Space used to be the final frontier.  Now it’s just another playground for the rich.  This week, rebel billionaire Richard Branson unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, the mothership that could make commercial space flight available as soon as next year.

The price for a two and a half hour flight that includes five minutes of weightlessness is projected to be $200,000.  That comes to $666.66 per second of actual time spent in space, and is equivalent to what the average American household makes in about four or five years.

I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this announcement.  On the one hand, I’m thrilled.  When I was in grade school, I can remember watching the Space Shuttle launches on televison and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could one day ride a rocket up into space.  I could only imagine the places that our space program would soar to during my lifetime. 

A standoff involving former soldiers who seized and occupied two former military buildings came to a peaceful conclusion yesterday. From the BBC:

The men were demanding 14 years of back pay and the reinstatement of the armed forces, which were disbanded in 1995 by ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The soldiers say the move was illegal and they continue to demand back pay.

After the army’s dissolution — sweet revenge for Aristide, who was overthrown in a military coup 1991 — a 9,000 member UN peacekeeping mission became the only security presence in Haiti.

As the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and an island nation heavily dependent upon imports, the boom in commodity prices is pushing desperate Haitian men and women to embrace more and more desperate measures. The food riots of last April, which began in the slum of Les Cayes and lead to Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ ouster, is one example. This latest standoff is yet another.

The US government has responded to Haiti’s troubles modestly, offering a small chunk of cash ($170 million in USAID, $60 million less than we’re giving Pakistan to upgrade its aging F-16 fighters), but balking at further measures. Most notably, the Bush administration refused to revisit the issue of Temporary Protective Status for Haitians.

If TPS were granted, the government would immediately suspend all deportations to Haiti, thereby refusing to throw men, women and children back into our hemisphere’s worst conditions. It would also boost the economy of Haiti, ensuring that remittances to the island continue. Experts agree that remittances from citizens living abroad will play a key role in stabilizing life in Haiti. Currently, citizens of Burundi, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan all enjoy TPS.

Though it seems callous, a strong case can be made for not granting TPS. Requests for Protective Status for Haitians is nothing new, and, if it were granted, the circumstances in Haiti are so dire that justifying its repeal would be a tricky business. “Temporary” status would risk becoming a de facto “permanent” status in this particular case.

The offensive in Diyala continues.

Officials said 35 wanted insurgents had been detained by the second day of the operation involving some 50,000 troops. Hot weather and the inhospitable terrain are making progress extremely difficult, military officials say.

House-to-house searches were currently focused on Baquba itself, but would be extended to rugged areas near the Iranian border, regional council head Ibrahim Bajilan said. The crackdown would take about two weeks “and then law will be imposed in all Diyala”, he said in an interview with AP news agency. 

Four American soldiers will come before a military tribunal in Germany next month:

The charges stem from allegations that they were part of a unit that killed “male detainees of apparent Middle-Eastern descent” between March 10 and April 16, 2007, in and around Baghdad, the statement said.

It is alleged that each soldier “and members of his unit took male detainees to a canal and members of his unit did shoot the male detainees,” according to the charge sheet.

The Army did not elaborate further, but in an earlier statement said the allegations related to “the deaths of several detainees who were captured as part of combat operations last year.”

That statement, released in January, said that “preliminary findings indicate the deceased detainees were not persons detained in a detention facility.”

And Bush pledges to reduce tours in Iraq to twelve months, while hinting at coming withdrawals:

President Bush said Thursday that increasing stability in Iraq would very likely allow the withdrawal of more American forces there. He praised the growing capability of Iraq’s government and security forces and said that terrorists were on the brink of defeat.

The president’s remarks, made in an unusual early morning statement outside the Oval Office, were the clearest indication yet that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops before leaving office in less than six months.

Mr. Bush said the United States was “also making progress” in negotiations on the long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, which sets the terms for the presence of American troops in Iraq and is under intense scrutiny in both countries.

But he made no mention of a final agreement, despite some indications that Iraq and the United States were close to a deal, and with an unofficial deadline for the agreement expiring on Thursday.

A car bomb in Mosul kills three Iraqi policemen and wounds four others.

