Bush Administration manipulates information via "military experts"

From Crooks and Liars...

Through newly obtained internal documents, The New York Times has uncovered an elaborate PR campaign run by the Pentagon that coached former military officials — or as they’re known on television, Serious Independent Military Experts — on how best to shill for Donald Rumsfeld during the fallout from the “General’s Revolt,” when numerous high-ranking retired Generals broke long standing tradition and began speaking out harshly against the former Secretary and his prosecution of the War in Iraq.

The New York Times full article is lengthy at 11 pages, but it’s a stellar exposé of how politicized, coordinated and deceitful the media campaign is under Bush. With the assistance of Peter Pace, Rumsfeld would literally convene meetings with former military brass — who, according to the article, consisted of “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants” — and conspire on how best to manage the press. Worse still, these compromised soldiers would then manipulatively go on television as Serious Independent Experts to parrot administration talking points and secure lucrative defense contracts. The Military-Industrial Complex is not alive and well, but thriving under the auspices of the Bush administration.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said. […] It was, he said, “psyops on steroids”

And it wasn’t limited to the mainstream media alone. Bloggers were also hired and paid to shape opinions at home. But don’t be surprised Sunday when this story is neglected in favor of endless discussions about bowling scores and various other “distractions.”

The New Economics of Hunger

By Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post
Sunday 27 April 2008
To view original click here.

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world's poor suffer most.
The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.
In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect - one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.
As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.
At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.
Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months' supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.
"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan - they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.
"We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer... . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."
Beyond Hunger
The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world's poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men - distributors, processors, even governments - but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.
The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.
To quell unrest, countries including Indonesia are digging deep to boost food subsidies. The U.N. World Food Program has warned of an alarming surge in hunger in areas as far-flung as North Korea and West Africa. The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world's poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.
"This crisis could result in a cascade of others ... and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.
The New Normal
Prices for some crops - such as wheat - have already begun to descend off their highs. As farmers rush to plant more wheat now that profit prospects have climbed, analysts predict that prices may come down as much as 30 percent in the coming months. But that would still leave a year-over-year price hike of 45 percent. Few believe prices will go back to where they were in early 2006, suggesting that the world must cope with a new reality of more expensive food.
People worldwide are coping in different ways. For the 1 billion living on less than a dollar a day, it is a matter of survival. In a mud hut on the Sahara's edge, Manthita Sou, a 43-year-old widow in the Mauritanian desert village of Maghleg, is confronting wheat prices that are up 67 percent on local markets in the past year. Her solution: stop eating bread. Instead, she has downgraded to cheaper foods, such as sorghum, a dark grain widely consumed by the world's poorest people. But sorghum has jumped 20 percent in the past 12 months. Living on the 50 cents a day she earns weaving textiles to support a family of three, her answer has been to cut out breakfast, drink tea for lunch and ration a small serving of soupy sorghum meal for family dinners. "I don't know how long we can survive like this," she said.
Countries that have driven food demand in recent years are now grappling with the cost of their own success - rising prices. Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40 percent of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high. In the southern province of Guangdong, there are reports of grain hoarding; and in Hong Kong, consumers have stripped store shelves of bags of rice.
Liu Yinhua, a retired factory worker who lives in the port city of Ningbo on China's east coast, said her family of three still eats the same things, including pork ribs, fish and vegetables. But they are eating less of it.
"Almost everything is more expensive now, even normal green vegetables," said Liu, 53. "The level of our quality of life is definitely reduced."
In India, the government recently scrapped all import duties on cooking oils and banned exports of non-basmati rice. As in many parts of the developing world, the impact in India is being felt the most among the urban poor who have fled rural life to live in teeming slums. At a dusty and nearly empty market in one New Delhi neighborhood this week, shopkeeper Manjeet Singh, 52, said people at the market have started hoarding because of fear that rice and oil will run out.
"If one doesn't have enough to fill one's own stomach, then what's the use of an economic boom in exports?" he said, looking sluggish in the scorching afternoon sun. He said his customers were asking for cheaper goods, like groundnut oil instead of soybean oil.
Even wealthy nations are being forced to adjust to a new normal. In Japan, a country with a distinct cultural aversion to cheaper, genetically modified grains, manufacturers are risking public backlash by importing them for use in processed foods for the first time. Inflation in the 15-country zone that uses the euro - which includes France, Germany, Spain and Italy - hit 3.6 percent in March, the highest rate since the currency was adopted almost a decade ago and well above the European Central Bank's target of 2.0 percent. Food and oil prices were mostly to blame.
In the United States, experts say consumers are scaling down on quality and scaling up on quantity if it means a better unit price. In the meat aisles of major grocery stores, said Phil Lempert, a supermarket analyst, steaks are giving way to chopped beef and people used to buying fresh blueberries are moving to frozen. Some are even trying to grow their own vegetables.
"A bigger pinch than ever before," said Pat Carroll, a retiree in Congress Heights. "I don't ever remember paying $3 for a loaf of bread."
Ill-Equipped Markets
The root cause of price surges varies from crop to crop. But the crisis is being driven in part by an unprecedented linkage of the food chain.
A big reason for higher wheat prices, for instance, is the multiyear drought in Australia, something that scientists say may become persistent because of global warming. But wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy.
This year, at least a fifth and perhaps a quarter of the U.S. corn crop will be fed to ethanol plants. As food and fuel fuse, it has presented a boon to American farmers after years of stable prices. But it has also helped spark the broader food-price shock.
"If you didn't have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today," said Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. "It doesn't mean it's the sole driver. Prices would be higher than we saw earlier in this decade because world grain supplies are tighter now than earlier in the decade. But we've introduced a new demand into the market."
In fact, many economists now say food prices should have climbed much higher much earlier.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world seemed to shrink with rapidly opening markets, surging trade and improved communication and transportation technology. Given new market efficiencies and the wide availability of relatively cheap food, the once-common practice of hoarding grains to protect against the kind of shortfall the world is seeing now seemed more and more archaic. Global grain reserves plunged.
Yet there was one big problem. The global food trade never became the kind of well-honed machine that has made the price of manufactured goods such as personal computers and flat-screen TVs increasingly similar worldwide. With food, significant subsidies and other barriers meant to protect farmers - particularly in Europe, the United States and Japan - have distorted the real price of food globally, economists say, preventing the market from normal price adjustments as global demand has climbed.
If market forces had played a larger role in food trade, some now argue, the world would have had more time to adjust to more gradually rising prices.
"The international food trade didn't undergo the same kind of liberalization as other trade," said Richard Feltes, senior vice president of MF Global, a futures brokerage. "We can see now that the world has largely failed in its attempt to create an integrated food market."
In recent years, there has been a great push to liberalize food markets worldwide - part of what is known as the "Doha round" of world trade talks - but resistance has come from both the developed and developing worlds. Perhaps more than any other sector, nations have a visceral desire to protect their farmers, and thusly, their food supply. The current food crisis is causing advocates on both sides to dig in.
Consider, for instance, the French.
The European Union doles out about $41 billion a year in agriculture subsidies, with France getting the biggest share, about $8.2 billion. The 27-nation bloc also has set a target for biofuels to supply 10 percent of transportation fuel needs by 2020 to combat global warming.
The French, whose farmers over the years have become addicted to generous government handouts, argue that agriculture subsidies must be continued and even increased in order to encourage more food production, especially with looming shortages.
Last week, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier warned E.U. officials against "too much trust in the free market."
"We must not leave the vital issue of feeding people," he said, "to the mercy of market laws and international speculation."

