Tauscher Warns Of Petraeus’ Conflict Of Interest In Reporting On Escalation

In an interview with ThinkProgress, Tauscher said:

We have to be sanguine about the surge, and it’s [Petreaus’s] idea. He is a fabulous military officer and tremendous pedigree, but I don’t know anybody that doesn’t want to sell their idea and keep selling it. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t think that people that aren’t for his idea are critical. So I think he’s been put in a terrible position by the Commander-In-Chief.

Read with vedio at ThinkProgress

The enduring myth of Americans' dislike of investigations

Glenn Greenwald @ Salon.com Wednesday August 22, 2007 12:15 EST

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In discussing Congress' low approval ratings yesterday, I noted that Bush followers and media pundits simply invent facts about these ratings that are plainly false. In particular, they repeatedly claim that Congress' low approval ratings are due to its excessive investigations of the administration -- which, they never tire of telling us, Americans do not like -- as well as Congress' failure to co-operate with the President in a bi-partisan way. That is a pure expression of conventional Beltway wisdom.

On cue, former Bush official Peter Wehner, writing on the Commentary blog, asserted that these negative Congressional polling numbers reveal that "Democrats are paying a high price for their hyper-partisanship. They appear angry, zealous, and vengeful, far more interested in investigations than legislation." Right-wing blogger McQ cited as one reason for the unpopularity that Democrats "spent all their time investigating marginal, and to most Americans, unimportant things while accomplishing nothing of importance."

Glenn Reynolds linked to this post conclusorily mocking my analysis of Congress' unpopularity by suggesting that Congress has investigated far more than most Americans want. And Reynolds himself then added: "YEAH, THAT'S THE TICKET: Why's Congress polling so badly? Because they haven't launched enough investigations. Uh huh."

All of these "analysts," making the same point (one heard frequently on television), have one thing in common: namely, not one of them cited a single piece of evidence, poll, or anything else to support their claim that Americans dislike investigations and/or that Congress is unpouplar due to too many hearings or too much obstructionism. Instead, they just literally make that up and then say it without having any idea if it's true.

Many people who assert that Americans dislike investigations of the President are just slothful; they sit around hearing television and newspaper pundits repeat this cliche -- which they do endlessly -- and then uncritically absorb and repeat it. For others, it is just a matter of extreme self-absorption; they reflexively assume that their own opinions are always the same as what "Americans believe." Thus, because they themselves don't like Congressional investigations of their Leader or think that the specific scandals are insignificant, they just assume, and then assert, that most Americans share this view.

But the overriding attribute evident here is a willingness to believe things about the world based not on evidence or reality but on what they want the world to be. They don't want George Bush investigated, and thus, they simply want to believe that Americans dislike investigations (exactly the same way they wanted to believe things were going well in Iraq, so they were, and reports to the contrary about "violence" and "civil war" were media fabrications).

Thus, they didactically assert, over and over, that Congress is in trouble for investigating Bush too much even though that claim is overwhelmingly contradicted by the actual evidence:

CNN poll, August 30-September 2, 2006:

Do you think it would be good for the country or bad for the country if the Democrats in Congress were able to conduct official investigations into what the Bush Administration has done in the past six years?

Good - 57%

Bad - 41%

Unsure - 2%

______________

From Rasmussen Reports, July 12, 2007:

Have there been too many investigations of the White House, not enough investigations, or about the right amount of investigations?

Too many - 32%

Not enough - 39%

About right - 19%

______________

From the USA Today poll, March 23-25, 2007:

14. Do you think Congress should -- or should not -- investigate the involvement of White House officials in this matter [the U.S. attorneys firings]?

Yes, should - 72%;

No, should not - 21%

15. If Congress investigates these dismissals, in your view, should President Bush and his aides -- [ROTATED: invoke "executive privilege" to protect the White House decision making process (or should they) drop the claim of executive privilege and answer all questions being investigated]?

Invoke executive privilege - 26%;

Answer all questions - 68%

16. In this matter, do you think Congress should or should not issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify under oath about this matter?

Yes, should - 68%;

No, should not - 24%

______________

From Rasmussen Reports, July 12, 2007:

Is Congress really seeking information about the firing of U.S. attorneys, or is Congress simply seeking to harass the White House?

Seeking information - 43%

Harass the White House - 32%



The only ones who oppose investigations are the 30% who support the administration in all circumstances. But Americans generally want investigations and oversight of the President; they overwhelmingly favor investigations of the U.S. attorney scandal; and substantial numbers believe that Congress in general is investigating too little.

This lazy, corrupt practice -- whereby commentators simply assert as fact cliches they hear without having any idea if they are true -- is quite common among our media pundits, among whom it is virtually an Article of Faith that Americans dislike Congressional investigations of the President. They repeat that over and over. Bush followers, wanting it to be true, then do the same. None of them ever bothers to see if what they are saying has any basis in reality. It just never occurs to them to do that.

The fact that, as Gallup itself noted, Congress' low approval ratings are due almost exclusively to unusually high levels of Democratic anger at their own Congress further bolsters the conclusion that Congress is so unpopular due to their failure to stand up to the administration.

The same is true with regard to Congressional efforts to stop the war. Beltway analysts frequently speak of the danger to Democrats from "over-playing" their hand by "obstructing" the President's war policies too much, even though polls show exactly the opposite is true:

From Rasmussen Reports, July 2, 2007:

Have the Democrats in Congress done too much to change President Bush's policies in Iraq, not enough to change President Bush's policies in Iraq, or about the right amount?

Too much - 26%

Not enough - 53%

About right - 13%

Think about how devoid of intellectual integrity a person must be in order to run around pronouncing that "Americans believe X" or "Americans dislike Y" without engaging in the slightest efforts first to determine if what they are saying is true. This is one critical reason why there is such a large and growing gap between the Beltway and the views of Americans. There are all sorts of Beltway platitudes like this about what "Americans want" that are the opposite of reality. Thus, the more our Beltway elites repeat and adhere to those platitudes, the more that gap grows.

Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts

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By Thom Hartmann on August 21, 2007 - 1:18pm

Our bridges are falling apart (among other things), and its Ronald Reagan’s fault.

A few hours before the bridge collapsed in Minnesota, a news release landed (among hundreds) in my email inbox. It was from the right-wing “Heartland Institute” and a Minnesota conservative group calling itself the “Taxpayers League of Minnesota.” It read:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) issued 20 full or partial vetoes of tax hikes and spending increases in May, giving taxpayers reason to smile. …

May 1, Pawlenty, in a move that took everyone by surprise, vetoed an entire $334 million “emergency” capital investment bill. Pawlenty said in his veto message the bill authorized “more than four times more spending on projects than I requested and is simply too large.”

