B and B

The Republican party launches fight against American workers

At TPMCafe, Robert Reich has a good summary of how Republican party is pitting Americans against Americans in oder for their obscenely wealthy patrons to re-assert control over the country and the vast majority of its money and resources.  He begins:

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class - pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

The assault on workers' rights in Wisconsin recently launched by its new governor Scott Walker is only one particularly visible and intense battle.  Those of us who don't want to see the country fall into the control of "robber barons" reminiscent of the late 19th century should stand with Wisconsin workers, and those of other states, in this battle.

 

San Antonio to take in hurricane refugees

Liberal Blogosphere for Hurricane Relief



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Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of lives.

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The situation in New Orleans, and in other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, in the aftermath of the devastating hurricane, has been truly horrifying. I am glad to see that Texas, and in particular my home of San Antonio, is stepping up to take care of many of those who lost everything.

Days after Hurricane Katrina left staggering numbers of Gulf Coast residents with nowhere to go, several thousand now have a place to call home: San Antonio.

Beginning today, they'll move into Buildings 1536 and 171 at KellyUSA, a military base-turned-civilian business park on the Southwest Side.

Seeking temporary homes for at least 25,000 refugees, the Texas governor's office called Mayor Phil Hardberger on Thursday morning. The mayor agreed to host part of that group.

Within hours, city street-cleaning trucks vacuumed debris from the quarter-mile-long Building 1536, which once stored aircraft components, shipping materials and weapons. Public works employees ground down bolts sticking up from the floor.

"Gotta get rid of the trip hazards," one torch-wielding worker said.

Creating this city within a city is no small endeavor: From the moment the refugees arrive, they will need food, clothing, shelter and medical care.

In the weeks and, almost certainly, months ahead, their needs will grow more complex: schooling for their children, and perhaps even jobs.

"We've never done anything like this," said Keith Berger, chairman of volunteers for the American Red Cross in Bexar County, one of many organizations helping to create the long-term refugee camp.

With the situation still evolving, many details remain unclear. City officials planned to open the buildings today but, as of Thursday night, remained uncertain about what time they would open.

It could be some time before anyone knows how many temporary residents San Antonio will receive and how long they will stay.

"I think it is legitimate to assume we're not talking about next week they're going to go home," Hardberger said. "The city of New Orleans is effectively closed."

Unfortunately, the number of people displaced by this natural disaster must be in hundred of thousands. Places like the Astrodome in Houston and Kelly USA (the former Kelly Air Force Base) in San Antonio will only be able to accomodate a small fraction of that number. This is going to be a huge effort. And it'll need help from all of us able to provide it.

Rove's story

It's after 2 AM here in Texas, and I see two new articles on the Rove/Plame affair in the new day's papers. The New York Times report is based on an anonymous source friendly to Karl Rove. It says:

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The Washington Post has a similar story, but based on a lawyer "who has firsthand knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors." It says:

At the end of that 15- or 20-minute call, according to the lawyer, Novak said he had learned that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

"I heard that, too," Rove replied, according to the lawyer, confirming the [New York] Times account. The Times article reports that Rove learned about Plame from Novak, but the lawyer with firsthand knowledge of the case said Rove was not certain of that.

This conversation, according to the Times, took place on July 8, 2003. Three days before Rove revealed Plame's CIA job to Matt Cooper of Time magazine, and six days before Novak's Chicago Sun-Times column officially outing Plame was published.

Daily Kos has a handy timeline of the whole Wilson/Plame/Rove affair. July 8 was two days after Joe Wilson's original New York Times op-ed attacking the Bush administration appeared, and one day after the White House was forced to retract its earlier allegation that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

According to the timeline, on July 8 the following happened:

A friend informs Wilson that Robert Novak believes that his wife had something to do with Wilson's appointment to investigate the Yellow Cake claim in Africa.

He asked Novak if he could walk a block or two with him, as they were headed in the same direction; Novak acquiesced. Striking up a conversation, my friend, without revealing that he knew me, asked Novak about the Uranium controversy. It was a minor problem, Novak replied, and opined that the administration should have dealt with it weeks before. My friend then asked Novak what he thought about me, and Novak answered: "Wilson's an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie [Plame], works for the CIA. She's a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him."

Wilson's friend went right to Wilson's office and documented the exchange.

So someone told Novak about Plame's true occupation on or before July 8. As we learned today, Rove's conversation with Novak was on July 8.

If we believe the Rove-friendly account in today's papers, someone had already spread around Plame's CIA job to both Novak and Rove. Who? Rove, by the account in the Washington Post, has conveniently forgotten.

If we don't believe the Rove-friendly account, then this timing is extremely suspicious.

