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The Huffington Post News Editors — 2010-03-09 18:45:02 GMT

The Wizard

Daniel Mendelsohn
The New York Review of Books

"Avatar"
a film directed by James Cameron

Two hugely popular "mashups"--homemade videos that humorously juxtapose material from different sources--that are currently making the rounds on the Internet seek to ridicule James Cameron's visually ravishing and ideologically awkward new blockbuster, "Avatar." In one, the portentous voice-over from the trailer for Disney's Oscar-winning animated feature "Pocahontas" (1995) has been seamlessly laid over footage from "Avatar," in which, as in "Pocahontas," a confrontation between dark-skinned native peoples and white-skinned invaders intent on commercial exploitation is leavened by an intercultural love story. "But though their worlds were very different...their destinies were one," the plummy voice of the narrator intones, interrupted by the sound of a Powhatan saying, "These pale visitors are strange to us!"

The other mashup reverses the joke. Here, dialogue from "Avatar"--a futuristic fantasy in which a crippled ex-Marine is given a second chance at life on a strange new world called Pandora, and there falls in love with a native girl, a complication that confuses his allegiances--has been just as seamlessly laid over bits of "Pocahontas." In one, we see an animated image of Captain John Smith's ship after it makes its fateful landing at Jamestown, while we hear the voice of a character in "Avatar"--a tough Marine colonel as he welcomes some new recruits to Pandora--sardonically quoting a bit of movie dialogue that has become an iconic expression of all kinds of cultural displacement. "Ladies and gentlemen," he bellows, "you are not in Kansas anymore!"

The satirical bite of the mashups is directed at what has been seen as the highly derivative, if not outright plagiaristic, nature of "Avatar" 's plot, characters, themes; themes that do, in many ways, seem like sci-fi updatings of the ones you find in "Pocahontas." In the film, the Marine, Jake Sully--a paraplegic wounded in a war in Venezuela--begins as the confused servant of two masters. On the one hand, he is ostensibly assisting in a high-tech experiment in which human subjects, laid out in sarcophagus-like pods loaded with wires that monitor their brain waves, remotely operate laboratory-grown "avatars" of the indigenous anthropoids, nine-foot-tall, cyan-colored, nature-loving forest-dwellers called Na'vi. All this technology is meant to help the well-intentioned scientists to integrate and, ultimately, negotiate with the Na'vi in order to achieve a diplomatic solution to a pesky colonial problem: their local habitation, which takes the form of an enormous tree-hive, happens to sit on top of a rich deposit of a valuable mineral that the humans have come to Pandora to mine.

The problem is that Jake's other master--for whom he is, at first, secretly working, infiltrating the Na'vi with an eye to gathering strategic reconnaissance--is the mercenary army of Marines employed by the mysterious "Company" that's mining the precious mineral. (Anonymous, exploitive corporations are a leitmotif in the movies of this director.) It's clear from the start that both the Company and the Marines are itching to eschew diplomacy for a more violent and permanent solution to the Na'vi problem. The "dramatic arc" of the movie traces Jake's shift in consciousness as he gradually comes to appreciate Na'vi culture, with its deep, organic connection to nature (and--the inevitable romantic subplot--comes to adore a lovely Na'vi princess bearing the Egyptian-sounding name of Neytiri). Eventually, Jake goes over to their side, leading the native people in a climactic, extremely violent uprising against their thuggish oppressors.

So far, it would seem, so politically correct. And yet most of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film since its December premiere have to do with the nature of its politics rather than the originality of its vision. Many critics have lambasted Cameron's film for what they see as the patronizing, if not racist, overtones of its representation of the "primitive" Na'vi; the underlying hypocrisy of an apparent celebration, on the part of a special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster, of nature and of an accompanying polemic against technology and corporate greed; and the way it betrays what David Brooks, in a New York Times Op-Ed column, derides as the movie's "White Messiah" complex:

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.[1]

Criticisms such as Brooks's are not to be dismissed--not least because the ugly complex he identifies is one that has consistently marred Hollywood representations of cultural confrontation from the earliest westerns to the more recent products of a supposedly more enlightened age. (One of the many earnest movies to which "Avatar" has been derisively compared by its detractors is the 1990 Kevin Costner epic "Dances with Wolves," in which a Civil War hero similarly goes native, leading the Indian tribes against his former compatriots.) What's striking is that so many critiques of "Avatar" 's political shortcomings often go out of their way to elide or belittle the movie's overwhelming successes as a work of cinema--its enormous visual power, the thrilling imaginative originality, the excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology that seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth--as if to acknowledge how dazzling it is would be an admission of critical weakness.[2]

An extreme example of this is to be found in a searching critique posted by the critic Caleb Crain on his blog:

Of course you don't really believe it. You know objectively that you're watching a series of highly skilled, highly labor-intensive computer simulations. But if you agree to suspend disbelief, then you agree to try to feel that Pandora is a second, improved nature, and that the Na'vi are "digital natives," to repurpose in a literal way a phrase that depends on the same piece of ideological deception.[3]

But our "objective knowledge" about the mechanisms that produce theatrical illusion is beside the point. To witness a critic working so hard not to surrender disbelief--the aim, after all, of drama since its inception--is, in a way, to realize how powerful the mechanisms that seek to produce that surrender really are.

As it happens, the movie that haunts "Avatar"--one that Cameron has often acknowledged as his favorite film--is one that takes the form of a fable about the difference (and sometimes traffic) between fantasy and reality; a movie whose dramatic climax centers on the moment when the protagonist understands that visually overwhelming and indeed politically manipulative illusions can be the product of "highly skilled, highly labor-intensive simulations" (a fact that does not, however, detract from the characters', and our, appreciation of the aesthetic and moral uses and benefits of fantasy, of illusion). That movie is, in fact, the one the Marine colonel quotes: "The Wizard of Oz." Consideration of it is, to my mind, crucial to an understanding not only of the aesthetic aims and dramatic structure of "Avatar" but of a great and disturbing failure that has not been discussed as fervently or as often as its overtly political blind spots have been. This failure is, in certain ways, the culimination of a process that began with the first of Cameron's films, all of which can be seen as avatars of his beloved model, whose themes they continually rework: the scary and often violent confrontation between human and alien civilizations, the dreadful allure of the monstrous, the yearning, by us humans, for transcendence--of the places, the cultures, the very bodies that define us.

Humanity and human life have never held much attraction for Cameron; if anything, you can say that in all his movies there is a yearning to leave the flesh of Homo sapiens behind for something stronger and tougher. The movie that made his name and established him as a major writer-director of blockbuster successes, "The Terminator" (1984), is ostensibly about the poignant conflict between the human race and a race of sentient, human-hating cyborgs--"part man, part machine...fully armored, very tough. But outside it's living human tissue. Flesh, hair, blood...." Its plot, which essentially consists of a number of elaborately staged chase sequences, concerns the attempts by one of these, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger--an actor notorious for his fleshly armor as well as for his rather mechanical acting--who returns to the present from a post-apocalyptic future in order to assassinate a woman called Sarah Connor who will, we are told, one day give birth to the man destined to lead a successful human uprising against the cyborgs.

But whatever lip service it pays to the resilience of the human spirit, etc., the film cannot hide its more profound admiration for the resilience of the apparently indestructible cyborg. As the story evolves, this creature loses ever-increasing amounts of its human envelope in various encounters with the woman and her protectors--an eye here, a limb there--and is stripped, eventually, of all human characteristics. By the end, it emerges out of an explosion as a titanium skeleton, hell-bent on pure destruction. (In an interview with The New Yorker that appeared last fall, just before the release of "Avatar," Cameron recalled that the inspiration for the movie, which he says came to him in a dream, was this sole image: "a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire." Everything else came later.[4])

It would be hard to claim that Cameron--who has managed to wring clanking and false performances from fine actors like Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane ("Titanic"), and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio ("The Abyss")--is an actor's director; his films' emotional energy, and certainly their visual interest, lies in their awed appreciation of what machines (and inhuman creatures) can do, from the seemingly unkillable cyborgs of the "Terminator" movies to the unstoppable alien monster queen of "Aliens" to the deep-sea diving capsules and remote-controlled robots featured in "Titanic." The performances that work in his films, significantly, are either those of mediocre actors like Schwarzenegger who actually play machines or good actors playing tight-lipped, emotionally shut-down characters, like Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens" (1986), which Cameron wrote and directed.

"The Terminator" had a dark sense of humor about our relationship to technology, an issue that is at the core, in its way, of "Avatar." In one memorably disturbing scene, a woman can't hear her boyfriend being beaten to death by the Terminator because she's listening to loud pop music with her headphones on; in another, we--and the Terminator--overhear a crucial message on Sarah Connor's answering machine, which greets callers with the sly announcement: "Ha ha, I fooled you, you're talking to a machine. But that's OK, machines need love too." The joke is that they don't--and that's their advantage. It's no accident that, by the end of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Cameron's hit 1991 sequel to the original, Sarah Connor has become rather machine-like herself--pointedly, even cruelly suppressing maternal feelings for the child she has borne, strenuously working out, hardening her body, arming herself to the teeth with an eye-popping arsenal of hand- and machine guns.

The fascination with the seeming invincibility of sophisticated mechanical objects, and an accompanying desire to slough off human flesh for metal (and a celebration of flesh so taut it may as well be metal: Cameron's camera loves to linger on the tightly muscled bodies, male and female, of the soldiers so often featured in his violent films), is a recurrent theme in the techno-blockbusters that cemented the director's reputation in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. "Aliens" famously ends with Weaver's character, Ellen Ripley, battling the dragonish alien monster queen after strapping herself into a giant forklift-like machine whose enormous pincers she mechanically controls by maneuvering her own slender arms--a technology that puts the puny human, finally, on a par with her gigantic, razor-toothed, acid-bleeding adversary.

This kind of exaggerated mechanical body gear, which endows people with machine-like strength and power, is a recurrent prop in Cameron's films. It's crucial in "Aliens" and it pops up again in his 1989 submarine fantasy "The Abyss," which imagines an encounter between a deep-sea oil-drilling team and an ethereally beautiful, bioluminescent species of marine aliens. Even in "Titanic" (1997), the clunky "human interest" subplot, about a doomed romance between a feisty Main Line nymphet and a free-spirited artist in third class, cannot compete with the swooning representation of machines: the ship itself, the pumping turbines and purring hydraulics and, later, the awful, methodical disintegration of those mechanical elements--and a lot of glittering modern-day gadgets, too. For the famous disaster sequence is intercut with scenes of present-day dives to the great wreck, during which human operators remotely manipulate treasure-hunting drones by means of sympathetic arm movements.

A violent variation on the same mechanical bodysuits reappears, memorably, in "Avatar," which culminates in a scene of bloody single combat between a Na'vi warrior and the evil Marine colonel, who has strapped himself into one such machine. If anything, the recurrent motif of humans inserting themselves into mechanical contraptions in order to enjoy superhuman powers reaches its fullest, most sophisticated expression in the new movie, whose characters can literally become other, superhuman beings by hooking themselves up to elaborate machines. All this seems to bear out the underlying truth of a joke that Linda Hamilton, the actress who played Sarah Connor in the "Terminator" movies, told about her first, unhappy interactions with the director (whom she later married and divorced): "That man is definitely on the side of the machines."

The awed appreciation for superhuman powers--and an understandable desire by human weaklings to lay claim to them, in times of great duress--that recur in Cameron's work before "Avatar" surely betrays a lingering trace of his formative encounter with "The Wizard of Oz," which so famously shows us a helpless twelve-year-old, set loose in a strange world inhabited by scary monsters and powerful aliens, discovering her own hitherto unknown powers (and learning that certain supposedly supernatural powers are produced by knowing how to maneuver the right gears and levers).

Another inheritance from that visually revolutionary work, of course, is Cameron's taste for plots that have to do with encounters between humans and aliens of one sort or another. "Avatar" would seem to be the most obvious manifestation of this particular debt that Cameron owes to his favorite movie. Apart from a number of explicit allusions to "Oz"--the line about not being in Kansas anymore, a corporate stooge's sneering reference to the Na'vi as "blue monkeys," which recalls the blue-tinged flying monkeys of the 1939 movie--the encounter between the human world and the world of the Na'vi is imbued with a sense of thrilled visual amazement that deliberately evokes a similar experience provided by the Hollywood classic. In the latter, Dorothy's life in Kansas was filmed in black and white; only when she awakes in Oz does the film move into dazzling three-strip Technicolor. In "Avatar," Cameron quotes this famous gesture. Jake Sully's world, the world of the humans--the interior of the marine transports and fighters, the hangars and meeting rooms, the labs of the scientists and the offices of the nameless corporation--is filmed in a drably monotonous palette of grays and blues (the latter being a favorite color of this director, who uses it often to represent a bleak future); the world of the Na'vi, in contrast, is one of staggering color and ravishing light.

The colors, apart from the opulent greens of the Na'vis' jungle homeland, tend to be lusciously "feminine" on the flora--violet, mauve, delicate peaches and yellows. They grow stronger on the fauna, a series of brilliantly imagined creatures among which, persuasively, certain morphologies recur. (Crests, say, and hammer-heads.) All, the plants and animals both, share one trait that clearly owes much to Cameron's lifelong passion for marine exploration, and which provides "Avatar" with much of its visual delight: bioluminescence. As the characters tread on plants or trees, the latter light up delicately, for a moment; the ritually important Tree of Souls looks like a weeping willow made of fiber-optic cables. It's a wonderful conceit that had me literally gasping with pleasure the first time I saw the movie.

This visual ravishment--which is the principal experience of the movie and which is, too, enhanced by the surprisingly subtle use of 3-D technology (there are gratifyingly few shots of objects projecting into the audience's field; you just feel that you're sharing the same plane as the creatures in the movie)--is part of a strategy intended to make us admire the Na'vi. Not surprisingly, given all this natural synergy and beauty, the native people, as we are told again and again, enjoy a special bond with all those colorful creatures and, more generally, with the ecosystem (to whom they have given the name Eywa; Cameron, apparently as much a stickler for linguistic as for biological verisimilitude, had his underlings work up a functional Na'vi language).

This, in turn, is part of the film's earnest, apparently anticolonial, anticapitalist, antitechnology message. These creatures, rather sentimentally modeled on popular notions of Native American and African tribes, are presented as being wholly in tune with nature--as preagricultural hunter-gatherers who subsist on the flesh of the animals they kill by means of their remarkable skill at archery. (When they do make a kill, they solemnly apologize to the victims: "All energy is borrowed and one day you have to give it back," Neytiri rather officiously informs the avatar-Jake when he makes his first kill.) They stand, therefore, in stark contrast to the movie's humans (the "sky-people"), with their heavy, rumbling, roaring copters and tractors and immense, belching, grinding mining-machines--the representatives of destructive "technology" who have, we are told, "killed their mother": which is to say, destroyed their own planet.

All this would be well and good enough, in its ecofable, "Pocahontas"-esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pre-technological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists--led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Ripley had the same bad habit)--protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na'vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. "Don't you get it?" an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na'vi to kingdom come. "It's a network--a global network!"