Staff writers Dan Morgan, Steven Mufson and Jane Black in Washington and correspondents Ariana Eunjung Cha in Beijing, Emily Wax in New Delhi and John Ward Anderson in Paris contributed to this report.

Senator: VA Lying about Number of Veteran Suicides

By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday 23 April 2008
To view original click here.
Washington - The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who've attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.
"The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA's mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.
"We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get accurate information we can't be there to do our jobs," Murray told Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield during the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.
Mansfield told Murray and the other senators that he didn't think the VA had deliberately tried to mislead Congress or the public.
Murray remained skeptical, however, saying that the VA has demonstrated a pattern of misleading Congress about the increasing number of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now seeking help and straining Defense Department and VA facilities and programs.
Murray said she's spoken with VA Secretary James Peake and demanded that he fire the man in charge of the department's mental health programs, Dr. Ira Katz. The senator said Peake has yet to respond to her request.
"I used to teach preschool, and when you bring up a 3-year-old and tell them they have to stop lying, they understand the consequences," Murray said. "The VA doesn't. They need to stop hiding the fact this war is costing us in so many ways."
The existence of the e-mails, uncovered as part of a class-action lawsuit filed against the VA in San Francisco, was first reported by CBS News on Monday.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities," Katz wrote in a Feb. 13 e-mail to Ev Chasen, the department's communication director. "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"
Chasen responded: "I think this is something we should discuss among ourselves, before issuing a press release. Is the fact we are stopping them good news, or is the sheer number bad news? And is this more than we have ever seen before?"
CBS reported that the VA had provided it with data earlier that showed only 790 attempted suicides in all of 2007.
"How do we trust what you are saying when every time we turn around we find out that what you are saying publicly is different from what you are saying privately?" Murray asked Mansfield. "How can we trust what you are saying today?"
Mansfield responded that the situation was unfortunate and didn't "send the right message" to Congress or the public.
"I know Dr. Katz is a dedicated public servant," he said. "There isn't a lot the VA should be keeping secret."
Murray pointed to a RAND Corp. study released last week that found that 320,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from traumatic brain injuries and 300,000 troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.
Of those with PTSD or depression, Murray said, only half have sought treatment, and only half of those have received treatment that was "minimally" adequate.
"I think we ought to be worried," Murray said, adding that, as with Vietnam-era vets, some of the more violent symptoms might not show up for 50 years.
"They can be walking time bombs for decades," Murray said. "I hope everyone in the VA understands this."
Mansfield said the VA is spending $3 billion on mental health programs this fiscal year and has 17,000 mental health workers.
"We want to make sure we take care of these individuals," he said.

Atheist soldier claims harassment

JUNCTION CITY, Kansas (AP) -- Like hundreds of young men joining the Army in recent years, Jeremy Hall professes a desire to serve his country while it fights terrorism.

