Good luck. Until the Republicans get their heads out of Bush’s ass, or until you refuse to fund this war, our troops are going nowhere.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A leading House Iraq war critic said Wednesday he’ll soon push legislation that would order U.S. troop withdrawals to begin in two months and predicted Republicans will swing behind it this time.
A vote on Rep. John Murrtha’s proposal likely will come in September, when Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus delivers a long-anticipated assessment on the war and members of Congress weigh some $600 billion in defense spending requested by President Bush.

Under his plan, Murtha, a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that he envisions troop withdrawals to start in November and take about a year to complete.

The House has passed similar proposals in the past, including one that Bush vetoed. But Murtha said he predicts this vote will be different because of mounting voter frustration with the war and a lack of progress in Iraq.

“This is big time,” Murtha, D-Pa., told reporters of the upcoming war debate in September. “When you get to September, this is history. This is when we’re going to have a real confrontation with the president trying to work things out.”

More at USAToday

By Emily Bazelon
SLATE Magazine online

And other ways for the legal left to rein in the Roberts Court.

The legal left is taking the summer to think. In the next few weeks, the American Constitutional Society and the YearlyKos Convention will host panels on the Supreme Court’s future and what the left can do about it. The short answer, of course, is cry. And then try to win the next election. But there is also a renewed effort to offer an alternative to the conservative vision that the Roberts Court has begun to fulfill-and also an alternative to the old quasi-liberal idea that it is judicial restraint and unity that will deliver the court from the right.

This is a long’standing project in the academy, and one that even Justice Stephen Breyer has weighed in on, in his book Active Liberty. In the wake of this year’s 5-4 conservative ascendance, however, fighting back-even if it won’t mean winning cases in the short-term-has an extra sense of urgency. And the discussion is especially welcome, because it’s time for the left to rethink the reliance on restraint and unity. For years, some left-leaning legal theorists have argued that constitutional law is best served if judges hesitate before striking down laws or imposing their own bold ideas on the country, and instead stick to narrow, fact-bound rulings that are more likely to achieve consensus. It works well enough in some cases and areas of law. But advocating for this approach has done little to stop the court and the law from moving to the right, and that’s not likely to change now.

There are, however, other promising signs of life on the left’signs that its legal scholars are looking for other ways to counter the court’s rightward intellectual underpinnings. This essay, just posted at the New Republic, picks up on arguments made by Akhil Amar and Jack Balkin that the left should wrestle fealty to the Constitution’s original intent from the right and reclaim it for the left. Yale law professors Robert Post and Reva Siegel’s new paper beats back the claim that the court’s totemic liberal decisions, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, did more harm than good. And University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has an upcoming essay in the American Prospect in which he points out how far to the right the composition of the current court has tilted when compared with the court of 1980-itself hardly the Warren Court of the previous decades.

read more at SLATE

By JAMES R. HAGERTY and RUTH SIMON
from The Wall Street Journal

Tighter credit is prolonging a deep slump in home sales, but a quarterly Wall Street Journal survey of 28 major metro areas shows that the surge in inventories of unsold homes is slowing. In two of those markets — Boston and Denver — the number listed for sale has actually declined from a year ago.

The latest trends offer some hope for an eventual recovery in a U.S. housing market that generally has been cooling since mid-2005. Even so, many economists and industry executives say that recovery will be very gradual and won’t start before 2008 at the earliest. That’s partly because more’stringent lending policies are keeping many potential buyers on the sidelines, while others are holding off in hopes of prices heading even lower. Meanwhile, there is still a glut of homes on the market in much of the country, especially in Florida and parts of Arizona, Nevada and California.

Home sales and prices generally should bottom out around mid-2008, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa. “The market will not revive quickly, however,” he says. “It won’t be until the turn of the decade before housing activity returns to more normal conditions.”

The message for home sellers is that they need to be flexible on price and may have to spruce up their house to stand out against plenty of competition, including from builders desperate to shed inventory. In Atlanta’s southwestern suburbs, builder Winstar Neighborhoods is offering free Chevrolet Aveo subcompacts to buyers of certain new homes. Given the glut, buyers in most markets can take their time and bargain hard on price.

read more at The Wall Street Journal

from United Press International

WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — An anti-globalization lobbying group in Washington says pending trade agreements will make imported food safety problems worse.

The report by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division says proposed NAFTA expansions that will increase seafood, meat and other imports undermine the ability of Congress to ensure the safety of imported food.

“This is a trade problem that is not just about China, but rather goes to a trade model that prioritizes increasing the volume of traded food over safety,” Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach said Wednesday in a news release.

The report said nearly $65 billion in food is imported annually — almost double the value imported when NAFTA went into effect.

“In 2005, the United States, formerly known as the world’s bread basket, became a net food importer for the first time, with a food deficit of nearly $370 million,” the report said.

Bill Bullard, chief executive officer of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, said U.S. farmers and ranchers will be locked into a competitive disadvantage that will continue to erode rural communities that are dependent on the U.S. cattle industry.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Talk might be cheap, but Oprah is not, topping a list of the highest-paid television stars in the United States.

Oprah Winfrey, host and supervising producer of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” earns an estimated $260 million a year, according to a list in TV Guide magazine’s July 23 issue. Music producer Simon Cowell, the blunt and often contentious British judge of “American Idol,” placed a distant second to Winfrey, with $45 million for his role on the Fox network’s smash hit talent show and other projects.

Courtroom chief Judge Judy (Judith Sheindlin), CBS News anchor Katie Couric and “Scrubs” actor Zach Braff round out the top five.