Dr. Augustine goes on to describe how, by means of the pistil-thing, the Na'vi can upload and download memories, information, and so forth--and can even communicate with their dead. One such upload to Eywa herself, transmitted through the Tree of Souls by Jake's avatar, will, in the end, help lead the Na'vi and their furry friends to victory over the human exploiters. (This, of course, is the "Dances with Wolves" paradigm.)

In its confused treatment of that favorite Cameron preoccupation--the relationship between the natural and the technological worlds--the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron's real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However "primitive" they have seemed to some critics, the Na'vi--with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself--are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichÃ©d representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie's intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized. "Avatar" 's desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.

And how not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe--a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a "blue-collar sensibility"; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by deep-pocketed corporations--a "company" man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects--none more than Avatar--on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn't as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes "Avatar" special is the "human interest" story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:

Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how a film is made. It's an emotional story. It's a love story. They're not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool--battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it's that [a love story], too.

But of course, when you see "Avatar," what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes--not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow.

Even beyond the incoherence that mars "Avatar" and hopelessly confuses whatever it thinks its message may be, there is a larger flaw here--one that's connected to Cameron's ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity; one that also brings you back, in the end, to "The Wizard of Oz"; one that is less political than ethical.

If it's right to see the movie as the culmination of Cameron's lifelong progress toward embracing a dazzling, superior Otherness--in a word, toward "Oz"--what strikes you, in the end, is how radically it differs, in one significant detail, from its model. Like the 1939 classic, the 2009 film ends with a scene of awakening. By the end, the Na'vi have triumphed but the human Jake, operating his avatar from within his computerized pod, has been fatally hurt. His dying body is brought back to the Tree of Souls where, in a ceremony of the greatest holiness, the consciousness of the human Jake will be transferred, finally and permanently, into his Na'vi avatar. (Technology at its best, surely.) In the closing moments of the film the camera lingers suspensefully on the motionless face of avatar-Jake; suddenly, the large, feline eyes pop open, and then the screen goes black. We leave the theater secure in the knowledge that the rite has been successful, that the avatar Jake will live. (And that there will be sequels.)

This moment of waking is, structurally, a crucial one; at the very beginning of the film, during Jake's introductory voice-over, the crippled man has poignantly described the liberating but ultimately deceptive dreams of flying that he often has: "I start having these dreams of flying...sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up." The final image of the redeemed and healed Jake waking up to his new Na'vi life is clearly meant, then, to be a triumphant rewriting of that sour acknowledgment.

But the implications of this awakening--in a character that Cameron himself described as an unconscious rewriting of "The Wizard of Oz" 's Dorothy ("it was, in some ways, like Dorothy's journey")--are not only different from but opposite to the implications of Dorothy's climactic wakening. When Dorothy wakes up, it's to the drab, black-and-white reality of the gritty Kansas existence with which she had been so dissatisfied at the beginning of her remarkable journey into fantasy, into vibrant color; what she famously learns from that exposure to radical otherness is, in fact, that "there's no place like home." Which is to say, when she wakes up--equipped, to be sure (as she was not before) with all that she has learned from her remarkable odyssey, not the least of which is a strong new awareness of her own human abilities--she wakes up to the realities, and the responsibilities, of the human world she'd temporarily escaped from.

The triumphant conclusion of "Avatar," by contrast, takes the form of a permanent abandonment of the gray world of Homo sapiens--which, as Dorothy learns, may contain its own hidden marvels--for the Technicolor, over-the-rainbow fantasy world into which Jake accidentally strayed. This represents something new in Cameron's work, something you can't help thinking is significant. In the director's films of the 1980s and 1990s, in the "Terminator" films or in "Aliens," in the misbegotten "Abyss" and even, in its way, in "Titanic"--just before the advent of cell phones and iPhones, of reality TV and virtual socializing, and, indeed, of mashups, of this new moment in which each of us can inhabit what you might call a private reality--the encounters with radical otherness or with extremes of violence and disaster always concluded, however awkwardly in some cases, with a moment of quiet, a return to the reassuring familiarity of life as most of us know it.

The message of what is now James Cameron's most popular movie thus far, and the biggest-grossing movie in history--like the message of so much else in mass culture just now--is, by contrast, that "reality" is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colorful trip over the rainbow, you don't have to wake up. There's no need for home. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, "Avatar" is very much a movie for our time.

Read more at the New York Review of Books website.

Notes

[1]David Brooks, "The Messiah Complex," The New York Times, January 7, 2010.

[2]A notable exception was the New Yorker review by David Denby, which begins, "Avatar is the most beautiful film I've seen in years." See "Going Native," The New Yorker, January 4, 2010.

[3]Caleb Crain, "Don't Play with That, or You'll Go Blind," his blog post at www.steamthing.com. Crain is more resistant to the film's beauties than I would be, and sees the director as "cynical" instead of unresolved in his treatment of technology and "primitive" cultures, as I see him.

[4]Dana Goodyear, "Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron," The New Yorker, October 26, 2009.

SacBee -- Opinion

2010-03-09 08:00:00 GMT

The word "McCarthyism" is overused, but in this case it's mild. Liz Cheney, the former vice president's ambitious daughter, has in her hand a list of nine Justice Department lawyers whose "values" she has the gall to question. She ought to spend the time examining her own principles, if she can find them.

A group that Cheney co-chairs, called Keep America Safe, has spent the past two weeks scurrilously attacking the Justice Department officials because they "represented or advocated for terrorist detainees" before joining the administration. In other words, they did what lawyers are supposed to do in this country: ensure that even the most unpopular defendants have adequate legal representation and that the government obeys the law.

Cheney is not ignorant, and neither are the other co-chairs of her group, advocate Debra Burlingame and pundit William Kristol, who writes a monthly column for the Washington Post. Presumably they know that "the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre" – in other words, older than the nation itself.

That quote is from a letter by a group of conservative lawyers – including several former high-ranking officials of the Bush-Cheney administration, legal scholars who have supported draconian detention and interrogation policies, and even Kenneth W. Starr – that blasts the "shameful series of attacks" in which Liz Cheney has been the principal mouthpiece.

Among the signers are Larry Thompson, who was deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft; Peter Keisler, who was acting attorney general for a time during George W. Bush's second term; and Bradford Berenson, who was an associate White House counsel during Bush's first term.

"To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions," the letter states.

But maligning is apparently the whole point of the exercise.

The smear campaign by Cheney, et al., has nothing to do with keeping America safe. It can only be an attempt to inflict political damage on the Obama administration by portraying the Justice Department as somehow "soft" on terrorism. Even by Washington's low standards, this is unbelievably dishonest and dishonorable.

"Whose values do they share?" a video on the group's Web site ominously asks. The answer is obvious: the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The most prominent of the nine Justice officials, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, represented Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, in a case that went to the Supreme Court. In a 5-3 decision, the court sided with Hamdan and ruled that the Bush administration's military tribunals were unconstitutional.

Are Cheney and her pals angry that Katyal was right? Or do they question the "values" and patriotism of the five justices who voted with the majority as well?

The letter from the conservative lawyers points out that "in terrorism detentions and trials alike, defense lawyers are playing, and will continue to play, a key role." It notes that whether terrorism suspects are tried in civilian or military courts, they will have access to counsel – and that Guantánamo inmates, even if they do not face formal charges, have a right to habeas corpus review of their detention. It is the federal courts – not defense lawyers – who have made all of this crystal clear. If Cheney and her group object, they should prepare a blanket denunciation of the federal judiciary. Or maybe what they really don't like is that pesky old U.S. Constitution, with all its checks, balances and guarantees of due process. How inconvenient to live in a country that respects the rule of law.

But there I go again, taking the whole thing seriously. This is really part of a "death by 1,000 cuts" strategy to wound President Barack Obama politically. The charge of softness on terrorism – or terrorist suspects – is absurd; Obama has brought far more resources and focus to the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan than the Bush-Cheney administration cared to summon. Since Obama's opponents can't attack him on substance, they resort to atmospherics. They distort. They insinuate. They sully. They blow smoke.

This time, obviously, they went too far. But the next Big Lie is probably already in the works. Scorched-earth groups like Keep America Safe may just be pretending not to understand our most firmly established and cherished legal principles, but there is one thing they genuinely don't grasp: the concept of shame.

Mundo. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Mundo en lainformacion.com

2010-03-09 10:29:00 GMT

La alta representante de Exteriores de la UE preguntará por qué el FBI utilizó una foto del diputado de Izquierda Unida para realizar un retrato robot de Osama Bin Laden

CBN.com - CBN News

2010-03-09 00:00:00 GMT

Al Qaeda is obsessed with destroying the U.S. And according to one former colleague of Osama bin Laden, they don't care how many innocents are killed in the process.

Business Insider

Chris Nelder — 2010-03-08 20:54:15 GMT

(This post appeared on GetREALList.)

When oil crossed $120 a barrel for the first time in May 2008, oil cornucopians knew they were in trouble. Prices had quadrupled in just five years, yet had failed to bring new production online. Regular crude had flatlined around 74 million barrels per day (mbpd). The case for peak oil was looking stronger with every new uptick in crude futures.

The following month, prominent peak oil critic and cornucopian Daniel Yergin of IHS-CERA changed his stance: The peak oil threat would be neutralized by peak demand. Gasoline consumption had peaked in the U.S. and Europe, he argued, due to the combined effects of increasing efficiency, biofuels, and the recession.

In 2009 the peak demand story seemed confirmed, as prices stabilized around $70 in June, and U.S. consumption remained well off its previous high. Most people thought the nearly 2 mbpd decline in U.S. petroleum demand from 2007 through 2009 owed to efficiency and people driving less.

In reality, only about 15% owed to reduced gasoline demand. The other 85% was lost in the commercial and industrial sector: jet fuel, distillates (including diesel), kerosene, petrochemical feedstocks, lubricants, waxes, petroleum coke, asphalt and road oil, and other miscellaneous products.

Very simply, when oil got to $120 a barrel it cut into real productivity, and forced the world’s most developed economies to shrink. At $147, it wreaked serious damage.

As I explained in “Investment Themes for the Next Decade,” the new normal will be cycles of bumping our heads against the supply ceiling, falling dazed to the floor, rising back to our knees, then finally standing, only to bump our heads against the ceiling once more.

Scooters Will Kill SUVs

Two interesting news stories crossed the wire this week, which portend badly for the world’s #1 net importer, the U.S.

The first was a Reuters report that the last quarter of 2009 had “wiped out” the equity of Mexican state oil monopoly Pemex, leaving it $1.4 billion in the negative. Falling crude output, falling refining margins and a burgeoning dependency of the state on its revenues had squeezed it to death.

Not only did the report offer further confirmation that the oil export crisis has arrived, but it also confirmed my growing suspicion that the oil production everyone has assumed will come online in five to ten years might, in fact, fail to materialize. Negative equity companies have a hard time raising capital for new exploration.

The second was a Bloomberg report that Saudi Arabia had agreed to double its oil exports to India, to some 866,000 barrels per day. India indicated separately that its onshore production of oil may peak this year.

This adds to the pressure on Saudi Arabia’s exports, whose oil shipments to China have been growing at a rate of 11-12% per year and now stand at roughly 1 million barrels per day (mbpd). China has eclipsed the U.S. as the primary bidder for Saudi oil, while U.S. imports from the Persian nation have fallen to a 22-year low.

The last two years have seen the marginal buyers of oil shift decisively to the non-OECD countries. A gallon of fuel delivers so much value in China and India–think peasants on scooters–that even at $120 a barrel, remarkable economic growth rates are possible. In major oil exporting countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, where subsidized gasoline still sells for under 25 cents a gallon, the appetite for fuel grows steadily every year with little thought given to efficiency.

It’s a different story in the U.S. For debt-laden consumers, an extra $50 or $75 to fill up the tank on an SUV every month sharply reduced discretionary income and starved the economy of its most fundamental driver, consumer demand.

The Real Meaning of Peak Demand

The most promising effort I’ve seen to quantify the role of efficiency in peak demand was a report in October of last year by Paul Sankey of Deutsche Bank entitled, “The Peak Oil Market.” My initial excitement quickly gave way to disappointment as dug into it, however, as I realized that its confident assertions were unsupported by the data. I applauded the effort enthusiastically–and I hope to see more serious work along the same lines–but it fell far short of proving that energy transition can be accomplished under the status quo of economic growth, let alone its optimistic twist on “The end is nigh for the age of oil.”

The fact is that peak demand in the OECD is not merely a function of efficiency gains and biofuels substitution, aided by a temporary recession.

Instead, peak demand will be the result of a permanent state of increasing depression in which non-OECD countries not only more than make up for the loss of OECD demand, but outbid them for the marginal barrel.

As we enter the post-peak phase of global oil supply sometime around 2012-2014, the price that heavily import-dependent countries like the U.S. would have to pay for that marginal barrel will become increasingly intolerable. In a weakened economy, $100 a barrel (or less) could be the new $120.

The true import of peak oil, therefore, may not be sustained high prices, but economic shrinkage. Demand will be destroyed long before oil gets to $200 a barrel, but it will not be destroyed by improved efficiency.

From where we stand today, it’s hard to make an argument for economic recovery. Persistently high unemployment rates, broken state and federal balance sheets, and an inflationary depression will continue to cut into petroleum demand. We spent the last several decades offshoring the fundamental value-adding sectors like energy production and manufacturing, and now our FIRE economy (finance, insurance, and real estate) rests entirely on real value created elsewhere.

The reason is simple: Energy is the only real currency. Every dollar of fiat currency or GDP was ultimately derived from cheap energy. Trying to print your way out of energy decline is like prescribing ever-higher doses of aspirin for a headache caused by a brain tumor. Yet those at the levers of monetary policy are, by all appearances, completely ignorant (or in willful denial) of this fundamental fact.

The vogue prescription for the sovereign debtors at greatest risk of default (see a Top 10 list here) is “austerity measures.” The theory is that a period of belt-tightening will stanch the fiscal bleeding until economic recovery puts everyone into the black again.

Yet, if primary energy supply is declining, and the rising star of developing economies is inexorably cutting into the supply available to developed and indebted economies, then there can be no recovery.

I have joked on Twitter that I’m expecting an “M-shaped recovery,” where we’re now on the second hump. A more accurate image is slow strangulation.

Two Questions for Recoveryistas

Those who would argue for economic recovery must answer two intractable questions.

The first is: Where will the energy come from, as more of the world’s net exporters become net importers?

Britain, Argentina, Indonesia, and others have become net importers in recent years. Mexico and Columbia are expected to follow suit within a decade. Clearly, we can’t all be net energy importers.

There is also the obstinate fact that aggregate net energy–the energy you get in return for investing energy in its production–has been dropping steadily. Oil net energy dropped from 100 in the early 1930s to 11 or less today. Net energy for natural gas is now in decline. We don’t have adequate data to know yet, but coal’s net energy is probably in decline too. Meanwhile, the net energy of all substitutes is low: wind, 18; solar, 6.8; nuclear, 5-15; all biofuels, under 2.

