Censored Whig Letters

GOP Says They’ll Continue Racist Voter Suppression Tactics
By Steven Rosenfeld

AlterNet
Thursday 27 September 2007

In 2004, Republicans used a Jim Crow-era tactic to target the voter
registrations of a half-million likely Democratic voters - often minorities
- for Election Day challenges in nine states, a national voting rights
group has charged in a new report.

“The intended effect of voter caging operations is to suppress
minority votes,” Project Vote said in its report, “Caging: A Fifty-Year
History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters. “Several court decisions
and occasional public comment by Republican officials lend support to this
conclusion.”

But Republicans say Project Vote’s report is biased because it
excludes Democratic examples of filing fraudulent voter registrations to
pad voter rolls and because it ignores Democratic efforts to “knock”
opponents off the ballot, such as Ralph Nader in 2004, after identifying
fraudulent signatures on his nominating petitions.

“When you send out a letter to people who have registered recently and
the letter comes back as an address of an empty lot or is undeliverable,
you tell me is that fraud or not?” said Heather Heidelbaugh, Republican
National Lawyers Association vice president for Election Education. “When
people say to me there is no such thing as evidence to commit voter fraud,
it is false. I’ve seen it. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve lived through it.”

Project Vote’s report is likely to draw more congressional scrutiny of
tactics that may continue in the upcoming presidential election. Since
2004, three battleground states - Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania - have
“made it easier for private individuals to challenge a voter’s
eligibility,” the report said, while two states, Washington and Minnesota,
have passed laws “making it harder.”

While the report - like many Democrats - says the GOP is relying on
voter suppression methods developed in once-segregated South, Republicans
like Heidelbaugh say mass registration drives intended to bring in new
Democratic voters often are rife with errors that can be used to pad vote
totals. She defended the GOP’s use of mailings to identify voters to be
challenged on Election Day as a legitimate tool to ensure fair elections.

“Both sides should recognize that voter fraud exists and both sides
should want to minimize it without prohibiting anybody’s right to vote,”
Heidelbaugh said. “The integrity of elections has to be maintained for the
credibility of the system.”

Project Vote organizes voter registration drives among low-income
voters and in 2004 worked with ACORN, another low-income advocacy group, to
register 2.3 million people across the country. In several states, ACORN
workers filed a handful of registrations that were shown to be false and
some of its workers were subsequently tried and convicted. That
relationship undermines the credibility of the Project Vote report, said
Heidelbaugh, who was Election Counsel in Pennsylvania for the Bush/Cheney
‘04 Campaign.

“It is telling me what I have seen for 23 years doesn’t exist,” she
said. “It is a waste of my time to hear ACORN, which has been indicted for
voter fraud, say that voter fraud doesn’t exist.”

Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater said GOP criticism of his
group’s ties to ACORN was fair, but he said Project Group, which is
non-partisan, did not find any evidence that Democrats had used the same
“caging” tactic to try to repress likely Republican supporters from voting.

“We didn’t target the Republicans in our research,” Slater said. “We
did a broad review, using multiple sets of tools and didn’t find incidents
of Democratic voter caging. If we missed something, we’d like to know about
it. We think vote caging is a problem. If Democrats did it we’d want it
stopped as well.”

The Republican National Committee did not return phone calls to
comment. However other RNLA members, who often oversee their party’s
Election Day legal activities at the state level, said the voter challenges
could reappear in 2008.

“I wish there was no need for any of this stuff,” said Michael
Theilen, RNLA executive director. “But I don’t think we are there yet.”

“I think we are going to have big problems in many urban areas -
Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison, Los Angeles, Miami, Jax (Jacksonville),
Washington, D.C.,” Thomas Spencer, RNLA vice chair, a Florida lawyer, said
in an e-mail this summer. “I think that it is a huge and solvable problem.”

Republican Ballot Security

The Project Vote report details a half-century of Republican
“ballot-security” efforts, culminating in a multi-state effort in 2004 to
disenfranchise likely Democratic voters through a tactic called “caging.”
That effort begins with a mailing Republicans send to newly registered
voters. If those letters are returned, the GOP assumes the recipient’s
address on their voter registration form is incorrect and the registration
is fraudulent.

Republicans identified 500,000 individuals whose registrations were to
be challenged on Election Day in 2004, Project Vote reported. The GOP,
usually at the state party level, recruited thousands of volunteers to
monitor who signs in to vote at local precincts with the goal of contesting
the registrations of the people who did not respond to its mailing. This
practice is legal and allowed in most states.

Project Vote noted that relying on undelivered mail was weak standard
to disqualify voters, because postal delivery rates tend to fall off in
lower-income neighborhoods. In 2004, journalist Greg Palast reported
soldiers serving in Iraq were among those who did not receive mailings and
were put on GOP lists in Florida to be challenged.

Federal courts have found “caging” can violate the Voting Rights Act,
which bars race-based discrimination in elections. Comparing the
demographics of zip codes where the mailings are sent and the challenges
are conducted is one tool used by federal courts to make that determination.

A 1982 federal court decree barred the Republican National Committee
from caging after the RNC targeted African-American and Hispanic voters in
New Jersey. That decision was reaffirmed in 1986 in a separate case
involving African-American voters in Louisiana. Since then, state
Republican Parties have contended in recent litigation that these rulings
only apply to the RNC, as state parties are different political entities.