But the short and soft-spoken specialist is at the center of a legal controversy. He has filed a lawsuit alleging that he's been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn't believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"I'm not in it for cash," Hall said. "I want no one else to go what I went through."

Known as "the atheist guy," Hall has been called immoral, a devil worshipper and -- just as severe to some soldiers -- gay, none of which, he says, is true. Hall even drove fellow soldiers to church in Iraq and paused while they prayed before meals.

"I see a name and rank and United States flag on their shoulder. That's what I believe everyone else should see," he said.

Hall, 23, was raised in a Protestant family in North Carolina and dropped out of school. It wasn't until he joined the Army that he began questioning religion, eventually deciding that he couldn't follow any faith.

But he feared how that would look to other soldiers.

"I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist," Hall said.

It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a firefight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.

"I said, 'No, but I believe in Plexiglas,' " Hall said. "I've never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I'm worm food."

The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall's allegations.

Hall said he had had enough but feared that he wouldn't get support from Welborn's superiors. He turned to Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Weinstein is the foundation's president and a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate. He had sued the Air Force for acts he said illegally imposed Christianity on students at the academy, though that case was dismissed. He calls Hall a hero.

"The average American doesn't have enough intestinal fortitude to tell someone to shut up if they are talking in a movie theater," Weinstein said. "You know how hard it is to take on your chain of command? This isn't the shift manager at KFC."

Hall was in Qatar when the lawsuit was filed September 18 in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas. Other soldiers learned of it, and he feared for his own safety. Once, Hall said, a group of soldiers followed him, harassing him, but no one did anything to make it stop.

The Army told him it couldn't protect him and sent him back to Fort Riley. He resumed duties with a military police battalion. He believes that his promotion to sergeant has been blocked because of his lawsuit, but he is a team leader responsible for two junior enlisted soldiers.

No one with Fort Riley, the Army or that Defense Department would comment about Hall or the lawsuit. Each issued statements saying that discrimination will not be tolerated regardless of race, religion or gender.

"The department respects [and supports by its policy] the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no beliefs," said Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense.

All three organizations said existing systems help soldiers "address and resolve any perceived unfair treatment."

Lt. Col. David Shurtleff, a Fort Riley chaplain, declined to discuss Hall's case but said chaplains accommodate all faiths as best they can. In most cases, religious issues can be worked out without jeopardizing military operations.

"When you're in Afghanistan and an IED blows up a Humvee, they aren't asking about a wounded soldier's faith," Shurtleff said.

Hall said he enjoys being a team leader but has been told that having faith would make him a better leader.

"I will take care of my soldiers. Nowhere does it say I have to pray with my soldiers, but I do have to make sure my soldiers' religious needs are met," he said.

"Religion brings comfort to a lot of people," he said. "Personally, I don't want it or need it. But I'm not going to get down on anybody else for it."

Hall leaves the Army in April 2009. He would like to find work with the National Park Service or Environmental Protection Agency, anything outdoors.

"I hope this doesn't define me," Hall said of his lawsuit. "It's just about time somebody said something."

The Left Has Lost Its Way

By Chris Hedges

This column was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The failure of the American left is a failure of nerve. It has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.

Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are created by the building of movements. This is a lesson American progressives have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

“The mistake of the former left-wingers, from Tom Hayden to Todd Gitlin, is that they want to be players in the Democratic Party and academia,” said John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, speaking of two prominent 1960s activists. “This is not what the left is supposed to be. The left is supposed to be outside the system. The attempt by the left to take control of the Democratic Party failed with [Eugene] McCarthy and George McGovern. The left, at that point, should have gone back to organizing, street protests, building labor unions, and the mobilization of grassroots activists. Instead, it went for respectability.”

The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda. Sure, every four years Democratic candidates pay lip service to the old values of the party, but then they head off to Washington and do things such as ram NAFTA down our throats, throw 10 million people off welfare, and peddle health-care proposals acceptable to the HMOs, huge pharmaceutical giants, and for-profit health-care providers who are, after all, the very sources of our health-care crisis. What we as citizens need and work for in a corporate state is irrelevant.

The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not, despite what the well-heeled Democratic and Republican apologists for the free market tell you, commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.

“The other side has religion, and we need some,” said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary. “We need a more robust understanding of the role of religious values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. The left, because it is largely secular, did not do enough as the working class was finished off. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of the left’s spiritual resources that has crippled the movement. The left forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back. History is not linear. History is about constant struggle. It is the struggle, if you come out of faith, which matters.”

The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until they had neither. The condemnations progressives utter—about the abuse of working men and women, the rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry, our disastrous foreign wars, and the collapse of basic services from education to welfare—are not backed by action. The left has been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have become hypocrites.

“The loss of nerve by the left comes down to this lack of faith,” Thistlethwaite said. “Having a soul means there is coherence between our actions and our values. The left can no longer claim this coherence. It has no moral compass. It does not know right from wrong. It has, in its confusion, lost the capacity to make moral judgments.”

Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to challenge the corporate state that is destroying our nation, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.