So let me get this straight…you funnel money, including my tax dollars, to thugs and terrorists in Pakistan for decades, and then act surprised to discover some of it is going to the Taliban?

Don’t insult our intelligence.

The CIA is now pushing out into the open what we’ve known for some time - elements within the Pakistani ISI (the country’s equivalent of our CIA) are almost certainly aiding militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Via the New York Times we learn of a visit by the CIA to the ISI to confront them on the issue. But first the background:

The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous reports in The New York Times. But the C.I.A. and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism.

[...]

The ISI has for decades maintained contacts with various militant groups in the tribal areas and elsewhere, both for gathering intelligence and as proxies to exert influence on neighboring India and Afghanistan. It is unclear whether the C.I.A. officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s spy service and military, or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus.

[...]

It was the ISI, backed by millions of covert dollars from the C.I.A., that ran arms to guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is now American troops who are dying in Afghanistan, and intelligence officials believe those longstanding ties between Pakistani spies and militants may be part of an effort to destabilize Afghanistan.

How much more obvious can it get? We pumped money to militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan via the ISI in the 80s, and what did you think would happen…they’d just quit talking to each other? Thirty years may be too long for America’s collective memory to deal with, but in the march of history that’s a tiny sliver. People in their 30s during that time are now in their 60s. We can split hairs over whether it’s the ISI as an institution supporting the Taliban, or just elements within it, but at the level of cash flows it seems the case is closing that your tax dollars go from you to the administration to ISI personnel to the Taliban, all while our soldiers die in Afghanistan.

Those who have been watching us squander billions in Pakistan post-9/11 have also been screaming that the money isn’t all going to “fight terror”…some of it is going to fund terror. Or to fund Musharraf’s aggressions against India, as we saw last week when the administration offered him more money, and not even to “fight terror” but to boost his air force:

The Bush administration plans to shift nearly $230 million in aid to Pakistan from counterterrorism programs to upgrading that country’s aging F-16 attack planes, which Pakistan prizes more for their contribution to its military rivalry with India than for fighting insurgents along its Afghan border.

That our money is being wasted there has been clear for some time now. But now in another burst of intelligence we send spies to confront other spies openly? Aren’t spies supposed to operate on the down low? Meaning not only have we have wasted billions, we’re now causing a public relations disaster, as our embarrassment and their corruption gets splashed across the pages of newspapers around the world.

Al Jazeera gives us the Pakistani reaction: 

Pakistan’s military has rejected as “malicious” a report that the CIA confronted Islamabad over allegations the country’s intelligence service was aiding al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

And the BBC has a little more:

Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said members of Inter-Services Intelligence were accused of “tipping off” militants before strikes in the tribal areas.

Mr Mukhtar said that the Americans “mistrusted” the ISI.

His unusual public admission of the rebuke seems to mark a new low in ties between the US and Pakistan’s spies.

And all this goes down while Pakistani PM Gilani is in Washington meeting with the Bush administration. Great. Can a fake friendship get any faker? Can we manage regional complexities more foolishly? Obama can keep ramping up the “get the job done in Afghanistan” rhetoric if he wants, but he’s going to be dealing with one hell of a mess come January 2009.

The Strategy for the McCain campaign seems to be attack Barack Obama no matter what he says or does, no matter how low the attack may be. The lesson that John McCain seems to have learned from his experience as a candidate in 2000 is that you can say anything you want about your opponent, no matter how inaccurate or slimy, as long as it helps you win. In other words the McCain strategy is now to run a smear campaign. How can we recognize a smear campaign? One political observer explains it this way:

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don’t agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter’s basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate’s natural supporters…

It’s not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate’s political weakness.

That seems to be an accurate description of current McCain tactics. And who is the observer who explained the elements of a smear campaign above? None other than Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager in both 2000 and the current presidential races. The irony is that Davis wrote that description in an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe in 2004 when he was describing the disgusting tactics of the Bush campaign in the 2000 primary - especially the dissemination of the false story that McCain had an illegitimate black daughter. The use of push polling and viral emails to the voters of South Carolina helped spread the story and McCain lost South Carolina big. But Rick is obviously a good learner and has decided to implement those kinds of tactics.