It is not surprising that a study of the Herold database (Gagnon, Hall, and Brinker, 2009) showed the amount of oil and gas produced per dollar spent declined between 1999 and 2006.

The second question is: If the creeping infection of sovereign default continues to spread to more countries, where will the money come from to bail them out? The answer has been, and continues to be, more aspirin. Without more cheap energy, monetary tactics to play the game into overtime will not only be futile, they will only draw us closer to the edge of the net energy cliff.

All of which begs a final question: If the answers are transition to renewables, and rebuilding our infrastructure for high efficiency, then where will the money and energy to do it all come from? And how long will it hold out?

Without cheap energy to fuel the growth that is hoped to pay off the accumulated debt, austerity will become an everyday reality, not a short-term fix. A reality that slowly sinks in for the rest of our lives, as net importers become progressively poorer.

The peak demand argument is a good one–but not for the nice reasons.

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Join the conversation about this story »

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Homeland Security News

national — 2010-03-09 02:23:46 GMT

Western leaders are often at odds over how to take on the threat of Islamic terrorism. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, appears totally focused on its mission. The terrorist group is obsessed with destroying the United States. And according to one former colleague of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, they don&’t care how many [...]

This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted source for homeland security news and information.

Ex-Terrorist Takes CBN News Inside Al Qaeda

Campaign Brief

CB — 2010-03-08 23:40:21 GMT

The bland, paper-laden conference showbag may be thrown in the bin for good, following the launch of an interactive solution created by Sputnik Agency, Mebourne. Targeting attendees of this year's Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) Awards, the AIMIA Goodie...

The Long War Journal

2010-03-08 20:38:37 GMT

More than 120 fighters from the anti-government Gulbuddin faction of Hezb-i-Islami have surrendered to local authorities in Baghlan after a weekend of fighting with the Taliban that left 60 insurgents and 20 civilians dead.

"Since Sunday 120 fighters including 70 armed men from Hizb-e-Islami have joined [the] government," a police spokesman in Baghlan told Xinhua. Mamor Malang, a local commander of the Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, was among those who surrendered to the government. More HIG fighters are expected to join the government in the coming days.

The fighting began on Saturday as a dispute between the local HIG units and Taliban forces in several villages in the Baghlan-e-Markazi district came to a head. The two forces, which are normally allied against Afghan and Coalition forces, battled over control of the region and the ability to collect taxes there. Twenty-five fighters were reported killed in the first day of the fighting, which ultimately ended on Sunday.

It is not clear if this split is localized to the district or portends a wider problem in the North; Taliban and HIG leaders have not commented on the fighting.

HIG has allied with the Taliban in the northern Afghan provinces of Baghlan and Kunduz. The allied terror groups maintain safe havens in Baghlan and in neighboring Kunduz province. Of the seven districts in Kunduz province, only two are considered under government control; the rest of the districts - Chahara Dara, Dashti Archi, Ali Abab, Khan Abad, and Iman Sahib - are considered contested or under Taliban control, according to a map produced by Afghanistan's Interior Ministry in the spring of 2009. Two districts in neighboring Baghlan province - Baghlan-i-Jadid and Burka - are under the control of the Taliban [see LWJ report, "Afghan forces and Taliban clash in Kunduz," and Threat Matrix report, "Afghanistan’s wild-wild North"].

HIG commanders claim to have thousands of fighters and supporters under arms in northern Afghanistan, and say the group is flush with foreign support and fighters.

"We have around 3,000 to 4,000 Hezb-i-Islami men in the north," a HIG commander named Kalakub told a PBS Frontline reporter who spent a week with fighters in Baghlan. "People come to us from all over Afghanistan. … They come from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan. We get special mujahids from abroad, but we're not allowed to talk about them." Quraishi believes that these special mujahids are mainly Arabs from Yemen and Saudi Arabia who have been trained by Al Qaeda.

The northern HIG is led by Commander Mirwais, "a former millionaire businessman who turned to jihad after the US invasion of Afghanistan."

"Jihad has become a duty for all the Afghan nation because the foreign and non-believer countries have attacked us," Mirwais told PBS Frontline. "They're getting rid of our religious and cultural values in Afghanistan. They've increased obscenity and want to force Western democracy on our country."

HIG is a breakaway faction of the Hezb-i-Islami, which has joined the Afghan government. HIG is a radical Islamist group that is loosely aligned with al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is closely tied to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Hekmatyar was a key player in the Soviet-Afghan war and led one of the biggest insurgent factions against Soviet and Afghan communist forces. His brutal battlefield tactics and wanton destruction of Kabul following the collapse of the Afghan Communist regime in the early 1990s led to the demise of Hekmatyar’s popularity. The Taliban overran his last stronghold south of Kabul in 1995 and forced him into exile in Iran from 1996-2002.

In May 2006, Hekmatyar swore alliance to Osama bin Laden. "We thank all Arab mujahideen, particularly Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, and other leaders who helped us in our jihad against the Russians," he said in a recording broadcast by Al Jazeera.

"They fought our enemies and made dear sacrifices," Hekmatyar continued. "Neither we nor the future generations will forget this great favor. We beseech Almighty God to grant us success and help us fulfill our duty toward them and enable us to return their favor and reciprocate their support and sacrifices. We hope to take part with them in a battle which they will lead and raise its banner. We stand beside and support them."

Hekmatyar has since reached out to the Afghan government to conduct negotiations to end the fighting. His son is reported to have attended negotiations in the Maldives earlier this year. Also, last month Hekmatyar released terms for an end to the fighting. The 15-point plan calls for Coalition forces to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2010.

Bleacher Report - Front Page

Christopher Kamrani — 2010-03-08 20:24:15 GMT

The Los Angeles Lakers have now lost three games in a row for the first time in three seasons; the first time since they acquired Pau Gasol.

It was in late January of 2008 that the Lakers last dropped three straight. At San Antonio. At Dallas. Home against Cleveland.

That was also the year L.A. was gift-wrapped an All-Star for Kwame Brown and that dude that went all Doc Holliday with Gilbert Arenas.

So, bring out the proverbial panic button. Wait, forget that. It's the Lakers.

After all, La-la land was over it a few hours later. The Oscars were on.

Ryan Seacrest was front-and-center and the skid was kaput in the minds of Los Angelinos. Oscar Sunday trumps a Lakers losing streak. Duh.

After all, it's Kobe. It's Phil. It's Tinsel Town. They probably don't even own a panic button.

Big whoop. L.A. was 46-15, and after three games on the east coast, the record now stands at 46-18.

Who cares? After all, it is Southern California.

It's Hawaii-lite.

Sunshine 362 days a year, some gusty winds and a couple downpours in the other few and far between days and that's about it.

And as the defending NBA champion Lakers have always done, they attract crowds. At Staples Center and all around the country.

They're the Boston Red Sox of professional basketball. Fans crawl out of the rotted woodwork when Kobe and Co. are in town—in the bunches, too.

The Lakers are the most-talented team in the association. They have two All-Star caliber seven-footers and the deadliest player in the game.

They have the only guy that could guard Kevin Durant straight up. And he comes off the bench.

And now, there's Ron Artest. Adjectives galore coming to mind. Overload, actually.

You know the dude. He's Ron Artest, and when he showed up with his hair dyed yellow and a purple inscriptions in three different languages all over, one could only think of Dennis Rodman.

Rodman? Artest isn't the new Rodman. He's the Artest. His track record speaks for itself. His mannerisms are of a combination of a cage-fighting steroid freak and a loyal British pitbull terrier.

There's Phil. And we all know Phil. Overload, yet again.

So, who cares if the Lakers lost three games in a row? One was to the defending Eastern Conference champs.

The others to Miami (cough once) and Charlotte (no cough).

But, it's how the team has played so sporadically over the course of this season that brings light bulbs to a flickering halt.

How can the richest, most talent-laden team in the league lose such gimme games?

Is the focus even there?

Well, Lamar Odom stars in a reality TV show with his wife for some reason or another. Artest is Artest, which says miles in mere inches. Sasha Vujacic is dating Maria Sharapova. Adam Morrison still looks awkward and lost.

Why isn't there a reality crew following this team? Spike Lee, what's your beeper number?

It shouldn't be Kobe Doin' Work this season.

It should be Lakers Kinda-Sorta-When-We-Feel-Like-It Doin' Work.

In Kobe Bryant, you have the one of the fiercest competitors in the history of the game. He wants to win like Lamar's wife wants her multi-million dollar villas.

That's how much four-time NBA champ wants each and every W.

He's openly questioned his team in the past. He called his team "soft" numerous times over the course of the past couple seasons.

Looks like the, here it comes, former "M-V-P!' knows a thing or to.

With talent comes expectation. With expectation comes aspiration. With aspiration comes achievement.

When the Lakers were bullied in six games two seasons ago at the hands of their cross-country rival Boston Celtics, something needed to change.

Kobe saw it. Phil Zen-ed it. And in 2009, the Lakers out-talented the field.

Question being: are these Lakers (Kobe, notwithstanding) content now that they have their own rings, reality shows, and supermodels?

Andrew Bynum's still oversleeping and whining about calls against him. Gasol, easily a top 10 player in the NBA, earns a Best Supporting Actor nom every time he is grazed by an opponent. Derek Fisher is torrentially declining and, in doing so, has stepped up his pestilential ways.

Sunday's loss to the Magic echoed what has become fairly evident over the last month or so.

The Lakers talent can only take them so far this season. There will be a time when Bryant will call upon his newly-minted, trusty pitbull and go to war.

And the team, as a whole, will have to follow suit.

Artest etched the word "defense" in his head before the loss to Orlando. He knows his role.

Who would have thought that this late into the season, Artest would have been the one who has kept his respective cool, more so than any other Laker?

Talent, as we all know is a gift that cannot be given twice.

If you've been a recipient of the gilded touch, bare it. Expound upon it. Exploit it.

This Lakers team could easily throw out Denzel, Jack, and Dyan Cannon to get some stops at times.

Hell, maybe even Leo could help defend the pick-and-roll.

The defending champion is written in the past tense. You're no longer the champion. You've got to earn it once again. Kobe knows that. He hadn't itched that scratch in seven years.

There will come a time when this Laker team has to cowboy up and ride its wave of talent and make it coincide with something that the likes of Artest and sometimes Kobe can only sport.

Illogical competitiveness.

Ludicrous effort.

Senseless sacrifice.

Such things aren't very synonymous with the City of Angels. It's L.A. Psh. The pedestal is higher than any other in the nation.

It's the always-flourishing mecca—for pro basketball, too. For anything, really. Sorry, Madison Square Garden. Your time has come and gone. Just know this. Lakers fans are ruthless. They can be, too.

They have titles like Charles Barkley has five buck boxes.

So, the Lakers will continue to skate through the regular season. Phil will make excuses for losses and Kobe will lower the booms and act as the real coach.

His teeth will be gnawed. His eyes fixated and will be ready to strike without premonition.

As for the lot of them, who knows.

It would be almost a sure-fire assumption that tension is brewing within the locker room. After all, there are so many type-A personalities that could rival, say...The Hills?

Nah. Spencer and Heidi would tear these guys apart. They know how to play team defense.

Kobe wins ball games, but he also takes 30 shots a game, at times.

The Lake Show seemed fine minus Mamba for a while, didn't they? It was, dare we say, team basketball?

Pau's stove dial is turned up to nine. RonRon's wackjobness is as wishy-washy as his awkward psyche and Lamar is just too damn stressed about what to get Mrs. Odom for her birthday this summer.

As for basketball, the verdict is still out whether or not this Laker team can out-talent their way to another title.

If Sunday's loss to the Magic cemented anything, it showed that Matt Barnes must have gone back and watched tape of the 2008 Finals for some pointers.

His team followed suit and Kobe missed his 30th shot and that was that.

Oh well. Back home to L.A. where there are no worries and the sun is always shining.

It's a hard knock life, folks. Even for those who have it all and then some.

The Long War Journal

2010-03-08 19:26:05 GMT

The US carried out its first airstrike in 12 days in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan. Five terrorists were killed while targeting the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network at a bazaar in the main town of Miramshah.

Two unmanned US strike aircraft, the Predators or Reapers operating from secret bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, fired three missiles at two compounds in a bazaar in Miramshah, according to reports at Geo News and Dawn.

"Two drones fired three missiles in Miramshah bazaar," a local Pakistani told AFP "Two buildings in the centre of the bazaar were hit and destroyed in the attack."

The Miramshah region is controlled by the Haqqani Network, the Taliban group that is based in North Waziristan group and operates in eastern Afghanistan. Anti-Soviet mujahedeen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani is the patriarch of the Haqqani Network, while his son Siraj is the military commander who runs the day-to-day operations.

The Haqqanis are closely allied to al Qaeda and the Taliban, led by Mullah Omar. The Haqqani family runs the Manba Ulom madrassa in the village of Danda Darpa Khel just outside of Miramshah. The madrassa is a hub of activity for the terror group. The US has struck at targets in Danda Darpa Khel five times since Aug. 20, 2009, and seven times since September 2008.

The US targeted Siraj in a strike on Feb. 18 in Danda Darpa Khel. Intelligence indicated Siraj was attending the funeral of Sheikh Mansour, an al Qaeda military commander who was killed in a US strike the day prior. Siraj escaped the attack, but his brother Mohammed, a military commander in the Haqqani Network, was killed.

Siraj is one of the most wanted Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in the Afghan-Pakistan region. The US military has described Siraj as the primary threat to security in eastern Afghanistan. He is the mastermind of the most deadly attacks inside Afghanistan, including suicide assaults in Kabul, and he is the senior military commander in eastern Afghanistan. Siraj serves as the leader of the Taliban's Miramshah Regional Military Shura, one of the Afghan Taliban's four regional commands [see LWJ report, "The Afghan Taliban's top leaders"].

Siraj is considered dangerous not only for his ties with the Afghan Taliban, but also because of his connections with al Qaeda's central leadership, which extend all the way to Osama bin Laden. On March 25, 2009, the US Department of State put out a $5 million bounty for information leading to the capture of Siraj.

Today's strike is the first carried out by the US in Pakistan this month, and is also the first in 12 days. The last attack, on Feb. 24, killed Qari Mohammad Zafar, a leader of the al Qaeda and Taliban-linked Fedayeen-i-Islam, in the town of Dargi Mandi near Miramshah. Zafar was wanted by the US for murdering a consular official in a suicide attack outside the US Consulate in Karachi in 2006.

The US has carried out 18 strikes in Pakistan this year, all of them have taken place in North Waziristan. The US carried out 53 strikes in 2009 and 36 in 2008. [For up-to-date charts on the US air campaign in Pakistan, see: Charting the data for US airstrikes in Pakistan, 2004 - 2010.]

