THE COST OF PREJUDICE: 2-3 BATTLE BRIGADES

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, As the military sends 43,000 troops it defines as medically unfit into battle because it can't keep up with its personnel requirements, it has dumped the equivalent of two to three battle brigades from its rosters because the troops were gay or lesbian. Over a ten year period ending in fiscal 2003, the Pentagon separated nearly 10,000 troops because of its anti-gay policies. This from a 2005 GAO report:

"The estimated training costs for the occupations performed by Navy members separated for homosexual conduct from fiscal year 1994 through fiscal year 2003 was about $48.8 million ($18,000 per member). The comparable Air Force cost estimate was $16.6 million ($7,400 per member). The Army estimated that the training cost of the occupations performed by Army members separated for homosexual conduct over the 10-year period was about $29.7 million ($6,400 per member). The Marine Corps was not able to estimate occupation-related training costs. . .

"The military services separated 9,488 members pursuant to the homosexual conduct policy statute from fiscal year 1994 through fiscal year 2003. . . Seven hundred fifty-seven (about 8 percent) of these separated servicemembers held critical occupations ("voice interceptor," "data processing technician," or "interpreter/translator"), as defined by the services. About 59 percent of the members with critical occupations who were separated for homosexual conduct were separated during their first 2.5 years of service, which is about 1.5 years before the expiration of the initial service contract of most enlistees. Such contracts are typically for 4 years. Also, 322 members (about 3 percent) had some skills in an important foreign language.

TWO MAJOR UNIONS MAKE SECRET AGREEMENTS WITH CORPORATIONS

KRIS MAHER, WALL STREET JOURNAL Two of the nation's largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.

The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers' rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership "that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements." That includes not disclosing them to union members.

The agreements involve workers who provide food, laundry and housekeeping services on an outsourced basis. The employers are Sodexho Inc. and the Compass Group USA unit of London-based Compass Group PLC. The unions are the 1.7 million-member Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and Unite Here. The unions say they negotiated a similar agreement with Aramark Corp. but that Aramark broke the deal last year, and they're trying to reach a new one. An Aramark spokesman declined to comment on that.

The unions defend the agreements and their secrecy, saying they've helped workers join unions in growing industries at a time of declining union membership in many sectors. Last year, 7.5% of private-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with 17% 25 years ago. The agreements have "resulted in tens of thousands of workers getting unions" and been a major advance for the labor movement, said the president of Unite Here, Bruce Raynor.

He defended keeping them confidential, saying the companies involved insisted on that for competitive reasons. . .

Labor experts said agreements such as those the SEIU and Unite Here reached open a window on a big debate within organized labor: what kind of tradeoffs to make . . .

A key question in the agreements is determining at which sites a union can organize. Unite Here's Mr. Raynor said specific sites where unions can organize are selected jointly by the companies and the unions.

The unions gave up the right to strike and to post derogatory language about the companies on bulletin boards. With Compass, the unions agreed to these restrictions "anywhere in the world." In exchange, the companies agree not to oppose union organizing at the designated locations.

But limits are also set. "Local unions are not free to engage in organizing activities at any Compass or Sodexho locations unless the sites have been designated," says the confidential summary.

BUSH SAYS POLAR BEARS CAN LUMP IT

GEOFFREY LEAN, INDEPENDENT, UK It's a classic stand-off between one of the world's best loved animals and one of its most unpopular leaders, between the planet's largest bear and its most powerful man. And it comes to a head this week.

On Thursday, by order of a federal judge, George W Bush must stop stalling on whether to designate the polar bear as a species endangered by global warming. The designation could have huge consequences for his climate-change policies; his administration would, by law, have to avoid doing anything that would "jeopardise the continued existence" of the mammal whose habitat is melting away.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the administration has sought to avoid the decision. It has delayed it for months, and was seeking to put it off for months more. . .

Polar bears depend on the sea ice for hunting, mating and moving around. Last summer, 200,000 square miles of ice – more than twice the size of Britain – melted for the first time, shrinking the frozen sea to an extent that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted would not occur until 2050. More and more scientists believe the Arctic could be ice-free in summer in little more than 20 years.