Chris Hedges is author of “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” and “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” This column was originally published by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Women Don't Ask? No, Employers Don't Pay

By Ellen Bravo
Women's Media Center
Monday 21 April 2008

Congratulations, working women! As of today, your salary since January 1, 2007, has finally reached the total earned by your male colleagues in 2007 alone. What's more, this pay gap is all your fault!

According to the media, the problem is that women just don't ask. If we learned to speak up in salary negotiations, pay equity would be a hard fact.

An ABC News segment called the negotiation process "something that each of us has the ability to control.... No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman's ear, 'Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn't speak up.'"

Stories like these leave out a few important realities: The majority of women work in jobs where they have no right whatsoever to negotiate for pay. Many are like Donna, a software developer whose employment agreement lists "discussing salary with colleagues" among "fire-able offenses." Hard to know you're making less than others if you're not allowed to know what the others earn.

Yes, women need to learn negotiation (and the facts about labor law, which already prohibit salary secrecy, according to the National Labor Relations Board). But blaming the wage gap on women's lack of assertiveness is like blaming sexual harassment on women's lack of snappy comebacks. The real problem isn't that women don't ask for more - it's that employers pay women so much less than they deserve.

Why do employers do this? Because they can, and often because they think they have to in order to compete.

A key problem is that society undervalues the work women do. Many jobs that are now female-dominated, such as clerical work, once excluded females. When men were in short supply during the Civil War, women were hired at half to two-thirds the wages of men. Women performed well, employers hired more and more of them - and that discriminatory wage eventually became the market rate. Similarly, the lack of regard for women's work as caregivers in the home set low values for similar work in the marketplace. That's why those who care for our young children earn less than those who care for our cars, our pets, our lawns.

Lack of collective bargaining rights also undermines women's wages. The Big Boys - those who control wealth and power in this country - like to say pay corresponds to risk. Yet the Washington Post found that one of the poorest paid occupations, nurse's aide, faces a risk of serious injury higher than that of a coal miner or steel worker.

Power, not risk, is what determines pay rates.

Another reason for women's low pay is the motherhood penalty. Studies agree that women with children are paid less across the board than women without kids or men of any family situation. The research varies only on how great that penalty is.

Women's pay is also hurt by inflation pushing down the value of the minimum wage, since women are disproportionately clustered in minimum-wage jobs, and by the lack of laws requiring equal treatment for part-time and temporary workers.

What about professional women? Studies show that they are less likely than men to initiate salary negotiations - and also that they're viewed as pushy when they do. More important, they're less like to get leads, training, mentoring, opportunities, promotions, and other rewards that result in higher pay.

The wage gap between men and women has been stuck at 77 cents on the dollar - 72 cents for African-American women, 60 cents for Latinas. The Big Boys like to remind women that the gap has narrowed. They forget to mention that half the narrowing comes from a loss of pay for men, especially men of color - not what we had in mind by equality. The gap is greatest for women with the most education and longest hours. And the mommy wage gap - the difference in pay between women with kids and everyone else - has in fact increased.

We need to change how pay is determined - not according to what you earned on your last job, or on how slick you are at promoting yourself, but rather on objective, transparent criteria.

A number of public policies will help, starting with The Fair Pay Restoration Act. This bill would reverse the Supreme Court ruling in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear: that discrimination claims must be made within 180 days after the pay is set, rather than any time a person discovers they are being paid at a discriminatory rate.

Another bill titled the Fair Pay Act would require employers to use objective job evaluations to achieve equal pay for equivalent work and remove gender, race or national origin as criteria in compensation. The Employee Free Choice Act would ease the negotiating that matters most, collective bargaining, by removing barriers to union representation. To end the motherhood penalty, we need to ensure that family responsibility is added to the list of categories protected under anti-discrimination law. And we need to raise the wage floor and guarantee equity for those in non-standard jobs.

And yes, do learn the art of negotiation. Groups like WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) offer terrific workshops and information on the web about how to do this.

But above all, learn the necessity of organizing. The best way to get what you need for yourself is to work with others on behalf of everyone for changes in workplace and public policy.

Torture and the Law

By Spencer Ackerman
The Washington Independent
Friday 18 April 2008
To view original click here.

Experts weigh in on top officials talking torture with Bush's approval.

With nine months remaining in President George W. Bush's term, virtually no legal analyst expects that anyone in his administration will face indictment and prosecution in connection with the torture of terrorism detainees. However, a new admission from Bush last week has some legal analysts contending that the case for such prosecution has gotten significantly stronger.

ABC News reported on Apr. 9 that then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice chaired an informal panel of top administration officials that approved specific brutal interrogation tactics for use on three suspected Al Qaeda detainees. The panel consisted of Vice President Dick Cheney, and former administration officials - Donald H. Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, George Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Ashcroft, then attorney general. This group debated for use on detainees - and eventually approved - methods of abuse like being "slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding," ABC reported.

On Apr. 11, Bush told ABC that he was personally aware of the panel's discussions. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush said. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

This disclosure presents a nested series of legal implications. "I predict that there will be calls for top administration officials to be prosecuted in an international court for war crimes," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a civil liberties expert who teaches at Duke University Law School. "This meeting supports the involvement of top officials - including the president - in approving torture."