Background on the recent strikes in Pakistan

US intelligence believes that al Qaeda has reconstituted its external operations network in Pakistan's lawless, Taliban-controlled tribal areas. This network is tasked with hitting targets in the West, India, and elsewhere. The US has struck at these external cells using unmanned Predator aircraft and other means in an effort to disrupt al Qaeda's external network and decapitate the leadership. The US also has targeted al Qaeda-linked Taliban fighters operating in Afghanistan, particularly the notorious Haqqani Network.

As of the summer of 2008, al Qaeda and the Taliban operated 157 known training camps in the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province. Al Qaeda has been training terrorists holding Western passports to conduct attacks, US intelligence officials have told The Long War Journal. Some of the camps are devoted to training the Taliban's military arm; some train suicide bombers for attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan; some focus on training the various Kashmiri terror groups; some train al Qaeda operatives for attacks in the West; some train the Lashkar al Zil, al Qaeda's Shadow Army; and one serves as a training ground for the Black Guard, the elite bodyguard unit for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and other senior al Qaeda leaders.

The air campaign has had success over the past few months. Since Dec. 8, 2009, the air campaign in Pakistan has killed two senior al Qaeda leaders, a senior Taliban commander, two senior al Qaeda operatives, and a wanted Palestinian terrorist who was allied with al Qaeda. The status of Hakeemullah Mehsud is still unknown.

Unmanned US Predator and Reaper strike aircraft have been pounding Taliban and al Qaeda hideouts in North Waziristan over the past several months in an effort to kill senior terror leaders and disrupt the networks that threaten Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the West. Since Dec. 8, 2009, the air campaign in Pakistan has killed four senior al Qaeda leaders, a senior Taliban commander, two senior al Qaeda operatives, and a wanted Palestinian terrorist who was allied with al Qaeda. The status of several others - a top Pakistani Taliban leader, a member of al Qaeda’s top council, and a wanted Philippine terrorist - is still unknown.

Already this year, the US has killed Mansur al Shami, an al Qaeda ideologue and aide to al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan Mustafa Abu Yazid; Haji Omar Khan, a senior Taliban leader in North Waziristan; Mohammed Haqqani, a military commander in the Haqqani Network; Sheikh Mansoor, an al Qaeda Shadow Army commander; and Qari Mohammad Zafar, a leader of the al Qaeda and Taliban-linked Fedayeen-i-Islam. Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, the Abu Nidal Organization operative who participated in killing 22 hostages during the 1986 hijacking of Pan Am flight 73, is thought to have been killed in the Jan. 9 airstrike.

The status of Hakeemullah Mehsud, the leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, is still unknown; the Taliban released a videotape of him on March 1 but it did not confirm he was alive. On March 1, a rumor surfaced that Abdul Haq al Turkistani, the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party and a member of al Qaeda’s Shura Majlis, was killed in a strike on Feb. 15. And Abdul Basit Usman, an Abu Sayyaf operative with a $1 million US bounty for information leading to his capture, is rumored to have been killed in a strike on Jan. 14, although a Philippine military spokesman said Usman is likely still alive and in the Philippines.

In December 2009, the US killed Abdullah Said al Libi, the top commander of the Shadow Army; Zuhaib al Zahib, a senior commander in the Shadow Army; and Saleh al Somali, the leader of al Qaeda's external network [see LWJ report, “Senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in US airstrikes in Pakistan, 2004 – 2010” for the full list of leaders and operatives thought to have been killed in US strikes].

US strikes in Pakistan in 2010:

• US airstrike in North Waziristan kills 5 Taliban fighters
March 8, 2010
• US hits Haqqani Network in North Waziristan, kills 8
Feb. 24, 2010
• US airstrikes target Haqqani Network in North Waziristan
Feb. 18, 2010
• Latest US airstrike kills 3 in North Waziristan
Feb. 17, 2010
• US strike kills 4 in North Waziristan
Feb. 15, 2010
• US strikes training camp in North Waziristan
Feb. 14, 2010
• Predators pound terrorist camp in North Waziristan
Feb. 2, 2010
• US airstrike targets Haqqani Network in North Waziristan
Jan. 29, 2010
• US airstrike in North Waziristan kills 6
Jan. 19, 2010
• Latest US airstrike in Pakistan kills 20
Jan. 17, 2010
• US strikes kill 11 in North Waziristan
Jan. 15, 2010
• US airstrike hits Taliban camp in North Waziristan
Jan. 14, 2010
• US airstrike kills 4 Taliban fighters in North Waziristan
Jan. 9, 2010
• US airstrike kills 5 in North Waziristan
Jan. 8, 2010
• US kills 17 in latest North Waziristan strike
Jan. 6, 2010
• US airstrike kills 2 Taliban fighters in Mir Ali in Pakistan
Jan. 3, 2010
• US kills 3 Taliban in second strike in North Waziristan
Jan. 1, 2010

SBNation.com - All Posts

Jeff Sullivan — 2010-03-08 19:59:43 GMT

Kathy Willens - AP

about 23 hours ago: Baltimore Orioles third baseman Miguel Tejada, left, starting pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, and catcher Matt Wieters hold a mound conference with the bases loaded with Boston Red Sox in the first inning of a spring training baseball game at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, Fla., Sunday, March 7, 2010. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

View full size photo »

As we gear up for the 2010 baseball season, we continue our daily, team-by-team previews with the doomed but exciting Baltimore Orioles. Vegas has set their odds of winning the World Series at 100/1.

By Stacey Long, James Feldman, and Jordan Katz of Camden Chat

-----

Introduction

I have something to tell you, and you might want to sit down for it. The Orioles are not going to win the AL East. Now that you've recovered from that shocking fact, let's get down to business.

There aren't many baseball fans who have it rougher than those who follow the Orioles. The Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates are really the only teams that can claim a higher level of woefulness over such a long period of time. It's reassuring to Orioles fans to say, "Hey, at least we're not the Pirates." We used to be able to say that about the Devil Rays. Man, those were the days.

But the 2010 Baltimore Orioles won't be the sad sack losers that all of baseball has come to know over the past 12 years. Once laden with high-priced mediocrity, the Orioles are younger, cheaper, and more talented than they've been in any year in recent history. I'm just going to go ahead and say it: The Baltimore Orioles are in the best shape of their lives. Promising young pitchers fill the rotation, they have arguably the best young outfield in baseball, and that impressive figure behind the plate needs no introduction.

They won't win the AL East in 2010, but they're not going to roll over, either. The Orioles have improved and are ready to move up in the standings, even if that just means finishing ahead of the Blue Jays.

Position Players

C: Matt Wieters
1B: Garrett Atkins
2B: Brian Roberts
3B: Miguel Tejada
SS: Cesar Izturis
LF: Nolan Reimold
CF: Adam Jones
RF: Nick Markakis
DH: Luke Scott

Bench: Felix Pie (OF), Chad Moeller (C), Robert Andino (SS/2B), Ty Wigginton (1B/2B/3B)

The Orioles didn't lose any position players of consequence for 2010 as only Melvin Mora and Aubrey Huff left the fold, replaced by free agents Miguel Tejada and Garrett Atkins. Both signed on one year deals, Tejada as a placeholder for 3B prospect Josh Bell and Atkins as a reclamation project.

Tejada, now in his second stint with the Orioles, isn't the MVP caliber slugger that the Orioles first signed in 2004. Now 36 years old, he isn't considered a viable defensive shortstop and will play 3B for the Orioles in 2010. His power numbers have slipped in recent years but Tejada can still hit. He'll provide an offensive upgrade from Mora that hopefully won't be negated by his defense at his new position.

Club officials claim to have reviewed video of Atkins and have high hopes of returning him to his earlier form. It's not entirely impossible that Atkins will succeed but it's certainly a long shot. Not many 30 year olds decline for three straight years and then rebound, especially not when they're taken out of Coors Field and plopped down in the American League East. Should Atkins completely bomb he could lose his position to former top prospect Michael Aubrey or even DH Luke Scott.

Double play partners Cesar Izturis and Brian Roberts make a good team but feature nearly opposite strengths. Izturis' glove is mighty but his bat is weak. He is nearly incapable of taking a walk (career BB% of 4.9) or hitting for any power (.331 career SLG with 14 HR) but he plays shortstop better than almost anyone in the American League. Roberts, now 32 years old, has lost a step at second base but continues to put up very solid offensive numbers. Roberts can be counted on for 40-50 doubles, 10-15 HR, and an OPS in the low 800s.

The Orioles are in the enviable position of having four young, talented outfielders in Nick Markakis, Adam Jones, Nolan Reimold, and Felix Pie. As it stands the first three will see the most playing time in the outfield but Pie showed potential to be very valuable in 2009 and will be ready to step in should any of the starters suffer injury or if Reimold doesn't repeat his 2009 success.

Markakis is the veteran of the group who, at age 26, is entering his fifth full season with the Orioles. Markakis' 2009 season, while respectable, was a disappointment to those who watched him improve every year he'd been in the league. His huge decrease in walks dragged down his OBP and SLG. There's no reason to think that Markakis won't bounce back, however, and he's still regarded as one of the finest right fielders in baseball.

In 2009, Jones gave Orioles fans and the rest of the American League a preview of what they can expect from him in center field for the foreseeable future. He started the season on fire, slugging his way to his first All Star appearance. Unfortunately he slowed down considerably in the second half as the plate discipline he showed earlier disappeared. He also struggled with injury and was shut down for the year in the beginning of September due to an ankle sprain. If Jones can stay healthy and consistent, 2010 could be the year he blooms into the superstar people are predicting.

Nolan Reimold, called up in 2009 to fill in for injury, took hold of left field and ran with it. A potential power threat, the rookie led the team in OBP in '09 and trailed only Luke Scott in SLG. He also led all rookies in HR with 15 despite not playing a full season at the Major League level. Reimold will need to avoid the sophomore slump and prove he can produce and stay healthy over a full season if he's going to be the long term answer in left field.

The odd man out, Felix Pie will be trying to repeat the success he found in the second half of 2009. It will be tough for manager Dave Trembley to find consistent at-bats for Pie if the other three outfielders are healthy and, in Reimold's case, productive, but hopefully he'll figure it out as Pie has a lot of promise. He's arguably the best defensive outfielder on the team, which is saying something considering the competition, but his bat is still suspect.

The myth of Matt Wieters grew so much prior to his call up in May '09 that it became hard to keep a rational state of mind regarding the rookie catcher. He essentially broke the PECOTA projection system with the very idea of his awesomeness, Bill James pretty much inducted him into the Hall of Fame, and Keith Law's excitement was so great that he created his own Matt Wieters Fact. Even The Onion got in on the fun. Given all that it's understandable that some Orioles fans felt a little let down when he didn't immediately play like the love child of Joe Mauer and Superman. The truth is he had a very solid rookie campaign considering the rigors of being a catcher learning his pitchers and the opposing batters mid-season. He improved steadily over the course of the season and will in all likelihood will be one of the best catchers in baseball in 2010 even without having reached his peak.

Rotation

Kevin Millwood, RHP
Jeremy Guthrie, RHP
Brad Bergesen, RHP
Brian Matusz, LHP
Chris Tillman, RHP

Last year, the Orioles' pitching was atrocious. They were last in the AL in hits, earned runs and homers allowed, and they had the pitcher with the most losses in league (17), Jeremy Guthrie (he also led the team in wins with 10). For the first half of the season, the O’s took a page out of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Camden Yards was the island of misfit pitchers. They had Adam Eaton, Rich Hill, Alfredo Simon, and Mark Hendrickson who had a combined ERA of around 6. But this year’s rotation is a vast improvement over last year’s. The likely Opening Day starter will be former Ranger, Indian, Phillie and Brave, Kevin Millwood. He will start Opening Day; however it’s unlikely he’ll be the staff’s ace. The Orioles got him primarily for three reasons. One - he’s an above average pitcher who’s shown that he can pitch really well (e.g., he pitched a no-hitter in 2003), not great but certainly not mediocre. Two - the team wanted a mentor for the young pitchers on the club, particularly the three who’ll most likely be in the rotation: Brad Bergesen (23), Chris Tillman (21) and Brian Matusz (22). Three - he is an innings-eating workhorse. The front office doesn’t want to have the bullpen to get overworked again and they expect Millwood to consistently go deep into games.

Jeremy Guthrie, a Stanford kid and a former first-round draft pick is the biggest question mark for the pitching, even more so than the three sophomores following him in the rotation. In 2007 and 2008, Guthrie was the staff ace, putting up ERAs of 3.70 and 3.63. Then last year, something went terribly wrong. His ERA went up by over a run (5.04), he allowed more homers then games he started (35-33) and everything went downhill. The question this year is simple: which Guthrie will we see?

Finally, the "Big Three": Brad Bergesen, Brian Matusz and Chris Tillman. Brad Bergesen recently got some unwelcome attention for getting injured during a commercial shot for MASN; however, if he keeps up the pace he had last year that won’t be the only exposure he gets. If you look on Baseball Reference, you’ll notice some familiar names for Brad Bergesen’s similarity score through age 23; notably Cy Young and John Lackey. Checking his stats, it doesn’t come off as far-fetched as some would think. His opponents slugging %, OPS, OBP were all lower than the league average. The main concern is he puts too many balls in play. He allowed 9% more balls in play than the league average, and a 5% higher contact rate.

The fourth starter, and perhaps the staff ace of the future, is Brian Matusz; he’s just got the look. His signature game of 2009 was his last of his season. He went into Yankee Stadium and lasted 7 innings while giving up just one run on four hits and ending the performance with back-to-back strikeouts of Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter. He finished the season strong, winning his last three games, allowing six runs in 21 innings and notching 15 strike outs.

Fifth in the rotation is Chris Tillman, the man with the most room for improvement of the big three, who had an ERA of 5.40 in 2009. His opponent’s batting average was almost .300. Tillman's biggest issue of 2010 was the long ball; he allowed 15 in just 65 innings pitched. Tillman will only be 21 on Opening Day and he should be able to improve greatly with a season under his belt.

Bullpen

Mike Gonzalez, LHP
Jim Johnson, RHP
Koji Uehara, RHP
Cla Meredith, RHP
Mark Hendrickson, LHP
Kameron Mickolio, RHP
Matt Albers, RHP

The Orioles also hope to improve the bullpen once again. Last year, if you were an Oriole fan you knew that no lead you had was insurmountable when your bullpen consisted of guys with ERA's between 4.00 and 7.00. To improve the bullpen, the Orioles got rid Danys Baez (now a Phillie) Dennis Sarfate (DFA’d and sent to AAA), Chris Ray, who had an ERA starting with 7 (Millwood trade) and Brian Bass (released).