THE SORT OF APPOINTEES YOU CAN EXPECT IF MCCAIN WINS

POLITICO The PR executive John McCain just tapped to help run the GOP convention quit today after a report that his firm once represented the Burmese junta that is now doing little to relieve its people from the devastation incurred by this week’s cyclone. Doug Goodyear, CEO of the DCI Group, said in a statement issued by the convention committee that he was resigning "so as not to become a distraction in this campaign.”

EARLIER NEWSWEEK STORY Some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain-who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests-is surrounded by lobbyists. Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.

Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to "begin a dialogue of political reconciliation" with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing "falsehoods" by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. . .

Another issue: DCI has been a pioneer in running "independent" expenditure campaigns by so–called 527 groups, precisely the kind of operations that McCain, in his battle for campaign-finance reform, has denounced. . .

Ironically, Goodyear was chosen for the post after the McCain campaign nixed another candidate, Paul Manafort, who runs a lobbying firm with McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. The prospect of choosing Manafort created anxiety in the campaign because of his long history of representing controversial foreign clients, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. More recently, he served as chief political consultant to Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian prime minister who has been widely criticized for alleged corruption and for his close ties to Russia's Vladimir Putin-a potential embarrassment for McCain, who in 2007 called Putin a "totalitarian dictator."

NUMBER OF SECRET LAWS SOARING

SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD, LA TIMES - The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA's controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law -- and it is law -- we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key.

It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.

Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress.

The content of the memo was deeply troubling, but just as troubling was the fact that this legal opinion was classified and its content kept secret for years. As we now know, the memo should never have been classified because it contains no information that could compromise national security if released. In a Senate hearing that I chaired April 30, the top official in charge of classification policy from 2002 to 2007 testified that classification of this memo showed "either profound ignorance of or deep contempt for" the standards for classification.

The memos on torture policy that have been released or leaked hint at a much bigger body of law about which we know virtually nothing. The Yoo memo was filled with references to other Justice Department memos that have yet to see the light of day, on subjects including the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without congressional authorization and the government's ability to bypass the 4th Amendment in domestic military operations.

Another body of secret law involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In 1978, Congress created the special FISA court to review the government's requests for wiretaps in intelligence investigations, which is -- and should be -- done behind closed doors. But with changes in technology and with this administration's efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law.

These interpretations deeply affect Americans' privacy rights, and yet Americans don't know about them because they are not allowed to see them. Very few members of Congress have been allowed to see them either. When the Senate recently approved some broad and controversial changes to FISA, almost none of the senators voting on the bill could know what the law currently is.

The code of secrecy also extends to yet another body of law: changes to executive orders. The administration takes the position that a president can "waive" or "modify" a published executive order without any public notice -- simply by not following it. It's every president's prerogative to change an executive order, but doing so without public notice works a secret change in the law. And, because the published order stays on the books, Congress and the public have no idea that it's no longer in effect. We don't know how many of these covert changes have been made by this administration or, for that matter, by past administrations.

No one questions the need for the government to protect information about intelligence sources and methods, troop movements or weapons systems. But there's a big difference between withholding information about military or intelligence operations from the public and withholding the law that governs the executive branch. Keeping the law secret doesn't enhance national security, but it does give the government free rein to operate without oversight or accountability. Even the congressional intelligence committees, which are supposed to oversee the intelligence community, have been denied access to some of these legal opinions.

Congress should pass legislation to require the administration to alert Congress when the law created by Justice Department opinions ignores or even violates the laws passed by Congress, and to require public notice when it is waiving or modifying a published executive order. Congress and the public shouldn't have to wonder whether the executive branch is following the laws that are on the books or some other, secret law.

ANTI-BLACK SECRET SERVICE E-MAILS DISCOVERED IN COURT CASE

DAVID JOHNSTON, NY TIMES Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing by lawyers for black Secret Service agents.

The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors. . .

In some of the court documents, the senders of the e-mail messages are identified only by the jobs they currently occupy and the rank they held when the messages were sent. For example, an Oct. 9, 2003, message referring to a "Harlem Spelling Bee,” ridiculing black slang, was sent by Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations, who, according to the filing, now heads the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs.

