PEEK

Buzz, perspectives, insight and news from AlterNet

Republican Procedural Tactics Throw Mothers Under the Bus
Posted by Julia , Firedoglake on May 11, 2008 at 12:29 PM.

Harking back to this morning's pyrrhic Republican stand against motherhood

Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."

...

The majority has taken, once again, their go-it-alone policy," Boehner lamented yesterday. "It's time for Democrats and Republicans to work together."

To induce this working together, Boehner decided to stop the House from working at all. As House Democrats tried to pass legislation to ease the mortgage crisis on Wednesday, Republicans served up hours of procedural delays, demanding a score of roll call votes: 10 motions to adjourn, half a dozen motions to reconsider, various and sundry amendments, a motion to approve the daily journal, a motion to instruct and a "motion to rise."

The high point came just after 6 p.m., when, after one of the motions to adjourn, 61 members lined up to change their votes, one by one. Forty-six went from aye to no, while 15 changed from no to aye. The maneuver ate up 28 minutes in all -- and caused an eruption by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who accused the minority of a "filibuster by vote changing."

Yes, they have been doing this all week, but they didn't start this week, and this is hardly the worst case. I'll see you mothers, and raise you grandmothers, grandfathers, children, grandchildren, a widow, and holocaust survivors

Republicans are outraged. Democrats are putting forward a resolution holding White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress. House GOP rank-and-file are planning a dramatic walk out when the vote is called.

Democrats are affronted. Right in the middle of the Statuary Hall service for the late Tom Lantos, a Republican went to the floor -- just steps from the solemn proceedings -- and called a procedural vote, apparently out of pique.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Intelligence Contractor Wasn't Pleased When We Showed up at its Shareholder's Meet
Posted by Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch on May 10, 2008 at 9:24 AM.

A funny thing happened on the way to exercising my presumed right, as a shareholder, to attend yesterday's annual shareholder meeting of private military contractor L-3 Communications, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan's financial district.

I was one of a group including a translator, Marwan Mawiri, who worked for a year and 1⁄2 for Titan, now an L-3 subsidiary, in Iraq. Marwan has witnessed first-hand numerous problems with the way interrogation and translation contracting is being handled in Iraq - a practice that may be putting at substantial risk the national security and lives of the Iraqi people, of U.S. and multinational troops, officials and contractors, and of the United States itself.

The problem is clear: inadequate and downright bad vetting and hiring practices for analysts, interrogators and linguists. Indeed, the U.S. military has recently canceled Titan's translation contract due to poor practices along with waste, fraud and abuse.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Missouri Nuns Fight Voter Disenfranchisement
Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast on May 9, 2008 at 5:00 PM.

Because Nuns. Kick. Ass.

Surely, our majority-Catholic Supreme Court should have known better than to get on the wrong side of the Sisters. As we wrote earlier, the first victims of the new ruling on Voter ID were elderly nuns in Indiana. This just in, in my emailbox: The nuns of Missouri rap the Supreme Court's knuckles with a great big ruler:

Nun of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary comments on Voter ID disenfranchisement

WHO: Missourians for Fair Elections

WHAT: Press Conference on the impact of legislation to require government-issued photo ID to vote

WHEN: 1:00 PM, Thursday, May 8, 2008

WHERE: League of Women Voters, 8706 Manchester, Jefferson City, MO 63144

JEFFERSON CITY, MO – On Thursday, May 8, three Missouri voters who lack government-issued photo IDs as well as Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and community leaders will discuss the potential impacts of legislation currently being pushed through the Missouri General Assembly. The proposed legislation would make Missouri one of the toughest states in the country for eligible citizens who want to vote by requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls. If passed, these changes could be in place by the November general election and could put the voting rights at risk for up to 240,000 registered Missouri voters.

"This may sound like a good idea at first," stated Sister Sandy Schwartz of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary regarding voter ID requirements, "but once you stop to think about who would really be affected, this is going to keep a lot of our loved ones from being able to vote." Yesterday in Indiana twelve nuns in their 80s and 90s were turned away from the polls because they lacked the needed IDs to vote. Sister Schwartz and others are concerned about the difficulties the policy change would create for elderly Missouri nuns, as well as other senior citizens, the poor, and minorities.

Awesome.