According to Project Vote, Republican Parties in Ohio, Florida,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin targeted hundreds of thousands of voters in
2004. Individuals who described themselves as partisan Republicans did the
same thing on a smaller scale in Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky, the report found. These efforts were mostly
unsuccessful due to a mix of factors: ensuing litigation that stopped or
delayed the challenges; and protests by local election officials and in
some cases by African-American Republicans who were angered they had been
targeted by their political party.

“The party went too far for some of its members,” the report said.

Republicans say the measures are necessary to prevent “voter fraud,” a
widespread belief among some Republicans that large numbers of Democratic
voters are voting more than once, stuffing ballot boxes and doing other
illegal actions to win elections. Independent studies - including a recent
U.S. Election Assistance Commission report that was initially censored -
have found rare instances of this kind of abuse on both sides of the aisle,
although it is usually insignificant in terms of swaying election outcomes.

The RNLA’s Heidelbaugh, who ran the GOP’s legal efforts in
Pennsylvania in 2004, said there was a “national concerted effort by
Democrats to try to convince the American public that voter fraud doesn’t
occur.”

However, in 2004 in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh where several
universities are located, she said she witnessed hundreds of students being
bussed in from New York who demanded to vote after local precincts had run
out of provisional ballots. Heidelbaugh said local election judges allowed
the students - who she said were John Kerry supporters - to vote, creating
a stir that did not end until sheriffs impounded the voting machines. She
said the media did not cover the incident and no charges were brought after
the election.

“Bush won. Where are the kids?” she said. “Who am I going to bring
charges against?”

Jim Crow Roots

Caging and other ballot security measures have their roots in the
South after the Civil War when “former Confederate states reacted to strong
political participation” by African-Americans, the report said. “The
Southern system had five salient features: burdensome residency
requirements, periodic registration, imposition of poll taxes, literacy or
understanding requirements and stringent disqualification provisions.”

Today’s push by Republicans for new voter identification laws,
aggressive voter roll purges, and more elaborate voter registration
requirements are seen as continuing this political legacy, according to the
report’s authors.

“Many of the state challenges laws have their roots in the
post-Reconstruction Era and are relics of Jim Crow laws intended to deprive
African-Americans of their franchise,” it said. “The origin of Florida’s
voter challenge statute, for example, illuminates the racial bias behind
its passage … In 1887, federal law pre-empted Florida law and extended
the right to vote to African-American men. The newly re-enfranchised
African-American voters responded by voting in large numbers. In response,
one year later, the Florida legislature enacted a challenge voters statute
that extended the power to challenge to private poll watchers.

“The current Florida statute on voter challenges permits poll watchers
to challenge a voter merely by signing an oath that states they have
“reason to believe” that the voter is ineligible to vote and stating the
reasons for the challenge.”

There is little question that “caging” and other “ballot security”
issues are alive in 2008.

Last week, a coalition of civil rights groups sued Florida alleging
that new technology used to create statewide voter databases was
disenfranchising thousands of minority voters because of mistakes in the
state records used to validate the registrations. And this week, the
Supreme Court agreed to hear a suit on whether Indiana’s new voter I.D.
requirements unfairly keep poor people and minority groups from voting.

———-

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of
What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004
Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

Following Bush Over a Cliff

By David S. Broder
Thursday, September 27, 2007; A25

Link to Washington Post column

The spectacle Tuesday of 151 House Republicans voting in lock step with the White House against expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was one of the more remarkable sights of the year. Rarely do you see so many politicians putting their careers in jeopardy.

The bill they opposed, at the urging of President Bush, commands healthy majorities in both the House and Senate but is headed for a veto because Bush objects to expanding this form of safety net for the children of the working poor. He has staked out that ground on his own, ignoring or rejecting the pleas of conservative senators such as Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, who helped shape the compromise that the House approved and that the Senate endorsed.

SCHIP has been one of the most successful health-care measures created in the past decade. It was started in 1997 with support from both parties, in order to insure children in families with incomes too high to receive Medicaid but who could not afford private insurance.

The $40 billion spent on SCHIP in the past 10 years financed insurance for roughly 6.6 million youngsters a year. The money was distributed through the states, which were given considerable flexibility in designing their programs. The insurance came from private companies, at rates negotiated by the states.

Governors of both parties — 43 of them, again including conservatives such as Sonny Perdue of Georgia — have praised the program. And they endorsed the congressional decision to expand the coverage to an additional 4 million youngsters, at the cost of an additional $35 billion over the next five years. The bill would be financed by a 61-cents-a-pack increase in cigarette taxes. If ever there was a crowd-pleaser of a bill, this is it. Hundreds of organizations — grass-roots groups ranging from AARP to United Way of America and the national YMCA — have called on Bush to sign the bill. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the largest insurance lobbying group, endorsed the bill on Monday.

But Bush insists that SCHIP is “an incremental step toward the goal of government-run health care for every American” — an eventuality he is determined to prevent.

Bush’s adamant stand may be peculiar to him, but the willingness of Republican legislators to line up with him is more significant. Bush does not have to face the voters again, but these men and women will be on the ballot in just over a year — and their Democratic opponents will undoubtedly remind them of their votes.

Two of their smartest colleagues — Heather Wilson of New Mexico and Ray LaHood of Illinois — tried to steer House Republicans away from this political self-immolation, but they had minimal success. The combined influence of White House and congressional leadership — and what I would have to call herd instinct — prevailed.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) argued that “rather than taking the opportunity to cover the children that cannot obtain coverage through Medicaid or the private marketplace, this bill uses these children as pawns in their cynical attempt to make millions of Americans completely reliant upon the government for their health-care needs.”