Two weeks later Pawlenty announced another important veto, this one to block a transportation bill containing more than $5 billion in tax and fee increases…

“Buying down property taxes through local government aid programs has never proven to be a long-term solution to property tax pressures,” Pawlenty said in a May 30 veto message.

Phil Krinkie, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, agreed.

“Relying on the benevolence of local units of government to restrain their spending and lower property taxes when the state drops sacks of money in their lap is simply foolish,” Krinkie said. “Thankfully, Minnesota has a governor that recognizes this.”

The transportation bill veto is the only one the DFL [the Democratic Farm and Labor party which controls the Minnesota legislature] tried to override. The attempt came with less than 20 minutes remaining in the session and was defeated by House Republicans, led by Minority Leader Marty Seifert (R-Marshall).

“Democrats made too many campaign promises to win their seats and are now learning they can’t pay for them,” Marshall [Seifert] said after the failed override attempt.

Ultimately, it was the DFL’s inability to override any of Pawlenty’s vetoes–particularly of the transportation bill–that resulted in a comparatively small $3 billion increase in state spending with no new taxes.

Said Krinkie of the 2007 session, “Minnesotans really need to thank Gov. Pawlenty and Rep. Seifert’s House Republicans. These guys stood strong in the face of overwhelming pressure and came through for taxpayers when they really needed them.”

If by “taxpayers” one means “millionaires, billionaires, and corporations,” the news release was accurate. And now its authors have blood on their hands.

After the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today’s dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us.

Through the 1950s, though, more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code, so much so that JFK observed in his second debate with Richard Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars (a half-week in Iraq) invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.

But the rich fought back, and won big-time in 1980 when Reagan, until then the fringe “Voodoo economics” candidate who was heading into the election trailing far behind Jimmy Carter, was swept into the White House on a wave of public concern of the Iranians taking US hostages. Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (they’re still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.

In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, Reagan’s tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadn’t been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.

And, most tragically, Reagan’s tax cuts caused America to stop investing in infrastructure. As a nation, we’ve been coasting since the early 1980s, living on borrowed money while we burn through (in some cases literally) the hospitals, roads, bridges, steam tunnels, and other infrastructure we built in the Golden Age of the Middle Class between the 1940s and the 1980s.

We even stopped investing in the intellectual infrastructure of this nation: college education. A degree that a student in the 1970s could have paid for by working as a waitress at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant (what my wife did in the late 60s - I did so working as a near-minimum-wage DJ) now means incurring massive and life-altering debt for all but the very wealthy. Reagan, who as governor ended free tuition at the University of California, put into place the foundations for the explosion in college tuition we see today.

The Associated Press reported on August 4, 2007, that the president of Nike, Mark Parker, “raked in $3.6 million [in compensation] in ‘07.” That’s $13,846 per weekday, $69,230 a week. And yet it would still keep him just below the top 70% tax rate if this were the pre-Reagan era. We had a social consensus that somebody earning around $3 million a year was fine, but above that was really more than anybody needs to live in America.

In the worldview Americans held in the 1930-1980 era, Parker’s compensation was reasonable. But William McGuire (aka in the business press as “Dollar Bill“) taking over $1.6 billion - $1,600,000,000.00 - from the nation’s second largest health insurance company (you wonder where your health care dollars are going?) would have been considered excessive before the “Reagan Revolution.”

There is much discussion of what the floor on earnings should be - the minimum wage - but none about the ceiling. That’s largely because effectively there is no ceiling, and those who control vast wealth in America are happy to have Americans fight over “How poor is too poor?” just so long as nobody asks “How rich is too rich?”

When Reagan dropped the top income tax rate from over 70% down to under 30%, all hell broke loose. With the legal and social restraint to unlimited selfishness removed, “the good of the nation” was replaced by “greed is good” as the primary paradigm.

In the years since then, mind-boggling wealth has risen among fewer than 20,000 people in America (the top 0.01 percent of wage-earners), but their influence has been tremendous. They finance “conservative” think tanks (think Joseph Coors and the Heritage Foundation), change public opinion (Walton heirs funding a covert effort to change the “estate tax” to the “death tax”), lobby congress and the president (who calls the “haves and the have-more’s” his “base”), and work to strip down public institutions.

The middle class is being replaced by the working poor. American infrastructure built with tax revenues during the 1934-1981 is now crumbling and disintegrating. Hospitals and highways and power and water systems have been corporatized. People are dying.

And Bush, following closely in Reagan’s footsteps, is making things worse. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out at recent hearings for the confirmation of Bush’s new nominee for the Office of Management and Budget:

Since Bush has been president:

over 5 million people have slipped into poverty;
nearly 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance;
median household income has gone down by nearly $1,300;
three million manufacturing jobs have been lost;
three million American workers have lost their pensions;
home foreclosures are now the highest on record;
the personal savings rate is below zero - which hasn’t happened since the great depression;
the real earnings of college graduates have gone down by about 5% in the last few years;
entry level wages for male and female high school graduates have fallen by over 3%;
wages and salaries are now at the lowest share of GDP since 1929.
The debate about whether or not to roll Bush’s tax cuts back to Clinton’s modest mid-30% rates is absurd. It’s time to roll back the horribly failed experiment of the Reagan tax cuts. And use that money to pay down Reagan’s debt and rebuild this nation.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on JOTC may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-5

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The New York Times/nytimes.com

August 21, 2007

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.

The combined income of all Americans in 2005 was slightly larger than it was in 2000, but because more people were dividing up the national income pie, the average remained smaller. Total adjusted gross income in 2005 was $7.43 billion, up 3.1 percent from 2000 and 5.8 percent from 2004.

Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.

The White House said the fact that average incomes were smaller five years after the Internet bubble burst “should not surprise anyone.”

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.

These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.

People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

The group’s calculations showed that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all, this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment income as a result of the tax-cut law.

The nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments. They collected 5.3 percent of the total savings from reduced tax rates on investment income.

The I.R.S. data showed that the number of Americans making less than $25,000 a year shrank, down by 3.2 million, or 5.5 percent.

Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000, and two-thirds make less than $50,000.

The number of taxpayers making more than $100,000 grew by nearly 3.4 million and accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in the number of returns filed in 2005 compared with those in 2000.

The fact that average incomes remained lower in 2005 than five years earlier helps explain why so many Americans report feeling economic stress despite overall growth in the economy. Many Americans are also paying a larger share of their health care costs and have had their retirement benefits reduced, adding to their out-of-pocket costs.

The White House noted that during the same five years, income tax rates have been cut under a series of laws sponsored by President Bush. Mr. Bush has delivered a steady stream of upbeat assessments of the economy, saying last fall, for example, “I’m pleased with the economic progress we’re making.”