"If you, as an individual, order such conduct, you're culpable under the aiding-and-abetting provision of federal law," said Aziz Huq, director of the Liberty and National Security Project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "There is at least a colorable theory, a credible case, for federal criminal liability here."

That theory, however, depends on whether the administration's 2002 meetings - and Bush's approval - rose to the level of an operational order. The treatment of the three detainees, which Huq says was a "violation of the Federal Torture Statute," included the employment of several of the techniques reportedly considered by Rice's panel, including waterboarding. Currently, the Justice Department has an investigation open into Jose Rodriguez, a former CIA official who destroyed videotapes of those interrogations.

"In my view this is all patently illegal on many different grounds - particularly as a violation of Common Article 3" of the Geneva conventions, said Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at Georgetown University. "But as a practical matter, there's little likelihood of any legal exposure - and virtually none of domestic federal prosecution, because the president and DOJ concluded it was legal."

The chain of events leading from Rice's panel to the CIA's use of the techniques that the panel apparently discussed is not publicly known, and no official inquiry into it exists. To make a case against Bush himself - regardless of the likelihood that he will never face charges - knowing that is essential.

"He has his fingerprints on torture," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, "but did he grip the whole thing? The real question is, what level of decision-making was the president involved in?"

Not every legal scholar is impressed by Bush's disclosure. Douglas Kmiec, a conservative law professor at Pepperdine University, contends that the statutes in question are too vague, and the facts of the matter too obscure, to congeal into an actual case against the president. "The whole difficulty in this area is the level of generality that exists in the international agreements that the U.S. has participated in and the manner in which those were ratified by the United States - obviously, particularly with the Convention Against Torture," Kmiec said. "But where the slippage is, in terms of legal analysis, comes with what those words mean in terms of domestic law. If I've understood matters correctly, we've tried to understand [the convention] in terms of our own Bill of Rights and the 'shock-the-conscience' standard - which is a standard that's far from self-evident."

As a matter of providing factual clarity, Fredrickson said a coalition of civil-liberties organizations, led by the ACLU, is drafting a letter to the congressional leadership urging the creation of a bicameral commission into both the facts of the torture and the legal implications. An implication of Rice's meetings is that the Bush administration appears to have effectively decided it would not bring charges against itself for criminal behavior.

"No one in the executive branch is free of the taint of involvement with the 2002 interrogations," said Huq, of the Brennan Center. "The whole idea of the executive branch immunizing itself becomes much more worrying than in other cases. It's really the right hand absolving the left hand of what's been done."

Fredrickson wants the commission modeled after the Church and Pike inquiries of the 1970s that revealed massive and systemic illegality within the intelligence services. "It's a great model because it was really the mechanism for bringing lot of illegality - not just by the Nixon administration but prior administrations - to light," she said. "That might be more appropriate, to use a wider lens, because panorama of illegality is quite broad."

Kmiec said he could conditionally support such a commission, provided it didn't degenerate into a partisan witch-hunt. "If the commission would advance the understanding of the U.S. as to its obligations, and demonstrate to the world our seriousness of purpose, then it's a good idea," Kmiec said. "If the purpose of the commission is just a surrogate way of establishing a special-counsel investigation into the actions of the sitting president and vice president, then I think it is likely to degenerate into partisan bickering and not accomplish very much. Much would depend on the objective of the commission and its composition."

But the likelihood of retributive measures against the Bush administration for torture remains remote. Huq observed that the "political appetite for that is nil," since "an excessive of zeal for prosecuting national-security activities, historically, hasn't happened." His preference is to legislate the videotaping of all terrorism interrogations. A measure to do that, introduced and supported by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), has been introduced, but it has no schedule for a mark-up, according to Holt's office.

Kmiec said that the ultimate arbitration of the torture debate will occur at the polls. "The way our constitutional system envisions accountability on questions such as this is accountability through electoral choice," he said. The president made his choice. The people will now make theirs.

Expelled Exposed - pseudo science for Kansas classrooms

From Kansas Families for Public Education....

It was not that long ago that the Kansas State Board of Education was trying to insert pseudo science into our classrooms, and they'll try it again if we give them the chance.

It's no coincidence that the Creationist propaganda movie "Expelled" opens in theaters around the country this weekend, just before important upcoming 2008 elections. They are invigorating their base, and they will mislead the public, use deceptive tactics, and yes, outright lies to do so.

Retaking a majority of the Kansas State Board of Education - and another expensive and embarrassing battle over creationism and evolution - is one of their major goals.

The National Center for Science Education has unveiled their website, "Expelled Exposed," to debunk the lies and distortions of the film. Please take a few minutes and visit their website to learn the TRUTH.

It only takes you a few minutes to be informed. Read the brief facts as reported by the NCSE, and watch the video. Then take two more minutes and forward this e-mail to everyone you know.

Visit:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/

Watch an important video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQacQy1KJ9M

For more information visit the following sites:

Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism's Manufactroversy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-tarico/ben-stein-front-man-for-c_b_96263.html

"Expelled" producers accused of copyright infringement
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2008/US/301_expelled_producers_accused_of__4_9_2008.asp

Taxing the Poor: Programming Note for NOW on PBS

Are the rich getting a sweet deal on taxes?