In his new book, former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan wrote that his fellow Republicans deserved to lose their congressional majority in 2006 because they let spending run out of control and turned a blind eye toward misbehavior by their own members. Now, those Republicans have given voters a fresh reason to question their priorities — or their common sense.

Saying no to immigration reform and measures to shorten the war in Iraq may be politically defensible, because there are substantial constituencies who question the wisdom of those bills — and who favor alternative policies. But the Bush administration’s arguments against SCHIP — the cost of the program and the financing — sound hollow at a time when billions more are being spent in Iraq with no end in sight. Bush’s alternative — a change in the tax treatment of employer-financed health insurance — has some real appeal, but it is an idea he let languish for months after offering it last winter. And, in the judgment of his fellow Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, Bush’s plan is too complex and controversial to be tied to the renewal of SCHIP.

This promised veto is a real poison pill for the GOP.

davidbroder@washpost.com

Latest Twist in MoveOn Ad Saga: ‘Star Tribune’ Refunds Money to Al Franken — After Sen. Coleman’s Attack

By E&P Staff and the Associated Press

Published: September 26, 2007 5:55 PM ET

MINNEAPOLIS The Star Tribune of Minneapolis will be refunding about $12,000 spent on a full-page ad to Al Franken’s Senate campaign, a Franken campaign spokesman says.

This week, Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign took out a full-page ad in the newspaper criticizing Franken for not condemning a New York Times ad by MoveOn.org, which had attacked General David Petraeus.

Coleman’s campaign says it paid a little over $23,000 on the ad - far less than the $37,000 that Franken’s campaign says it paid for a full-page ad two months ago.

Franken campaign spokesman Andy Barr says that after contacting the Star Tribune, the paper agreed to refund a little over $12,000. That’s slightly less than difference between what the two campaigns paid - which Barr said was probably because of the different days of the week the ads ran.

Benjamin Taylor, senior vice president for communications and marketing at the Star Tribune, said today: “We are refunding Franken’s campaign $12,165 to rectify this particular situation. In fact, Coleman was charged the wrong rate, and Franken was charged the correct rate….

“A new sales rep made a mistake and gave the Coleman campaign a rate from the local retail rate card, rather than the national rate card,” he told a reporter for his paper. “We only discovered the mistake when the Franken campaign complained. We thought the best way to make it right is to give the Franken campaign the same rate we gave Coleman on this particular ad. Going forward both campaigns will be charged the national rate.”

Link to article in Editor and Publisher

Bush Speech on Iraq and Democrats on Impeachment

Since George W. Bush is completely ignoring the views of both the vast majority of American citizens and the majority of the members of Congress concerning the ending of the Iraq War, impeachment hearings should be started. Bush will not conform to democratic norms. He will not respect public opinion or democracy. There are plenty of reasons to hold immediate joint impeachment hearings for both Bush and Cheney.

It is obvious that Bush is relying on his devoted minority following of Congressional Republicans to obstruct withdrawal from Iraq. The same Republican minority has been able to block meaningful legal reforms and most progressive legislation. For most of Bush’s terms in office, Republicans were in the majority and blocked all investigations into law-breaking by the Bush White House.

Iraq and many of the other Bush-connected scandals are connected. The White House inspired and directed outing of CIA agent Valerie Palme for political reasons related to her husband’s opposition to invading Iraq based on lies is closely connected. The obstruction of justice issue in that instance remains unresolved.

Crimes, like warrantless wiretapping in direct violation of federal law, go unpunished. The political firing on US prosecutors, who were unwilling to use their offices to influence elections in favor of Republicans, still have not been honestly investigated. Prosecutions of White House operatives should already be underway. Political interference in civil rights, labor rulings, voting rights, environmental and consumer lawsuits by Bush appointees may have violated the law. We need open, public, televised hearings.

Executive privilege claims, non-existent executive power claims, excessive government secrecy and Presidential signing statements have all been abused by Bush and/or Cheney. The abuses amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” when viewed in total. The pattern is one of a White House who routinely ignores both the rule of law and the will of the people.

Impeachment hearings would reveal the contempt Bush Republicans have for honest, open Government. They would reveal the contempt Bush and Cheney have for democratic processes, honest elections and the will of the people. They would show abuses of power. They would show financial corruption in the form of politically-connected government contracting that include FEMA, Iraq, Homeland Security and much more.

How energy legislation was crafted, as a result of the secret Cheney Energy Taskforce actions and recommendations should be publicly investigated in impeachment hearings. The same thing can be said about how prescription drugs were added to Medicare, in a way that benefited drug companies at the expense of taxpayers thanks to the Bush White House.

Only revealing the true nature of Bush Republicans by holding impeachment hearings will force enough Republican Senators and House members to abandon Bush on the issue of Iraq. Republicans, who continue to stand with Bush once the facts are televised live in impeachment hearings, will be turned out of office even in the reddest of states. Impeachment will force Republicans to bend to the will of the people or be voted out of office.

Bush/Cheney impeachment hearings would not be on trumped-up, essential personal failings. They would be dealing with abusive and incompetent performance in office, public corruption by officeholders and Constitutional issues. These types of issues are why our Founding Fathers designed a system where Presidents and Vice Presidents can be impeached. Even if Bush and Cheney were not removed from office, impeachment hearings would be good for American Democracy…. And world peace!

Written by Stephen Crockett (co-host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com). Mail: P.O. Box 283, Earleville, Maryland 21919. Email: midsouthcm@aol.com . Phone: 443-907-2367.

Feel free to publish without prior approval at no charge.