Let’s look at two recent examples of McCain lines of attack on Obama. First is the attack on Obama, also turned into a campaign ad, that Obama didn’t visit the troops in Germany because there were going to be no cameras at the event. The truth, that the Pentagon told the Obama campaign that none of his political staff could join him, including a retired General that was a military adviser, was of course no interest to the McCain campaign, with the candidate himself claiming that he wouldn’t listen to the Pentagon and would have found a way to visit the troops anyway. How do we know that this is a mere political smear tactic rather than an honest political debate? Because of this information that was published in a Business Week blog post by David Kiley:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

So no matter what Obama did in Germany, the McCain machine had their smear tactic at the ready. Either way the attack takes a potential concern by the voters — that Obama is an inexperienced, ambitious and arrogant attention-seeker — and then takes a lie — that Obama wouldn’t visit troops because cameras wouldn’t be there (cameras had never been scheduled to join Obama on that venture), and repeat it over and over, with the right-wing propaganda tools of talk radio and Fox Noise repeating the charges as though they were fact, and you get the false story out there as though it is legitimate, despite the truth.

The smear campaign continues today as Obama travels the country, warning voters of these tactics:

“So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” he told voters in Springfield. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”

So how does the McCain campaign respond? Not by telling voters all of the policy differences that their candidate has with Obama. Not by showing all of the policy speeches that McCain has delivered. Those responses wouldn’t be divisive enough. Instead they accuse Obama of “Playing the race card.”

“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

And who delivered this zinger? None other than Rick Davis.

Most analysts are now agreeing that no one has much idea what’s going on after Olmert’s announcement yesterday that he will step down after the Kadima Party’s primary on September 17th. Today Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud Party called for snap elections.

“This government has finished its mission, irrespective of who will head Kadima. Everyone in this government is responsible for a string of failures. We must let the people decide through new elections.” 

Meanwhile top members of Kadima, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are readying themselves for the succession struggle.

How does this affect negotiations with the Palestinians, especially coming on the heels of Olmert’s statement earlier this week that peace before 2009 appears unlikely?

Some of Olmert’s aides insist that peace is still possible, but prominent Israeli voices say he has little leverage to bring about any major progress.

Israeli lawmakers and analysts doubt Olmert will have the political strength to make commitments, either in the final-status talks with Abbas or in Israel’s Turkish-moderated negotiations with Syria.

“He has no legitimacy, not from the public, nor the Knesset, nor the government, to reach any understandings with the Palestinians or with Syria that would bind the government,” said Communications Minister Ariel Attias of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, a member of Olmert’s governing coalition.

Professor Gadi Wolfsfeld of Hebrew University agreed: “Who is going to make a deal with him when they know he can’t deliver? He is a lame duck.”

And with our own lame duck still out of touch with reality on multiple fronts, it’s unlikely we’ll see any efficacious American involvement before year’s end either.

With the nation focused on our economy, higlighted by the spiraling price of gas, Phil Bredesen, the governor of Tennessee, hits on the larger issue:

Gas prices are in the political spotlight  right now; this year’s spike has been painful and the calls for action —  and heads  —  have pushed other issues to the side. But it is worth remembering that when it comes to real, sustained growth in costs, when it comes to real, sustained erosion of families’ disposable income, gas still can’t hold a candle to the real elephant in the room: health care.

If gas prices had risen during my adult lifetime  —  since I got out of high school in 1961  —  at the same rate as per capita health-care expenditures, gas would not be $4 a gallon today. It would be about $15.

In this election season, we need to demand more attention to health care. It’s not the squeaky wheel now, but after gas prices have been driven down or we have bought smaller cars, our health-care problem will still be with us.

I want to connect this with a larger point. Health care costs, as Bredesen points out, are 1/6th of our economy. How do we expect to get our economic situation fixed with 15% of our economy tied up in a wasteful system that fails to provide customers with the value it promises.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with spending a substantial portion of our GDP on our health, though certainly the fact that the U.S. spends more of its GDP per capital on health care than pretty much anywhere in the world deserves some thought. However, when that money is flowing into an industry full of waste (private insurance is less efficient than public plans like Medicare), and when that money fails to provide people with adequate coverage, something is broken. Very simply, in America we pay a lot, but we get very little for that money. It would be one thing if we got what we pay for - if American’s huge expenditures on health care bought us the best coverage in the world - but that’s not true. The U.S. ranks 37th among world health care systems.