(h/t)

Editor's Note: The issue before the Missouri Legislature actually has two moving parts: a new photo ID requirement AND a proof of citizenship requirement for new voters. That second piece – requiring that voters produce papers documenting their citizenship is nothing to sneeze at. In Arizona, where such a law has been in place since 2004, approximately 17 percent or some 30,000 voter registration forms have been rejected because of the failure to produce citizenship documents. And it’s not just minorities who are affected. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School reported in November 2006 that slightly more than 50 percent of all married women lack birth certificates with their married names on it. Of course, poor people and the elderly also are disproportionately affected.

We’ll be watching Missouri next week, when the state Senate is slated to pick up the voter ID bill as it ends its legislative session. --Mike

The Progressive Generation: What Millennials Think About the Economy
Posted by Mike Connery, AlterNet on May 9, 2008 at 3:21 PM.

Anyone who has read a poll knows that the economy is the #1 concern for young people today, but what does that mean in terms of the policies they would support? The Center for American Progress just issued a new report that sheds light on this not-often-explored intersection of demographics and policy. The report - The Progressive Generation: How Young Adults Think About the Economy - does much to dispell myths (like the one that says young people are gung-ho about Social Security Privatization), and clarifies the position of Millennials on a number of issues. The report provides some rays of hope to the labor movement, and has a lot to say not just about the economy, but really what Millennials think about the role of government in America.

This should be mandatory reading for campaigns, the Party, and anyone seeking to understand the political beliefs of the youngest generation. Here are the major findings:

• Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any age group in the 30 previous years the question has been asked, with 57 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds saying that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan.

• Eighty-seven percent of Millennials think the government should spend more money on health care even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level of support in the question’s 20-year history.

• An overwhelming 95 percent of Millennials think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level ever recorded on this question in the 20 years it has been asked.

• Sixty-one percent of Millennials think the government should provide more services, the most support of any age group in any of the previous 20 years the question was asked.
• When asked in the General Social Survey whether they were in favor or against the idea that cutting government was a good way to help the economy, Millennials had the lowest support of cutting government spending in the history of the question.

For the more graphically inclined, here's what that looks like in graphs:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Coal Subsidy Act To Fail?
Posted by A Siegel, Energy Smart on May 9, 2008 at 2:06 PM.

The latest news suggests that the Lieberman-Warner Coal Subsidy Act (the Climate InSecurity Act, CISA) has moved from critical condition to the morgue. As it will require 60 votes to get past any threatened filibuster (not that the Senate Democratic Party leadership could force a filibuster on anyone other than their own Senators fighting for Americans' privacy rights), corraling enough Senators to vote for even the CISA's inadequate measures looks to be an impossible task. As Joe Romm phrased it at Climate Progress:

Serious climate legislation had been in critical condition for some months. Doctors and family members finally pulled the plug this week, and the patient appeared to lose all vital signs. The coroner listed the cause of death as “apathy.”

While disagreeing with Joe about whether to call Lieberman-Warner serious or seriously dangerous, apathy in face of ever mounting evidence of the existing damage from Global Warming and looming threats of more damage to come is moving toward reckless endangerment of America's and humanity's future prospects.

What is truly sad, truly, is that so much of what is necessary can fall into a no regret strategy, with "win-win&" categories. We can "geo-engineer" to a better planetary environment with biochar and white roofing, gaining other benefits at the same time, win-win-win paths. We can pursue greater energy efficiency, leading toward more comfortable lives while creating good jobs, reducing pollution, and spending less money on energy. With each day that passes, renewable energy is becoming more cost competitive with fossil fuel energy, even before we discuss making "external" costs internal to the calculation of energy prices. We can do so much good - even without considering the climate benefits.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Rumsfeld Blames the Generals for Poor Pre-War Planning
Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress on May 9, 2008 at 10:57 AM.

In February 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki famously predicted that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed for post-war hostilities in Iraq. According to documents recently released by the Pentagon in response to The New York Times's expose on its propaganda program, however, Donald Rumsfeld claimed in a 2006 briefing that the reason why he did not support a larger invasion force was because commanders did not request it:

RUMSFELD: Now, it turns out he [Shinkseki] was right. The commanders - you guys ended up wanting roughly the same as you had for the major combat operation, and that's what we have. There is no damned guidebook that says what the number ought to be. We were queued up to go up to what, 400-plus thousand.

Q: Yes, they were already in queue.

RUMSFELD: They were in the queue. We would have gone right on if they'd wanted them, but they didn't, so life goes on.

