Bela Fleck and the Flecktones
“Lover’s Leap”

By Peter Grier
The Christian Science Monitor

“Some Democrats regret updating FISA to expand the NSA’s ability to tap American calls”.

It’s a little too late for that thinking now, isn’t it, boys and girls? - JS

Washington - The administration’s warrantless wiretapping program looks set to be the subject of renewed and bitter wrangling between Congress and the White House when lawmakers return to Washington in September.

And this upcoming battle promises to be far more complex than a run-of-the-mill dispute over an agriculture bill, say, or tax legislation. The law in this area is unusually dense and difficult. The underlying activity is classified. One of the key administration figures dealing with the issue is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, an official in whom many in Congress have little trust.

“Essentially, it’s a difficult situation to have a rational conversation on the merits,” says Benjamin Wittes, an expert on national security law at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The expanded snooping powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been controversial ever since they became public in 2006. To critics, the program opens the door to the possibility of dangerous infringement on the civil liberties of US citizens. To supporters, they’re a necessary tool against terrorism in an era of cellphones and Internet communications.

At issue now is the temporary update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed earlier this month, just before Congress fled Capitol Hill for its summer break. This update was made necessary when the secretive judicial body that oversees the wiretapping, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, banned eavesdropping on foreigners whose communications were being routed through the United States.

read more HERE

By Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta
The Washington Post

Post-ABC Poll on Economic Conditions Shows Largest One-Week Drop Since 1985.

Consumer comfort plummeted this week amid turbulence in the stock market and a seemingly infectious crisis in the home mortgage market.

The Washington Post-ABC News consumer comfort index (CCI), a barometer of the public’s assessment of current economic conditions, plunged nine points this week, the biggest ever one-week drop since the poll started in late 1985.

The CCI now stands at -20 on its scale of –100 to +100, well off its high for the year, +2 in March, and near its post-Hurricane Katrina lows. After that storm devastated the Gulf Coast two years ago, consumer confidence quickly dropped by 11 points before recovering several months later.

The current fall has been even more precipitous. A month ago, easing gasoline prices helped lift the index to -5, 15 points higher than it is this week.

Although pump prices remain below the highs reached earlier this year, the stock market’s recent ups and downs likely have rattled some nerves. In an April Gallup poll, about two-thirds of Americans said they have money invested in securities. The volatility’s close link to the cooling housing market personalizes the crisis.

read more HERE

By CHELSEA J. CARTER
The Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, Utah - With six trapped coal miners all but left for dead in a crumbling mountain, families and friends vented their frustration at the mine’s owner Tuesday and asked: Was it too dangerous to be working there in the first place?

At a funeral Tuesday for one of the three rescue workers killed, a friend of one of the trapped miners confronted mine co-owner Bob Murray and accused him of skimping on the rescue efforts. He then handed Murray a dollar bill.

“This is just to help you out so you don’t kill him,” the man said.

Murray’s head snapped back as if slapped. When the man wouldn’t take back the bill, Murray threw the money on the ground. “I’ll tell you what, son, you need to find out about the Lord,” Murray said.

It was an emotional exchange with an owner who had insisted that rescue of the miners was his top priority since the collapse. And it revealed more than just the frustration of people in this mining community in central Utah’s coal belt, where most still speak in whispers when criticizing the officials whose businesses pay their bills.

Critics are now openly calling the mine a disaster waiting to happen and pointing fingers at Murray Energy Corp. and the federal government as the agents of the tragedy.

Miners’ advocates have accused the Mine Safety and Health Administration in recent years of being too accommodating to the industry at the expense of safety. And they say MSHA was too quick to approve the mining plan at Crandall Canyon despite concerns that it was too dangerous for mining to continue when Murray bought the place a year ago.

read more HERE

God only knows what would come out of those 5 million emails. These guys are going to such extreme lengths to keep them secret, there’s got to be stuff in there we haven’t even imagined.

The Justice Department said Tuesday that records about missing White House e-mails are not subject to public disclosure, the latest effort by the Bush administration to expand the boundaries of government secrecy.

Administration lawyers detailed the legal position in a lawsuit trying to force the White House Office of Administration to reveal what it knows about the disappearance of White House e-mails.

The Office of Administration provides administrative services, including information technology support, to the Executive Office of the President.

The office has prepared estimates that there are at least 5 million missing White House e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005, according to the lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private advocacy group.