O’Malley: “83% of Us” To Pay Less Taxes Under His Plan
September 18, 2007
WBAL Radio as reported by Robert Lang

Governor Martin O’Malley said today that while he is proposing a series of tax hikes and spending cuts to help lower a projected budget deficit, most people won’t see higher taxes overall.

“At the end of the day (the plan) would have 83% of us paying less in taxes, rather than more,” O’Malley told reporters before leaving a ceremony at the University of Maryland, College Park

http://wbal.com/news/story.asp?articleid=63269

Link to Huffington Post article

Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has become the fourth leading GOP presidential candidate to shun the PBS debate this month at a historically black college in Baltimore, the Huffington Post has learned.

The debates, moderated by Tavis Smiley, will go on as planned, despite the absence of Thompson, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, former governor Mitt Romney, and Sen. John McCain. Each campaign cited scheduling issues as the reason for their absence. Nevertheless, the rejections underscore the consistent absence of GOP candidates at minority voter forums.

“There is a pattern here,” Smiley told the Huffington Post. “When you tell every black and brown request that you get throughout the primary process that ‘no, there’s a scheduling problem.’ That’s a pattern… Are we really supposed to believe that all four of these guys couldn’t make it because of scheduling?”

The Republican frontrunners’ snubbing of Smiley and PBS comes on the heels of their rejection of a debate sponsored by the Spanish-language network Univision (McCain was the only GOP candidate to accept that invitation). This past June, only one Republican presidential candidate, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, showed up at the convention of the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials.

“It’s not just that they are not coming. It’s that some of them are visibly insulting us,” Cecilia Munoz, vice president of NCLR, told the Politico.

According to Smiley, the Thompson campaign knew about the debate - taking place at 9 pm on September 27 at Morgan State University- well before he declared his candidacy. Former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman chose the date because it worked best for all the potential candidates, Smiley said.

An official on Thompson’s staff called up the PBS host on Monday to deliver the message.

“I told them I thought they were making a grave mistake and I thought they should reconsider,” said Smiley. The Thompson campaign did not respond for a request for comment by the time of print.

The five other Republican candidates for president have all committed to the PBS debate and Smiley plans to proceed with the plans - albeit with four empty lecterns on stage.

“Unlike Univision which cancelled their debate, unlike CNN, which changed their date [of the YouTube debate] we are going live,” said Smiley. “We are delighted the other five are coming and appreciate their courage for showing up. The beat goes on.”

Timothy Butcher’s letter of 9/7 about Democrats “circling the wagons” omits any mention of George Bush or Dick Cheney.

Granted, Bill Clinton’s personal conduct was deplorable, and the Republican Congress at the time decided it amounted to an impeachable offense.

Since then, President Bush took us to war under false pretenses (including a deliberate lie in his 2003 State of the Union address), violated U.S. law by flouting the Geneva Conventions and the FISA act requiring court approval of domestic spying, and purposely exposed one of our undercover CIA agents. The Republican Congress squelched any meaningful investigation of these incidents, unlike their vigorous investigations of Whitewater, which occurred before Clinton’s presidency, and “Travelgate.” Both investigations ultimately exonerated the Clintons.

Now, comparing the two presidents’ lies and illegal acts, which would you say have had the most serious consequences for our country?

The President and the Congress took an oath to uphold the Constitution. The President and Vice-President have breached that oath, and Congress will have too if it fails to hold them accountable. By not pursuing impeachment, Congress is implicitly stating such acts are constitutional, setting a precedent allowing similar transgressions in the future.

Another impeachment trial would be very hard on our nation, but isn’t preserving our Constitution worth some trouble and inconvenience? For over 200 years brave Americans have unselfishly given life and limb defending it. If we permit the abuses of the last six years to stand, how can we ever ask them again?

Michael Burns
Cecil County Democrat

Dear Friend,

When reading the op-ed pages in your local daily newspaper, have you noticed column after column written by conservatives? A new report released today from Media Matters for America confirms what many have suspected — that for the majority of daily newspapers across the country, conservatives dominate the op-ed page.

>> Read the Report, Look Up Your Paper, and Take Action!

http://mediamatters.org/reports/oped/
Our new report, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: The Conservative Advantage in Syndicated Op-Ed Columns,” is a comprehensive and unprecedented analysis of nationally syndicated columnists from nearly 1,400 newspapers — or 96 percent of English-language daily U.S. newspapers. Because of the time, labor, and difficulty involved in gathering such a wide scope of detailed information about America’s newspapers, no one has ever before determined exactly where syndicated columnists are published.

>> Read the Report, Look Up Your Paper, and Take Action!

The report shows that conservative syndicated columnists are carried in far more newspapers and have a much larger audience than their progressive counterparts, giving conservatives a distinct advantage in the marketplace of ideas. Here are some of our key findings:

Conservative Syndicated Columnists Dominate Daily Newspapers — Sixty percent of the nation’s newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.

Conservative Syndicated Columnists Reach Millions More Than Progressives — In a given week, nationally syndicated conservative columnists are published in newspapers with a total combined circulation of more than 153 million. Progressive columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a total combined circulation of 125 million.

Top Syndicated Columnists Are Mostly Conservative — The top-10 list of columnists, sorted by the number of papers in which they are carried or by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published, includes five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.

In Region After Region, Conservative Syndicated Columnists Enjoy Advantage — In eight of the nine regions into which the U.S. Census divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic region (which includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.

>> Read the Report, Look Up Your Paper, and Take Action!