To fill the void left by the trade of closer George Sherrill to the Dodgers, GM Andy MacPhail brought in Mike Gonzalez, who set-up last year for the Braves. Gonzo has closing experience with both the Braves and Pirates, racking up 54 career saves over the last 5+ years. Jim Johnson will return to his role of set-up man after failing miserably to be Sherrill’s replacement at the end of the season. It’s possible last year’s Japanese import, Koji Uehara, could have a chance to gain a save or two as well. After having trouble staying in games for very long last year, the bullpen seems perfect for him. He always pitched well for the first five or so innings of the game, then his arm turned into one big wet noodle. Cla Meredith, obtained in a trade last year, was one of the best pitchers in the second half for the Birds. Another reliable pitcher out of the pen was former NBA-er Mark Hendrickson. Miserable in the rotation, he became excellent in the bullpen and re-signed with the O's in the offseason. The Orioles have yet another young pitcher in Kam Mickolio. He looks to be a future closer, though it’s a small sample size: 9.2 K/9 and no home runs in 13.2 innings. This will most likely be his first full season in the bigs, so we'll see if he can keep up his impressive stats for the duration. The last piece of the bullpen is the most suspect. Matt Albers, who missed the second half of 2008 rehabbing a torn labrum, had an atrocious 2009. Prior to his shoulder injury, Albers was very reliable in the pen. The Orioles have to be hoping that the farther removed he is from his injury the more he'll resemble the Albers of old.

Over the past few years the Orioles bullpen has fallen into a pattern of starting off well before imploding in the second half. One key to improving the bullpen is improving the rotation, which pitched less innings than any other starting rotation in baseball last year. The addition of Millwood and the maturation of the young pitchers will hopefully lead to more innings pitched and therefore a less overworked bullpen.

In The System

Jake Arrieta, RHP – Arrieta had an up-and-down 2009 season. Dominant in AA Bowie, he was promoted to AAA Norfolk where he had his worst numbers of his professional career. In AAA, Arrieta was particularly prone to giving up a big inning, most often in the fourth inning or later. Despite his struggles at Norfolk, Arrieta showed good improvement in his control, walking batters in only 8.2% of their plate appearances, the best ratio of his career and a 1.2% improvement over his numbers in Bowie. His GB% remained relatively constant at 41%, and his HR/FB ratio remained at 5% where it has been his entire minor league career. There are two major deviations from his career numbers in Norfolk – his BABIP, which ballooned to .333 after being below .290 his entire minor league career, and his K/PA, which fell to 19.5% after being above 25% his entire minor league career. In short, Arrieta put more balls in play than he ever had before while in Norfolk, and the defense behind him gave up more hits than should be expected on those balls in play.

There is cause for a lot of optimism about Arrieta’s possible 2010 debut. A refinement of his mechanics and improvement with his fastball location would cement the improvements in his secondary pitches and overall control that brought his walk rate below 10% for all of 2009 for the first time in his career. Arrieta doesn’t have too far to go before he is ready to be an impact arm at the Major League level.

Brandon Snyder, 1b/3b – In 2009, Snyder had a year much like that of Arrieta – he dominated in the first half with Bowie, but struggled in the second half with Norfolk. In Snyder’s case, the difference was even more pronounced – he had an OPS of 1.018 in AA and a mere .671 in AAA. This dropoff in performance coupled with the doubts about Snyder that have persisted since his first injury-plagued seasons leave many questioning whether Snyder’s breakout in Bowie was real and whether he has the potential to be the Orioles’ starting first baseman going forward.

Like with Arrieta, there are reasons to remain optimistic about Snyder, but the case isn’t as clear cut. Snyder was sent to the Arizona Fall League after the season, where he was dominant for the league champion Desert Dogs, with an OPS of 1.056 that was fifth-best in the AFL among players who had two or more plate appearances per game. While the AFL is notorious as a hitter’s league, the fact is that Snyder outperformed many of the game’s top first base prospects there, including Yonder Alonso, Ike Davis, Josh Vitters, Mike Moustakas, and Dustin Ackley. If he builds on his strong AFL performance with a strong start to the year in AAA, all it will take to see Snyder at Camden Yards is an injury or continuation of last year’s struggles by Garrett Atkins.

Troy Patton, LHP – Once the top prospect of the Houston Astros, Patton has been largely forgotten by prospect watchers. Patton came to the Orioles as the centerpiece of the Miguel Tejada trade before the 2008 season, was promptly diagnosed with a torn labrum, and missed the season. Patton came back last year, beginning with Bowie where he was pretty dominant in the first half, posting an ERA of 1.99 with a FIP of 3.53. While those numbers spoke well of his recovery from surgery, they are less impressive than they seem, seeing as it was Patton’s third stint in AA. But then, possibly due to pressure to fit in with his fellow prospects, Patton struggled in the second half after a promotion to Norfolk, with an ERA of 6.45 and a FIP of 6.80 in nine starts.

As a flyball pitcher, Patton has a lot of work to do on limiting home runs before Orioles fans can hope that he will fulfill his early promise that had him among Baseball America’s top 100 prospects for three seasons. And there is reason to fear that even a slight decrease in his already marginal stuff may prevent him from ever being an effective pitcher at the Major League level. But considering how his struggles in Norfolk in the second half of 2009 were so strongly focused in a single area, there is still a lot of reason to hope that Patton may yet be a quality starter in the back end of Baltimore’s rotation. If Patton is healthy and shows he has recovered his ability to limit home runs in 2010, I’d expect him to be in line for a couple starts in September, but unlike Arrieta, he probably won’t be someone who gets the call if a spot starter is needed due to injury. With more heralded arms like Zack Britton on the way and two full seasons gone since his Major League debut, Patton needs to have a strong 2010 to have much of a future in the organization.

Josh Bell, 3b – Bell exploded onto the prospect scene in 2009, and his tremendous season, split between the Baysox and the Chattanooga Lookouts, made him the Orioles’ top position prospect after his arrival in the midseason trade of closer George Sherrill.

The big knock on Bell so far has been his platoon split, which is huge for a switch-hitter. In 2009, Bell hit .340 against right-handers but only .198 against southpaws, and his OPS against lefties was .497 lower than against right-handers. With only 131 at-bats against lefties, some of this is possibly distorted by sample size, but comments by Baysox manager Brad Komminsk that questioned Bell’s work ethic regarding hitting left-handers combined with the stats is a cause for serious concern. Bell showed improved results against left-handers in a strong AFL performance, but he will need to show improvement over a larger sample to quell doubts. But far worse things could happen than Bell turning into an excellent Major League hitter who needs to be platooned against tough lefties. Despite some discussion about whether he should stop switch-hitting, the decision for now seems to be that he will continue, and the O’s will hope to add another strong switch-hitter to the lineup along with Brian Roberts and Matt Wieters.

Bell’s chances at seeing Major League time took a big hit this offseason when Miguel Tejada was signed. The Orioles are not paying Tejada $6 million to sit on the bench come midseason, and team officials have been adamant that Tejada is expected to start at third for the entire season. It seems that the decision has been made that no matter how Bell does, he is going to be in Norfolk until September. But unless Bell struggles terribly, count on seeing him get a lot of playing time down the stretch, as the Orioles will need to evaluate his readiness with Tejada on a one-year deal.

Luis Lebron, RHP – Signed as a free agent out of the Dominican Republic in 2004, Lebron was always an electric arm, with a fastball in the mid to high 90s. But he also had a reputation as someone who couldn’t control his stuff. He gave up 55 walks in as many innings in 2007 with Delmarva, and in an injury-shortened 2008 where he pitched solely in the Gulf Coast League and short-season Aberdeen, he gave up 27 walks in 19 2/3 innings. But in 2009, Lebron found his control, bringing his BB/9 to a manageable 4.84, which paired with a 13.09 K/9 will turn quite a few heads.

Now 25, Lebron has been added to the 40 man roster, and should likely see some time in the Major League bullpen by midseason. The key to keep an eye on will be his walk rate; if he cements the control improvements he showed in 2009, he will likely be a key piece of our future bullpen, and a much needed success for our international scouting department.

Brandon Erbe, RHP – Selected by the Orioles in the third round of the 2005 draft out of McDonogh High, Erbe is the most prominent local product in the Orioles’ system. Erbe’s calling card is his mid-90s fastball, which tops out at 98, and some still think that his skinny 6’4" frame still has some projection. He compliments his four seamer with a cutter, a slider and a change. His change lags behind his other offerings, and it shows in his splits – he held right handed batters to a .133 average and had a WHIP against them of 0.82 in Bowie.

A major cause for concern for Erbe is regression in his control. After cutting his BB/9 to 3.0 in 2008 in his second pass at Frederick, Erbe saw a huge regression in his control at Bowie, with his BB/9 ballooning to 4.3. The key for Erbe in 2010 will once again be harnessing his electric stuff and limiting his walks. If he does, Erbe could see time with the Orioles in September.

Wilfrido Perez, LHP – A free agent from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a slightly built lefty relief arm who has achieved stellar results in five seasons in the Orioles organization, never posting an ERA above 3.30 and posting ERAs below three in his three seasons in full season ball. With a fastball sitting from 88-92, a plus curveball and a decent change, the Orioles tried to use Perez as a starter initially, but moved him to the bullpen on a permanent basis when Perez reached the Sally League one season removed from Tommy John surgery in 2006.

The Orioles are quite high on Perez, and he is likely to see time in the big league bullpen this season. He probably won’t win a spot in Spring Training, but he will compete with Alberto Castillo to be the next lefty up after Will Ohlman. That the club believes he will be a contributor is made clear by his continued presence on the 40-man roster, despite the fact that several other lefties also hold roster spots.

The key for Perez’s 2010 will be to remain healthy. Perez would have seen time in the majors last year if not for July surgery to remove bone chips from his throwing elbow that ended his season. This is Perez’s second major surgery to his throwing arm, and if he fails to recover, his time with the Orioles may quickly come to a close. But good health will get Perez to the majors in 2010, even if he may not have the talent to last there.

Conclusion

The Orioles' success in 2010 lies almost solely in the pitching. With three 2nd year pitchers in their rotation it's just as likely that they'll fall flat on their faces as it is that they'll rise to their potential. If Brian Matusz and Brad Bergesen pick up where they left off in 2009 and Chris Tillman can harness his talent, the American League will be in for a surprise. If they struggle, the Orioles will continue to flounder.

Las Vegas has given the Baltimore Orioles 100:1 odds of winning the World Series, which actually seems generous. They are improved and have a lot to look forward to but are still quite a ways behind the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays. When the three best teams in baseball play in the same division as you, it's a difficult and daunting task to compete, but the Orioles, led by Andy MacPhail, are assembling the pieces they need to make a run soon. Just not in 2010.

Mojo Feed | Mother Jones

David Corn — 2010-03-08 16:23:38 GMT

Now that Liz Cheney is being slammed by her fellow Republicans and conservatives—Ken Starr, Ted Olson, John Bellinger III, and more—for having mounted a vicious attack on lawyers who performed pro bono work for suspected terrorist detainees, Bill Kristol, her partner-in-slime, is trying to wiggle his way out of the controversy.

Kristol, the neocon godfather, is one of three board members of Keep America Safe, the group that released an ad decrying these lawyers and questioning their loyalty to the United States. That ad triggered a firestorm of criticism, and most of the incoming fire was directed at Liz Cheney, the outfit's chairperson. But on Countdown on Friday night, I noted that Kristol also ought to be held accountable for this Cheneyesque crusade. And on Sunday afternoon he took the time to write a post for his Weekly Standard in which he derided the notion that the ad was an attack. He suggested that the spot merely had raised the issue of "whether Congress and the public are simply entitled to know who these lawyers are, and the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department."

This is too disingenuous and dumb to be effective spin. The spot—shot in the ominous style of a scare-'em ad—refers to the Justice Department as the "Department of Jihad." And as a ghostly image of Osama bin Laden moves behind silhouettes of these lawyers, the narrator asks, "Whose values do they share?"

It isn't subtle. Keep America Safe is not in this for the sake of transparency. The group was angling to kick-start a witch hunt. And that's why so many former Republican officials have been willing to go on record criticizing—some using sharp terms—the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Liz Cheney obviously miscalculated, and the ever-savvy Kristol is looking for cover. But his case—just like the WMD argument he made for war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003—is not supported by the facts. He's stuck with Liz Cheney in a very-disclosed and very-exposed location.

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ABC News: ABCNews

2010-03-08 18:44:59 GMT

The FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives started on March 14, 1950 and will celebrate its 60th anniversary. To date some 494 fugitives, including Osama Bin Laden, have appeared on the list.

Blogs | Mother Jones

David Corn — 2010-03-08 16:23:38 GMT

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Brian Moylan — 2010-03-08 16:12:29 GMT

It's because his secret stash of booze ran dry. Sandra Bullock wins worst actress, Mo'Nique and Oprah clash, Farah Fawcett is forgotten, terrorists hate Hollywood, Tom Cruise gets in a wreck. Monday's gossip has a champagne hangover.

George Clooney was getting tanked drinking out of a flask on the red carpet. That may explain his behavior, but it isn't a justification for his mullet. When he started making mean faces during the program, we thought for sure it was going to be part of a gag later on, but it either never happened or he was just pissed off. Maybe he ran out of his contraband appletinis. [E! Online]
Hollywood is afraid of terrorists. How do we know? Apparently the Vanity Fair Oscar party had bomb sniffing dogs and ex-CIA agents dressed up as waiters in case something went horribly awry. Maybe this year they thought Al Qaeda were especially threatened because some Olympians were in attendance. Shaun White wore an outfit only slightly less ridiculous than his snowboarding costume, and Evan Lysachek brought Vera Wang as his ~~beard~~ date. Of course, all the celebs still showed and partied, but the whole time they were looking over their shoulders for Osama bin Laden himself to come in and grab Graydon Carter by the lapel and ask where his invitation was. All he really wants is to be recognized for his work. [P6]
Sandra Bullock, stop trying to make us like you! First you gave the Platonic ideal of a great Oscar speech, then we found out that you showed up on Saturday night to the Golden Raspberries to accept your award for Worst Actress for All About Steve. Way to keep it real, sister.[P6]
At a luncheon on Saturday afternoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mo'Nique either made nice happy faces at one another, or Mo'Nique got so pissed at Oprah stealing her thunder that she pouted and forced the restaurant to be cleared so that she could shaker her booty to "What's Going On." [P6 , NYDN]
Nobody went to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences official New York party at the Palace Hotel. Maybe it's because of the scary appetizers. [P6]
Yes, you were right, they did leave Farrah Fawcett out of the And Now They're Dead montage at last night's Academy Awards. Don't worry, the happy memory of her work in Saturn 3 will live far longer than this snub. [TMZ]
Gossip dowager Cindy Adams thinks Meryl Streep was robbed. God, I hate when I agree with her. [Cindy Adams]
Itty bitty Tom Cruise crashed his itty bitty motorcycle when he mistook his real life for Mission Impossible IV and ran a stop sign crashing into another car. He is luck that Xenu is on his side and saving him from harm. [Hollywood Life]
"Prince William gives shitty gifts. Well, not really. He gave girlfriend Kate Middleton a pair of $28,000 antique pearl earrings, and they were eaten by her dog! Of course they eventually came out the other end, but were "damaged beyond repair." It sucks for whichever member of the royal staff was tasked with searching for the studs in order to make that assessment. [NYDN]

[Image via Getty]

The Long War Journal

2010-03-08 15:55:26 GMT

Pakistani officials have begun to retract claims that a wanted American-born al Qaeda propagandist was captured yesterday during a raid in Karachi.

