, sometimes years, even decades, after they are dropped.

Cluster bombs are delivered by artillery or aircraft. Each releases hundreds of mini-bomblets that are supposed to explode upon impact. But failure rates are immense. For instance, when Israel and Hezbollah went to war in southern Lebanon two years ago, as many as 40 percent of the bomblets failed. Perhaps a million of these lethal explosives remained scattered around after the fighting stopped. When they do explode, chances are close to 50-50 that they will kill a child aged 5 to 15.

In addition to the Cheney-Bush Administration's opposition to any international ban, the Pentagon is trying to keep Congress from passing the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act. So far, that effort has succeeded. The bill, S. 594, was introduced 16 months ago by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Barbara Mikulski. It has 18 co-sponsors. Neither Sen. Clinton nor Senator Obama have joined them. The bill states:

No funds appropriated or otherwise available to any Federal department or agency may be obligated or expended to use, sell, or transfer any cluster munitions unless--

(1) the submunitions of the cluster munitions have a 99 percent or higher functioning rate;

(2) the policy applicable to the use, or the agreement applicable to the sale or transfer, of such cluster munitions specifies that the cluster munitions will only be used against clearly defined military targets and will not be used where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians; and

(3) not later than 30 days after such cluster munitions are used, the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees a plan, including estimated costs, for cleaning up any such cluster munitions and submunitions which fail to explode and continue to pose a hazard to civilians ...

ScottyUrb reminds me that the companion bill in the House, with 27 co-sponsors, is here.

Next time you talk with or e-mail one of your Senators or Representatives, or your favorite presidential candidate, request that they co-sponsor this bill.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.