In court papers seeking to end the case, the Justice Department said the White House Office of Administration has no substantial authority independent of President Bush and therefore is not subject to the disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

Most of the White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, but certain components within it handle FOIA requests, including the Office of Administration, which issues annual reports on the number of FOIA requests it processes each year.

More at the Guardian

This is weird……….

Boxes of documents containing personal information from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research were supposed to be shredded but instead turned up last week in a trash bin, police said.

A resident of a suburban Washington neighborhood near the Army medical research’s campus found the boxes Friday and alerted Montgomery County police.

The files were research study records, said Cynthia Vaughn, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Medical Command. An investigation was under way to determine precisely what information they held and why they appeared off base, Vaughn said Monday. Police said most were from the late 1990s and likely were placed in the bin on the same day they were discovered.

The records were supposed to be shredded by a Walter Reed research division employee.

The Silver Spring-based institute is the Pentagon’s largest biomedical research laboratory and is not directly affiliated with the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in nearby Washington. Researchers at the facility work on issues such as tropical diseases and post traumatic stress disorder.

More at FoxNews

From VOA News:

“Wondering whether America is making a political left turn”? I’m wondering why Republicans still have a shot in ‘08! I’m wondering why republicans are even still allowed in this country! What’s wrong with Americans? Hasn’t the last umpteen years of corrupt republican rule not taught you anything???

The Poll results show a marked swing from the right to the left, which is good. But it surprises me that there are still people willing to answer polling questions as happy republicans.

The news that liberal blogger Lane Hudson yesterday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that not-quite Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson is violating election law by raising more money than he needs to “test the waters” for a White House run, is charging up discussion in the blogosphere.

Hudson explains his reasoning here. His bottom line:

It is my contention that he has violated the ‘testing the waters’ exemption of election law. He has been presenting himself as a candidate for president, he has been raising large sums of money beyond what would be required to explore a possible candidacy, and he has signed a long term lease on a headquarters for his campaign. He has even spent advertising dollars, which are specifically prohibited by the law.

Up to this point, no one has taken the time to take action against this abuse. I hope that the FEC will act quickly on this issue. Failure to do so will contribute to further corruption of the American political process.

Thompson’s response? We don’t find any at his testing-the-waters website, I’m With Fred. But, “we’re following the law,” spokesman Jim Mills told the Associated Press. The wires service adds that “under federal guidelines, the FEC will now give Thompson 15 days to respond to the complaint. Following Thompson’s response, election commissioners will decide whether to dismiss the case or investigate further.”

More at USAToday

Mayor Jim Naugle and several religious leaders held a news conference Tuesday to draw attention to what they described as the moral and health risks of gay sex.

Naugle is at the center of a political war between gays and religious conservatives that started earlier this summer when he said public bathrooms in Fort Lauderdale are plagued by gay men cruising for sex and said he uses the term “homosexual” because “most of them aren’t gay. They’re unhappy.”

At a news conference in front of City Hall on Tuesday, Naugle and other speakers called on gays to end promiscuous sex in order to stem Broward County’s HIV/AIDS crisis. Though the health department has no statistics concerning how many cases of HIV are contracted via sex in public bathrooms or parks, Naugle has tied the two issues together.

Read more and watch video here

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported on Karl Rove’s politicization of the federal government. The article highlighted that Rove had organized “asset deployment teams” that allowed the White House “to coordinate the travel of Cabinet secretaries and senior agency officials” to secure GOP victories:

In practical terms, that meant Cabinet officials concentrated their official government travel on the media markets Rove’s team chose, rolling out grant decisions made by agencies with red-carpet fanfare in GOP congressional districts, and carefully crafted announcements highlighting the release of federal money in battleground states.

This morning, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote to the heads of 18 federal agencies who attended the briefings, confirming the existence of the teams:

As part of our investigation, the Committee has received documents that confirm the existence of this “asset deployment team.” According to the documents, the White House invited 18 federal agencies, including yours, to asset deployment meetings in 2003.

More at Think Progress

The Atlanta Humane Society said they are receiving donations from across the country — and you-ll never guess what people are sending.

More than a dozen Michael Vick jerseys have been sent to AHS, and they are putting them to good use.

“When I first saw them, I was kind of shocked. I was like, A-Why do they have Vick jerseys here,- said Julie Sentner.

Vick is innocent until proven guilty, but his association when men pleading guilty to federal dog fighting charges makes the number 7 jersey an unexpected find at the Atlanta Humane Society.