A March 3, 2003, message describing Mr. Jackson as the "Righteous Reverend” was passed among several Secret Service supervisors. The message, about a missile striking an airplane in which Mr. Jackson and his wife were traveling, concludes, it "certainly wouldn’t be a great loss and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either." . . .

The lawsuit, which has dragged on through years of litigation, was filed in 2000 by 10 black agents who charged that they were unfairly denied promotions. The agency employs about 3,200 agents, about 10 percent of whom are black.

WHEN CAMPAIGN REPORTERS STILL TOLD IT LIKE IT WAS

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. [Warren] Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. - HL Mencken

PENTAGON USES CREMATORY FOR DEAD VETS . . . AND DEAD PETS

WASHINGTON POST The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement. The facility, located in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David A. Bose estimated last night. It uses separate crematories a few feet apart to cremate humans and animals, he added, insisting that there had "not been any people gone through the pet crematory."

Pentagon officials said they do not think that human remains and animal remains were ever commingled at the facility. "We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever at this point that any human remains were at all ever mistreated," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference hastily convened last night.

Regardless, the Pentagon will no longer permit crematories not located with funeral homes to handle the remains of U.S. troops, defense officials said.

BUSH SIGNS DEMOCRATS' BILL SETTING UP DNA DATABASE ON ALL NEWBORNS

INFOWARS President Bush signed into law a bill which will see the federal government begin to screen the DNA of all newborn babies in the U.S. within six months, a move critics have described as the first step towards the establishment of a national DNA database. Described as a "national contingency plan" the justification for the new law S. 1858, known as The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007, is that it represents preparation for any sort of "public health emergency."

The bill states that the federal government should "continue to carry out, coordinate, and expand research in newborn screening" and "maintain a central clearinghouse of current information on newborn screening… ensuring that the clearinghouse is available on the Internet and is updated at least quarterly". Sections of the bill also make it clear that DNA may be used in genetic experiments and tests.

One health care expert and prominent critic of DNA screening is Twila Brase, president of the Citizens’ Council on Health Care . . . Brase states that . . . the bill, will:

- Establish a national list of genetic conditions for which newborns and children are to be tested.

- Establish protocols for the linking and sharing of genetic test results nationwide.

- Build surveillance systems for tracking the health status and health outcomes of individuals diagnosed at birth with a genetic defect or trait.

- Use the newborn screening program as an opportunity for government agencies to identify, list and study "secondary conditions" of individuals and their families.

- Subject citizens to genetic research without their knowledge or consent.

"Soon, under this bill, the DNA of all citizens will be housed in government genomic biobanks and considered governmental property for government research," Brase writes. "The DNA taken at birth from every citizen is essentially owned by the government, and every citizen becomes a potential subject of government-sponsored genetic research." . . .

Texas Congressman Ron Paul who made the following comments before the U.S. House of Representatives: "I cannot support legislation, no matter how much I sympathize with the legislation’s stated goals, that exceed the constitutional limitations on federal power or in any way threatens the liberty of the American people."

OKLAHOMA CLOSE TO APPROVING NAFTA HIGHWAY

TOM DEWEESE, CANADA FREE PRESS Despite massive public opposition, the Oklahoma state legislature approved a bill to allow creation of "Smart Ports" and continuation of the NAFTA Superhighway system in Oklahoma. The bill is on Governor Brad Henry’s desk. . . . The road will be regulated under international law, and the bill waives the State’s 11th Amendment protection from being sued in federal court. . .

There is significant support for NAFTA superhighways in Oklahoma’s public sector. Oklahoma Senator Debbe Leftwich serves as NASCO’s Secretary, and Dawn Sullivan, a planning and research division engineer for Oklahoma’s Department of Transportation, is a member of NASCO. . . . Another major supporter has been Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett.

Mayor Cornett signed the "Kansas City Declaration” in 2004 at the North American Trade Corridor Partnership in Kansas City. . . . This document recorded participants’ "shared vision of future cooperation for communities along the NAFTA Trade Corridor in Canada, the United States and Mexico (concluding the) economic vitality and social integration of our communities demand open, dynamic and secure borders.” Mayor Cornett also called for the economic integration of North America in a video interview at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June of 2004.