To say that this study is unparalleled in its scope and level of detail is no exaggeration. Despite the enormous influence of America’s op-ed pages, no one has ever before determined where syndicated columnists are specifically published. Previous examinations of syndicated columnists relied on data provided by the syndicates themselves, while Media Matters contacted almost every English-language daily newspaper to ensure the highest level of accuracy.

These results prove what many have suspected for years — that our opinion pages are consistently skewed to the right, allowing conservatives a disproportionate advantage in shaping public opinion. The American people, as a result, are left with a lopsided view of the critical issues that affect their daily lives.

>> Read the Report, Look Up Your Paper, and Take Action!

When the debate of today’s pressing issues is dominated by one side of the argument, it means the integrity of our nation’s newspapers is at stake. I urge you to read the report, forward it to your friends, family, and coworkers, and sign our petition asking local daily newspapers to provide balance on their op-ed pages.

Thank you once again for your continued support.

Sincerely,

David Brock,
President & CEO
Media Matters for America

Republican, global warming denier, and sun worshiper
Fred Thompson’s confused stance on climate change

Posted by Joseph Romm

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/7/12747/26118

He’s running for president now, so let’s revisit Fred Thompson’s climate change confusion. He took some standard denier myths and threw in a dash of his own unwarranted sarcasm to create this mishmash on the Paul Harvey radio show:

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.

Ask Galileo.
I thought Thompson was a member of the Churches of Christ, not a heliolater or perhaps a Druid. I have previously debunked this bit of denier disinformation and will expand on the key facts below — especially his misguided sun worship.

What is saddest to me — besides the possibility he might actually become president — is the ease with which this otherwise intelligent man believes the entire scientific community somehow failed to examine the contribution of the sun to recent global warming.

His Law and Order alter ego, D.A. Arthur Branch, would not be so easily duped. He would demand evidence. Here it is:

Mars does appear to be experiencing short-term regional warming, not long-term global warming, as the climate scientists of RealClimate have explained.

Jupiter is not experiencing global warming, but it is poised to experience regional climate change, “getting warmer near the equator and cooler at the poles,” as a U.C. Berkeley scientist noted last year.

As for Pluto, an MIT article explains, “Pluto’s orbit is much more elliptical than that of the other planets, and its rotational axis is tipped by a large angle relative to its orbit. Both factors could contribute to drastic seasonal changes.” One of the scientists involved in the research explained, Pluto’s warming was “likely not connected with that of the Earth. The major way they could be connected is if the warming was caused by a large increase in sunlight. But the solar constant — the amount of sunlight received each second — is carefully monitored by spacecraft, and we know the sun’s output is much too steady to be changing the temperature of Pluto” — or of the Earth, for that matter. “The sunspot record and neutron monitor data,” as Realclimate.org explains, “show that solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming.”

This last point is key. The causal link between the Earth’s warming and the alleged warming of other planets would have to be solar activity. But a recent study has shown that solar activity, including cosmic rays, are not responsible for recent planetary warming. The study concluded:

Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
Want more facts? A new debunking website, Skeptical Science, has a nice post on this. They explain that, “The study most quoted by skeptics actually concluded the sun can’t be causing global warming.” D’oh!

And they list a bunch of other studies dismissing or minimizing the sun’s contribution:

Foukal 2006: concludes “The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years.”
Usoskin 2005: concludes “during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
Stott 2003: increased climate model sensitivity to solar forcing and still found “most warming over the last 50 yr is likely to have been caused by increases in greenhouse gases.”
Solanki 2003: concludes “the Sun has contributed less than 30% of the global warming since 1970.”
Lean 1999: concludes “it is unlikely that Sun-climate relationships can account for much of the warming since 1970.”
Waple 1999: finds “little evidence to suggest that changes in irradiance are having a large impact on the current warming trend.”
Frolich 1998: concludes “solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade.”
Only a pagan would continue to worship at the altar of the sun-explains-everything religion.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Launching Brand Petraeus
By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.TomDispatch.com
Sunday 09 September 2007

This is the third in Tomdispatch’s “by the numbers” series, leading up
to this week’s White House “Progress Report” from the US commander in Iraq,
General David Petraeus, and US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. The first,
in June, was “Iraq by the Numbers”; the second, in August, was “Escalation
by the Numbers.” You can check them for topics missing this time around.

It was about this time of year in 2002, in the halcyon days of the
Bush administration, that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card offered a
little political marketing advice to the world. In explaining why the Bush
administration had not launched its “case” against Iraq (and for a future
invasion) the previous month, he told a New York Times reporter, “From a
marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

It’s a piece of simple business wisdom, and when it comes to
manipulating the public, the Bush administration is still sticking to it
five years later. The corollary, which Card didn’t mention, is: Do your
market research and testing in the dog-bites-man news months of July and
August. And that’s just what the Bush administration did in the run-up to
what will certainly be its victorious battle with congressional opponents
to extend its surge plan into next spring and its occupation of Iraq into
the distant future. (As present White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten
said in a meeting with the USA Today editorial board last week, he doesn’t
think “any ‘realistic observer’ can believe that ‘all or even most of the
American troop presence’ will be out of Iraq by the end of Bush’s presidency.”

The core marketing decision was, of course, finding the right
spokesman for the product. As Robert Draper, author of the new book Dead
Certain, reported recently, the President was “fully aware of his standing
in opinion polls” and so, earlier this year, decided that “his top
commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job
selling progress to the American people than he could.” As Bush put it,
“”I’ve been here too long. Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it
gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.” Indeed.