UPDATE (10:22 AM): I cross-posted this last night at TPMCafe. In that version substitute 2003 for my late-night "1993".

Best interests of Rove, Bush, or the U.S.A.?

The San Antonio Express-News published an editorial about the Karl Rove/Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair yesterday that does what Bush doesn't want the media to do. It "prejudges" the investigation by Justice Department special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. How does the editorial board know that "Rove is unlikely to be criminally culpable because there is no evidence that he intentionally leaked her name"?

Beyond that, the editorial board seems peculiarly anxious about the political consequences for the administration and oblivious to the larger criminal, ethical, and national security concerns. "The political problem ... is substantial," they write. "The way the president handles this will have a huge impact on his credibility for the remainder of his second term."

All true, of course. But what about the criminal concerns? Fitzgerald, who has a reputation as a straight-shooting prosecutor, has been investigating this case for a long time now. We don't know where he's going with this, but there's clearly something there.

What about the ethical concerns? High-level administration officials sabotaging the career of a critic's wife by blowing her cover to at least half a dozen members of the press, either through malice or through willful ignorance. Is everything permissible when it comes to attacking someone perceived to be a political troublemaker?

What about the national security concerns? The CIA operations whose cover was blown were on issues of weapons of mass destruction. This act could have repercussions that endanger the lives of not just CIA operatives that worked with Plame, but of people all over the world.

The Express-News editorial board concludes by writing:

The best interest of the administration must supercede the best interest of Rove if the two diverge.

What about the best interest of the country?

UPDATE (7-21-2005): I sent a variant of this post as a letter to the editor of the San Antonio Express-News. Today, they published it.

Bad goings-on at NIH

This is an amazing story from the Associated Press about official misconduct of many different types at the National Institutes of Health.  The allegations include sexual harrassment, a hostile workplace, abuse of taxpayer funds, lax attention to safety standards, retaliation against a whistleblower.  Apparently all of this is coming out now due to testimony provided in a congressional investigation into the whistleblower's claims.  Unfortunately, the article throws everything together in a big mess, so it is hard to keep it all straight.

WASHINGTON - A boss sends a red bra to a former female subordinate who had a falling out with him. Government e-mails distribute profanity and a picture of a partly nude woman. An order to better protect patients in a medical experiment takes two years to complete.

All of that happened inside the National Institutes of Health, the nation's premier medical research agency, according to sworn testimony and other documents obtained by The Associated Press from a variety of sources inside and outside the NIH.

Two senior female officers testified that the NIH workplace is so uncomfortable and intimidating that safety concerns are frequently dismissed and some employees are afraid to speak up.

...

Documents tell of women being hugged or kissed by bosses, or being subjected to catcalls in the hallway. In one instance, a supervisor invited a colleague to a West Coast rock concert and suggested they also visit an AIDS clinic there so the trip could be charged to taxpayers.

[NIH medical officer Betsy] Smith and the top regulatory compliance officer in the NIH's AIDS division, Mary Anne Luzar, stepped forward in interviews with investigators and in sworn depositions in recent weeks and expanded upon allegations made last year by an agency whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein. Their videotaped testimony was given in Fishbein's lawsuit against the agency.

Fishbein alleges he is in the process of being fired as the AIDS division's chief of human research protection because he raised concerns about patient safety and shoddy science. NIH says he was fired for poor performance.

The Senate and the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department are investigating the allegations. In addition, officials told the AP that NIH is conducting an internal investigation on sexual harassment.

...

Luzar, the AIDS division's compliance officer, alleged that her bosses frequently sided with the front-line researchers they are financing, rather than with the agency's safety and regulatory experts.

"I think we (safety officials) got in the way, and that we were an impediment to the science," Luzar testified. She described the division managers as "totally unsupportive" of safety concerns and bending to "tremendous pressure" from drug companies and researchers in the name of trying to cure AIDS.

"I think the culture was certainly strong for a period of time that the ends could justify the means," she testified.

Smith said Fishbein was a strong advocate for improving safety for research participants and the effort to fire him is "a warning to other individuals."

After Fishbein was forced out, she said, NIH held a meeting at which he and his allegations were attacked and a picture of one of Fishbein's relatives was shown on a screen. Smith said the event was so intimidating that fellow safety and medical officers "called it scientific terrorism."

(Via Democratic Underground.)

Bush Labor Department cuts Wal-Mart a deal on child labor violations

The Bush Department of Labor has given a sweetheart deal to Wal-Mart in a settlement of an investigation into child labor law violations.  The New York Times reported this story last weekend.  Wal-Mart pays a measly sum of $135K, and then gets a promise from the DoL of a 15-day warning in the event of any future investigations.