In a June 25, 2007, interview with Dr. Jerome Corsi, Mayor Cornett repudiated his signing "The Declaration of North American Integration,” saying "It was a pretty stupid thing to get involved with.” He further stated, "I am opposed to the extension of the Trans-Texas Corridor into Oklahoma if the whole point is to make it cheaper to transport containers from China coming through Mexican ports.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE POPULISM

JONATHAN CHAIT THE NEW REPUBLIC Conservative populism and liberal populism are entirely different things. Liberal populism posits that the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest. Conservative populism, by contrast, dismisses any inference that the rich and the non-rich might have opposing interests as "class warfare." Conservative populism prefers to divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans.

Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg, West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of the little guy. A more classic expression of conservative populism cannot be found. . .

Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's statement about "hard- working Americans, white Americans" simply made explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.

Liberal populism is mostly harnessed to a concrete legislative program aimed at broadening prosperity. Al Gore's "people versus the powerful" campaign focused on his differences with Bush over issues like regulation of HMOs and progressive taxation. Conservative populism, by contrast, is a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without redressing them. It has an ever- shifting array of targets--Michael Dukakis's veto of a law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or the rantings of Jeremiah Wright--but no way to knock them down.

Conservative populists sometimes ape liberal populism by promising material benefits to average people. But the promise is structured so as to pose no threat to any wealthy economic interest. George W. Bush offered tax cuts to the middle class, but paired them with far larger tax cuts for the rich, so that, ultimately, the middle class bore a larger proportion of the tax burden.

Hillary Clinton's embrace of the gas tax holiday is a miniature example of the same pattern. Her plan, which rests upon the political principle that high gasoline prices are unacceptable and that the federal gas tax is a burden on hard-pressed Americans, is highly congenial to the interests of oil companies. Yet she presents it as an assault on Big Oil, much as Bush presented his tax cuts as a way to force the rich to pay a higher share of the burden of government. . .

The liberal populist sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an appeal that can't be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more manly? (James Carville: "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two.")

SHOP TALK: STILL UNDERGROUND AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Sam Smith

THERE still is an underground press and we can prove it. Every week we receive a referral report for our site that tells where people have come from to get there. Over the years, we've noticed something remarkable, given traditional assumptions about marketing and the web: hardly any of our referrals come from other news or political sites; the overwhelming number are people coming directly to the site (return users), personal referrals (which only count for one each) and through search engines such as Google or StumbleUpon. Two repeated exceptions: the Mike Malloy radio talk show and the Arts & Letters Daily, a site for literary and intellectual news.

We are one of the oldest sites on the web. When we started in 1995 there were only 20,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are more than 150 million. In our first full year, 1996, we got 27,000 article visits; last year we got almost five million and have grown each year except for one. According to Alexa, the Review ranks in the top one-tenth of one percent of all websites worldwide. Almost all of this growth has come from word of mouth or from people stumbling upon us during a search for information.

Why don't we get more links from other news and political sites? One reason is that we are considered too radical or independent, the latter these days considered a synonym for the former. Never in the past fifty years has the conventional media been so beholden to conventional. Unlike, say, the 1960s, you don't find mainstream reporters wondering what those nuts on the left up to and giving you a call. Today, they just throw in a dismissive reference and get back to business, which is to not rock the boat. When they want to sound hip, they check in with some site like Daily Kos, closely linked to the Democratic Party.

The other problem has been that the Review was a leading member of the minuscule left wing conspiracy that told the truth about the Clintons from the start. I also helped start the national Green Party. Neither was appreciated in either liberal or Washington media circles although these folks have now suddenly discovered, 16 years late, that the Clintons aren't as honest they long thought. Beginning in the mid to late 90s, my transgressions led me to be banned from talk shows or dropped from guest lists, and to be blacklisted by various liberal groups, including being tossed out as a vice president of Americans for Democratic Action.

But here's what's interesting, and perhaps instructive about the web: during a period when my talk show appearances and interviews with conventional media were dropping by almost a half, visits to the Review web site quadrupled one year and then doubled in each of the next two. In other words, as long as ten years go, we were benefiting from a new reality that would eventually drive batty the circulation departments of the major archaic media..

And, of course, it's still happening. It's one of the hardest things to comprehend in a media obsessed culture like ours, but what's on the billboard doesn't necessarily tell you what's happening on the streets.