The list breaks down star salaries by category — prime-time TV, daytime, cable and news with a partial listing below:

TOP FIVE (all salaries are per year)

Oprah Winfrey (”The Oprah Winfrey Show”): $260 million

Simon Cowell (”American Idol”): $45 million

Judge Sheindlin (”Judge Judy”): $30 million

Katie Couric (”CBS Evening News Anchor”): $15 million

read more at Reuters

By Christopher Doering

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House threatened on Wednesday to veto a broad agriculture law being drafted in Congress, which the administration said misses a major chance to overhaul U.S. farm policy in dire need of reform.

The Bush administration has argued that the House Agriculture Committee’s plan for the 2007 farm bill — which will set subsidy, biofuels, rural development, conservation and nutrition spending for five years — increases taxes unnecessarily and uses accounting tricks to pay for programs.

“Myself, and the president’s entire team of senior advisors, will recommend that he veto the bill if it is adopted in its current form,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told reporters. “There are serious problems with the way this (House) bill was put together.”

The farm bill package, passed last week under the leadership of committee Chairman Rep. Collin Peterson, would deny subsidies to people with an adjusted gross income above $1 million, which Johanns said would only be about 3,000 people. It also would require payments to be tracked to an individual.

The Bush administration has expressed concern that the House falls short on priorities such as renewable energy and rural development. It also said the bill does not sufficiently limit eligibility for government farm supports.

read more at Reuters

By Ishani Ganguli

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cigarette warning labels should cover at least half of the package’s front and back and use graphic color photos of cancer and other health effects to deter smokers, U.S. Senators said on Wednesday.

The effort was part of ongoing debate on a bill that would allow Food and Drug Administration to regulate but not ban tobacco products, a proposal supported by public health groups and the nation’s largest cigarette maker.

“Shocking messages convey the truth in no uncertain terms and have been known to have an impact,” said Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi. He put forward the amendment creating a minimum standard for regulation of the labels.

Under the original bill, the proposed FDA regulatory committee would have authority to decide what the labels say and show, and how they are placed, modifying them over time as research findings change, according to Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the bill.

Kennedy chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is expected to vote on the tobacco bill on Thursday.

Enzi’s amendment, which Kennedy said he accepted, would require the agency to mandate warning labels covering at least 50 percent of the front and rear panels of the package. The labels would also have to include color images of the health consequences of smoking — including oral cancer and gangrene.

read more at Reuters

By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL (Reuters) - The Taliban have not killed the remaining 22 South Korean Christian volunteers held hostage in Afghanistan despite a deadline passing, a senior official said on Thursday.

“I was awake all night and if the Taliban had killed any of them I would have known,” said General Ali Shah Ahmadzai, provincial police chief of Ghazni province where the 22 remaining hostages are being held and where one was killed on Wednesday.

The Taliban said the Afghan government had been given until late Wednesday night (2030 GMT) to agree to exchange the group for eight imprisoned rebels, but the deadline passed without word from the kidnappers.

“No, they have not killed any of the hostages and we are trying to contact the Taliban for resumption of talks,” the Ghazni police chief told Reuters.

No Taliban member could be contacted for comment.

Earlier reports by some media that eight hostages had been released have been denied by officials, negotiators and a spokesman for the Taliban.

The fate of the 22 Christian volunteers had hung in the balance overnight, after the rebels shot dead one hostage and dumped his bullet-ridden body near where the group was seized last week.

He was identified in Seoul as the group’s leader, Bae Hyung-kyu, a pastor who would have turned 42 on the day he was murdered.

read more at Reuters

This essay is a review of the book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

By Chalmers Johnson

The American people may not know it, but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA’s approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly US$44 billion to $48 billion or more spent on “intelligence”. This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the agency, and hardly the most serious one, either.

There are currently at least two criminal trials under way, in Italy and Germany, against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to “disappear” into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the United States without any form of due process of law.

Continue at the Asia Times

According to Medical Supply Chain CEO Samuel Lipari who is suing hospital supply company Novation LLC, Missouri Democratic Senator Claire C. McCaskill knew that seven U.S. attorneys-two assistants who turned up dead, three assistants who resigned or were fired and two U.S. attorneys who were also forced out-had something in common: all seven were investigating Medicare and Medicaid fraud in the United States healthcare system involving overcharging for hospital supplies and medical fees amounting to billions of dollars in fraud.
Senator Claire C. McCaskill (D-MO)
Lipari’s suit against Novation has ties to the White House in that the President’s brother Jeb Bush joined the board of directors of Novation member Tenet Healthcare on April 12, 2007 and George W’s cousin’s company wrote software for hospital equipment global reference numbers, raising questions as to why Jeb Bush has become associated with a company involved in multiple lawsuits and fraud probes.

President Bush’s first cousin Jonathan Bush is CEO of Athena Health in Watertown, Massachusetts, the developer of Novation’s “CodeRyte” software program that “runs on an algorithm built into the system,” which “can read the data entry, find any required associations and automatically contact on’staff coders who can read the work and determine the appropriate code.”

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s association with Novation’s Tenet Healthcare comes after Tenet was audited in 2004 by the California Department of Health Services after overcharging the state’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, by $11.9 million at Redding Medical Center, linked to a Tenet probe by fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, a 45-agent FBI raid and multiple subpoenas signed by a Dallas assistant U.S. attorney found dead the day before Senate healthcare anti-trust hearings.

San Diego and Memphis papers reported that Tenet Healthcare Corporation of Dallas has agreed to pay $21 million as part of a civil settlement with the federal government over allegations of kickbacks to doctors. The settlement also requires Tenet to close or sell the hospital where the kickbacks allegedly took place, Alvarado Hospital Medical Center in San Diego.

The settlement averts a third criminal trial over an alleged kickback scheme between 1992 and 2002 to pay doctors for referring patients to Alvarado. Two previous trials, in 2004 and 2005, ended in deadlocked juries.

Read more »