Fortunately, congressman George Miller (D-CA), has called for an investigation into this settlement:

"I am very concerned about this secret arrangement between Wal-Mart and the Bush Administration," said Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "This is a company that has been accused of a lengthy list of labor violations. Wal-Mart does not have the credibility to serve as an impartial investigator of accusations of labor violations against itself. I intend to find out how this arrangement was reached and, if appropriate, I will consider asking Congress to rescind the agreement if it cannot be justified."

Unfortunately, the Republicans who run Congress have shown no indication that they care to hold the Bush administration accountable for anything.

Nathan Newman and Labor Blog have more on this story here, here, here, and here.

Digby on torture

Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be our next Attorney General has brought the subject of Americans torturing terrorist suspect back into the news.  Digby has an excellent post on this:

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong to torture animals and other kids. We don't say that there are exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words "cruel and unusual" are written into our constitution.

The problem is not that there isn't a widely accepted admonition not to conduct torture, it's that many people, as with all crimes, will choose to ignore the admonition under certain circumstances. However, that does not mean that they do not know that what they are doing is wrong. There is nothing surprising in that. It's why we have laws.

The arguments for torture being raised by the right are rationalizations for what they know is immoral and illegal conduct. Their discomfort with the subject clearly indicates that they don't really want to defend it. (Witness the pathetic dance that even that S&M freak Rush Limbaugh had to do after his comments were widely disseminated.) Will they admit that they know it's wrong? Of course not. But when they take up their manly jihad and accuse the Democrats of being swooning schoolgirls they will also be forced to positively defend something that many of them know very well is indefensible. And every time they do that their credibility on values and morals is chipped away a little bit.

I don't expect them to change their tune. Way too much of this comes from a defect in temperament and garden variety racism and that's not going to go away. But Democrats have to thicken their skins and be prepared for the usual attacks and insist over and over again that it is against the values and principles of the United States to torture people, period. It is not only right, it is smart.

As I wrote below, the opposition will bluster and fidget and scream bloody murder. But listen to the tenor of their arguments. The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] article below rails against the "glib abuse of the word" as if they can run away from the issue by engaging in a game of semantics. They are reduced to claiming that unless we torture it will be unilateral disarmament. We, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, will be defeated by a bunch of third world religious misfits if we don't engage in torturing suspects. Just who sounds weak?

Tsunami warnings

In the late 1990s, I lived in Hawaii for a few years, including a stretch where we lived at about 10 feet above sea level about 3 blocks from the sea.  Hawaii is very tsunami-aware, from hard experience (in particular, a legendary 1946 tsunami killed over a hundred people), and Hawaii has warning sirens near the coasts in populated areas and has published maps of risk zones and evacuation information in the front of telephone books.   Living there, it was impossible not to be aware of the risks. 

Sadly, due to the rarity of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean region devastated over the weekend, that does not appear to have been the case in those places.

From the New York Times:

HONOLULU, Dec. 27 - When experts at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu were first alerted that an earthquake had struck Sunday off Indonesia, they had no way of knowing that it had generated a devastating tsunami and no way to warn the people most likely to suffer.

Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, which has no system for detecting them and alerting those in danger, and scientists do not have the tools to tell when an earthquake has created one.

Not until the deadly wave hit Sri Lanka and the scientists in Honolulu saw news reports of the damage there did they recognize what was happening.

"Then we knew there was something moving across the Indian Ocean," said Dr. Charles McCreery, the center's director.

"We wanted to try to do something, but without a plan in place then, it was not an effective way to issue a warning, or to have it acted upon," Dr. McCreery said. "There would have still been some time - not a lot of time, but some time - if there was something that could be done in Madagascar, or on the coast of Africa."

...

The first notice of the earthquake that anyone at the Pacific tsunami center received was a computer-generated page set off by seismic sensors at 2:59 p.m. on Saturday Honolulu time. The immediate message received by people like Laura S. L. Kong, a Department of Commerce expert who is the head of a United Nations tsunami education center in Hawaii, included the time of the quake, latitude, longitude and an initial estimate of magnitude, about 8.0.

Nobody was in the office of the Pacific tsunami center. But staff members who received the pages reached the office, took a closer look at available data and sent out a warning to a preset list of contacts around the Pacific.

The center was advising of sea level changes in Fiji, Chile and California measured in inches, the echo of a distant event that had sloshed through the straits that connect the oceans. The warning center continued to refine its estimate of the quake, eventually raising it to a magnitude of 9.0, which is 10 times more powerful than the initial estimate of 8.0, because the scale is logarithmic.

The Pacific center, operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, faced two problems in recognizing what was occurring in the Indian Ocean and alerting potential victims. There is no direct connection between an earthquake magnitude and a resulting tsunami. Not all quakes under the ocean lift the ocean floor to displace the water needed to create a tsunami.