Watch the show RIGHT NOW at:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/415/index.html

This month, millions of Americans are filing their taxes and hoping for the best, but are rich people actually paying a smaller percentage of taxes than the poor? NOW looks at plans in many states to raise sales taxes and lower property taxes in an effort to generate revenue. But those changes may come at an even bigger price. Anti-poverty advocates say this shift would place the heaviest tax burden on the poorest households - and benefit higher-income Americans. Despite the charge, it's a model many states have long embraced.

NOW travels to one of these states, Alabama, to document the personal impact of regressive tax policies on three very different families. They include a working mom who shows us how a ten percent sales tax on groceries makes a significant difference in what her family eats; a couple living in a ramshackle house in the backwoods, who've always held jobs but still face hunger; and a well-to-do suburban couple who benefit from huge tax breaks.

Are taxes being levied fairly when it comes to the rich and the poor?

At NOW's web site at www.pbs.org/now

See the income gap between rich and poor in your state:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/415/states-income-inequality.html
and download the fact sheet on Kansas. Kansas ranks 28th in the nation for the division between rich and poor.

Take their quiz for surprising facts about family, taxes and fairness:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/415/family-taxes.html

The Next President's First Task [A Manifesto]

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Vanity Fair
May 2008 Issue

Last November, Lord (David) Puttnam debated before Parliament an important bill to tackle global warming. Addressing industry and government warnings that we must proceed slowly to avoid economic ruin, Lord Puttnam recalled that precisely 200 years ago Parliament heard identical caveats during the debate over abolition of the slave trade. At that time slave commerce represented one-fourth of Britain's G.D.P. and provided its primary source of cheap, abundant energy. Vested interests warned that financial apocalypse would succeed its prohibition.

That debate lasted roughly a year, and Parliament, in the end, made the moral choice, abolishing the trade outright. Instead of collapsing, as slavery's proponents had predicted, Britain's economy accelerated. Slavery's abolition exposed the debilitating inefficiencies associated with zero-cost labor; slavery had been a ball and chain not only for the slaves but also for the British economy, hobbling productivity and stifling growth. Now creativity and productivity surged. Entrepreneurs seeking new sources of energy launched the Industrial Revolution and inaugurated the greatest era of wealth production in human history.

Today, we don't need to abolish carbon as an energy source in order to see its inefficiencies starkly, or to understand that this addiction is the principal drag on American capitalism. The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe's wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

We know that nations that "decarbonize" their economies reap immediate rewards. Sweden announced in 2006 the phaseout of all fossil fuels (and nuclear energy) by 2020. In 1991 the Swedes enacted a carbon tax - now up to $150 a ton - and as a result thousands of entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from wind, the sun, and the tides, and from woodchips, agricultural waste, and garbage. Growth rates climbed to upwards of three times those of the U.S.

Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy-independent, with 90 percent of the nation's homes heated by geothermal and its remaining electrical needs met by hydro. The International Monetary Fund now ranks Iceland the fourth most affluent nation on earth. The country, which previously had to beg for corporate investment, now has companies lined up to relocate there to take advantage of its low-cost clean energy.

It should come as no surprise that California, America's most energy-efficient state, also possesses its strongest economy.

The United States has far greater domestic energy resources than Iceland or Sweden does. We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation's electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation's electricity needs without any rooftop installation, even assuming every American owned a plug-in hybrid.

In America, several obstacles impede the kind of entrepreneurial revolution we need. To begin with, that trillion dollars in annual coal-and-oil subsidies gives the carbon industry a decisive market advantage. Meanwhile, an overstressed and inefficient national electrical grid can't accommodate new kinds of power. At the same time, a byzantine array of local rules impede access by innovators to national markets.

There are a number of things the new president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation. A carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions is quite simply a no-brainer. Already endorsed by Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama, such a system would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction emissions credits. The supply of credits is then reduced each year to meet pre-determined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators who reduce carbon. Since it is precisely targeted, cap-and-trade is more effective than a carbon tax. It is also more palatable to politicians, who despise taxes and love markets. Industry likes the system's clear goals. This market-based approach has a proven track record.

There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.

The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.

Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.

Energy expert and former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicts: "With rational market incentives and a smart backbone, you'll see capital and entrepreneurs flooding this field with lightning speed." Ten percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world's biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.

The president's final priority must be to connect a much smarter power grid to vastly more efficient buildings and machines. We have barely scratched the surface here. Washington is a decade behind its obligation, first set by Ronald Reagan, to set cost-minimizing efficiency standards for all major appliances. With the conspicuous exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger's California, the states aren't doing much better. And Congress keeps setting ludicrously tight expiration dates for its energy-efficiency tax credits, frustrating both planning and investment. The new president must take all of this in hand at once.

The benefits to America are beyond measure. We will cut annual trade and budget deficits by hundreds of billions, improve public health and farm production, diminish global warming, and create millions of good jobs. And for the first time in half a century we will live free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.

---

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-governmental organization that promotes clean water throughout the world.

Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in US

By Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post
Saturday 12 April 2008

Congressional critics want more assurances of legality.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities - such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

"There is no basis to suggest that this process is in any way insufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans," Chertoff wrote to Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and its intelligence subcommittee, respectively, in letters released yesterday.