So launching “Brand Petraeus” and providing him with some upbeat Iraqi
news (Sunnis in al-Anbar Province ally with U.S.) and numbers (violence
down in August) were the two necessities of the summer. In July, the
celebrity surge general, who had already shown a decided knack on earlier
tours of Iraq for wowing the media, was loosed. Petraeus, in turn, loosed
all his top commanders to enter vociferously into what previously would
have been a civilian debate over U.S. policy and the issue of “withdrawal.”
This campaign, by the way, represents a significant chiseling away at
traditional prohibitions on U.S. military figures entering the American
political arena while in uniform.

Like any top-notch PR outfit, the administration also put various toes
in the water in August and wiggled them vigorously - including offering
rousing presidential speeches and radio addresses, especially a “Vietnam
speech” to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At the same time, an allied $15
million, five-week ad campaign was launched by a new conservative activist
group, Freedom’s Watch, led by former White House press spokesman Ari
Fleischer. The ads, “featuring military veterans,” were aimed directly at
congressional opposition to the President’s surge strategy. In the
meantime, key pundits and experts like Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution (who helps produce that organization’s anodyne, New York
Times-published tabulation of numbers from Iraq) and former invasion
enthusiast Kenneth Pollack (both of whom re-billed themselves as
“critics”), not to speak of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and
others, arrived in Iraq. There, they were given well-organized,
well-scripted, Green Zone-style Pentagon-led tours and sent back home to
write Petraeus-style news releases about modest, but upbeat, “progress.”

Next, of course, came the full-scale September launching of the
campaign. This involved a “dramatic” presidential secret exit from the
White House and secret Air Force One flight to al-Asad Airbase in Iraq’s
isolated western desert, one of our giant “enduring” bases (whose imposing
nature U.S. reporters tend to be oblivious to, even when reporting from
them). With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and hand-picked
reporters along, Bush performed what was, as PressThink’s Jay Rosen has
written, not just a photo-op, but “a propaganda mission that required the
press to complete the mission for him.” And so they did, as he met Brand
Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, along with Iraqi Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki and various Sunni tribal Sheikhs from al-Anbar province -
with smiles and handshakes all around.

Even CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric flew into Iraq to deal with
her dreadful ratings by - guess what? - interviewing Brand Petraeus et al.
and reporting on the reports of “progress.” Finally, the military completed
its early September groundwork by releasing a spate of new numbers from
Iraq - doubted by pundits and experts of many stripes. Military officials
claimed (could anyone be surprised?) that, by their count, a miraculous
August turnaround had occurred; and here’s another shock, credulous
reporters like Michael Gordon of the New York Times swallowed, and
front-paged, this one, too (though the Times also had a far more sober
report the following day).

Under the circumstances you couldn’t do it much better. And this week,
we have the full-scale media spectacle of testimony to Congress by General
Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, along with the delivery of the so-called
“Progress” or Petraeus Report which, thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we
now know - though the mainstream media has made nothing of it - was
actually written not in Baghdad by the general and ambassador, but in the
White House. (There’s yet another shock for us all!)

Why anyone in the media or Congress takes this situation seriously as
“news,” or even something to argue about, is hard to tell. Think of it this
way: The most political general in recent memory has been asked to assess
his own work (as has our ambassador in Iraq), and then present
“recommendations” to the White House in a “report” that is actually being
written in the White House. You couldn’t call it a political version of
“the honor system”; but perhaps the dishonor system would do.

Numbers in Iraq are a slippery matter at best, though again, why
anyone pays serious attention to U.S. military numbers from that country is
a mystery. On countless occasions in the past, these have been ridiculous
undercounts of disaster.

In the midst of such chaos, mayhem, and pure tragedy, of course, who
exactly is counting? Nonetheless, wherever you look, numbers, however
approximate, are indeed pouring out - and, when you consider them, there is
no way on Earth to imagine that the situation is anything but grim and
deteriorating: first for the Iraqi people; second for the overstretched
U.S. military; and finally, for the rest of the region and us.

So here, on the eve of the orbiting of Brand Petraeus, is my best
attempt at “progress” by the numbers:

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq before the President’s “surge plan” or
“new way forward” was launched in February 2007: 130,000

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq by September 2008, if General Petraeus’
reported “drawdown” plan is followed: Approximately 130,000, according to a
“senior official” quoted by the Washington Post.

Number of American troops in Iraq when President Bush declared “major
combat operations” to have “ended” on May 1, 2003: Approximately 130,000.

Number of American troops Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
and other Pentagon civilian strategists predicted would be stationed in
Iraq in August 2003, four months after Baghdad fell: 30,000-40,000,
according to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his bestselling book Fiasco.

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq in July 2007: 162,000; in September
2007, 168,000; later in the fall of 2007, an expected 172,000 - each an
all-time high in its moment.

Number of British troops in southern Iraq, May 1, 2003: 45,000 in four
provinces.

Number of British troops in southern Iraq, August 2007: 5,000, all
gathered in a heavily fortified, regularly mortared base at Basra airport;
number of British troops expected to be in Iraq by spring 2008, 3,000.

Number of nations that have withdrawn their troops from the Bush
administration’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq: At least 17, according
to Globalsecurity.org. Poland is expected to withdraw its drawn-down forces
by year’s end and other countries have been drawing down their minimal
forces as well. Among the remaining powers in the “coalition”:
Albania, Azerbaijian, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Estonia, Mongolia, and
Ukraine.