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, attributed the drop in average incomes to “the significant wrenching hits that our economy took in 2001 and 2002, so no one should be surprised that what a bubble economy created in the late 1990s and 2000, where economic data were skewed, would take some time to recover.”

Mr. Fratto said the fact that nearly all of the growth in incomes was among those in the upper reaches of the income ladder and that the majority of investment tax breaks went to those making more than $1 million “is not a very interesting story.”

“There is no question that you will always have distributional concerns with a tax rate, a broad-based tax rate, at the very top of the income scale,” Mr. Fratto said.

He said the more significant issue was the reduction in taxes for middle class Americans that Mr. Bush won from Congress.

For the middle fifth of taxpayers, their share of incomes going to federal income taxes was cut in half under tax cuts championed by Mr. Bush, according to calculations by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of two Washington research organizations, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.

The Treasury Department has repeatedly said that it respects the center’s estimates.

Income taxes took 5.6 percent of earnings reported by the middle fifth of taxpayers in 2000, but will take only half that much, 2.8 percent, this year, the center estimated. Payroll taxes paid by the middle fifth, however, rose, wiping out half of the income tax savings.

Robert S. McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, said that even though he expected a few very wealthy people to reap most of the tax savings generated by lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, the size of the savings “still takes your breath away.”

He said the tax savings at the top, combined with lower average incomes after five years, “shows that trickle down doesn’t work.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on JOTC may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

After the Pain of Foreclosure, a Big Tax Bill

The New York Times/nytimes.com

August 20, 2007

By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

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Two years ago, William Stout lost his home in Allentown, Pa., to foreclosure when he could no longer make the payments on his $106,000 mortgage. Wells Fargo offered the two-bedroom house for sale on the courthouse steps. No bidders came forward. So Wells Fargo bought it for $1, county records show.

Despite the setback, Mr. Stout was relieved that his debt was wiped clean and he could make a new start. He married and moved in with his wife, Denise.

But on July 9, they received a bill from the Internal Revenue Service for $34,603 in back taxes. The letter explained that the debt canceled by Wells Fargo upon foreclosure was subject to income taxes, as well as penalties and late fees. The couple had a month to challenge the charges.

For those who struggle to pay their bills, who watch their housing payments rise out of reach with their adjustable-rate mortgages, who lose a job or who fall victim to illness, losing one’s home can feel like hitting bottom. But one more financial indignity may await as the fallout from the great housing boom ripples across the United States.

“Getting that tax bill,” Mrs. Stout recalled, “my first thought was that I needed to see my family doctor to help me with my stress, because we had a big mortgage and other debt and then here came the I.R.S. saying we owe this.”

Notices of unpaid taxes, unanticipated and little understood, will probably multiply as more people fall behind on their mortgages, said Ellen Harnick, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonpartisan research and policy center in Durham, N.C.

Foreclosure is one way that beleaguered homeowners can fall into this tax trap. The other is when homeowners are forced to sell their homes for less than the value of the mortgage. If the lender forgives that difference, they are liable for income taxes on that amount.

The 1099 shortfall, as it is called, stems from an Internal Revenue Service policy that treats forgiven debt of all types as income even if the taxpayer has nothing tangible to show for it, unless the debt is canceled through bankruptcy.

The Center for Responsible Lending expects that 20 percent of the home loans made in 2005 and 2006 to people with weak credit, commonly called subprime loans, will end in foreclosure. Because so little money was required as a down payment during the boom, the value of many of these houses may be less than what is owed.

Some people in this predicament are fighting the I.R.S. and winning. Sometimes, lower payments can be negotiated with the I.R.S., tax experts say.

In other cases, bankruptcy or a claim of insolvency can eliminate the tax burden. Sometimes, the bills are sent out erroneously, as banks fail to keep track of home values and what price the properties ultimately sell for.

“The tax laws are far too complex for borrowers to understand,” said Kurt Eggert, a professor at Chapman University School of Law, noting that there are distinctions between selling a house for less than the loan amount and losing one in foreclosure. He says it is crucial to get expert tax advice to sort through the bewildering complications.

The whole concept can be counterintuitive. “Your home has declined in value and you lose it,” Mr. Eggert said. “Then the I.R.S. says you owe tens of thousands in taxes because you got a windfall when the debt was forgiven.”

Mr. Stout has suffered doubly from the downturn in the housing market. He earned $65,000 last year as a salesman for a roofing company. But last winter, his job was cut from a salaried position to an hourly one. Then his hours were reduced, as construction demand eased. Through July he had earned only $25,000, said his lawyer, Stephen G. Doherty, of Bennett & Doherty in Doylestown, Pa., putting him on pace for a pay cut over all this year.

Mr. Doherty set out to appeal the Stouts’ tax bill by arguing that Wells Fargo got the home as collateral so the family did not reap a benefit. The Stouts and their lawyer also hoped to show that Wells Fargo was able to sell the house for far more than $1. Finally, they contended that penalties were inappropriate because they did not receive a tax notice in 2005 or 2006.

After a reporter inquired about the Stout matter, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage said last week that it had reviewed the Stouts’ tax documents and was filing a corrected 1099 tax form to show that no debt had been canceled, because the fair market value of the home was actually more than Mr. Stout had owed.

Mr. Doherty, the Stouts’ lawyer, pointed out that the acquiring lender, in this case Wells Fargo, has some leeway in valuing a house. The fair market value can be the high bid at a sheriff’s sale, or an alternative valuation.

In this case, Wells Fargo’s about-face was tied to an appraisal that Mr. Doherty says he believes was completed before the sale. It set the value of the house at $132,844, eliminating the Stouts’ liability. (Lenders do periodic appraisals once a property is in default, Mr. Doherty said.)

The Stouts found in county records that Wells Fargo had sold the house to U.S. Bank for $106,000 — the same amount Mr. Stout had owed — in March 2006. The house was resold that month for $140,000.

An I.R.S. spokesman would not comment on the Stout matter or how the agency applies the tax rules on forgiven debt, but referred to a document on the I.R.S.’s policies.

Diane Thompson, a lawyer in Godfrey, Ill., for the National Consumer Law Center, says the tax can be a real hardship for some people.

She recalled a client who owed $39,000 to her lender and got a tax bill after her house was sold in foreclosure for $10,000. Ms. Thompson appealed to tax authorities, contending that her client, a part-time waitress, was broke because her debts were greater than her assets.

“If you can prove you are insolvent, the I.R.S. does not treat the forgiveness of debt as income,” Ms. Thompson said. Her client did not have to pay.

Lawyers may also be able to show that the original loan process was so flawed that the borrower is not liable for taxes. Indeed, during the real estate bubble, lenders and mortgage brokers sometimes encouraged homeowners to borrow more based on inflated home values.