So, given that we are spending 15% of our national prosperity on a product that fails to deliver on its promises, is it any wonder we find ourselves in dire straight economically? And if we could get that same 15% that we spend on health care working harder, isn’t it possible we could either a) spend less, or b) get more for that money, and that would help turn our economy around? Healthy children learn more. Healthy adults work more. Healthy contries are more prosperous.

It’s not rocket science. Fix the health care system and you make a real dent in fixing our economy.

(originally posted at the NOW! blog)

Maybe i am selling media elites short.  On MSNBC a few moments ago, Ron Brownstein said that someone needs to ask McCain why he ran an ad juxtaposing two young, blond women with Barack Obama.  Brownstein noted the parallel to the Harold Ford ads that I commented on yesterday.  Just before that, Andrea Mitchell asked McCain campaign manager Rick Davis some important questions about the celebrity ad and ended up laughing at Davis’s responses, making clear that she sees the ad as junk.  Davis lost his cool and said next time he was on, he hoped the discussion would be more substantive.  Maybe it will be if the McCain campaign stops running ridiculously unsubstantive ads that demean the campaign.

The Politico claims the McCain celebrity ad is “gaining traction”.  Not from what I see.  Thank you Ron Brownstein and Andrea Mitchell for doing some real journalism, and please keep it up.

Hosted by DC Drinking Liberally. Several of us will be there, will you?

Join us tonight, July 31, when we’ll host Jeffrey Feldman discussing his new book “Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy”.

When: July 31, 6:30 to 9.
Where: Timberlake’s (1726 Connecticut Ave NW, north of Dupont Circle).

6:30-7:30 Happy Hour, appetizers provided. (Drink discount until 9)
7:30-8:15 Discussion, Q&A
8:15-9:00 People hang out, etc.

More on Jeffrey Feldman at his blog.

Copies of Jeffrey Feldman’s book “Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy” available at the Progressive Book Club. You can find them here.

Jeffrey is a brilliant writer and a great guy, I hope you can join us.

The ‘Lewis Carroll’ pleadings showed the Department of Justice arguing that its findings were true because it repeated them three times. In the future, this same discredited Justice Department wants to keep any other pleadings off the table. As long as no argument is presented against its pleadings, it can finally prove something. Saying something three times isn’t enough for the mad hatter department, it now has to have everyone else just shut up.

In a brief filed late yesterday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Bush administration asked that any review of the new warrantless surveillance law be kept secret and that the court refuse to accept legal briefs from anyone other than the Justice Department itself. The government is responding to a motion the American Civil Liberties Union filed earlier this month asking the FISC to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) be open to the public to the extent possible.

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

“The government is proposing that the intelligence court should consider the constitutionality of the new surveillance law in proceedings that will be entirely secret. If the government’s request is granted, the court won’t hear arguments from anyone except the government and those arguments will be presented to the court in secret briefs. At the end of the process, the court will issue a ruling that is also secret. The process the government is proposing is completely unacceptable. Especially because the new surveillance law departs so significantly from the standards that have applied to government surveillance for the last 30 years, any proceedings relating to the new law’s constitutionality should be adversarial and as informed and transparent as possible.”

In a separate legal challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the ACLU seeks a court ruling declaring that the FAA is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt. Plaintiffs in the case include Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Nation and PEN American Center. (Emphasis added.)

This politicized group of second- and third-rate attorneys is certainly trying to cut the country off from any prospects of achieving the Justice this department was named for - back in the day. Its disreputable agents should be ordered out of the court, and a replacement with some degree of actual ability to represent its real client, the U.S. public, retained. The Republican National Committee should be ordered to pay the costs.

The Justice Department was set up to protect the Rule of Law, but the worst administration ever has much to fear from the law. Its power has been misused, and the effort made to keep the war criminals from justice. This has to be stopped, and the ACLU has never been needed so badly.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com )