For the Pacific, there are computer models to analyze the consequences of an earthquake, based on years of observations of previous quakes and tsunamis. For the Indian Ocean, there are no such models, according to Vasily V. Titov, a research oceanographer with the Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, based in Seattle. "They assemble quite a bit of data to get the right information and the right warning message," he said of such models.

Another difficulty is that countries that have experienced tsunamis in recent memory are set up with warning systems. Hawaii, for example, has warning sirens, and the "weather radio" network of oceanographic administration can also carry tsunami warnings.

...

"Based on it being an 8.0, we assumed the damage would be confined to Sumatra and would be a local tsunami event, one that strikes shore within minutes of the event," he said. "We weren't overly concerned at that point that it was something larger."

But using another, sometimes more accurate method of measuring, Dr. McCreery said, the staff quickly determined that the magnitude had been closer to 8.5, more intense, but still only borderline for generating more distant damage. The center issued a follow-up bulletin.

But it was not until they saw news reports of casualties in Sri Lanka that all that changed.

...

One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder.

The experts knew they were set up for the wrong ocean, but over a holiday weekend, Dr. Kong said, "it's tough to find contact information."

Mark Kleiman comes through with a common-sense suggestion:

But if you're an American seismologist and your problem is to get a tsunami warning to folks in Sri Lanka, India, and Burma within a couple of hours, surely calling people in those countries and hoping that the governments will be able to improvise a warning system must be the wrong way to go.

Why not call CNN, the Associated Press, and Reuters? They're in the business of putting out information, and they put it out in a way that gets directly to senior public officials as well as to lots of ordinary folks who might live on, or have friends or relatives on, the relevant coastlines.

I promise you, a phone call from the International Tsunami Information Center saying "There's just been a Richter 9.0 quake in Sumatra and a big tsunami will hit the following places at the following times" will receive the undivided attention of any newsdesk in the world.

If you want to put a system in place, put it in place with the news organizations, so you have the direct-line phone numbers of the assignment desks and can send out an authenticated e-mail showing it's not a hoax. And the media process builds in redundancy; if CNN or AP or Reuters carries a big, breaking story, the others will have it within minutes.

[Or skip all that and just phone it in to Drudge with a hint that the earthquake was Kerry's fault. That's the fastest way to get a story out, true or false.]

Yes, it would be better to have an intergovernmental system in place as well. But that will take months. The news-media system could be up and running in a week.

One (slight) problem I see with Kleiman's suggestion is that, without the monitors in place, no one knows for sure if a tsunami has actually been generated, so no one can actually say "a big tsunami will hit the following places."  But still, it seems prudent to use such a system in the meantime, perhaps by issuing alerts like "tsunami watches," comparable to "tornado watches."

Ronnie Earle versus Tom DeLay

Ronnie Earle is the long-time Travis County District Attorney who has been heading up the investigation into Tom DeLay and his cronies' abuses of Texas campaign financing laws. With the House GOP's sleazy actions to attempt to save DeLay's neck getting some flack in the press, DeLay and friends have launched a predictably vicious counter-attack against Earle.

Mark Kleiman asks "Who's got Ronnie Earle's back?":

Is anyone rallying the law enforcement folks behind Ronnie Earle?

I've only met him at a few conferences, but I know his reputation, and he rates about as high on professionalism as any D.A. in the country. But that doesn't mean that Earle won't get spattered by the current slime-and-defend if people don't speak out for him.

We all need to stand up for Earle. NPR last night actually did a great take down on the GOP's slander of Earle, pointing out very prominently how, back when Texas was controlled by Democrats, Earle was known for his prosecutions of abuses by Dem politicians. But we can't expect the rest of the media to actually bother to look up, much less present, the facts. So we need to let them know.

Pro-criminal GOP leadersip

As most probably already have heard, yesterday the House Republicans voted to eliminate a rule that would have required a member of their leadership to relinquish his post if indicted by a grand jury.  Not coincidentally, GOP Supreme Honcho Tom DeLay is facing possible indictment for breaking Texas campaign finance laws in the 2002 elections.

So which Republicans exactly voted to condone illegal activity by their leadership?  Josh Marshall has been trying to figure out the answer.  With the help of his readers, he has discovered that many GOP Representatives are too ashamed to admit how they voted on this motion.  In fact, while a few, the "Shays handful" as Marshall has dubbed them, admit to voting against the motion, many are silent, and many now claim that there was no vote at all.

Let's keep the pressure on and get to the bottom of this.

Sadly, it appears my representative, Henry Bonilla, not only voted in favor of pro-criminal GOP leadership, but was one of the driving forces behind it.