Such was the case with Agnes Mouser, a 65-year-old widow who works in the records department in a Houston prison. In 2000, she sought to pay off her credit-card debt with a loan from Beneficial Finance, which sent an appraiser to assess the value of her home.

“A real nice young man came out to see me,” Mrs. Mouser recalled. “He could have been my grandson.”

That appraiser compared her 1977 mobile home with two new standard homes with two-car garages. Using those homes as benchmarks, Beneficial agreed to lend $34,730 on her home, valued at $43,500, in 2000. Mrs. Mouser’s loan carried an interest rate of 14.88 percent, and she paid 7 points, or $2,431, at closing to get that rate, along with $270 to Beneficial for the appraisal.

A spokeswoman for HSBC, the parent company of Beneficial, said it did not comment on matters involving specific customers.

In 2003, when Mrs. Mouser could not meet the payments, she contacted Ira D. Joffe, a lawyer in Houston. He found that her property was valued by the county at $19,970, less than half of what Beneficial had estimated.

“I promised to depose the appraiser’s Seeing Eye dog if there was a lawsuit,” Mr. Joffe recalled telling Beneficial.

Beneficial released the lien. But then Mrs. Mouser got a tax bill for $10,000, or the amount owed on the $29,566 that Beneficial had treated as a canceled loan.

“The tax bill scared her to death,” Mr. Joffe recalled. “It took a letter from an accountant and two letters from me to get the I.R.S. to go away.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on JOTC may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

Giuliani's Fox-y pal cash flap

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BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Sunday, August 19th 2007, 4:00 AM

It's no secret that Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News commentator, has helped to raise Rudy Giuliani's profile - but now he's helped the former mayor raise money, too.

In a little noticed event this month, Hannity - co-host of Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes" and host of a popular WABC radio show - introduced the Republican front-runner at a closed-door, $250-per-head fund-raiser Aug. 9 in Cincinnati, campaign officials acknowledge.

In so doing, some believe that Hannity - while clearly a commentator paid to express his opinions - crossed the line from punditry into financial rainmaking for a presidential candidate whose bottom line is now better for it.

"Fox's in-kind contribution to Republican politicians in the form of softball coverage is one thing," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a left-leaning media watchdog group. "But this is the first time they have crossed this line into fund-raising."

More independent observers said Hannity's appearance underscored the blurring lines between news and advocacy and could be interpreted as a kind of endorsement.

"It signals within that brand of conservatism that they ought to vote for the guy," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communications.

Hannity declined to comment, but his bosses at Fox News Channel and WABC, flagship station for his national radio show, defended their marquee star by arguing that he's not a journalist and shouldn't be judged as one.

"Sean is not a journalist - Sean is a conservative commentator," said Bill Shine, Fox's senior vice president of programming. "Sean doesn't hide, and never has hidden, his beliefs from anyone."

Hannity isn't the first news figure to cross the line into fund-raising. James Carville, a Democratic consultant and CNN personality, has stumped for Democratic candidates in recent years.

And then-CBS anchor Dan Rather caused howls of protest when he attended a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Texas in 2001 organized by his daughter.

Rather - whose transgression was in many ways worse, since news anchors are expected to betray no bias in covering the news - immediately apologized.

But the dustup led to a public debate during which one Fox News colleague of Hannity's, commentator Bill O'Reilly, made it clear that he saw an ethical problem in attending political fund-raisers.

"Now Rather gave a speech at a fund-raiser, so money changed hands. I mean, I wouldn't do that," O'Reilly said on his own Fox show, "The O'Reilly Factor."

Hannity's leanings for Giuliani have been well-documented. The Hotline, a political journal, has noted that through July 15, Giuliani had enjoyed 115 minutes of free face time on Fox - more than half of that on "Hannity & Colmes." His airtime on Fox was 25% higher than any other Republican candidate, data show.

The Aug. 9 fund-raiser where Hannity worked the crowd for Giuliani, held at Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse in downtown Cincinnati, was closed to the press. No known recording of his comments exist.

But some who were there - including Hannity's boss at WABC, Phil Boyce - said Hannity was typically effusive.

"He talked about Rudy's leadership after 9/11, about how Rudy had turned the city around and taken people off the welfare rolls," said Boyce "There wasn't anything he said that I haven't heard him say on the radio."

dsaltonstall@nydailynews.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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The War as We Saw It

The New York Times/nytimes.com
August 19, 2007

Op-Ed Contributors

By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH, JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA, EDWARD SANDMEIER, YANCE T. GRAY and JEREMY A. MURPHY

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Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on JOTC may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

U.S. military practices genetic discrimination in denying benefits

Those medically discharged with genetic diseases are left without disability or retirement benefits. Some are fighting back.

By Karen Kaplan

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August 18, 2007

Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA.

Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering back pain during a tour in Afghanistan, he underwent three surgeries to remove tumors from his brain and spine that left him with numbness throughout the left side of his body.

So began his journey into a dreaded scenario of the genetic age.

Because he was born with the mutation, the Army argued it bore no responsibility for his illness and medically discharged him in 2005 without the disability benefits or health insurance he needed to fight his disease.

"The Army didn't give me anything," said Miller, 28, a seven-year veteran who is training to join the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

While genetic discrimination is banned in most cases throughout the country, it is alive and well in the U.S. military.

For more than 20 years, the armed forces have held a policy that specifically denies disability benefits to servicemen and women with congenital or hereditary conditions. The practice would be illegal in almost any other workplace.

There is one exception, instituted in 1999, that grants benefits to personnel who have served eight years.

"You could be in the military and be a six-pack-a-day smoker, and if you come down with emphysema, 'That's OK. We've got you covered,' " said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University."But if you happen to have a disease where there is an identified genetic contribution, you are screwed."

Representatives from the Pentagon declined multiple requests to discuss the policy.

A high cost

The regulation appears to have stemmed from an effort to protect the armed services from becoming a magnet for people who knew they would come down with costly genetic illnesses, according to Dr. Mark Nunes, who headed the Air Force Genetics Center's DNA diagnostic laboratory at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

The threat is almost certainly small. A 1999 military analysis estimated that about 250 service members are discharged each year for health problems involving a genetic component. Disability payments for them would amount to $1.7 million the first year and rise each year after that as more veterans join the rolls. Healthcare expenditures would have added to the tab.

"Maybe they didn't want to foot the bill for my disability," said Miller, whose rare genetic disease is called Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome. "It's saving money for them. I'm just one less soldier that they have to dish out compensation to."

But the cost for individuals medically discharged can be high. While some eventually receive benefits from Veterans Affairs or private insurers, the policy leaves Miller and others scrambling to find treatment for complex medical conditions at the same time they are reestablishing their lives as civilians without having the benefit of Tricare, the military's health insurance.