Reports that Adam Gadahn was in Pakistani custody were the result of a case of mistaken identity, Pakistani officials are now saying.

"Our initial impression was that the guy was Adam Gadahn but that information now looks incorrect," an unnamed Pakistani intelligence official told Reuters.

Gadahn's capture was first reported in the Pakistani press; he was not directly named, however. Geo News identified the captive al Qaeda leader as Commander Abu Yahya Azam, while Dawn identified him as Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al Adam and described him as a close confidant of Osama bin Laden.

"Probably the name and his origin caused the confusion," another official told Reuters.

Gahdan's nom de guerre is Abu Azzam al Amriki (the American), and he is also referred to as Abu Yahya. The captive al Qaeda leader, Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al Adam, is said to be from Pennsylvania and is believed to serve as a military commander who operates in eastern Afghanistan.

Doubts about Gadahn's arrest emerged late yesterday as US intelligence officials became increasingly skeptical of the reports [see Threat Matrix report, "Is Adam Gadahn in Pakistani custody? Depends who you ask"]. But Pakistani officials were telling several major wire services up until late Sunday night that Gadahn was in custody.

Gadahn is wanted by the US for treason and for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was officially charged with treason in a US federal court in October 2006.

ABC News: ABCNews

2010-03-08 15:08:11 GMT

The FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives started on March 14, 1950 and will celebrate its 60th anniversary. To date some 494 fugitives, including Osama Bin Laden, have appeared on the list.

ABC News: ABCNews

2010-03-08 11:57:06 GMT

The FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives started on March 14, 1950 and will celebrate its 60th anniversary. To date some 494 fugitives, including Osama Bin Laden, have appeared on the list.

Daily News & Analysis

2010-03-08 10:44:35 GMT

Pakistan's intelligence agencies have arrested two terrorists, including a US-national, who for many years acted as a spokesman for Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda.

Mundo. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Mundo en lainformacion.com

2010-03-08 09:15:52 GMT

KARACHI (PAKISTAN), 8 (Reuters/EP)

Agentes de seguridad paquistaníes negaron este lunes que el portavoz estadounidense de Al Qaeda buscado por Estados Unidos por traición haya sido detenido, explicando que había habido confusión en torno a la identidad de un sospechoso detenido.

Algunos responsables paquistaníes habían indicado el domingo que Adam Gadahn, norteamericano nacido en California y convertido al Islam sobre cuya cabeza pesa una recompensa de un millón de dólares, había sido detenido en las afueras de Karachi, en el sur de Pakistán.

Pero un alto responsable gubernamental y dos agentes de seguridad aclararon este lunes que el presunto miembro de Al Qaeda detenido en Karachi no es Gadahn. "Nuestra impresión inicial es que el tipo era Adam Gadahn pero ahora parece que la información era incorrecta", señaló un responsable de seguridad, que pidió no ser identificado.

El detenido se cree que es un estadounidense conocido por el alias Abu Yahya, según estas fuentes. Se sabe que Gadahn ha empleado un alias similar. "Probablemente el nombre y su origen provocaron la confusión", admitió uno de los responsables, que no quiso especular sobre la identidad del detenido, salvo para indicar que se trata aparentemente de un miembro estadounidense de Al Qaeda.

Gadahn ha estado implicado en la sección mediática de Al Qaeda, as Sahab, y aparecido en vídeos de la red terrorista vistiendo turbante y advirtiendo a Estados Unidos de que se enfrentará a ataques si no accede a las demandas del grupo que lidera Usama bin Laden.

Ayer se divulgó un vídeo en web islamistas en el que Gadahn llama a los musulmanes en Estados Unidos a lanzar ataques que minen la economía, según una página web que analiza los anuncios de Al Qaeda. El FBI ha estado intentando interrogar a Gadahn desde mayo de 2004, y el Gobierno estadounidense ha ofrecido una recompensa de un millón de dólares por información que lleve a su arresto.

Newest articles on The Sacramento Press

Steven Bloom — 2010-03-08 09:20:11 GMT

Paula Poundstone is funny, smart, quick and has a profound friendliness about her.

A steady flow of excited audience members streamed through the doors of the beautiful Crest Theater Saturday night to see Poundstone perform, filling the theater to it's maximum capacity. All walks of life and lifestyles seemed to be well-represented, making it clear that she has a very broad appeal.

It became apparent just how much anticipation the audience had for this night when General Manager Sid Garcia-Heberger came onstage and asked that all cell phones be turned off for the performance and the crowd applauded. How could Poundstone follow that? Simple. She just jumped right in.

"So, were you all clapping because you hate cell phones in general?" she queried as her opening line. This was to be the first of many times that she reached out to the collective and individual audience members to pose a question and then another and then a follow-up until everyone realized that this is Poundstone doing what she does best, incorporating the audience into her act.

The honesty that she shared with her audience when she said things like, "I really don't like sex," or, "I am OCD, and I can't stop talking. Luckily, I found a job where that works to my advantage!" made audience member feel like she wants to know more about them.

That opinion was strongest while watching her stay in the lobby for more than an hour after her performance to sign her book and CDs, pose for pictures and greet each and every person with, "Hey! How ya doing?" It felt like she really wanted to know.

During the almost three-hour show, (including a 20-minute intermission), Poundstone's famous ability of ad-libbing with the audience amounted to about a third of her show, while the rest of her material was topical and fresh. She had no hard-and-fast roadmap for the night, but the destination definitely wasn't as important as the wonderful meandering means of getting there.

Poundstone covered so many topics, often segueing them right from her conversations with the audience, that no one ever knew what was coming next. She started with a few digs about Sacramento politics and referenced her earlier days when she performed comedy at the historical Laughs Unlimited in Old Sac (the term "sac" was discussed at length with all of the testosterone-laden references intact), She also discussed her three children and the uniqueness of each of them, the F-word, health care, CNN and more.

During her audience participation segments, Poundstone was able to find, at random, a state worker who writes regulations and proposals, a professor who teaches writing at UC Davis to artists and the business manager of a local magazine (from whence the "Sac" references were born). Each one provided unintentional fodder for Poundstone's quick wit and unique interrogation skills.

At times she resembled a parent dragging information from a child. "And then what happened?" she asked, followed by, "What made you do that?" and finally, "What were you thinking as you were making that decision?"

Each question usually dragged out less-than-voluntarily, elicited laughter from those in the crowd and a secret desire that she not turn her laser-focused questions on them. However, the "business manager," the "state regulations writer" and "Dr. Andy" will forever be included in the audience's recollections of this performance

So captivated and in-tune was the audience that when an intermission was announced, one audience member felt so comfortable that she shouted out that Poundstone "ought to join us in the lobby." Surprisingly, she did just that. This led many to wonder whether they were watching Poundstone perform her act or if she just having an intimate conversation with them.

A special acknowledgment goes to Garcia-Hedberger and The Crest Theater for continuing to bring big-name comedy to Sacramento. In the last six months, The Crest has been the venue of choice for Lisa Lampinelli, Bob Saget and the locally produced Coexist? Comedy Tour. Continuing that trend, it was announced that San Francisco-based political humorist Will Durst will be appearing May 8.

Steven Bloom is the founder of SacramentoComedy.Com, the Official Guide to Sacramento Comedy. This website is dedicated to interviews, comedian bios, videos and consolidating all of the Sacramento comedy events to a single site. You can send your questions directly to The Comedy Guy at Steven@SacramentoComedy.Com

RSS Agregación ABC

(ANNA GRAU | NUEVA YORK) — 2010-03-08 08:45:13 GMT

Tim Weiner es el autor de «Legado de cenizas», una historia de la CIA desde su fundación. Lo tiene difícil para no estar de moda con la que está cayendo sobre la Inteligencia americana y su incapacidad para hacer lo que todos pensábamos que hace: tener a todo el mundo controlado (Osama bin Laden incluido) y poner y quitar gobiernos a placer. ¿No es así en las películas? «La gente cree que la CIA es perversa, cuando las más de las veces ha sido estúpida», nos desilusiona Weiner nada más empezar. Nueve años después del 11-S, nadie sabe aún cómo evitar que se monte en un avión americano un becar...

The Guardian World News

2010-03-08 07:39:13 GMT

Blast in eastern Pakistani city far from Afghan border kills at least 11 and injures scores more

A suicide car bomber has struck at a building where police interrogate high-value suspects in Lahore in eastern Pakistan, killing at least 11 people and wounding scores more, including women and children heading to school, officials said today .

The attack broke what had been a relative lull in major violence in Pakistan. It also showed that insurgents retain the ability to strike the country's heartland, far from the Afghan border regions where al-Qaida and the Taliban thrive despite army offensives aimed at wiping them out.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion immediately fell on the Pakistani Taliban and allied militant groups. Those groups are believed to be responsible for a wave of attacks that started in October and has killed more than 600 people. Several of the earlier attacks took place in major Pakistani cities. More recent ones have been smaller and confined to remote north-western regions near Afghanistan.

The bomb blast today comes amid reports of a Pakistani crackdown on Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida operatives. Among the militants said to have been arrested in that operation is the Afghan Taliban's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

The explosion went off outside a police building in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province, a police official said. TV footage showed a huge crater in the ground.

Lahore's police chief, Pervez Rathore, said: "This place was used to interrogate important suspects... more then 40 staff were manning the place." No such suspect had been in the building at the time of the bombing, he said.

Noorul Huda, a student at a nearby religious school, was in his first class when the blast happened, he told TV reporters.

"With the huge bang, blocks and pieces of the roof fell upon us and six of us were wounded," said the young man, who suffered a head injury. "It was total chaos outside and people were running and crying for help."

Khusro Pervez, a Lahore government official, said 11 people had died and several of the wounded were in critical condition. The suicide bomber appeared to have rammed his explosives-laden car into the perimeter wall.

A hospital official, Jawed Akram, said the dead included at least one woman and a young girl, apparently part of a group heading to a school. Several women were wounded, Pervez said.

"People are coming with multiple wounds, many with head injuries and broken limbs."

Parts of the brick building appeared to have collapsed, and there were piles of bricks and metal everywhere at the site, the footage showed. Other nearby buildings, including a mosque, were damaged. Militant attacks in Pakistan frequently target the security forces, though civilian targets have not escaped. During the wave of attacks that began in October, and coincided with a major army ground offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal area, Lahore was hit several times.

In mid-October, three groups of gunmen attacked three separate security facilities in the city, 28 leaving 28 people dead. Two co-ordinated suicide bombings at a market in Lahore a few weeks later killed nearly 50 people.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Homeland Security News

national — 2010-03-08 06:43:44 GMT

According to a report in the UK’s Daily Express, nuclear weapons carried aboard Royal Navy warships are high on Al Qaeda’s hit list. The report states, followers of Osama Bin Laden are being urged to track the Ark Royal, Illustrious and Invincible in what is being called the “battle of the masts”. A message from the Al [...]

This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted source for homeland security news and information.

Report – al Qaeda Urges Followers To Track Royal Navy Ships

A Pakistan News

Gulraiz — 2010-03-08 05:47:10 GMT

KARACHI, Pakistan News: Pakistani security forces arrested Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al- Adam, who is a close associate of Osama Bin Laden. Abu Yahya was arrested on Sunday from an area surrounding the super highway, on the outskirts of Karachi. Sources said the arrested militant commander has been shifted to Rawalpindi for further investigation. Pennsylvania-born Abu Yahya is a [...]

NYT > Arts

By BEN RATLIFF — 2010-03-07 22:44:15 GMT

One way to understand the music of the improvising electro-acoustic quartet Glissando bin Laden is as a fight between rigid law and individual choice.

balita.ph

2010-03-08 06:35:22 GMT

ISLAMABAD, March 8 — America-born al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn was arrested in Pakistan, reports said Sunday. Gadahn, wanted in the United States, was captured in Karachi, Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying. (PNA/Xinhua) ALM Similar Posts: Pakistani court stops deportation of Afghan Taliban leaders US says concerned at 'provocative actions' in Pakistan U.S. locates bin Laden in [...]

Jalopnik

Ben Wojdyla — 2010-03-08 05:00:01 GMT

The 2011 Ford Super Duty is a gamble. Ford abandoned the well-known Navistar-supplied Powerstroke diesel for a brand new all-Ford designed powerplant supposedly delivering monstrous power, squeaky-clean emissions, better fuel economy and the same price. Seems suspiciously impressive.

Full disclosure: Ford wanted me to drive the new Super Duty so much they flew me out to Prescott, Arizona where they put me up at a weird hilltop hotel casino, fed me buffet food then sent me to a remote gravel pit to beat the stink out of the truck. Note to self: buy gravel pit, they're really fun.

Let's be frank here, everything outside the engine bay on the new Super Duty truck isn't remarkably different than the outgoing trucks. The styling changes are more or less limited to the big bracketed equal sign grille, and the interior's most significant upgrades are technology related. The big news is the new powertrain. The upgrade from the 5.4-liter gasoline V8 to the new 6.2-liter is worth noting, but the real deal is the all new Powerstroke diesel with 735 lb-ft of torque and 390 HP. Mated to the all new Torqueshift six-speed transmission and a host of towing and control aids the entire setup packs unprecedented power.

But what's the impetus behind all of this? Considering the current truck commands huge segments on both the domestic and commercial side, messing around with the Powerstroke is risky business, but the time was right. When the 2010 diesel emissions regulations were released, there was an "oh shit" moment across the industry. The way things had been done would no longer work and as a result a new engine would be required.

The problem with the emissions requirements was they essentially mandated a massive two-part particulate filter and NOx catalyst: not a cheap prospect, and passing such costs along to consumers would push purchase price way up. Since Ford is the designer and builder for the 6.7, Navistar had been cut out as the middle-man allowing for a lot of wiggle room with the emissions equipment. The 6.7-liter V8 turbodiesel is more powerful, lighter, has better fuel economy and comes in at the same option price as the outgoing engine. It's actually about $500 cheaper on the chassis-cab F-450 trucks. Those aspects are fantastic, but the weirdest parts are the sound and the emissions. Sitting at idle inside the cabin you can barely tell it's even running. Even through about 1500 rpm it's down right quiet; Only when you stomp on it do you hear that diesel rattle, but it's barely even there. Stick your face in the exhaust stream and all you're greeted with is carbon dioxide and hot air, there isn't even a whiff of diesel smell, not even a faint petroleum smell. It's like a 409 cubic inch hair dryer. Freaky.

Just because it's environmentally friendly now certainly doesn't mean the Super Duty's gone soft. Far from it. When you're pulling a ten thousand pound trailer up a four degree switchback grade on the side of mountain in Arizona and accelerating past slower traffic you know this thing means business. Everything about hauling and towing has been improved on the 2011 model. Trailer sway control has been made standard, just as it was in the light duty trucks, along with Selectshift which is manual control of the automatic, and range selection which allows you to eliminate gears as many top end gears as you like in order to control downhill speeds. It's all used in conjunction with the integrated turbo brake to make anyone look like a seasoned over-the-road hauler. Towing 23,000 lbs of plate steel with an F450 up that same grade was certainly a chore, but it was handled surprisingly easy. When we drag raced with 85,000 lb front end loaders through dirt, the point was made. (By the way, we drag raced towing front end loaders. Awesome.)