In reality, Rumsfeld fought back when generals like Shinseki requested more troops. He said in 2003 that Shinseki was "far from the mark." As McClatchy reported in 2004, "Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld's opening bid was about 40,000. ... By September 2003, Rumsfeld and his aides thought, there would be very few American troops left in Iraq."

Has Politics Jumped the Shark?
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on May 9, 2008 at 9:28 AM.

Sex? Yawn. Politics? That’s Hot!

A FORMER editor of People magazine had some hard-and-fast rules: young is better than old, pretty is better than ugly, television is better than music, music is better than movies, movies are better than sports.

And anything is better than politics.

Apparently that rule does not apply to the high-drama presidential campaign of 2008, judging by the unprecedented number of pages in People and other celebrity magazines devoted to coverage of the presidential candidates, along with their spouses, children, BlackBerries, wardrobes, iPods and travel Bibles.

“People are craving it,” said Larry Hackett, People’s managing editor. “They are really, really interested in what’s going on, and so we’re covering it more than ever.”

Behold the symbiotic relationship that has developed between the campaigns and the entertainment press. Some of the most celebrity-centric, entertainment-obsessed news media outlets have added a heavy dose of political news to their lineups, taking space normally devoted to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and handing it to articles on people known more for wonkiness than sexiness.

And the candidates have batted their eyelashes back, obligingly granting interviews, posing for pictures and writing personal essays.

Campaign aides say that they can usually count on a soft, friendly chat conducted by reporters or television hosts who are unlikely to hit them with questions about the Iraq war, while at the same time reaching crucial younger female voters.

Driving all of it, editors and campaign aides say, is the appetite for news on presidential candidates and their families — people who have transcended politics to become bona fide celebrities. As the campaign stretches into its second year, in some corners it is simply seen as entertainment.

What do you think? Is this a good thing or a bad thing for politics?

I can see an argument for either. But I do wonder what happens when the Politics Show gets boring in its second season as so many of them do? Will it lose its audience? Does it matter?

Bipartisan Majority Defies Bush Over Mortgage Crisis
Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny! on May 9, 2008 at 8:00 AM.

While Republican House leaders wring their hands and rend their clothes fretting over why voters are massively rejecting their candidates and worrying that the GOP minority could easily lose another 2 or 3 dozen House members in November, all they need to do is look in the mirror to figure it out. And blaming hapless schnooks like Vito, Vitter or Larry Craig isn't going to do the trick. They are the party of obstructionism and the party that is standing in the way of progress, preventing an end to the occupation of Iraq, preventing universal health care, preventing sound environmental and energy policies, preventing, in fact, everything that the American people want!

Yesterday their despised leader, George Bush, threatened to veto a foreclosure bill that would attempt to help families and neighborhoods that have been victimized by predatory lenders who have been enabled by out-of-control Republican deregulation mania. Today the House passed the first of two of the bills Bush was railing against, Maxine Waters' Neighborhood Stabilization Act of 2008. Only one Blue Dog, Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) voted with the Republicans. Eleven Republicans-- all of whom are either retiring or in grave danger of losing their re-election bids in November-- abandoned their party's reactionary leadership and voted with the Democrats (even including such inveterate rubber stamps as the Diaz-Balart brothers in Florida and Steven LaTourette of Ohio).

While Bush was eager to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars towards the predatory lenders to shore up their businesses and even to provide irresponsible and possible criminal executive with multimillion dollar bonuses for causing the collapse of the real estate market, he dug in his heels on Water's attempt to "make federal money available in loans and grants for the rehabilitation and eventual sale or rental of blighted properties."

And just moments ago, the House also passed the companion bill, Barney Franks' American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act, a responsible and comprehensive response to the nightmare of the Bush Economic Miracle. It seeks to assist families facing foreclosure keep their homes, help other families avoid foreclosures in the future, and, with Maxine Waters' bill, help the recovery of communities harmed by empty homes caught in the foreclosure process. The bill, which Bush swears he will veto and McConnell vows to obstruct in the Senate, provide mortgage refinancing assistance, which will help keep families from losing their homes and protect neighboring home values. Barney's bill was voted on in 3 parts and dozens of Republicans were too frightened of the constituents to oppose the bill. On Roll Call 302, in fact, 95 Republicans gave Bush and their extremist leaders the finger and joined all the Democrats to pass it overwhelmingly and with a veto-proof majority. In fact only 94 Republicans voted with Bush. It passed 322-94, one of Bush's biggest defeats since he stole the presidency in 2000. Only the most insane kooks and loons-- The Dana Rohrabachers, John Shadeggs, Michael McCauls, Mean Jean Schmidts, and Scott Garretts hung in there with Boehner, Blunt, Cole and Howdy Doody.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Elizabeth Edwards: ‘Most Preventable Cause Of Unnecessary Suffering’ Is Lack Of Health Insurance
Posted by Ali Frick, Think Progress on May 9, 2008 at 6:43 AM.