"It seems particularly draconian to say, 'Well, you're out with no benefits,' whereas another person with the same injury gets the coverage simply because we don't know there's a gene in there that's causing this," said Alex Capron, a professor who studies healthcare law, policy and ethics at USC.

The fear of genetic discrimination coincides with early efforts to decode the human genome more than 25 years ago.

It took no great insight to realize that a complete inventory of life's building blocks would not only revolutionize the practice of medicine, but also mark individuals whose genes put them at risk for myriad diseases.

Congress took action in 1996, banning genetic discrimination in group health plans, and in 2000, President Clinton signed an executive order forbidding the practice against the federal government's nearly 2 million civilian employees. Similar laws against genetic discrimination swept through 31 states.

Congress is working to extend the federal law with the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect people with individual medical policies. The act has passed the House and awaits a vote in the Senate.

Even if it becomes law, it will not apply to military personnel.

The Defense Department's original policy did not consider genetics when determining whether a soldier deserved medical retirement, assuming that any disease discovered during service had been incurred in the line of duty.

There was little reason to consider genetic mutations, since few were known. But by 1986, as scientists associated more sections of DNA with particular diseases, the military declared that it was not responsible for soldiers with "congenital and hereditary" conditions.

At the urging of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Defense Department proposed in 1999 that anyone who had served for 180 days be eligible for medical retirement, even if their health problem had a genetic component, said Barbara Fuller, assistant director for ethics at NHGRI, part of the National Institutes of Health.

But the Office of Management and Budget decided on the longer, 8-year term to conform with other military health and retirement guidelines, according to an OMB official.

Some genetic discrimination is unavoidable given the demands of military service, said Nunes, now a geneticist at Ohio State University.

"If you have achondroplasia -- if you're a dwarf -- you're not eligible for military service," he said. "If you have hereditary hearing loss, you're not eligible for military service. If you have color blindness, you're not eligible to fly an airplane. Obviously, there's genetic discrimination in the military, for good reason."

But Nunes said the armed forces' disability policy was flawed by a fundamental misunderstanding about the biology of inherited diseases.

Only in a few cases, such as Huntington's disease, does a specific mutation in a particular stretch of DNA guarantee the onset of illness.

In most cases, a faulty gene increases an individual's risk of developing a disease, but does not ensure it. Typically, an external event is necessary to trigger the onset of a medical condition.

Such was the case with an Army helicopter gunship pilot who was reassigned to desk duty after she became too pregnant to fly.

Dr. Melissa Fries, an Air Force geneticist who became involved in the case, said the pilot developed a blood clot in her leg -- a typical complication of pregnancy that is exacerbated by inactivity.

She was diagnosed with chronic thrombophlebitis, a condition that disqualified her from flying. The pilot, who declined to discuss her case, decided to retire from the Army.

As part of her medical work-up, doctors discovered she had a genetic mutation for Factor V Leiden, which is found in 5% of Caucasians and increases their risk of developing blood clots.

An Army physical evaluation board, which determines disability benefits, denied her claim because of the mutation.

Her military doctors were stunned since her thrombophlebitis was probably caused by her pregnancy and desk job. They downplayed the role of her mutation because 99% of Factor V Leiden carriers never develop blood clots.

Testing discouraged

Military doctors now discourage their patients from getting potentially life-saving genetic tests, undermining their ability to provide top-notch care.

"If someone called me up with regard to genetic testing, I had to say, 'That might not be something you want to pursue,' " Nunes said. "That's very hard to say."

In her 26 years in the Air Force, Fries said she often dissuaded women from getting tested for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that dramatically increase their risk of developing breast cancer.

She recalled counseling a 22-year-old soldier whose father had just been diagnosed with Huntington's disease. The soldier had 50-50 odds of developing the disease.

A neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center ordered a genetic test for Huntington's, and it turned up positive.

"He was discharged from the military on the basis of the Huntington's disease gene even though, at that level of gene expansion, there was expected to be another 25 years before he would display any symptoms," said Fries, now director of genetics and fetal medicine at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

For many in the military, the best course is to simply refuse all genetic tests, even though they may be needed for an accurate diagnosis, she said.

Getting genetic tests through civilian channels is not an option because it would violate the uniform code of military justice.

"You could get court-martialed if it were revealed that you had sought medical treatment or testing outside the system," Nunes said.

Most soldiers have no idea about the genetic rule, much less have a reason to challenge it. For those who choose to fight, it can be arduous process.

No one contested the policy until Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jay Platt did in 1998.

Platt had lost an eye and a testicle to Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome before doctors told him he had a malignant tumor in his left kidney and four benign tumors on his brain. He knew his 15-year Marine career was over.

"If you want to go ahead and medically retire me, I'm not going to fight it," he told his doctors.

But the Marines refused. Instead, he was medically discharged without any benefits because his genetic disease was a preexisting condition.

A discharge have would cut Platt off from Tricare, which allows members to seek care from a large network of providers, just like a civilian HMO.

"That was my biggest thing," he said. "I needed to have treatments for the rest of my life."

With the help experts from NHGRI, Platt appealed his case to an physical evaluation board. His doctors said that although the mutation predisposed him to Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, some aspect of his service -- such as repeated exposure to the solvents used to clean weapons -- could have triggered the tumors.

Platt ultimately won his case and was granted disability payments of about $2,000 a month. He now travels the country as a motivational speaker talking about his fight against his disease.

The helicopter pilot with the Factor V Leiden mutation also appealed her case, going all the way to the Army surgeon general to win a medical retirement.

But Miller, the Army ranger, did not fare so well. Even though he had the same disease as Platt, he lost his appeal and was discharged without benefits in 2005.

He still has to monitor his slow-growing tumors and be on the lookout for new ones. But without Tricare coverage, he can't afford to see a civilian doctor close to his home in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Instead, he travels an hour and a half to the Veterans Affairs facility in Johnson City at least twice a year. Every so often, he makes the three-hour drive to another VA facility in Lexington, Ky., to see a neurologist with expertise in his disease.

The worry never leaves him. His genes guarantee that he will never be cured.

karen.kaplan@latimes.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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U.S. actions against Iran raise war risk, many fear

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By Warren P. Strobel and Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Fri, August 17, 2007

WASHINGTON — As President Bush escalates the United States' confrontation with Iran across a broad front, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East are growing worried that the steps will achieve little, but will undercut diplomacy and increase the chances of war.

In the latest step, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are considering designating Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves as the guardian of Iran's Islamic state, as a foreign terrorist organization.

News of the decision was leaked to newspapers in what a senior State Department official and Washington-based diplomats said was a sign of an intensifying internal struggle within the U.S. government between proponents of military action and opponents, led by Rice.

