Pombo Time

The lead editorial in the today's New York Times features none other than Richard Pombo.

Richard Pombo has had a hard time keeping himself out of the news lately. In late September, a watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Mr. Pombo, a seven-term House member from California, one of the 13 most corrupt politicians in Congress. Three weeks later the Center for Public Integrity accused him of taking junkets paid for by the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources - the kind of organization, heavy with corporate donors, in which the word "conservation" is a wink to the wise. And last week the League of Conservation Voters accused him of selling out to a long list of corporate interests.

But what has really put Mr. Pombo on everyone's radar is the steady stream of environmentally destructive legislation flowing from the House Resources Committee, which he runs. The legislation would undermine environmental safeguards and raise broad new threats to endangered species and public lands.

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Mr. Pombo's bill would also authorize drilling in coastal areas that have been off limits for decades and sell leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But asking the oil companies themselves for money is, of course, unthinkable - Mr. Pombo would freeze the fees these companies pay to operate on public land, even as they report huge profits.

This is, in short, a sleazy piece of work, written by a man who appears to be able to conceive of property rights as something that only a private individual or a corporation can have; a man who betrays no awareness that the American public has a shared right in the refuge and the national parks and the millions of acres he wants to sell to developers.

Mr. Pombo's only idea, and it is a terrible one, is to treat this nation the way he treats his Congressional district, as if it were ripe for exploitation.

Community in Action

Studs Turkel had a wonderful segment this morning on This I Believe on NPR.

And this is my belief, too: that it's the community in action that accomplishes more than any individual does, no matter how strong he may be.

Einstein once observed that Westerners have a feeling the individual loses his freedom if he joins, say, a union or any group. Precisely the opposite's the case. The individual discovers his strength as an individual because he has, along the way, discovered others share his feelings -- he is not alone, and thus a community is formed. You might call it the prescient community or the prophetic community. It's always been there.

And I must say, it has always paid its dues, too. The community of the '30s and '40s and the Depression, fighting for rights of laborers and the rights of women and the rights of all people who are different from the majority, always paid their dues. But it was their presence as well as their prescience that made for whatever progress we have made.

And that's what Tom Paine meant when he said: "Freedom has been hunted around the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. In such a situation, man becomes what he ought to be."

Still quoting Tom Paine: "He sees his species not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy" -- you're either with us or against us, no. "He sees his species as kindred."

And that happens to be my belief, and I'll put it into three words: community in action.

Listen here.

The Very Bad Idea

Tom Tomorrow. Click to enlarge.


What more can I say?

Sidney Blumenthal Gets It Right

In the Guardian and Salon magazine, Sidney Blumenthal provides a concise report on Bush's failure to grasp the obvious.

President Bush is the most conservative president in modern times. He consciously modelled himself as the opposite of his father. A conservative revolt contributed to defeat of the elder Bush, who was fiercely attacked as a betrayer. In a classic case of reaction formation, George W Bush was determined never to make an enemy on the right.

The younger Bush brought the neoconservatives - banished by Reagan and Bush Sr - back into government, and followed their scenario for remaking the Middle East through an invasion of Iraq, using 9/11 as the pretext. He followed the rightwing script on supply-side economics, enacting an enormous tax cut for the wealthy that fostered a deficit that dwarfed Reagan's, the problem his father had tried to resolve through a tax increase, which earned the right's hostility. And Bush has followed the religious right's line on stem-cell research, abortion and creationism.

For his vision of the world as black and white, his disdain for internationalism, his tainting of the opposition as unpatriotic, his tax breaks for the upper bracket and his religious zealotry, conservatives celebrated him. For his second term, Bush took his narrow victory as a mandate to govern from the hard right. At last he would begin the privatisation of social security, rolling back the New Deal. But he stumbled upon a dirty little secret of conservatism: the public supports conservative presidents so long as they leave alone the liberal programmes that benefit them.

Baffled by the opposition, he ploughed ahead, even as the Iraq war eroded his support. Then Hurricane Katrina blew the top off his administration's culture of cronyism. Meanwhile, the special prosecutor investigating the disclosure of a covert CIA operative's identity by senior administration officials has moved steadily towards his targets.

Read it all .

One Year Ago Today

Exactly one year ago today, I posted this item: "Bush's Hometown Newspaper Endorses Kerry."

And with good reason. Last Friday, Doonesbury directed readers to this endorsement from The Lone Star Iconoclast. I recommend you read the whole thing but here is a taste:

'Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would


Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.

Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.

Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.

Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.

Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.

Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and

Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.


These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.

The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.

Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered,but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.'"

Take a look at each bullet. Things have gotten far worse.

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

Frank Rich continues to write the most compelling material about "what Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called 'the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.'" Check out his latest column here.

Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

"Like Sam Houston beat Santa Anna"

Here is what Nick Gillespie over at the conservative Hit & Run web site has to say about Bush's profligate ways and the patterns similar to Lyndon Johnson.

The Latest Data on Bush's Spendthrift Ways

Over the past two weeks, I've written or co-written a couple of things about how George W. Bush outspent Lyndon Baines Johnson in his first four budgets. To recap: When it comes to inflation-adjusted increases in discretionary spending (comprising most defense and nonentitlement spending), Dubya beats LBJ like Sam Houston beat Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto.

The gap becomes even bigger when you stretch the comparisons out to the first five years of each prez's budgets. Here are numbers for all recent presidents who oversaw at least five budgets prepared by American Enterprise Institute analyst Veronique de Rugy. All are based on Office of Management and Budget and all are adjusted for inflation. The Bush figure for fiscal year 2005 is based on OMB midsession review numbers; the figure for fiscal year 2006 is based on the OMB midsession review of the budget Bush submitted earlier this year (if anything, the final figures will be higher than his provisional budget):

First Five Years, Percentage Changes in Real Discretionary Spending

LBJ: 25.2%
Nixon: -16.5%
Reagan: 11.9%
Clinton: -8.2%
Bush: 35.2%

Read 'em and weep.

Nick Gillespie is hardly the first conservative to latch onto this pattern. Check out Pete Peterson's "Riding For A Fall" from September 2004.

"Ike Was Right About War Machine"

Andy Rooney used his time on 60 minutes last night to lament our disastrous embrace of the military industrial complex.

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

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No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.