“At first we were like, A-I wonder what we-re going to use this for,” said P.J. Smith with AHS.

And the jerseys kept coming. About a dozen or so jerseys were sent from people wanting to make good from a bad situation. In fact, the Humane Society is getting flooded with e-mails about Vick.

So what are volunteers doing with the jerseys?

“We discovered like any donation we get, any shirt or towel, we put it to good use here at Atlanta Humane Society. We-re always using things to clean kennels, use for bedding and stuff like that,” said Smith.

More at WSBTV.com

I’m not pimping for CNN, but I do like Christiane Amanpour. I’m looking forward to this series.

We haven’t seen Christiane Amanpour in quite a while - in, oh, like 15 minutes or so. Flip on CNN and there she is, somewhere, though usually somewhere over there, in the war-torn world and far away from our safe, tethered and generally anesthetized lives. Outside of Anderson Cooper, Larry King or maybe Lou Dobbs, she is CNN’s most visible presence and someone who has amassed a pretty amazing body of work at this network over nearly 25 years.

If this doesn’t sound like a reasonable buildup for her six-hour tour of religious fanaticism that begins Tuesday at 9, then the fault is mine alone. “God’s Warriors” is an estimable achievement, even for a subject that has been relentlessly worked over by hundreds of scholars, journalists and book authors in recent years, including Amanpour herself. (It’s even hard to say how much of “God’s Warriors” has been strip mined by Amanpour before, although “Struggle for Islam,” which won her an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2002, addressed similar themes.)

But what’s special about “God’s Warriors” is the sheer totality of it. Over six hours, Amanpour and her team seem to capture the essence of a hugely important moment in world history, and with the exception of the title, do so without hyperbole or histrionics. It’s really the best of Amanpour - and really, dear, old, battered and much-maligned CNN, too.

More at Newsday

Excellent post by Brian Trent, of Populist Party Of America. A must-read!

You are Destroying America. Yes, You.

Sooner or later (as all great civilizations through time have dealt with) America will be attacked by terrorists again. There are too many people out there hopelessly addicted to extremism, to acting as pawns in a game of supernatural Risk, to blind fanaticism for it not to happen.

But that won’t destroy America.

In history, there have been the Hyksos, the Hittites, the Visigoths, the Huns, the Golden Horde, the Crusaders, and countless other unnamed peoples who have arrived with sword and torch to bring devastation to society. Today they use bombs and AK-47s. And in the future, even if education raises up humanity from the gutters of ignorance there will still be those of the fanatic pathology. It is likely there will always be barbarians.

But that won’t destroy America either.

You will.

Read more »

U.S. COMMANDER TOURS CHINESE MILITARY

RUSSIA: CZECHS HOSTING U.S. MISSILE DEFENSE BIG MISTAKE

RULES WILL LIMIT HEALTH PROGRAM AIDING CHILDREN

MONSTER.COM DATA BREACH

UN OPENS FURTHER TALKS WITH IRAN

CROCKER: PROGRESS IN IRAQ EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING

SMELL OF DEATH PERMEATES RUINED YAZIDIS VILLAGES

DOES YOUR CHEWING GUM LOSE ITS FLAVOR…..

PAINKILLER USE SKYROCKETS IN U.S.

IT’S A MIRACLE! THINGS ARE BETTER IN IRAQ IN PAST 24 HOURS!!

Last month, Washington approved massive military-aid packages and arms sales to its Arab allies, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and a number of smaller Gulf States. But while U.S. officials say the deals aim to bolster the “forces of moderation” in the region, some local commentators see the move as an unnecessary - and dangerous - provocation.

“The arms deals represent a continuation of U.S. policy aimed at creating tension and polarizing the region,” Ahmed Thabet, professor of political science at Cairo University, told IPS.

On July 28, the Bush administration announced its intention of providing Egypt with a $13 billion military assistance package, to be paid out over the next 10 years. The deal comes within the framework of the Camp David peace accord, to which Egypt, along with Israel, has been a signatory since 1979.

The White House also announced its willingness to sell some $20 billion worth of advanced U.S. weapons systems to several Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Despite a degree of domestic opposition, the sales are expected to be approved by the U.S. Congress next month.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying that both the aid package and weapons sales reflected Washington’s commitment “to provide for the security of our allies.” She added that the deals were intended to “counter the negative influences of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.”

Continue reading at Antiwar.com