Number of months before the Iraqi army can “independently fulfill
[its] security role”: At least 24, according to a report recently issued by
a congressionally-appointed commission of retired senior U.S. military
officers. (Donald Rumsfeld, October 2003: “In less than six months we have
gone from zero Iraqis providing security to their country to close to a
hundred thousand Iraqis…. Indeed, the progress has been so swift that….
it will not be long before [Iraqi security forces] will be the largest and
outnumber the U.S. forces, and it shouldn’t be too long thereafter that
they will outnumber all coalition forces combined.” George Bush, November
2005: “Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad
province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over
responsibility for areas in South-Central Iraq, sectors of Southeast Iraq,
sectors of Western Iraq, and sectors of North-Central Iraq…. The Iraqis,
General Dempsey says, are ‘increasingly in control of their future and
their own security - the Iraqi security forces are regaining control of the
country.’” Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq, Gen. George Casey, in
October 2006: “And the third step is you make [the Iraqi army] independent,
and that’s what you’ll see going on here over the better part of the next
12 months.”)

Amount President Bush is to request from Congress in September to pay
for his “surge” plan: Up to $50 billion - in addition to a pending $147
billion “supplemental” bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this
fiscal year. (”The decision to seek about $50 billion more appears to
reflect the view in the administration that the counteroffensive will last
into the spring of 2008 and will not be shortened by Congress.”)

Cost of the war in Iraq per week, if this $197 billion joint request
is granted by Congress: More than $3 billion.

Cost to Pentagon of shipping two 19-cent metal washers to a key
military installation abroad, probably in Iraq or Afghanistan: $998,798.00
in “transportation costs,” according to the Washington Post. This was part
of a defense contractor’s plan to bilk the Pentagon, based on its weak
system of financial oversight.

Amount paid by the U.S. military to two British private security
firms, Aegis Defence Services and Erinys Iraq, to protect U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers reconstruction teams in Iraq: $548 million, more than $200
million over budget, according to the Washington Post based on “previously
undisclosed data.” The contracts to the two companies have a combined “burn
rate” of $18 million a month and support a private army of approximately
2,000 hired guns, the equivalent of three military battalions.

Cost of Aegis’ armored vehicles and the guards manning them:
Approximately $150,000 per vehicle and $15,000 a month per guard.

Percentage of team members in the $2 billion U.S. civilian-military
Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) program with “the cultural knowledge
and Arabic-language skills needed to work with Iraqis”: 5% or just 29 out
of 610 PRT members, according to Ginger Cruz, the deputy special inspector
for Iraq reconstruction

Number of U.S. criminal investigations underway for contract fraud in
Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan: 73, according to an Army spokesman.

Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2004:
Approximately 33%.

Percentage of U.S. military deaths by roadside bomb (IED), 2007:
Approximately 80%.

Amount Pentagon invested in counter-IED jamming technology in the last
year: $1.6 billion; $6 billion since the war began.

Amount needed to make a typical IED (which can be built from
instructions on the Internet): “About the cost of a pizza,” according to
Newsweek magazine.

Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in 2005: $100.

Cost for hiring Iraqis to plant a successful IED in central Iraq in
2007: As low as $40.

Percentage of the West Point class of 2001 who chose to leave the U.S.
Army last year: Nearly 46%, according to statistics compiled by West Point.
More than 54% of the class of 2000 had chosen not to re-up by January 2007.
Over the previous three decades, the percentages for those departing the
service at the five-year mark after graduation ranged from 10%-30%. The
major reason given now: wear and tear from multiple deployments to Iraq.

Number of U.S. Army suicides, 2006: 99 (more than one quarter while
serving in Iraq or Afghanistan), according to the Army, or 17.3 per
thousand, the highest rate in 26 years (during which the average rate was
12.3 per thousand). 118 U.S. military personnel have committed suicide in
Iraq itself since 2003, according to Greg Mitchell, editor of the Editor &
Publisher website; and Army suicide numbers do not, Mitchell notes, include
“many unconfirmed reports [of suicides], or those who served in the war and
then killed themselves at home.”

Percentage of 1,320 soldiers interviewed in Iraq who ranked their
unit’s morale as “low or very low”: 45%, according to the Los Angeles
Times. Seven percent ranked it “high or very high.”

Percentage increase in U.S. Army desertions in 2006: 27% or 3,196
active duty soldiers, according to figures corrected by the Army, which had
inaccurately been reporting much lower numbers. The percentage rise for
2005 had been 8%. From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army
prosecutions of deserters tripled (compared with the five-year period from
1997 to 2001) to roughly 6% of deserters, Army data shows.

Number of states authorized by the Army National Guard to accept “the
lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those who scored between 16 and
30 on the armed services aptitude test”: 34 (plus Guam), according to the
New York Times. (”Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from
enlisting.”)

Percentage of Army recruits since late July who have accepted a
$20,000 “quick ship” bonus to leave for basic combat training by the end of
September: 90%, part of an Army campaign to meet year-end recruiting goals
after a two-month slump. A soldier coming out of basic training is paid on
average $17,400 a year.

Percentage of U.S. military equipment destroyed or worn out in Iraq
(and Afghanistan): 40% or $212 billion worth.

Percentage of Iraqi national police force which is Shiite: 85%.

Number of Iraqis in American prisons in Iraq: 24,500 (and rising), up
50% since the President’s surge plan began in February, according to Thom
Shanker of the New York Times; nearly 85% of these prisoners are Sunnis.
(U.S. holding facilities at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper
near Baghdad are still being expanded.)

Number of foreign suspected jihadis held in those prisons: 280.