"I think we've fully addressed anybody's concerns," Chertoff added in remarks last week to bloggers. "I think the way is now clear to stand it up and go warm on it."

His statements marked a fresh determination to operate the department's new National Applications Office as part of its counterterrorism efforts. The administration in May 2007 gave DHS authority to coordinate requests for satellite imagery, radar, electronic-signal information, chemical detection and other monitoring capabilities that have been used for decades within U.S. borders for mapping and disaster response.

But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.

Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.

"I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration," said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. "I won't make the same mistake... . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program."

Thompson called DHS's release Thursday of the office's procedures and a civil liberties impact assessment "a good start." But, he said, "We still don't know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided."

DHS officials said the demands are unwarranted. "The legal framework that governs the National Applications Office ... is reflected in the Constitution, the U.S. Code and all other U.S. laws," said DHS spokeswoman Laura Keehner. She said its operations will be subject to "robust," structured legal scrutiny by multiple agencies.

What Happened to the Fairness Doctrine?

By Mike Lillis
The Washington Independent
Monday 31 March 2008

No repercussions in "60 Minutes" blackout case, even if politics at play.

Last month, as 10.5 million Americans were watching a "60 Minutes" episode implicating the Bush administration in an alleged conspiracy to prosecute political opponents, television viewers in Huntsville, Ala., found something different: a black screen.

The rare event - occurring at WHNT-TV, Huntsville's CBS affiliate - aroused the suspicions of Democrats and media watchdogs, not least because the segment focused on the corruption-related imprisonment of a leading state Democrat, former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Friday, Siegelman was released on bond pending an appeal, vaulting his saga into the national spotlight, and signaling that his charges of a politically motivated prosecution - the same charges many Alabamans missed on "60 Minutes" - could ultimately exonerate him.

The Federal Communications Commission has launched an official inquiry into the blackout. But legal experts say that, even if WHNT acted purposefully, and for the most naked political reasons, the station could at worst walk away with a slap on the wrist. In fact, they say, years of deregulation have left broadcasters with broad freedoms over the content they air, and their reasons for doing so.

(Matt Mahurin) "If they say, 'Look, we're owned by conservative Republicans and we don't want to show something that makes the party look bad,' they can do it," said Michael Botein, director of the Media Law Center at New York Law School. "There are almost no rules today."

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit First Amendment watchdog group, said that Reagan-era deregulation could, indeed, allow broadcasters to black out programs of their choosing. Even if WHNT is found to have acted "for the most nefarious reasons," Schwartzman said, "it's not at all clear that any violation of any FCC regulation was involved."

The controversy stems from a Feb. 24 "60 Minutes" episode suggesting that the Bush administration had for years conspired to pin corruption charges on Siegelman, a popular Democrat in a largely Republican state. Central to CBS' investigation was Dana Jill Simpson, an Alabama lawyer who claimed to have done "opposition research" for the Republican Party. In 2001, Simpson told CBS, then-senior White House advisor Karl Rove asked her to get evidence of Siegelman cheating on his wife.

It was not the first time Rove had targeted Siegelman, Simpson said. "I had other requests for intelligence before." Through a lawyer, Rove denied the allegations, CBS reported.

In 2004, the administration brought one of its several long-running investigations against Siegelman to court, charging the Democrat with involvement in a Medicaid-scam. The judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.

In 2006, the Justice Dept. brought a new case against Siegelman. This time the charge was bribery for accepting $500,000 from a health company executive in support of a lottery campaign the governor had pushed. In exchange, the executive was given a seat on a hospital regulatory board. A jury found Siegelman guilty, and he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison - a case currently under appeal.

CBS' Siegelman segment ran for 13 minutes of the hour-long news program. In Huntsville, the blackout lasted 12 minutes, coinciding directly with that story.

WHNT first claimed the blackout was the result of a faulty feed originating with CBS in New York. A more thorough investigation, station officials later said, revealed that the trouble was a local equipment failure preventing WHNT from receiving the CBS signal - a situation remedied 12 minutes into the Siegelman segment. In response to local complaints, WHNT re-ran the segment four hours after it was initially scheduled, and again the following evening. But the re-runs did little to cool the suspicions of Democrats. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, pushed hard for an official inquiry, which was initiated nine days following the blackout.

Legal experts and media watchdogs say that blackouts of such length are extremely rare, particularly during peak viewing hours.

"Blackouts, of some duration, probably happen all the time," said Aaron Craig, communications director of Free Press, a non-partisan media reform group. "Now, do they happen during prime-time, when the story is focused on potential corruption in the same state? At best, it's an unfortunate coincidence."

Botein agreed, saying that the sophistication of today's broadcast equipment - combined with the commercial appeal of the program in question - makes such a coincidence highly unlikely.

"A show like '60 Minutes' gets incredible ratings," Botein said. "A 12-minute blackout? - It'd never happen. They'd lose half their audience."

The rare incident caught the attention of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who sent a Mar. 5 letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush, wondering "whether the nature of the content played a role" in the blackout. Kerry asked that the full results of the FCC inquiry be shared with Congress.