This is extremely important for alternative media and activist groups to understand. These days, anyone trying to do anything independent, decent or novel is almost certain to find themselves in the underground.

But then there has never been a time in history when the conventional media approved of positive change. And Tom Paine, Ben Franklin and Frederic Douglass would have been the first to hit the Web, if it has been invented a little earlier.

The trick is figure how to build powerful communities when no one in power is looking. It's not easy. After all, the big guys are using the Web as well and, sad to say, since its arrival on the scene, our country has moved rapidly to the right. I don't think that's inevitable, but we do need to think of new Web ways that those seeking a better America can better find each other, help each other and celebrate the fact that they are not alone.

OLMERT ADMITS TAKING CASH FROM U.S. BUSINESSMAN

REUTERS - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted on taking cash from a U.S. businessman but resisted calls to resign over a police investigation into alleged hefty bribes over almost a decade. As Israelis enjoyed festivities marking Independence Day and the 60th anniversary of the founding of their state, police lifted a week-old media gag order and announced details of accusations that sparked opposition calls for Olmert to quit. He said he would resign only if he were formally indicted. . .

Olmert, in a late-night televised address to the nation, said: "I look each and every one of you in the eye and say, 'I never took bribes. I never took a penny for myself'." His allies say there is a right-wing campaign to wreck the peace process, but it was unclear if his fragile coalition would rally behind a man who last year said he was "indestructible".. . . Olmert, who was questioned by police for an hour last Friday, has weathered a string of investigations since he succeeded Ariel Sharon as prime minister in 2006. Sharon's son is in jail for campaign funding misdeeds on his father's behalf.

On Thursday, Olmert said all the cash he received -- put at hundreds of thousands of dollars by one judicial source -- was legitimate support from New York financier Morris Talansky to fund various election campaigns over nearly a decade from 1993.

DEPARTMENT OF GOOD STUFF

TOM WAITS SHOWS HOW
TO CONDUCT A NEWS CONFERENCE


FINALLY, A GOOD USE FOR SPY CAMS:
MAKING A CHEAP VIDEO

THE CLINTON DIVORCE

WALL STREET JOURNAL No, we don't mean Bill and Hillary. We mean the separation now under way between the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Like all divorces after lengthy unions, this one is painful and has had its moments of reconciliation, but after Tuesday a split looks inevitable. The long co-dependency is over.

Truth be told, this was always a marriage more of convenience than love. The party's progressives never did like Bill Clinton's New Democrat ways, but after Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis they needed his epic political gifts to win back the White House. They hated him for their loss of Congress in 1994, but they tolerated Dick Morris and welfare reform to keep the presidency in 1996.

The price was that they had to put their ethics in a blind Clinton trust. Whitewater and the missing billing records, Webb Hubbell, cattle futures and "Red" Bone, the Lincoln Bedroom, Johnny Chung and the overseas fund-raising scandals, Paula Jones and lying under oath, Monica and the meaning of "is." Democrats, or all of them this side of Joe Lieberman and Pat Moynihan, defended the Clintons through it all. Everything was dismissed as a product of the "Republican attack machine," an invention of the "Clinton haters," or "just about sex.". . .

Then something astonishing happened. A new star emerged in Barack Obama. . . Democrats supporting Mr. Obama had a revelation about Clintonian mores. David Geffen, channeling William Safire, declared that "everybody in politics lies," but the Clintons "do it with such ease, it's troubling." Ted Kennedy was shocked to see the Clintons play the race card in South Carolina. The media discovered their secrecy over tax records and Clinton Foundation donors. . .

By the time Mrs. Clinton made her famous claim about dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Democrats and their media friends no longer called it a mere gaffe, as they once might have. This time the remark was said to be emblematic of her entire political career. The same folks who had believed her about Whitewater and the rest now claimed she never tells the truth about anything.

As the scales suddenly fell from liberal eyes, the most striking statistic was the one in this week's North Carolina exit poll. Asked if they considered Mrs. Clinton "honest and trustworthy," no fewer than 50% of Democratic primary voters said she was not. In Indiana, the figure was merely 45%.

Slowly but surely, these Prisoners of Bill and Hill are now walking away, urging Mrs. Clinton to leave the race. Chuck Schumer damns her with faint support by saying any decision is up to her. Columnists from the New York Times, which endorsed her when she looked inevitable, now demand that she exit so as not to help John McCain. With Mr. Obama to ride, they no longer need the Arkansas interlopers.

If the Clintons play to their historic form, they will ignore all this for as long as they can. . . The difference between now and the 1990s, however, is that this time the Clinton foes aren't the "vast right-wing conspiracy." This time the conspirators are fellow Democrats. It took 10 years, but you might say Democrats have finally voted to impeach. \

MAJOR MEDIA HIDING DIRT ON HILLARY CLINTON

RICHARD PRINCE, JOURNAL-ISMS Clinton told USA Today, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence, the story said, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

While bloggers, some columnists and editorial writers and some readers jumped on the comments, stories in the mainstream media downplayed them. . .

Even USA Today, to whom Clinton uttered the comment as a response to a general question about her campaign, broke the story under a bland Web site headline, "Clinton makes case for wide appeal."

An Associated Press story by Beth Fouhy seemingly attempted to validate Clinton's comments and to marginalize those who found them offensive. . .

CNN's "Situation Room" and the "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" both interviewed Obama but did not ask him about Clinton's "white Americans' comment. If it made the network evening news shows, it was reported routinely.

THAT'S NOT THE ONLY STORY about Clinton the major media has concealed of late. A full day after Jerry Seper's major scoop about documents from former Whitewater prosecution aide Samuel Dash's estate providing more evidence of Hillary Clinton's dishonesty, a Google search failed to come up with a single major media story on the topic. There were 62,839 stories in that period that mentioned Clinton but not one about the revelations concerning Whitewater and Webster Hubbell

THE HATE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CRITICS OF ISRAEL

JOHANN HARI, INDEPENDENT, UK In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence - and to a large degree, it works. . .

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more. . .

I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes. . .

Some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups - including Honest Reporting and Camera - said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked. . .

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behavior of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. . .

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that. . .

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews - the majority - are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organizations they work with, because they believe this campaign of deionization is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

AGRIBUSINESS MAKING HUGE PROFITS OUT OF FOOD CRISIS

INDEPENDENT, UK Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation. . . And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor - who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food - into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertilizer companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertilizer. The prices of some kinds of fertilizer have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. As a result, plans to increase harvests in developing countries have been hit hard. . .

The soaring prices of food and fertilizers mainly come from increased demand. This has partly been caused by the boom in biofuels, which require vast amounts of grain, but even more by increasing appetites for meat, especially in India and China; producing 1lb of beef in a feedlot, for example, takes 7lbs of grain.

GREAT THOUGHTS OF GEORGE W. BUSH

Just think about what life was like in Afghanistan under the Taliban, with al Qaeda driving the agenda. This is where girls have no rights. You can't worship freely. This is a very dark, grim vision that they believe they must spread far and wide. That's what they think. And one way they achieve their objectives, of course, is to intimidate by death. There's no rules with these people. There's just - so America has got to understand that in order to find them we've got to get in their heads. If you're facing a nation, you can find the nation. If you're facing people that burry [sic] in failed states you've got to understand how to find them.

BLOOMBERG, NYC COPS RUN HAYWIRE WITH MASSIVE POT ARRESTS

NAT HENTOFF, VILLAGE VOCE I have never seen such systematic dishonesty and contempt for the law as those documented in the 102-page report, "Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City 1997-2007," by Professor Harry Levine of Queens College and Deborah Peterson Small, executive director of Break the Chains. In 2007 alone, there were 39,700 misdemeanor arrests for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. But such possession hasn't been a crime in New York State since the Marijuana Reform Act of 1977. Under that law, which is still in effect, an offender can usually expect to get only a ticket, punishable by a fine of not more than $100.

But most of the 353,000 New Yorkers arrested for having these small amounts from 1997 to 2006 got much more than a ticket: They were handcuffed, photographed, and fingerprinted, held overnight, arraigned in criminal court, plagued with permanent criminal records, and charged with the crime of having marijuana "burning or open to public view.". . .

The report also notes. . . "Mayor Bloomberg and other prominent politicians [and the FBI] have urged collecting DNA from everyone arrested for anything whatsoever, including, therefore, marijuana possession."

GAY PENGUINS: THE MOST OBJECTIONABLE BOOK IN AMERICA

NEWS, AUSTRALIA The tale of a pair of gay penguins who adopt a chick has once again topped the 'objectionable' list in US libraries. 'And Tango Makes Three' is a children's picture book published in 2005 about a family of penguins – with two fathers. It is the most 'challenged' book in public schools and libraries for the second year in a row, according to the American Libraries Association.

The ALA defines a "challenge" as a "formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness." "The complaints are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don't agree with that," Judith Krug, director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, told AP.

Other books hitting the Top Ten complained about include Maya Angelou's memoir 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,' in which Angelou writes of being raped as a child; Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' long attacked for racism; and Philip Pullman's 'The Golden Compass,' which is widely perceived to be pro-atheism.

DON'T CRY FOR ME, ARKANSAS

Nostalgic moments from the Clinton years

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2001 - Robert Haas, one of the Northrop Grumman contractors who discovered and worked on the missing e–mail at the Clinton–Gore White House, has revealed that after he was threatened to keep his mouth shut about what he had discovered, someone anonymously left a death list on his chair of 58 people who had died during the Clinton–Gore Administration. Linda Tripp testified that a similar death list was left on her chair on at least two occasions during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

BREVITAS

WORD

Moderation in temper is always a virtue. But moderation in principle is always a vice. -- Tom Paine

OUTLYING PRECINCTS

The Louisiana Democratic Party's hopes this fall of winning two congressional seats long held by Republicans could be dashed by a potential crippling revolt within its base. If Barack Obama wins the presidential nomination, Democratic candidates in Louisiana and other states could be swept into office by a massive African-American turnout. Yet some black legislators here have their own ideas about who should ride Sen. Obama's wave. Sen. Lydia Jackson of Shreveport, in the 4th District, and Rep. Michael Jackson of Baton Rouge, in the 6th District, say they are considering running for Congress in the fall as independents. As such, they would go directly onto the November ballot without having to survive one or two Democratic primaries against better-funded white candidates. African-American voters comprise 31 percent of the 4th District, 30 percent of the 6th and 24 percent of the 7th. Bayou Buzz

ACTIVISM

John Halle makes the case for a general strike next May Day, a tool used around the world, but not typically found in the American activist playbook.

FURTHERMORE. . .

Jeff Stein, CQ The State Department says it has found the 400 laptops that CQ reported were unaccounted for last week. A senior official in the department's Office of the Inspector General, speaking only on a not-for-attribution basis, acknowledged that managers in the Diplomatic Security service had lost track of the computers, which are destined for friendly foreign police services. But he said that they were located "within 24 hours" after CQ reported them missing over the weekend. "We didn't start looking until Monday morning, and found that this may have been an internal management count (problem)," the official said. "By the end of the afternoon they found out they were in Springfield or Herndon or wherever they're stored before they go overseas." CQ also reported May 2 that Mark Duda, a representative of the inspector general's office . . . warned the managers that they needed to get on top of the equipment issue before it "blows up." Duda said a scandal loomed akin to the one that engulfed the Veterans Administration in 2006, when news broke that a VA official had taken home a laptop with the personal records of 26 million veterans, which was subsequently stolen.

Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted says lawmakers determining whether Attorney General Marc Dann should be impeached over a sex scandal need help from an unlikely source: the attorney general himself.

Husted said Wednesday the House isn't equipped to investigate whether Dann has committed any impeachable offenses. He says it would be helpful if Dann appointed an independent investigator to review all the information from the scandal.

U.S. OWES NEARLY $3 BILLION TO U.N.

PAPERS OF TOP WHITEWATER INVESTIGATION AIDE SUGGEST MAJOR HILLARY CLINTON LYING, POSSIBLE HUSH MONEY FOR WEBSTER HUBBELL

Another scoop from Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, one of the best reporters on the Clinton scandal stories. The papers confirm a number of items reported by the Progressive Review including the apparent hush money for Webster Hubbell

JERRY SEPER, WASHINGTON TIMES A decade before Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted fudging the truth during the presidential campaign, federal prosecutors quietly assembled hundreds of pages of evidence suggesting she concealed information and misled a federal grand jury about her work for a failing Arkansas savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater probe, according to once-secret documents that detail the internal debates over whether she should have faced criminal charges.