Number of juveniles, aged 11-17, held in those prisons: Approximately
800 (also 85% Sunni).

Number of U.S. reconstruction projects officially considered
“completed” in al-Anbar Province by July 2007: 3,300 projects “with a total
value of $363 million,” according to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad; 250 more
projects at a price tag of $353 million are supposedly under way.

Percentage of U.S. reconstruction money estimated to go to Sunni
insurgents and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq militants for “protection” for any convoy
of building materials entering al-Anbar Province: 50% or more, according to
reporter Hannah Allam of the McClatchy Newspapers. (”Every contractor in
Anbar who works for the U.S. military and survives for more than a month is
paying the insurgency,” according to a “senior Iraqi politician.”)

Estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters: 850 or 2-5%
of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The
Terrorists of Iraq, who “has worked with military and intelligence units
tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq.”

Number of times President Bush mentioned al-Qaeda in a speech on the
Iraqi situation on July 24, 2007: 95.

Percentage of unemployed in the now-”secure” city of Fallujah,
three-quarters of whose buildings were destroyed or damaged by U.S.
firepower in November 2005 in al-Anbar Province: More than 80%, according
to local residents.

Percentage of U.S. military supplies carried on the vulnerable “Route
Tampa,” the 300 miles of highway from Kuwait to Baghdad: 90% of the food,
water, ammunition, and equipment, according to John Pike of Globalsecurity.org.

Percentage increase of alcoholics in care in Iraq: Up 34% in May-June
2007, compared to previous year, according to the Iraqi Psychologists
Association, based on a study of 2,600 patients and inhabitants of
Baghdad’s suburbs.

Amount spent by the average household in Baghdad for a few hours of
electricity a day: $171 a month in a country where $400 is a reasonable
monthly wage.

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths in August: 1,809, according to an
Associated Press count, the highest figure of the surge year so far. Surge
commander Gen. Petraeus is evidently going to claim a 75% drop in sectarian
killings as well as a drop in civilian deaths (especially in Baghdad) in
his upcoming report. To the extent that those questionable figures are
accurate, they may, in part, result from the fact that, in the surge
months, the ethnic cleansing of the capital actually increased
significantly. Experts also believe the U.S. military’s figures for “surge
success” rely on carefully defined and cherry-picked numbers. The AP, in
fact, claims that sectarian deaths have nearly doubled since a year ago.
All such figures are, in any case, considered significant undercounts in a
country where it is no longer possible to report anywhere near the total
number of deaths from violence.

Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2007: 62,
according to the AP count.

Average number of deaths per day from political violence in 2006: 37,
according to the AP count.

Number of daily attacks on civilians, February to July 2007:
Unchanged, according to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office.

Number of Iraqis fleeing their homes on average during each surge
month, February to July 2007: 100,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent
Society. The United Nation’s International Organization for Migration
offers the lower, but still staggering figure of 50,000 Iraqis fleeing
their homes each month.

Number of internally displaced Iraqis during the surge months: Over
600,000, more than doubling the number of internal refugees to 1.14
million, according to the Red Crescent Society. (The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees has offered the higher estimate of 2.2 million
internal refugees.)

Percentage of Iraqis who fled their neighborhoods in the surge months
due to direct threats on their lives: 63%, according to the UN. (”More than
25 percent said they fled after being thrown out of their homes at
gunpoint.”) Iraqis leaving their homes in Baghdad in the same time period
“grew by a factor of 20.”

Number of Iraqi “bus people” now in exile in neighboring lands: 2.5
million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
This is the fastest growing - and already the third-largest - refugee
population in the world.

Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the U.S. in August: nearly 530,
more than all those admitted in the previous 11 months. Number of Iraqi
refugees estimated to be in Syria alone: 1.5 million.

Total number of Iraqis killed, sent into exile, or turned into
internal refugees: More than four million by a conservative estimate, or
somewhere between one out of every five and one out of every six Iraqis.
(There is no way even to estimate the numbers of Iraqis who have been
wounded in these years.)

Total number of Americans who would have been killed or turned into
refugees, if these numbers were extrapolated to the far more populous
United States: 50 million, according to Gary Kamiya of Salon.com, a figure
“roughly equal to the population of the northeastern United States,
including New York, New Jersey, Maryland and all of New England.”

Percentage of people across the globe who “think U.S. forces should
leave Iraq within a year”: 67%, according to a just-released BBC World
Service poll of 23,000 people in 22 countries. Only 23% think foreign
troops should remain “until security improves.”

Percentage of people across the globe who think the United States
plans to keep permanent military bases in Iraq: 49%.

Percentage of Americans who think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq
within a year: 61%, according to the same BBC poll, including 24% who favor
immediate withdrawal and 37% percent who prefer a one-year timetable; 32%
of Americans say U.S. forces should stay “until security improves.” In a
recent Harris poll, 42% of Americans favored U.S. troops leaving Iraq
“now”; 30% in a recent CBS poll (with another 31% favoring a “decrease”).

Percentage of citizens of U.S.-led “coalition” members in Iraq, who
want forces out within a year: 65% of Britons, 63% of South Koreans, and
63% of Australians, according to the BBC poll. Even a majority of Israelis
want either an immediate American withdrawal (24%), or withdrawal within a
year (28%); only 40% opt for “remain until security improves.”

Percentage of Americans who believe, “in the long run,” that “the U.S.
mission in Iraq [will] be seen as a failure”: 57%, according to a poll by
Rasmussen Reports. Only 29 % disagree.
——–
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is
the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory
Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.