Kerry's suspicions are not without merit. While WHNT is owned by Oak Hill Capital, a Texas-based private equity firm with a long history of support for Democratic candidates and causes, the day-to-day operations are run by a newly created Oak Hill venture called Local TV LLC. Based in Kentucky, Local TV is headed by Robert Lawrence, a long-time GOP supporter whose many political contributions include $2,000 to the Bush campaign in 2004, and $7,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2000.

Local TV's previous CEO, Randy Michaels, a controversial figure who once headed the radio division at Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest radio conglomerate, also has a long history of ties to conservative figures. Michaels is credited with discovering the popular conservative talk show host Sean Hannity in the early 1990s. He also signed enormous radio deals with Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, two powerhouses on the conservative talk-radio circuit.

WHNT General Manager Stan Pylant said the FCC inquiry will reveal that there was no political foul play on the part of the station. "Indeed, the record will show that our team worked quickly to get CBS back on the air that night," Pylant said in a Mar. 7 statement.

In any case, experts say there is little the FCC can do regardless of the inquiry's conclusions. "While the First Amendment protects not only one's right to say what he or she has to say, it also protects one from being required to say something," Miriam Smith, professor of broadcast and electronic communication at San Francisco State University, said in an e-mail. "WHNT cannot be forced to engage in speech they do not wish to make."

Media experts say that a former federal regulation, the Fairness Doctrine, would have given the FCC greater punitive powers in this case. That rule required broadcasters to air stories of public importance, regardless how controversial, and also mandated equal time for opposing views.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, during a period of widespread deregulation under the Reagan administration. A congressional effort to prevent the repeal was vetoed by President Ronald Reagan. A 1991 attempt to reinstall it also failed, this time under veto threat from President George H.W. Bush.

What remains relevant is a federal requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest. If the Huntsville blackout is found to be politically motivated, then the FCC, currently composed of three Republicans and two Democrats, could deem it an act of censorship. This would be a taken into consideration when the station's license came up for renewal, which happens every eight years. License revocations are rare, however. Experts say it would require a years-long pattern of censorship - not just one event.

"In this case, they're certainly not going to pull their license over it," said Clay Calvert, communications professor at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of Mass Media Law, the nation's top-selling undergraduate communications law textbook. "At most, it might merit a warning."

Considering the partisan make-up of the FCC, it might not even merit that. The commission's "notice of inquiry" falls short of an investigation. And if Martin, the panel's Republican chairman, accepts the station's claim that the trouble was strictly technical, then the process could end there.

Kerry said his pursuit of the story will hinge on the FCC's actions. "[T]he FCC should carry out a full investigation before we take any further action," he said in an e-mail. "If the FCC fails to do so, then we will have to make a decision about further congressional action."

The FCC launched its inquiry on Mar. 4. WHNT has until Apr. 3 to respond. Mary Diamond, an FCC spokeswoman, declined to say whether the agency has received a response. Messages left with the station Friday were not returned.

Meanwhile, last week was doubly eventful for Siegelman. First, the House Judicial Committee on Thursday requested his temporary release to allow his testimony in Washington on events leading to his conviction. A day later, an appeals court secured his release on bond pending an appeal.

In his first interview after his release, Siegelman gave no indication of easing his campaign to tie Rove to his conviction.

"His fingerprints are smeared all over the case," he told The New York Times.

Doctors Support Universal Health Care: Survey

By Maggie Fox
Reuters
Monday 31 March 2008

Washington - More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday.

The survey suggests that opinions have changed substantially since the last survey in 2002 and as the country debates serious changes to the health care system.

Of more than 2,000 doctors surveyed, 59 percent said they support legislation to establish a national health insurance program, while 32 percent said they opposed it, researchers reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

The 2002 survey found that 49 percent of physicians supported national health insurance and 40 percent opposed it.

"Many claim to speak for physicians and represent their views. We asked doctors directly and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, most doctors support national health insurance," said Dr. Aaron Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who led the study.

"As doctors, we find that our patients suffer because of increasing deductibles, co-payments, and restrictions on patient care," said Dr. Ronald Ackermann, who worked on the study with Carroll. "More and more, physicians are turning to national health insurance as a solution to this problem."

Patchwork

The United States has no single organized health care system. Instead it relies on a patchwork of insurance provided by the federal and state governments to the elderly, poor, disabled and to some children, along with private insurance and employer-sponsored plans.

Many other countries have national plans, including Britain, France and Canada, and several studies have shown the United States spends more per capita on health care, without achieving better results for patients.

An estimated 47 million people have no insurance coverage at all, meaning they must pay out of their pockets for health care or skip it.

Contenders in the election for president in November all have proposed various changes, but none of the major party candidates has called for a fully national health plan.

Insurance companies, retailers and other employers have joined forces with unions and other interest groups to propose their own plans.

"Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy," Ackermann said in a statement.

The Indiana survey found that 83 percent of psychiatrists, 69 percent of emergency medicine specialists, 65 percent of pediatricians, 64 percent of internists, 60 percent of family physicians and 55 percent of general surgeons favor a national health insurance plan.

The researchers said they believe the survey was representative of the 800,000 U.S. medical doctors.

Reporting by Maggie Fox; editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand.