Strib Article: Cheney lies about Clinton administration anti-terrorism plans

Editorial: Truth / Too little of it on Iraq

Cheney repeated the mantra that the nation ignored the terrorism threat before Sept. 11. In fact, President Bill Clinton and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, took the threat very seriously, especially after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. By December, Clarke had prepared plans for a military operation to attack Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, go after terrorist financing and work with police officials around the world to take down the terrorist network.
Because Clinton was to leave office in a few weeks, he decided against handing Bush a war in progress as he worked to put a new administration together
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Instead, Clarke briefed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and others. He emphasized that time was short and action was urgent. The Bush administration sat on the report for months and months. The first high-level discussion took place on Sept. 4, 2001, just a week before the attacks. The actions taken by the Bush administration following Sept. 11 closely parallel actions recommended in Clarke's nine-month-old plan. Who ignored the threat?

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The truth about what Cheney, Rice et al were briefed on is coming out a bit at a time. I'm sure there's more to come.

The slow motion credit card/check fraud train wreck

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

I posted previously on Cringely's identity theft essay. This essay is even better than his first. He even mentions some vulnerabilities I didn't know about.

He really covers all the bases, and he lays out a methodical case. This train has been in the process of crashing for about fifteen years. It just seems so dramatic now because the problem has entered the steep phase of its exponential growth.

This needs legislation. It's needed legislation for over 10 years.

Brad DeLong: The Bush Administration lies --- compulsively?

Brad DeLong: The Bush Administration lies --- compulsively?

At long last, the anti-Bush forces seem to have finally settled on a single theme: He lies. His advisors lie. A lot. About everything.

And this is true. In some sense, the remarkable thing about the Bush administration is not what they do — after all, other administrations have cut taxes, busted unions, and gone to war — but the fact that they tell so many baldfaced lies about what they do. Thanks to yeoman work from the likes of Al Franken, Joe Conason, Paul Krugman, David Corn, and others, this storyline is starting to become conventional wisdom, and I think the Democratic candidates should start picking up on it and hammering it home. If they repeat it often enough, the Bushies are going to end up on the ropes. Americans don't like liars.

Oh, and one more thing: aside from plain old, ordinary, garden variety lies — of which they have plenty — I've noticed that the Bushies have a real specialty in one particular kind of lie. More on that some other time.

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Sometimes I think they lie even when the truth would serve them better than a lie. I'm not as optimistic as DeLong about the American passion for honesty -- I think American's can live quite well with a comforting myth. The problem for the BA is that their stories aren't very comforting now ...

The Billionaires enter the campaing to retire GWB

NATIONAL POST: "George Soros ... is once again aiming high, declaring he wants to be known as the man who brought down the government of George W. Bush, or at least prevented the U.S. President from winning a second term in 2004.

To that end, Mr. Soros has personally committed an initial US$10-million to building an anti-Bush grassroots campaign in 17 states ..."

I posted on this earlier. Intelligence and insight is not closely related to wealth, but at the very high end I think there is somewhat more insight than average. Many of the ultra-rich may see GWB as a bit of a disaster, and will be worried about the future of their own families.

How and why health care is broken in the US: Boca Raton

Patients in Florida Lining Up for All That Medicare Covers

This is a very well done article. Brief and very illustrative. This is why primary care physicians are all looking for new careers, and why the enrollment trend for family practice is heading towards 0% within six years.

The outcome data is as academics have long suspected. All the immensely fragmented specialized care, in which each piece is probably well done but with a bias towards interventions, is associated with worse outcomes.

How to learn that your news media parrots the Bush administration

The Agonist: In Need Of RepairThe Bush administration has distributed talking points to help with managing the fallout from the failure of their Iraq policy. You can test how independent your favored media is by comparing their language to the talking points.

87 Billion Apologies - Take your money, Mr. President, but at least say you're sorry. By Michael Kinsley

87 Billion Apologies - Take your money, Mr. President, but at least say you're sorry. By Michael Kinsley: "This $87 billion request is a minefield of embarrassments, through which a simple 'We got it wrong' would have been the safest route. After all, Bush either knew we'd be spending this kind of money for two or more years after declaring victory and didn't tell us, or he didn't realize it himself. Those are the only two options. He deceived us, or he wasn't clairvoyant in the fog of war. Apparently, Bush would rather be thought omniscient than honest, which is a pity, since appearing honest is a more realistic ambition. Especially for him."

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Cruel and perfectly convincing. A lovely Kinsley essay in Slate.

Krugman explores the future consequences of the Bush tax cuts

The Tax-Cut Con

If taxes stay as low as they are now, government as we know it cannot be maintained. In particular, Social Security will have to become far less generous; Medicare will no longer be able to guarantee comprehensive medical care to older Americans; Medicaid will no longer provide basic medical care to the poor.

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This is a long NYT Magazine article, probably worth keeping for future reference.

Unless you believe in the "voodoo economics", which has far fewer credible believers than in Reagan's days, the consequences of the Bush administration will be a greatly shrunken Federal government. Some services may be moved to the state level, but the problem is that people move between states without passports. So if a state chose to tax people to distribute revenue to the poor or poor elderly, they would loose young people and gain elderly people. Social service and poverty protection really needs to be done at the national level, with some potential state level extensions.

So what Bush is really doing is dismantling the federal social safety net, and there can be no state level replacement. I happen to think that, even excluding obvious things like boomer retirement, we're going to need that safety net far more in the next 20 years (beyond that the technology impact is so great estimation is impossible) than in the past 20 years. This is going to be very painful.

Paul Krugman, A BuzzFlash Interview

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Author of "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century" - A BuzzFlash Interview

... a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that's a pretty large segment of the media.

As for the rest, certainly being critical at the level I've been critical -- basically saying that these guys are lying, even if it's staring you in the face -- is a very unpleasant experience. You get a lot of heat from people who should be on your side, because they accuse you of being shrill, which is everybody's favorite word for me. And you become a personal target.

... A lot of good things happened in the 1920s, although there were a couple of really bad presidents. But all of that now, in historical memory, is colored by the realization of what followed afterwards.

I think that with the looming disasters of the budget on foreign policy - and the things that really scare me, which I know we're not going to get into but let's just mention the erosion of civil liberties at home - I think that, in retrospect, this will be seen in terms of how did the country head over this cliff. I hope I'm wrong. If there's regime change in 2004, and the new man actually manages to steer us away from the disasters I see in front of us, then we'll probably be talking a lot about the long boom that was begun during the Clinton years, and how it was resilient, even to an episode of incredibly bad management.

But I don't think that's the way it's going to play out, to be honest. Whatever happens in the election, I think that we've done an extraordinary amount of damage in the last three years.

BUZZFLASH: Looking just at the economic impact of Iraq, how much of a strain will that continue to be?

KRUGMAN: Well, there are levels and levels. I think Iraq is going to cost us $100 billion a year for the indefinite future. Now at one level, you can say, well, that's only about 20 percent of our budget deficit, and it's only about 5 percent of the federal budget. But on the other hand, it's being added onto a very nasty situation. It's a little unpredictable. I don't know how much collateral damage Iraq is going to inflict. At the rate we're going, it's clear that unless something happens soon, we're going to have a much bigger Army. It may seem like we have enough troops, but I've been talking to people, including officers, who are just crying about what they see as the degradation of the Army's quality because of all of this.

Right now, I'm trying to understand what a petroleum industry expert is telling me, when he says that some of the market futures suggest that the market is pricing in about a one-in-three chance that unrest in Iraq spreads to Saudi Arabia. And if that happens, of course, then we're talking about a mammoth disaster.

BUZZFLASH: I've got to say I don't know how you sleep at night.

KRUGMAN: I have a little trouble, to be honest. It's this funny thing: I lived this very comfortable life in a very placid college town, with nice people all around. And life is good. But some of us -– not just me, but a fair number of people, including my friends -- we've looked at the news, and we sort of extrapolate the lines forward. And there's this feeling of creeping dread.

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Paul Krugman, a college professor for Pete's sake, has become the Right's favorite target. He's inherited the Clinton role. Thank heavens he's around.

The interview is excellent. I like the comment on propaganda. Contrary to common opinion, I think the American public is very naive about propaganda, and quite easy to manipulate. We were spoiled by at least 30-40 years of a dynamic free press; most Americans don't have the nose to spot propaganda. I suspect, but have no proof, that your average Russian does a better job.

Now, what media belongs to Reverend Moon? I wonder why we don't hear more about what he's up to. A big Bush donor ?

The futures market anticipation of a Saudi civil war fits in with a prior posting.

More on Identity Theft -- Cringely: How to Steal $65 Billion

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

A good overview. Yep, this is a problem. No, it won't go away. Yes it needs serious study and legislation.

It's been brewing for over 10 years. Maybe this will be the year that identity theft makes it into the tabloids?

Unfortunately Microsoft is waiting with Palladium as the solution. It will work, but it's like inviting the Huns to patrol your borders. They'll do a great job of keeping the other bad guys away ...

Most life on earth lives in the crust and breathes iron?

Deep Under the Sea, Boiling Founts of Life Itself

... in 1977, when oceanographers working deep in the Pacific found bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and long tube worms.

When brought to the surface, the creatures smelled of rotten eggs, a sign of sulfur. It turned out that the ecosystem's main energy source was sulfur compounds emitted by the hot vents, in particular hydrogen sulfide. The primary producers (like plants on land) were tiny microbes thriving on volcanic heats and chemical energies rising from the earth's interior.

The dark ecosystems forced scientists to conclude that not all life on earth depends on the sun's energy or on photosynthesis.

As similar communities were found in the deep, intrigued scientists theorized that the vents were perhaps windows on a deep microbial world, a hidden biosphere extending for miles into the earth's crust, with a total mass rivaling or exceeding that of all surface life. Even stranger, they suggested that life on earth might have begun in such realms, nurtured by a steady diet of hot chemicals.

Since those frenetic early days, ocean scientists have found not only scores of such deep oases but strong evidence that they do in fact represent the tip of a very old, very large ecosystem.

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It appears that the most primitive of these organisms, and perhaps the most common, metabolize iron. Next we'll learn that oil is a waste byroduct of the metabolism of a bizarre crustal organism. We live on an increasingly weird world in an increasingly weird universe.

Microsoft, file formats, and information rights management ...

BBC NEWS | Document controls vs net liberties

It is not too late for government action. There is no realistic prospect that the US administration will do anything which might upset or oppose Microsoft, but here in Europe we have a more robust attitude to the company and its activities.

If Microsoft is going to roll out digital rights management in software that will be used by many European companies, surely the European Commission or our MEPs should be taking an interest - before we find that we have given up any possibility of asserting proper democratic control over this important technology?

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The author of this BBC article is complaining about Microsoft's "information Rights Management", a system that restricts access to Microsoft Office documents. IRM will sell very well in corporate settings.

Microsoft build their empire in several ways, many of them very shady. Their use of file format lock-in, however, was quite above board. APIs are nowhere near as important as file formats, and not nearly as effective a tool as file formats for locking in customers (data lock I call it). There's no mystery to this; I hope most corporate customers undersood the implications. Unfortunately it appears many experts didn't undersand this; despite my faint pleas the FTC never seriously considered mandating that Microsoft open their file formats.

Maybe the EU will have more luck, but I doubt it. At this point I usually say, "If you don't like it, buy a Mac" -- but at the moment there's NO acceptable OS X word processor other than Microsoft OS X Word! (BTW, I suspect "IRM" will not work on a Mac.)

The outsourcing of IT: one story ...

No Americans Need Apply - CIO Magazine Sep 1,2003

One developer's journey from the dot com boom to persistent unemployment. So goes manufacturing ...

Canon i960 photo printer

Canon U.S.A., Consumer Products i960

I like the ability to replace ink one color at a time. Every year these ink jets seem substantially better, I wonder what I can do with our older model.

I didn't see any data on how the photos last before fading.

Fliers to Be Rated for Risk Level (washingtonpost.com)

Fliers to Be Rated for Risk Level (washingtonpost.com)

The federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer system next year to measure the risk posed by every passenger on every flight in the United States.

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The article makes no mention of an appeal process. That's a really bad sign.