PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag america

In sum, the U.S., the supposed leader of the free world and the economy, especially as pronounced daily by politicians and the corporate and mainstream media, and by corporate spokespeople, educators and other officials, is far from number one, often dead last, in health care, education, housing, environmental protection, safety, freedom, financial security, democracy, and peace.

The clock may be ticking, but all is not lost; it is possible to imagine a different strategic approach. Over the past several months the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution brought together a group of experts on Iraq, military affairs, reconstruction, and democratization to undertake a thorough review of U.S. policy on Iraq. This group, the Iraq Policy Working Group, reflected a wide range of beliefs and politics. It included military and civilian personnel who have served in various governments. Most of them have also had significant on-the-ground experience in Iraq. The group met to try to answer this question: If America can’t leave Iraq precipitately, what should we be doing differently to give ourselves the greatest prospect of success? The result is a 70,000-word report on all aspects of Iraq policy, from security to economics to politics.

War has this nasty habit of being unpredictable. Those who start it invariably do so with optimism, but a full measure of unanticipated heartbreak then accompanies victory, to say nothing of defeat. Even allowing for the inevitability of the unexpected, there cannot have been many wars when the victor was so ill-prepared for triumph as the Americans in Iraq. As George Packer demonstrates in The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, his splendid and detailed account of life in Iraq under the occupation, just about every assumption the Bush administration made about the country was wrong.

It's the fabled Gulf Stream. Traveled by whalers and sailors for centuries but never accurately charted until it aroused the curiosity of none other than Benjamin Franklin, the current has emerged in the last decade as a focal point for scientists studying global climate change. The concerns about the state of the ocean today run so deep that an unprecedented international effort is underway from the Straits of Florida to Greenland to track changes in the North Atlantic. And the Gulf Stream is a narrow but critical piece of the larger system: It moves warm surface water from the tropics toward the North Pole and pumps cold water back toward the equator in a deep-sea current -- a mechanism scientists have come to call the North Atlantic ``conveyor belt.'' Scientists believe if the Gulf Stream were to slow or take a more southerly route, the change could disrupt the system and the world's weather. Over time -- how much time is a key uncertainty in the theory -- the North Atlantic could cool, turning Europe and eastern North America colder as the rest of the world heated up.

President Bush continued on Sunday to defend both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order.

President Bush today mounted his third defense in two weeks of his secret domestic spying program, calling his order authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens a limited, legal program that Americans understand is protecting their security.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

Torture's Terrible Toll Abusive interrogation tactics produce bad intel, and undermine the values we hold dear. Why we must, as a nation, do better. By Sen. John McCain

The Bush administration's approach to torture beggars belief This week saw the sad spectacle of an American president lamely trying to explain to the citizens of Panama that, yes, he would veto any such bill but, no, “We do not torture.” Meanwhile, Mr Bush's increasingly error-prone vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been across on Capitol Hill trying to bully senators to exclude America's spies from any torture ban. To add a note of farce to the tragedy, the administration has had to explain that the CIA is not torturing prisoners at its secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe—though of course it cannot confirm that such prisons exist.

As news analyst Michael Gawenda, writing in the Australian daily the Age, noted incredulously, "When the president of the United States, under repeated questioning and under pressure, has to declare, as he did [during a stop in Panama], 'We do not torture,' you know that even his allies in Congress no longer believe him."

I don't know how else to put this: Is US vice-president Dick Cheney mad?

In an interview with Britain's ITV news Thursday, Turner said the U.S. vice president was damaging America's reputation by overseeing torture policies of possible terrorist suspects, the UK's Press Association reported. "I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture," Turner said, according to ITV's Web site. "He condones torture, what else is he?"

"This was a fundamental change in the rules of the game," Heather Gerken, a professor at Harvard Law School, said. "The rules were, Fight it out once a decade but then let it lie for ten years. The norm was very useful, because they couldn't afford to fight this much about redistricting. Given the opportunity, that is all they will do, because it's their survival at stake. DeLay's tactic was so shocking because it got rid of this old, informal agreement." But Texas law contained no explicit prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, so the leadership of the state government, now unified in Republican hands, tried during the summer of 2003 to push through a new plan. Democrats attempted novel forms of resistance. In May, fifty-one House members fled to Oklahoma, to deprive the new leadership of a quorum; in July, a dozen senators decamped to New Mexico, for the same purpose. But defections and the passage of time weakened Democratic resolve, and, on October 13th, the plan sponsored by DeLay was passed.

The forgotten city beneath modern Sacramento, known as “the underground,” is shrouded in mystery and rife with urban myths. But this is true: It has historical significance and should be preserved.

John Edwards, the former senator whose presidential primary campaign last year was based on the theme that America is a country torn in two by race and class, sent an e-mail to supporters last week, saying that the hurricane's destruction exposed "a harsher example of two Americas." "Every single resident of New Orleans, regardless of their wealth or status, will have terrible losses and life-altering experiences," Mr. Edwards wrote. But poor people, he added, "suffered the most from Katrina because they always suffer the most."

If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects. Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.

Red and Blue staters fight over religion, moral values and the culture. But philosopher Simon Blackburn sees something deeper -- a war over the very nature of truth

That's all true -- and it's always worth reminding people of the lunatic fiscal priorities of the Cheney administration and its supporters in the congressional pork chop caucus. But the bigger story behind the drowning of New Orleans is what it reveals about the longer-term consequences of America's lunatic environmental priorities. For nearly 160 years, private industry and governments alike have been chopping and channeling the Mississippi and its tributaries -- turning rivers into drainage ditches, riverbanks into Maginot Line-style fortifications, and wetlands into factory farms. This has created the same self-defeating spiral that doomed New Orleans -- the rivers rise, the riverbanks sink, forcing the levees higher and higher, until some of them are now as tall as four-story buildings.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need." Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."

Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.

Environmentalists already are criticizing the proposal, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Eric Haxthausen, an economist with Environmental Defense, told the newspaper the rules are "woefully inadequate." The paper reported Tuesday that environmental lobbyists are looking for the fuel economy target to be raised about 1.5 miles per gallon over three years, beginning with the 2008 model year.

The proposal is a complicated formula based on the dimensions (not weight) of six different categories of such vehicles. Smaller pickups, minivans, and SUVs would have to become stingier on gas between now and 2011 than under current law (28.4 miles per gallon instead of 23.5 m.p.g.); for larger light truck models, the requirement would actually be reduced somewhat (21.3 m.p.g. instead of 23.5 m.p.g.). Highway behemoths - Hummer H2s, Ford Excursions, and other models weighing between 8,500 and 10,000 pounds - would remain exempt from fuel economy standards on the grounds that they're a very small percentage of all personal vehicles on the road today.

In his weekly opinion column, Harold Evans considers rising concern in the US over the Bush administration's hostility to science.

Television evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers the U.S. should kill Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to prevent the Latin American country from becoming a ``launching pad'' for extremism, the Associated Press said.

Now, there's no reason a country can't have both an excellent health care system and a troubled economy (or vice versa). But are European economies really doing that badly? The answer is no. Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe - France, in particular - shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We're talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time. And there's a lot to be said for the French choice. First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as "productive." Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States. It's true that France's G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that's because French workers spend more time with their families.