State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice's push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran. By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations.

Partisans of military force argue that Rice's strategy has failed to change Tehran's behavior.

"It really does seem this is more tied to the internal debate that is going on in the administration on Iran, rather than a serious attempt to influence Iranian behavior," said an Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"How that debate will play out is what's concerning" Arab and European countries, he said.

Designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group "is the State Department trying to do something short of war," said former U.S. diplomat Charles Dunbar, a professor of international relations at Boston University.

"What else can we do?" said Dunbar, who worked for the State Department in Tehran from 1963 to 1967.

The Revolutionary Guard would be the first military unit of a sovereign government ever placed on the department's list of terrorist organizations. The move would allow the Treasury Department to go after the group's finances and those of its reputed business network inside and outside Iran.

The Bush administration has been engaging Iran in a increasingly strident war of words since the spring, when the Bush administration demanded tougher U.N. sanctions over Iran's nuclear energy program. The White House says that Bush remains committed to diplomatic and financial actions to persuade Iran to stop enriching nuclear fuel, which the U.S. says can be made into a bomb but that Iran insists is intended only for electricity generation.

Recently, the administration has stepped up the rhetoric, accusing Iran of providing Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq with particularly deadly roadside bombs that have killed dozens of U.S. service members.

"We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of different, quote- unquote, battlefields, if you will," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon temporarily moved an additional aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran. U.S. commanders in Iraq have also highlighted intelligence they say shows that the Revolutionary Guard's Qods force is shipping sophisticated road-side bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq.

Bush and his aides also have accused Iran of playing an unhelpful role in Afghanistan — although some State Department officials say the reality is much more complicated.

Finally, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to the Middle East in late July and early August, bearing promises of billions in weapons sales to friendly Arab states and a $30 billlion, 10-year military aid package to Israel. The rationale: Iran.

What remains unclear is what the administration will do if none of those steps has an impact on Iran, whose leaders seem confident as they see Bush unpopular at home and bogged down in Iraq.

"The coercion ... undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By early 2008, "You're in a position where you have a series of escalatory measures ... And then the military option becomes something you can consider," Takeyh said.

On the nuclear front, since taking office in 2005, Rice has backed a European-led effort to persuade Iran to stop enriching uranium in exchange for economic, political and security benefits.

The U.N. Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear work. But negotiations on a third have stalled and a September deadline for enacting new sanctions will likely be missed, say State Department officials and diplomats.

Critics say that designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group could further undermine the effort, and also scuttle U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad on Iraq's security. Those talks have achieved little.

On Iran's role in Iraq, U.S. ground commanders in Iraq oppose proposals from Cheney and his allies to counter-attack inside Iran itself, saying they believe they can contain Iran's growing influence without acting outside Iraq.

Privately, some are hostile to suggestions that the military strike another country, saying they are mired in Iraq.

"Let them put on the uniform and go there then," said one military official in Baghdad who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said Friday that Shi'ite factions, backed by Iranian groups, are now responsible for nearly half the attacks in Iraq, compared to 30 percent in January.

Odierno said he could deal with the problem inside Iraq, without going over the border into Iran. But he conceded that the military still is learning about how Iranian networks run through Iraq.

"We're just in the beginning stages" of denting Iranian influence, he said. Iran's abilities are "still significant. So we still have an awful lot of work to do."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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Judge: Spy Records Demand Must Be Answered

CBS Go to OriginalWASHINGTON, Aug. 17, 2007

(AP) The government must answer a watchdog group's demands to release records about the nation's classified terrorist spying program, the chief judge of a secretive national security court has ruled.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which announced the order Friday, said it was the first time the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had responded to a request filed by the public.

In her 2-page order, dated Aug. 16, Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called the ACLU's demand "an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing."

The ACLU last week asked the court to explain publicly the need to revamp laws that expand the government's authority to spy on foreigners. The request was prompted by Congress' approval earlier this month of legislation updating the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the government to eavesdrop on terror suspects who are believed to be foreigners without first getting a court warrant.

The overhaul, according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, was the result of the court's ruling in January to bring the program under its authority — effectively banning eavesdropping on foreigners when their messages were routed through communications carriers based in the United States.

The ACLU wants that ruling to be released publicly — which would be an unusual move by the court that deals almost entirely with classified information.

It remains unclear whether the court records will ever be unsealed. Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Justice Department to respond to the ACLU's request by Aug. 31. If Justice officials want to seal parts of their response, the government must explain why to the court, which will have the final say.

In turn, the ACLU must answer the government's response by Sept. 14.

"While our motion may be unprecedented, we are responding to an unprecedented situation, where Congress has just granted the president sweeping new authorities," said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. "And yet nobody knows why or even whether the authority was needed at all."

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the government's attorneys are reviewing the order and declined further comment.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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Operation Silent Thunder: 'The Daily Show' In Iraq

NEW YORK, August 17, 2007

Join "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" for “Operation Silent Thunder: The Daily Show in Iraq,” a week of special reports filed from Iraq. Yes, actual Iraq, not greenscreen Iraq. "Daily Show" Senior War Correspondent Rob Riggle will provide in-depth coverage and insights from the front lines throughout the country where he was embedded with the troops and learned just how hot 120° really feels. Tune-in to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" the week of August 20 at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT for "Operation Silent Thunder: 'The Daily Show' in Iraq."

"The Daily Show" airs Monday-Thursday at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT and repeats at 1:00 a.m. the same night and at 10:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. the following day. All segments will be posted for viewing the following day at both www.comedycentral.com with URL and embed links.

Read More at:Comedy-Central

The Trouble with the DLC

By Glenn W. Smith
The Rockridge Nation

Monday 13 August 2007

Glenn W. Smith examines how a strategy pursued for decades by advocates of "centrism" has suppressed appeals to progressive values.

Why are Harold Ford and others from the more paternalistic and condescending quarters of the Democratic Party so keen on discrediting the rising progressive movement? What have been the consequences of their obsession with "the middle"? Most importantly, how have the Tory Democrats managed to bury the expression of deep progressive values, and what should the progressive movement do about it?

For three decades, advocates of "centrism" have used their money to monopolize the Democratic message and leave the progressive base out in the cold, not spoken to. Since its founding in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has been leading this effort. How did they pull this off? Before we get into that, let's call them what they are. "Centrist" implies conciliation, moderation, compromise. It reinforces the mistaken idea that our political life falls along a neat, linear scale from left to right. That metaphor makes the center a pretty good and safe place to be. And that it certainly is not.

Read More/Vedio at: Trouthout

Leahy Asks for DOJ Probe of Gonzales

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By Klaus Marre
The Hill

Thursday 16 August 2007

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine Thursday to review whether testimony Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has provided "was in any instances intentionally false, misleading, or inappropriate."