Setting everything up for this towathon was a snap with the new 4.2 inch information center between the gauges. With it you can set up as many as seven trailers for brake gain and miles driven, get constant streams of data about grade (truck pitch), and yaw, coolant and transmission temps, it'll even walk you through all the steps needed to hook up a given trailer, standard tow bar, goose neck or fifth wheel. Speaking of hitches, Ford's gone an eaten the aftermarket lunch by offering a factory installed under-bed cross member designed for quick changing between a goose neck and a fifth wheel hitch. When we say quick we mean the goose neck takes maybe 1 second to drop into place and the Reese fifth wheel hitch takes maybe 30 seconds to install if you're clumsy. The whole system from the factory is about $400 less than a comparable aftermarket.

One thing we didn't expect was the ride. For a knock-down, drag out work truck this thing rides pretty well. Unladen the hind-end tends to skip around a bit over washboards and potholes, but with a thousand pounds in the bed it's smooth going and the fuel economy barely even suffers. We beat on it hard, like twenty miles of gravel pit access road bombing corners with the tail out, dodging open range cattle and throwing 20 ft water wings in the wash outs and we got over 20 MPG pretty easy, others saw as high as 29.2 MPG (!) babying the thing.

Now, admittedly a truck with this kind of wheelbase isn't going to be the rock-crawler's darling, but if you need to get deep, really deep into the back country to, who knows, tow a town closer to a lake, its fairly capable. The FX4 Super Duty's come equipped with four wheel drive including two high, four high and low, and there's an electromagnetic rear end locker. We never managed to get stuck, and we tried, some of the Ford guys on the other hand got hung up on some rocks, catching the low dangly bits, rear differential and transfer case armor. Nothing The Hoss couldn't handle though.

The Super Duty is an exercise in superlatives right now, however the proof will be in the pudding. Ford commands a class dominating 60% of the commercial segment with the Super Duty, but commercial buyers have no appetite for downtime, that's why this is the most tested new powertrain the truck division's ever done. Right now, it's the best full-size pickup on the road; it's powerful, smart, comfortable, clean as a whistle and the same price as the outgoing models, but the Silverado HD is still in GM's quiver. It's got an all-new frame and chassis and fully upgraded Duramax. The final word in the heavy truck battles is still out, but Ford's certainly staked a very powerful claim.

A Pakistan News

Umar — 2010-03-08 05:28:13 GMT

Al-Qaeda’s most wanted militant leader Abu Yahiye Gadahn was arrested from Karachi. Abu Yahya is considered as a close associate of Osama Bin Laden. According to sources, Abu Yahya was arrested from an area surrounding the super highway, on the outskirts of Karachi. The arrested militant commander has been shifted to Rawalpindi for further investigation. Abu Yahya [...]

Artes. Noticias, vídeos y fotos de Artes en lainformacion.com

2010-03-08 00:55:48 GMT

POR ANNA GRAU CORRESPONSALNUEVA YORK. Tim Weiner es el autor de «Legado de cenizas», una historia de la CIA desde su fundación. Lo tiene difícil para no estar de moda con la que está cayendo sobre la Inteligencia americana y su incapacidad para hacer lo que todos pensábamos que hace: tener a todo el mundo controlado (Osama bin Laden incluido) y poner y quitar gobiernos a placer. ¿No es así en las películas?«La gente cree que la CIA es perversa, cuando las más de las veces ha sido estúpida», nos desilusiona Weiner nada más empezar. Nueve años después del 11-S, nadie sabe aún cómo evitar que ...

Green Talk™

Green Talk — 2010-03-07 23:49:03 GMT

Photo by Phillip Stewart

Did you ever wonder if what we bring into our homes could be increasing our risk of cancer, developmental issues in our children, or asthma? How could a lovely PVC shower curtain or new stain resistant couch cause any problems? Or perhaps that new shade of yellow paint that smelled for a couple of days after you painted the wall?

Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way, through my children. When you have children that have learning disabilities, ADD, asthma, eczema, and JV Diabetes, you start to examine your own life and ask what have you done wrong. I started to question as they grew older, if any of the products that I used in our home caused any of their problems?

Over a decade ago, I started digging into this chemical nightmare. According to the Center for Health, Justice, and the Environment (CHJE),

“Increasingly, children are being found to be hyperactive, slow to learn, and disruptive in school. The number of children in special education programs classified with learning disabilities increased 191% from 1977 to 1994.ii Asthma is a leading reason for school absenteeism and the number one chronic childhood illness. iii One in a hundred American children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).iv 8,000 American children are diagnosed each year with cancer,.v and dust, and in human urine, blood and breast milk.xi”[source]

The outcome? Seven years ago, we started building a house with nontoxic or low toxic materials. The learning curve was huge, but it made me realize how many chemicals make up a home. Not just the building products but also the contents in it. Some good. Some not so good.

According to the fact sheet, “Toxic Chemicals in Building Products,” there are three problematic categories of chemical compounds in building products: volatile organic compounds, semi-volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals. In addition, health and environmental concerns have been raised by the use of PVC. Dioxins are created during the manufacturing process, when accidentally burned, or intentionally during disposal.

Where are these chemicals found and how can we stop the toxic building madness?

Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)

PVC is found in flooring, ceiling tiles coatings, carpet backing, pipes, conduits, siding, window treatments, furniture, wall and corner guards, wiring and cable sheathing, wall covering and upholstery.[Source] For a laundry list of PVC laden products, see here.

PVC contains harmful phthalates and dioxins. ( Phthalates will be discussed below.) Dioxins in PVC build up in our bodies and could remain there for years. In fact, the CHEJ states many chemicals used and released by PVC may be linked to breast cancer, decreased fertility, inability to carry pregnancy to term, decreased sperm levels as well as asthma in our children.

How to rid PVC from your life? See CHEJ’s alternative guide. (In order to download the guide, you must sign up for their e-bulletins. ) Also, for further resources, see HealthyBuilding.net’s alternative PVC guide for the health care industry, which includes many items used in a home setting.

Simply put, don’t buy #3 plastics, shy away from the vinyl window treatments and shower curtains , or use the guides above to find alternatives to vinyl building products and home furnishings. I know that many of these products are easier to care for and have longevity, but is your health worth it?

I will be honest. There is PVC in my house. I was not able to find non-PVC waste lines for my plumbing; however, my water pipes are cooper. Nor, was I able to find quick enough non-PVC coated electrical wiring in my house. If you are renovating, repairing, or building new, I have given you to the tools to correct my mistakes.

The VOC smell?

You know the new furniture or freshly painted smell? What you are smelling is volatile organic compounds. According to HealthyBuilding.net’s Toxic Chemical report noted above,

“Some VOCs have been associated with short-term acute sick building syndrome symptoms, as well as other longer-term chronic health effects, such as damage to the liver, kidney and nervous systems, and increased cancer risk.”

Examples of problematic VOCs are formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, xylene, acetaldehyde, and isocyanates, which can be found in furniture, paint, stains, and other common building products.

Formaldehyde is a potential caronogenic. It is found in cabinets, flooring, furniture, insulation, curtains, glues, and many other products. However, there are many formaldehyde-free products available today such as formaldehyde free insulations (John Manville, as an example), formaldehyde free plywood (Columbia Forest products), and even formaldehyde free FSC certified bamboo flooring (Smith Fong’s Plyboo) I bet you did not know that your bamboo flooring could have formaldehyde in it. The resin (glue) contains the formaldehyde.

For a list of alternatives, see products that have received GreenSpec, Green Seal, and Greenguard approvals. Note, that some of Greenguards’ approved products contain PVC since the Company only tests indoor air quality. In addition, buy carpets that have a CRI green label/green label plus approved for indoor air quality. Note, many of these carpets listed could have a petrochemical based backing. I opted for rugs to be made out of wool with a jute back in lieu of wall to wall carpet. The rationale behind this decision was that if one of my children developed an allergy to wool, I could simply pick up the wool carpet rug.

Could your dust bunnies harbor toxic chemicals?

Semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) are released slowly from materials and are likely to transfer to human or attach to dust. [Source] In fact,in the report, Sick of Dust: Chemicals in Common Products A Needless Health Risk in Our Home, which analyzed dust from different house found PBDEs (flame retardants), phthalates, organotin compounds, alkylphenols, and perfluorinated organics chemicals (PFO/PFOA). For more details, see here.

These chemicals are suspected hormone disruptor, toxic to the immune system and/or potentially carcinogenic. Now, you can’t stop living and freak out over the dust bunnies hiding in your corners. The Environmental Working Group provides the following tips to remove dust:

Vacuum frequently with a HEPA vacuum cleaner. (See Green Guide’s vacuum cleaner guide.)
Wet mop uncarpeted floors
Buy wood furniture or furniture stuffed with down, cotton, polyester or cotton since it is unlikely that it contains flame retardant. (I just want to add ask the manufacturer of the furniture if the furniture contains flame retardants whether on the fabric or the cushions. Additionally, ask if the fabric has been sprayed to make it stain resistant If so, it has coated with a PFOA chemical.)
Wipe dust with a microfiber or wet cotton rag to hold the dust. (For those wishing to not use microfibers since they are made from petrochemicals, consider using SKOY cloths, made of cellulose and cotton.)
Equip your heating system with a high quality filter and change them frequently. (I have an electrostatic filter.)
Simply take off your shoes when you walk into the house, which reduces your exposure to outside toxic chemicals such as pesticides.
For more EWG tips see here. (In addition, the Green Guide has some additional tips. See here.)

So, you are thinking how am I going to find furniture that does not contain formaldehyde and/or flame retardants. Look for wood furniture made out of FSC-certifed woods, no or low voc stains and finishes. Upholstered furniture without stain resistant fabric, which is made from renewable sources (USDA, SKOL, or perferably GOTS certified fabric), and natural latex cushions. See my category on fabric here for many greenier fabric choices. I hesitate to say green since not all of them are 100% green. A good starting point is the Sustainable Furniture Council.

In addition, some manufacturers are touting their soy based cushions, which are part soy and mostly petroleum base and contain flame retardants (nonhalegeon based flame retardants.)

Call me a skeptic, but I don’t have a lot of faith in the chemical industry when it comes to flame retardants. I don’t want to hear in ten years that there is another problem with flame retardants. Remember, the manufacturing and distribution of PCBs flame retardants, the predecessor to PBDEs has been banned due to health concerns. Two strikes at bat as far as I am concerned.

There are many green furniture companies available that have healthier choices for consumers such Cisco Brothers, Furnature, and Viesso.

Heavy Metals:

Such heavy metals as arsenic, antimony,cadmium, chromium, copper, cobalt, lead, mercury and zinc, have raised concerns for human and aquatic toxicity. During the extraction, production, and disposal of heavy metals, toxic chemicals have been released into the environment, notably our waterways.

Lead and mercury are neurotoxicants; whereas cadmium, hexavalent chromium (used in stainless steel and chrome production), and antimony trioxide (synergist in flame retardants for textiles) are carcinogens. [source] Note, antimony is a catalyst to making PET (recycled polyester and plastic water bottles.)

Heavy metals are used as stabilizers in the production of PVC. In addition, heavy metals can be found in roofing, solder, radiation shielding, and in dyes for paints and textiles. [Source] See here for a more detailed list of where to find heavy metals in your home.

In: Life Support: The Environment and Human Health, Chapter 4 author Howard Hu, M.D., M.P.H., Sc.D. noted:

“Metals are notable for their wide environmental dispersion from such activity; their tendency to accumulate in select tissues of the human body; and their overall potential to be toxic even at relatively minor levels of exposure. Some metals, such as copper and iron, are essential to life and play irreplaceable roles in, for example, the functioning of critical enzyme systems. Other metals are xenobiotics, i.e., they have no useful role in human physiology (and most other living organisms) and, even worse, as in the case of lead and mercury, may be toxic even at trace levels of exposure. Even those metals that are essential, however, have the potential to turn harmful at very high levels of exposure, a reflection of a very basic tenet of toxicology–“the dose makes the poison.”

Bottom line. Ask when you buy if your products contain heavy metals

Radon:

Test your house for radon especially if you added a pool lately, an addition, or your neighbor renovated any area of their property. Disturbing the Earth causes radon to seep through cracks and crevices in our homes. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer. You can buy kits in any hardware store. See here for more information about radon. As soon as I finish my radon post, I will link it to this article.

Although this article is brief in the discussion of toxicity of building product, this should give you a start of what to look for when you bring new products into your home. Please feel free to add to this post other chemicals that people should be aware of when they shop for household or building products.

This article is part of the Green Moms Carnival being hosted by Tiffany of Natural Moms Blog regarding cancer being caused by our environment. Check out what all the other green moms have to say about this timely subject especially about your food and personal care products. Don’t get me started…

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allvoices - All News >> 1 >> Popular

noreply@allvoices.com — 2010-03-07 19:06:18 GMT

Adam Gadahn, the spokesperson for the Al-Qaida network and a close associate of the terrorist Osama Bin Laden has been arrested in Pakistan and faces charges of Treason. Adam Gadahn is the Californian Terrorist who was collaborating with the Al...

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan — 2010-03-07 22:04:00 GMT

"I would rather give up my law license than represent Osama bin Laden's driver, for example. And I take a very dim view of the decision by Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal to undertake that representation. However, I would not...

World news: al-Qaida | guardian.co.uk

Daniel Nasaw, Saeed Shah — 2010-03-07 22:29:24 GMT

California-born American was charged with treason and had $1m reward offered for his arrest

A US-born spokesman for al-Qaida has been arrested, Pakistani authorities said today , hailing an intelligence coup that struck a blow at the organisation's public relations apparatus.

Reports of the arrest of Adam Gadahn in Karachi came on the same day the California-born American appeared in a web video in which he called on American Muslims to launch attacks in the US.

Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason since the second world war era, is one of the FBI's top 10 most wanted terrorists and has had a $1m reward offered for information leading to his capture.

The 31-year-old is believed to have been captured in recent days in the seaport metropolis, according to Pakistani intelligence officers. Authorities there also said the arrest was a joint operation with US intelligence and he had been shifted to Islamabad for interrogation. Officials in Washington would not confirm the arrest.

The arrest came after recent visits to Pakistan by leading US diplomatic and security officials, including Barack Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, FBI director Robert Mueller and national security adviser General James Jones. Earlier this week, Pakistani intelligence agents arrested a former finance minister to the Afghan Taliban, and in recent weeks have detained at least four other senior Taliban.

In a video on Sunday Gadahn praised Nidal Malik Hassan, the Muslim-American Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 soldiers at an army base in Texas in November, calling him a role model.

Raised in southern California, Gadahn converted to Islam at 17 and left the US about 10 years ago, later attending Taliban or al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, US officials say.