Conservatives love to crow that the United States has "the best health care in the world." Yet these same conservatives overlook the fact that 47 million Americans lack any health insurance at all, leaving them shut out of access to this world-class health care.

Indeed, as Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Elizabeth Edwards told the Senate Health Committee today, "It doesn't matter what kind of services we have if we don't have access to them":

Health insurance matters. The quality of coverage, of course, matters, but health insurance itself is really crucial part of this. Probably the most preventable cause of unnecessary suffering in our health care system is the lack of adequate health insurance. We know how to lengthen and improve the lives of people with cancer. But we've chosen as a nation to turn our backs on some of us who have the disease. I urge you to reform health care responsibly, morally, and aggressively.

Watch it:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Juan Crow in Georgia
Posted by Roberto Lovato, Of America on May 9, 2008 at 5:36 AM.

This article appeared in the May 26, 2008 edition of The Nation.

From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. “My mother went out, and I was alone,” she said. “I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back.” She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: “Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were ‘illegals,’ ‘Mexicans.’ These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. ‘Oh, my God!’ I yelled.”As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was “Mexican” and whether she had “papers” or a green card. They told her they were looking for “illegals.”

After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents–who, according to the women’s lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home–simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn’t fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of “Mexicans”; they were US citizens.

Though she had experienced discrimination before the raid–in the fields, in the supermarket and in school–Mancha, who testified before Congress in February, never imagined such an incident would befall her, since she and her mother had migrated from Texas to Reidsville. Best known for harvesting poultry and agricultural products, Reidsville, a farm town about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, is also known for harvesting Klan culture behind the walls of the state’s oldest and largest prison. But its most famous former inmate is Jim Crow slayer and dreamer Martin Luther King Jr. His example inspires Mancha’s new dream: lawyering “for the poor.”

The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on Mancha represents but a small part of its effects on noncitizen immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, and other Latinos. Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white–and black–children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos’ subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. Listening to the effects of Juan Crow on immigrants and citizens like Mancha (”I can’t sleep sometimes because of nightmares,” she says. “My arms still twitch. I see ICE agents and men in uniform, and it still scares me”) reminds me of the trauma I heard among the men, women and children controlled and exploited by state violence in wartime El Salvador. Juan Crow has roots in the US South, but it stirs traumas bred in the hemispheric South.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

New Study Shows Genetically Modified Crops Produce Less
Posted by Manila Ryce, The Largest Minority on May 9, 2008 at 4:22 AM.

While many studies have shown that GM foods pose serious health and contamination risks, a new study carried out for three years at the University of Kansas has shown that genetically modified crops also produce less food. This dispels the great corporate myth, perpetuated by the Department of Agriculture, that GM technology is necessary to solve world hunger.

Professor Barney Gordon, of the university’s department of agronomy, began the study when farmers who had switched over to the GM crop had noticed that even under optimal conditions their yields were not as high as expected. The yields of GM soybean were 10 percent less than those of an almost identical conventional variety grown in the same field.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.

The Nebraska study suggested that two factors are at work. First, it takes time to modify a plant and, while this is being done, better conventional ones are being developed. This is acknowledged even by the fervently pro-GM US Department of Agriculture, which has admitted that the time lag could lead to a “decrease” in yields.

But the fact that GM crops did worse than their near-identical non-GM counterparts suggest that a second factor is also at work, and that the very process of modification depresses productivity. The new Kansas study both confirms this and suggests how it is happening.

The Kansas study suggested that genetic modification hindered the soya’s ability to absorb manganese from the soil. However, even when additional manganese was added, the GM soya yield was only able to equal that of the conventional crop, failing to surpass it as promised.

Low yields have also been seen with other GM plants, such as cotton, where the total US crop declined as GM technology took over the industry. To counter the embarrassing results, Monsanto falsely claimed that the GM soybeans used in the study were not modified to increase yields, but said it was now developing one that would. Last week, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.

source