Leahy had granted Gonzales additional time following the attorney general's last appearance before the panel to revise or clarify any statements he made. The senator said that Gonzales "has not meaningfully addressed our significant concerns."

Leahy added that he has "identified numerous instances in which the attorney general appears to have contradicted his own previous testimony or the statements or testimony of other senior officials, or where he appears to have engaged in efforts to mislead."

The senator specifically asks Fine not to limit his inquiry to whether Gonzales has committed criminal violations.

"Rather, I ask that you look into whether the attorney general, in the course of his testimony, engaged in any misconduct, engaged in conduct inappropriate for a Cabinet officer and the nation's chief law enforcement officer, or violated any duty - including the duty set out in federal regulations for government officials to avoid any conduct which gives the appearance of a violation of law or of ethical standard, regardless of whether there is an actual violation of law," Leahy stated.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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Workouts, Not Bailouts

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By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 17 August 2007

In April, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declared that all the signs he saw indicated that the housing market was "at or near the bottom." Earlier this month he was still insisting that problems caused by the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages were "largely contained."

But the time for denial is past.

According to data released yesterday, both housing starts and applications for building permits have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, showing that home construction is still in free fall. And if historical relationships are any guide, home prices are still way too high. The housing slump will probably be with us for years, not months.

Meanwhile, it's becoming clear that the mortgage problem is anything but contained. For one thing, it's not confined to subprime mortgages, which are loans to people who don't satisfy the standard financial criteria. There are also growing problems in so-called Alt-A mortgages (don't ask), which are another 20 percent of the mortgage market. Problems are starting to appear in prime loans, too - all of which is what you would expect given the depth of the housing slump.

Many on Wall Street are clamoring for a bailout - for Fannie Mae or the Federal Reserve or someone to step in and buy mortgage-backed securities from troubled hedge funds. But that would be like having the taxpayers bail out Enron or WorldCom when they went bust - it would be saving bad actors from the consequences of their misdeeds.

For it is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody's Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the '90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.

Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn't prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.

Most of the proposals I've seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices - which would have been very useful three years ago - but they wouldn't help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.

Consider a borrower who can't meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan's terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.

Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, "the first link in a financial merry-go-round." The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody's or Standard & Poor's were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there's nobody to deal with.

This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there's a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn't be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.

And we've done this sort of thing before - for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries' debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.

The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages - not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans - at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I'm happy to listen to better ideas.

The point, however, is that doing nothing isn't the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts - but let's help borrowers work things out.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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The Padilla verdict

Glenn Greenwald
Thursday August 16, 2007 16:18 EST

A federal jury in Miami today unanimously found U.S. citizen Jose Padilla guilty of "conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas." In so doing, the jury dealt an enormous blow not only to Padilla himself, but also to the theory which the Bush administration cited to justify its most extremist power over the last six years -- namely, the power to imprison U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, with no charges of any kind.

Padilla's story is by now depressingly familiar. Arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in April, 2002, he was declared to be an "enemy combatant" by George Bush and imprisoned in a naval brig for the next three-and-a-half years with no charges brought against him. The day following his arrest, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft called a hastily arranged news conference in Moscow to announce that Padilla was attempting to detonate a radiological weapon in the U.S., and from that point forward, the media referred to him as the "Dirty Bomber."

Read at: Salon-Gleen Greenwald

From a Distance

by twilight falling
Thu Aug 16, 2007 at 12:36:23 PM PDT
Three more American service people are dead. Three more families are torn asunder. Three more children will grow up with dim memories of a parent instead of the real thing.

Writing tributes for these soldiers, sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Guardsmen is hard. Every story is different, but every one shares in common the tragedy of a life lost too soon—the life of an exceptional person, with so much potential, who wanted to do the right thing for his or her country, his or her family, his or her future, and who was willing to offer his or her own life to see the right thing done. Doing justice for such people is a daunting task.

The two soldiers and one Marine we remember today—Sgt. Michael E. Tayaotao, PFC Shawn D. Hensel, and Staff Sgt. Alicia A. Birchett—shared something else in common: they all wanted the people of Iraq and the people of the US to enjoy peace, and they died working for that hope

Feds pay $80,000 over anti-Bush T-shirts

Bostom.com
August 16, 2007 AP

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. --A couple arrested at a rally after refusing to cover T-shirts that bore anti-President Bush slogans settled their lawsuit against the federal government for $80,000, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday.

Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and removed from the July 4, 2004, rally at the state Capitol, where Bush gave a speech. A judge dismissed trespassing charges against them, and an order closing the case was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Charleston.

"This settlement is a real victory not only for our clients but for the First Amendment," said Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of West Virginia. "As a result of the Ranks' courageous stand, public officials will think twice before they eject peaceful protesters from public events for exercising their right to dissent."

White House spokesman Blair Jones said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing.

"The parties understand that this settlement is a compromise of disputed claims to avoid the expenses and risks of litigation and is not an admission of fault, liability, or wrongful conduct," Jones said.

The front of the Ranks' homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for "no" superimposed over the word "Bush." The back of Nicole Rank's T-shirt said "Love America, Hate Bush." On the back of Jeffery Rank's T-shirt was the message "Regime Change Starts at Home."

The ACLU said in a statement that a presidential advance manual makes it clear that the government tries to exclude dissenters from the president's appearances. "As a last resort," the manual says, "security should remove the demonstrators from the event."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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Pentagon Paid $998,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers (Update3)

Bloomberg.com
By Tony Capaccio

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Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina -- twin sisters -- exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled ``priority'' were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced soon, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.

Corley didn't immediately return a phone message left on her answering machine at her office in Lexington. Her attorney, Gregory Harris, didn't immediately return a phone call placed to his office in Columbia.

`Got More Aggressive'

C&D's fraudulent billing started in 2000, Stroot, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's chief agent in Raleigh, North Carolina, said in an interview. ``As time went on they got more aggressive in the amounts they put in.''

The price the military paid for each item shipped rarely reached $100 and totaled just $68,000 over the six years in contrast to the $20.5 million paid for shipping, she said.

``The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas -- that's why they got paid,'' Stroot said. If the item was earmarked ``priority,'' destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, ``there was no oversight.''

Scheme Detected

The scheme unraveled in September after a purchasing agent noticed a bill for shipping two more 19-cent washers: $969,000. That order was rejected and a review turned up the $998,798 payment earlier that month for shipping two 19-cent washers to Fort Bliss, Texas, Stroot said.

The Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency orders millions of parts a year. ``These shipping claims were processed automatically to streamline the re-supply of items to combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,'' the Justice Department said in a press release announcing today's verdict.

Stroot said the logistics agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which pays contractors, have made major changes, including thorough evaluations of the priciest shipping charges.

Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the logistics agency, said finance and procurement officials immediately examined all billing records. Stroot said the review showed that fraudulent billing is ``not a widespread problem.''

``C&D was a rogue contractor,'' Stroot said. While other questionable billing has been uncovered, nothing came close to C&D's, she said. The next-highest billing for questionable costs totaled $2 million, she said.

Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and ``high- end automobiles'' that the sisters spent the money on.

``They took a lot of vacations,'' she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio at acapaccio@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: August 16, 2007 15:16 EDT

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on JOTC may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

Karl Rove Targets Alabama Governor Don Siegelman

Karl Rove Targets Don Siegelman
Bobby Kennedy, Jr. of GoLeft TV and Air America's Ring of Fire talks with attorney Vince Kilborn who represented former Alabama governor Don Siegelman. It is now apparent that Siegelman was the target of politically motivated charges initiated by Karl Rove.

Not General Petraeus: White House To Write September Iraq Evaluation

Top general may propose pullbacks

Petraeus is expected to tell Congress that Iraqis can assume duties in some areas, freeing U.S. troops for other uses.

By Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

August 15, 2007

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WASHINGTON -- —
Intent on demonstrating progress in Iraq, the top U.S. general there is expected by Bush administration officials to recommend removing American troops soon from several areas where commanders believe security has improved, possibly including Al Anbar province.

According to the officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus is expected to propose the partial pullback in his September status report to Congress, when both the war's critics and supporters plan to reassess its course. Administration officials who support the current troop levels hope Petraeus' recommendations will persuade Congress to reject pressure for a major U.S. withdrawal.

The expected recommendation would authorize U.S. commanders to withdraw troops from places that have become less violent and turn over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces.

But it does not necessarily follow that Petraeus would call for reducing the overall number of troops in the country. Instead, he could move them to another hot spot, or use them to create a reserve force to counter any rise in violence.

"That is the form of the recommendation we are anticipating him to come back with," a senior administration official said. But referring to the redeployment options, the official added, "I just don't know which of those categories he is going to be in."

Petraeus has not told the White House where he might recommend reductions. But military commanders have indicated in recent briefings that Nineveh province in northern Iraq and its capital, Mosul, like Al Anbar in the west, could be an area from which it might be suitable for the U.S. to withdraw.

American commanders have found that pulling out too soon and leaving pacified areas to unprepared Iraqi troops can lead to a resurgence of militant activity. In the north, where U.S. officials have reduced the number of combat troops, devastating bomb attacks Tuesday killed at least 175 people.

Tall Afar, a town about 40 miles west of Mosul that had been cited by President Bush as a key U.S. success, has seen a rise in violence since the spring after a period of stability.

Petraeus has been keeping a "close hold" on the recommendations he intends to deliver next month, according to a senior military officer in Baghdad. But the officer said Petraeus wanted to ensure that any moves he made did not cause violence to flare up again.

"He doesn't want to lose the gains we have made," said the military officer who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because the report is still being developed.

Some officials say they expect Petraeus to push for maintaining the current force level for at least six additional months to build upon security improvements in Baghdad.

U.S. force levels reached nearly 162,000 this month, an increase of about 30,000 from the beginning of the year, when the American military's troop buildup began.

Another Defense official, who has been part of Iraq planning but skeptical of the troop increase, said moving forces out of Al Anbar could make sense to the White House, because doing so would enable the administration to show that improved security translates into a reduction in troops.

Cutting the number of troops in Al Anbar would also eliminate the need to request more forces to secure areas around Baghdad, where the U.S. has been focusing much of its military effort.

"If the Marines are having so much success in Al Anbar, maybe we redeploy them to some other hot spot," said the Defense official. Administration officials have cited improved ties with Sunni Arab leaders in Al Anbar with helping reduce violence and curb the power of the insurgents.

Not all military commanders favor reducing the number of troops in more stable areas. In a news conference last month, Marine Maj. Gen. Walter E. Gaskin, the commander of U.S. forces in Al Anbar, cautioned against cutting back forces there too quickly.

Gaskin argued that the added forces had allowed the Marines to eliminate havens used by the insurgent group that calls itself Al Qaeda in Iraq.

A "persistent presence" of U.S. forces, he said, would help give Iraqi security forces more experience and confidence, and the ability to keep militants out.

"It takes time to gain experience," he said. "I see that experience happening every day, but I don't see it happening overnight. I believe it's another couple of years in order to get them to do that -- and that's not a political answer, that's a military answer."

But division and brigade commanders in other parts of Iraq have said they anticipate recommending further reductions in the months to come. Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. "Randy" Mixon, the American division commander for northern Iraq, said last month that he expected to cut the number of troops in his area, but emphasized that reductions should be made slowly.

The Army 1st Cavalry Division's 4th Brigade has moved soldiers out of combat roles in Mosul and other cities, and into assignments such as full-time advisors with Iraqi units.

Col. Stephen M. Twitty, the brigade commander, said in an interview before the bombings Tuesday that the U.S. combat force in Mosul had been reduced from the size of a division, or nearly 20,000, to that of a battalion, typically about 1,000.

The senior officer in Baghdad said the military was still debating whether Petraeus should make his detailed strategy recommendations to Congress in an open or closed session.

The officer said that though Petraeus would discuss his broad recommendation for adjusting operations, he would avoid detailed public discussion of where he intended to reposition specific brigades.

The officer said Petraeus would not go deeply into detail in an open session.

"The future plan, how he thinks we can move forward, you really do not want to broadcast that to the world," he said.

Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress. How to deal in the report with the lack of national reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects has created some tension within the White House.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

The senior administration official said the process had created "uncomfortable positions" for the White House because of debates over what constitutes "satisfactory progress."

During internal White House discussion of a July interim report, some officials urged the administration to claim progress in policy areas such as legislation to divvy up Iraq's oil revenue, even though no final agreement had been reached. Others argued that such assertions would be disingenuous.

"There were some in the drafting of the report that said, 'Well, we can claim progress,' " the administration official said. "There were others who said: 'Wait a second. Sure we can claim progress, but it's not credible to . . . just neglect the fact that it's had no effect on the ground.' "

The Defense official skeptical of the troop buildup said he expected Petraeus to emphasize military accomplishments, including improving security in Baghdad neighborhoods and a slight reduction in the number of suicide bomb attacks. But the official said he did not believe such security improvements would translate into political progress or improvements in the daily lives of most Iraqis.

"Who cares how many neighborhoods of Baghdad are secured?" the official said. "Let's talk about the rest of the country: How come they have electricity twice a day, how come there is no running water?"

julian.barnes@latimes.com

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Just-Off-The-Cuff has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Just-Off-The-Cuff endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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