A pudgy man who has been seen with a beard and turban in the online videos in which he assails the United States, Gadhan has been al-Qaida's translator and chief English language spokesman. The FBI has said he has had close contacts with Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders. In one video Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's lieutenant, praised him as a brother.

He was seen as a particularly effective public relations tool for the group because he speaks fluent American English and is schooled in American culture. In one video, he referred to the classic American board game Monopoly: "If you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims, you're going straight to hell, without passing Go."

In others, he ceremoniously tore up his American passport and said his grandfather was Jewish, ridiculing him for his beliefs and calling on Palestinians to continue fighting Israel.

A US indictment against him for treason and giving material aid to al-Qaida stems from a series of videos shot between 2004 and 2006 in which Gadahn, styling himself Azzam al-Amriki, taunted the United States, acknowledges he had joined al-Qaida and praised the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Gadahn was brought up by parents who lived a self-sufficient lifestyle, for years owning no telephone, producing their own electricity from rooftop solar panels, and home schooling Gadahn and his three siblings.

His father slaughtered livestock in the ritual Islamic fashion in order to sell them at a local Muslim market, through which Gadahn was exposed at an early age to Islam, although his parents have been described as non-denominational Christians.

Gadahn converted to Islam at 17, later working at a mosque in Orange County, California. In 1997, he assaulted an elder who questioned his work habits and was expelled from the mosque, serving two days in jail. He left the US in the late 1990s, and later married an Afghan refugee.

Daniel Nasaw

Saeed Shah

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Twittorati - RSS Feed

2010-03-07 17:09:16 GMT

Andrew Sullivan: Yglesias Award Nominee: "I would rather give up my law license than represent Osama bin Laden's driver, for exampl... http://bit.ly/cav16o

(By @dailydish - Editor - Andrew Sullivan, Politics)

Corriere.it

2010-03-07 20:47:45 GMT

Fermato in Pakistan Adam Gadahn, noto come il portavoce dell'organizzazione di Bin Laden

DiePresse.com - Schlagzeilen

2010-03-07 20:30:00 GMT

Der aus den USA stammende Adam Gadahn soll ein enger Vertrauter Osama bin Ladens sein. "Azzam der Amerikaner" steht auf der FBI-Liste der meistgesuchten Verbrecher.

FOXNews.com

foxnewsonline@foxnews.com — 2010-03-07 19:19:21 GMT

Abu Yahya Azam, a close associate of Usama Bin Laden, was arrested in Karachi Sunday and has been taken to custody, Fox News confirms.

True/Slant Network Activity

Michael Roston — 2010-03-07 18:40:35 GMT

[1]Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Two hours ago, NBC News tweeted via Breaking News Online [2] that Adam Gadahn, known also as 'Azzam al-Amriki' or 'Azzam the American' was arrested in Pakistan. Now the Associated Press [3] is reporting it, too. Dawn [4], a Pakistani news service, seems to be one of the first outlets to issue an actual news report on the subject (HT: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air [5]): Pakistani security forces along with help of US intelligence arrested Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al- Adam, who is a close associate of Osama Bin Laden. Abu Yahya was arrested on Sunday from an area surrounding the super highway, on the outskirts of Karachi. Sources confirmed that the arrested militant commander has been shifted to Islamabad for further investigation. This is rather interesting timing. The AP report says that Gadahn was arrested "in recent days." Today, the AP also reported [6] that one of Gadahn's epistles went live on the Islamic terrorist undernet. In this one, he saluted Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan for shooting up Fort Hood and killing his fellow soldiers, and he encouraged other American Muslims to do the same. I would suppose his fellow terrorists raced to get his latest piece of propaganda out in order to rebut claims that he had been arrested. For more background on Gadahn, I encourage you to read all of Raffi Khatchadourian's profile in the New Yorker from January 2007 [7]. I'm fascinated by how much I have in common with Gadahn. He's about a year younger than me. We are both part Jewish. He spent his teenage years on the Internet trading obscure music with strangers, and so did I. I lived down the street in Chicago from Devon Avenue's Indian and Pakistani communities, and various Muslims societies and Islamic reading rooms. While I had some 'crisis of identity' issues in those years, too, I never walked into those places to learn more about Islam. Gadahn did in Orange County, California. Unquestionably, this is great news for the Obama administration and its counterterrorism efforts. Gadahn was al-Qaida's chief English-language propagandist in the post-9/11 period. He evaded capture during the 7 years of President Bush's Global War on Terrorism. A year into President Obama's post-Bush pursuit of terror, we are seeing real results in rolling back the core of al-Qaida overseas. He is charged with treason, but if there is any possibility that a deal can be struck to get intelligence on the whereabouts of top Qaida planners and financiers, it might be worth it for the sake of America's security. However, Gadahn may be so poisoned by ideology that he will welcome martyrdom. Of course, there will be spin here. Partisan compatriots of Liz Cheney will be demanding that Gadahn be subjected to 'enhanced interrogations' we know as torture to the edge of his life to extract actionable intelligence. Then they'll seek military tribunal kangaroo courts, or indefinite detention of this key American figure in al-Qaida's efforts to bring about an Islamic Caliphate via acts of terror. But there cannot be any question that Gadahn is the latest major al-Qaida or Taliban figure to be captured or killed. You just can't spin your way around that to prove that our current president is being weak on terrorism. [1] http://www.daylife.com/image/0d085OV1h8dIQ?utm_source=zemanta&utm_medium=p&utm_content=0d085OV1h8dIQ&utm_campaign=z1 [2] http://twitter.com/BreakingNews/status/10126702256 [3] http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_PAKISTAN_AL_QAIDA_ARREST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-03-07-13-23-09 [4] http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/22-intelligence-agencies-arrested-al-qaeda-commander-abu-yahya-in-karachi-03-aj [5] http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/07/breaking-pakistanis-capture-american-born-taliban-commander/ [6] http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_AL_QAIDA_AMERICAN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-03-07-13-05-39 [7] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/01/22/070122fa_fact_khatchadourian

islam « WordPress.com Tag Feed

creeping — 2010-03-07 18:04:31 GMT

This is the kind of guy who is supposedly rehabing Gitmo jihadists? Take note…excellent insigh

Pakistan News Watch

Dawn - Pakistan News — 2010-03-06 19:00:00 GMT

Pakistani security forces along with help of US intelligence arrested Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al- Adam, who is a close associate of Osama Bin Laden. Abu Yahya was arrested on Sunday from an area surrounding…

True/Slant Network Activity

Claudia Deutsch — 2010-03-07 17:24:17 GMT

[1]Image by qi.Thomas via Flickr Leafing through yesterday's paper (don't ask, suffice it to say I have a reason for being a day behind) I'm struck by the number of ways consumers are getting screwed. Whatever happened to the idea that treating people well ensures they'll keep coming back for more? Let's pick on Japan first. Yeah, Toyota is bending over backwards with its mea culpas in the United States. But in Japan? Not only are they ignoring safety problems with vehicles, but the government is helping them do so. Here's what happened [2]to one woman who was in an injury-laden accident when her Toyota accelerated beyond her control: She says that Toyota — from her dealer to headquarters — has not responded to her inquiries, and Japanese authorities have been indifferent to her concerns as a consumer. Mrs. Sakai says the Tokyo Metropolitan Police urged her to sign a statement saying that she pressed the accelerator by mistake — something she strongly denies. She says the police told her she could have her damaged car back to get it repaired if she made that admission. She declined. (...) Veterans of Japan’s moribund consumer rights movement say that Mrs. Sakai, like many Japanese, is the victim of a Japanese establishment that values Japanese business over Japanese consumers, and the lack of consumer protections here. “In Japan, there is a phrase: if something smells, put a lid on it,” said Shunkichi Takayama, a Tokyo-based lawyer who has handled complaints related to Toyota vehicles. The article goes on to show how the Japanese government protected a company that made faulty heaters, and another that sold pure ground beef that, well, sure wasn't. The one hopeful thing: The woman in that accident came forward and told her story to an outraged reporter. In Japan, where "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down" is the cautionary phrase that seems to rule behavior, that was a hugely brave thing to do. Again, is a consumer revolt in the making? Moving on to the United States. There's a fairly upbeat piece [3] that describes how small investors, that most powerless of groups, may soon find ways to make their voices heard, albeit at whisper decibels. But it is downright depressing to be reminded about how completely their voices are muffled now. They have no say about who is nominated to corporate boards; directors don't need majority votes, so withholding a vote is meaningless; your broker can cast your vote if you don't -- and generally votes with management. And the proposed fixes -- hence the upbeat characterization -- are incremental improvements at best. Starting this year brokers can no longer vote your shares without your permission. Some companies have adopted majority vote for directors, and a growing number are giving shareholders a non-binding vote on compensation plans. That non-binding part sticks in my craw, but a whisper is still better than muteness. But back to my headline: Is a consumer revolt in the making? More voter resources are beginning to sprout on the Web that aim to educate smaller investors, demystify the issues on the ballot and make voting easier. Investors would also stand to benefit from the so-called Shareholder Bill of Rights, legislation proposed by Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, both Democrats, most of which was included in the original draft of Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial overhaul bill. Business groups, and some Republicans are fighting that legislation -- twas it ever thus? -- and it may not survive. But the SEC is looking to pass rules this year that give shareholders proxy access -- a way to get their own board nominees into proxy materials. But most important, small investors control about 30% of shares, and if they get their act together they can have a truly effective revolt. “Thirty percent of outstanding shares is a substantial portion, easily enough to change the outcome of many proxy voting results,” said Mark Latham, a member of the S.E.C.’s investor advisory committee. Michael Passoff, an associate director at As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group on environmental issues, has first-hand experience. “There have been many successes shareholders have had in changing corporate policies or practices,” he said. “You can imagine virtually all retail shareholders supporting resolutions that would limit or link executive pay to performance.” Read the piece -- it gives tips on how you can make more of an impact. None of them are earthshattering, or are likely to get corporate directors quaking. But, repeating myself, it's a start. And then there's the piece that doesn't chronicle nascent signs of consumer revolt, but certainly should help spark one. A bill protecting consumers from predatory bankers and brokers [4] should be a slam-dunk, Instead, it's mired in attempts to protect bankers and brokers from effects of the bill. Republicans want the Federal Reserve or the FDIC to house a new consumer protection unit. And they want bank regulators to have veto power over the new agency. Foxes guarding henhouses, anyone? The Fed, for instance, ignored years of warnings about the dangers of subprime mortgages and overdraft fees before finally taking substantive action in recent years. <...> Kathleen E. Keest, a lawyer at the Center for Responsible Lending, said that while bank regulators already had some consumer protection duties, it “was an afterthought, at best, and viewed as a drag on profitability and innovation.” <...> “Anything that would subordinate this to bank regulators would be a bad mistake,” Mr. Frank said. “If you could trust bank regulators to handle consumer protection, we wouldn’t need to be doing this. There’s a natural tension there. It gets second priority.” Amen, Barney. But one thing on which all sides agree: The status quo is simply not tenable, consumers can not be left to fend for themselves. Man the barricades, folks. This may just be our year. [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/74002923@N00/4015112925 [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/business/global/06toyota.html?ref=todayspaper [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/your-money/stocks-and-bonds/06money.html?ref=todayspaper [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/business/06consumer.html?ref=todayspaper

Wikio - Feminism

2010-03-07 13:37:00 GMT

Your Sunday morning surrender ceremony: I still look forward to the day that Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar surrender on board the USS Ronald Reagan...

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Altsounds

altsounds — 2010-03-07 08:13:13 GMT

The heart of Chicago’s DIY hip hop scene pumps out the arteries of three ravenous Emcees - Epic, Illekt and Jasson Perez - who make up the bombastic hip-hop trio Bin Laden Blowin’ Up (BBU). With arrestingly catchy beats and hard-hitting lyrics, the boys of BBU are pleased to announce the release...

Grasping Reality with All Six Feet

Brad DeLong — 2010-03-07 08:21:00 GMT

1) Robin Wigglesworth: Moody’s downgrades Abu Dhabi companies: >Moody’s downgraded government groups in oil-rich Abu Dhabi on Thursday, after reviewing state-linked entities following neighbouring Dubai’s $22bn debt restructuring. The troubles at Dubai World, the debt-laden conglomerate owned by Abu Dhabi’s northern neighbour, has rattled financial markets and led many people to question the level of government support that state-linked conglomerates in the United Arab Emirates can command. “Dubai has changed the dynamic of how investors look at government-related entities,” said Nish Popat, head of fixed income at ING Investment Management in Dubai. “People will now look at each entity on a case by case basis.” The downgrades included leading companies involved in Abu Dhabi’s ambitious development plans such as Mubadala, the sovereign investment fund with stakes in the Carlyle Group and General Electric, Tourist Development & Investment Company, which is developing the $27bn Saadiyat Island project, and International Petroleum Investment Company... 2) David Leonhardt: Weak Economic Reports Raise Specter of Double Dip Recession: >[T]he stimulus program and the Fed’s emergency programs are in the early stages of slowing down. These programs have done tremendous good, as I’ve written before. The bubbles in housing and stocks over the last decade were far larger than an average bubble, and yet the resulting bust is on pace to be shorter and less severe than the typical one in the wake of a financial crisis. That’s not an accident. It’s a result of an incredibly aggressive response by the Fed, Congress, the Bush administration and the Obama administration.... The stimulus bill last year included a tax credit for first-time home buyers that originally expired on Dec. 1. Like clockwork, home sales fell 16 percent in December. From March to November, sales rose 36 percent. The credit has since been extended, but if you combine the other fading parts of the stimulus with household debt burdens, you can see why some economists are concerned. Mr. Shapiro predicts monthly job growth will be only 50,000 to 75,000 by the end of this year. To keep up with population growth — to keep unemployment from rising — the economy needs to add more than 100,000 jobs a month. >Recent events in Congress, however, have offered some cause for optimism. Last week, the Senate passed a small-bore $15 billion jobs bill, focused on road building and employer tax credits. But on Monday, Democratic leaders announced a proposal that would do more: a $150 billion bill to extend jobless benefits, Medicaid payments to states and some tax cuts. Some of the extensions last through the end of the year, rather than for just a few months, as is typical. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, told me the bill was meant to prevent what he called the “Perils of Pauline” problem — referring to the silent movie serial that placed its heroine in repeated danger. The most recent extension of jobless benefits expired on Sunday. The Senate voted Tuesday night to extend the benefits for 30 more days...

Crooked Timber

John Quiggin — 2010-03-07 05:47:29 GMT

My namesake, Tom Quiggin has been in the news lately, debunking the idea that Al Qaeda cultivates sleeper agents and also tracing to its source the urban myth that Osama Bin Laden used a private fortune of $300 million to promote the group. He’s sent me some reflections on the sloppy research that’s been used to [...]

Raw Story

Andrew McLemore — 2010-03-07 03:42:08 GMT

The percentage of civilians killed by drones in Pakistan is at about 32 percent, or one out of three, the report states, and the strikes themselves have little effect in deterring terrorist activities in either Pakistan or Afghanistan. Researchers do not believe any of the reported strikes targeted Osama bin Laden.

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