Ordinarily, such files containing grand jury evidence and prosecutors' deliberations are never made public. But the estate of Sam Dash, a lifelong Democrat who served as the ethics adviser to Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, donated his documents from the infamous 1990s investigation to the Library of Congress after his 2004 death, unwittingly injecting into the public domain much of the testimony and evidence gathered against Mrs. Clinton from former law partners, White House aides and other witnesses.

The documents, reviewed by The Washington Times, identify numerous instances in which prosecutors questioned Mrs. Clinton's honesty. . .

For instance, the papers say prosecutors thought Mrs. Clinton first concealed her legal representation of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association - and the money she made doing it - during the 1992 presidential campaign when she and her husband, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, came under fire in a questionable Arkansas real estate project known as Whitewater.

Beginning in March 1992 and continuing over the next several years, Mrs. Clinton steadfastly denied that she ever "earned a penny" in representing her Rose Law Firm clients, including the failing thrift's owners, James and Susan McDougal - the Clintons' partners in the Whitewater Development Corp. project.

But the newly discovered records, more than 1,100 pages in 30 separate documents, tell a different story.

A June 1998 draft indictment of Mrs. Clinton's Rose firm partner Webster L. Hubbell, who followed the Clintons to Washington in 1993 as associate attorney general, said Mrs. Clinton did legal work for Madison "continuously" from April 1985 to July 1986. It also said she represented the thrift before the Arkansas Securities Department for approval to issue preferred stock, helped Madison obtain a questionable broker-dealer license to sell the stock and was actively involved in a failed Madison project known as Castle Grande.

The draft indictment clearly asserts that Mrs. Clinton, despite her denials, represented Madison and its projects "in a series of real estate and financial transactions." A separate 183-page report included in the Dash documents said Mr. Hubbell and Mrs. Clinton "concealed from federal investigators the true nature of their work" with Madison and its various entities.

Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson disputed the allegations. "This is a baseless accusation which was looked into over a decade ago in an investigation that took $71.5 million and eight years to determine there was no case," he said. . .

In April 1998, Whitewater prosecutors, divided over Mrs. Clinton's truthfulness, argued over whether to indict her on charges of lying under oath about her legal work for Madison. Lawyers and others close to the probe said a draft indictment of the first lady became "a work in progress" after Mrs. Clinton's January 1996 grand jury appearance in U.S. District Court in Washington.

Prosecutors concluded at the time, the sources said, that she had testified falsely in denying doing legal work in the Castle Grande venture.

"There is concern among some about how successful they might be in bringing a criminal indictment against Mrs. Clinton for obvious reasons, but there is no lack of desire to do so," one lawyer familiar with the probe said at the time. The lawyer said the decision rested on two major points: whether there was sufficient evidence to contradict her sworn testimony and, more importantly, whether prosecutors could win the case in court.

No indictment was sought, but Whitewater prosecutors noted at the time, according to the Dash documents, that sworn statements by Mrs. Clinton were contradictory and misleading and that her involvement with Madison"s failed real estate project known as Castle Grande project was only fully detailed with the discovery of her Rose firm billing record summaries in the White House living quarters in January 1996 - two years after they had been subpoenaed.

A week before the summaries were found, the Resolution Trust Corp. said in a Dec. 28, 1995, report it had little information on Mrs. Clinton's ties to Madison or Castle Grande. After their discovery, the agency concluded Mrs. Clinton was more involved with the two entities than was previously known.

The summaries said Mrs. Clinton billed Madison for 60 hours of legal work, spoke with Madison officials about the Castle Grande project on 14 occasions, discussed legal matters with Madison's owners - the McDougals - 16 times, had 28 meetings with Rose firm lawyers on Madison, and met with state regulators about Madison at least twice.

At the time, Madison was seeking help from Mrs. Clinton's Rose Law Firm in Little Rock to fend off state and federal regulators concerned that the thrift was insolvent. Madison also wanted to jump-start a questionable preferred stock deal to pump much-needed cash into the operation and was desperate to keep the government from shutting it down. . .

In a report titled "Hubbell Hush Money Summary," Whitewater investigators said that a day before Mr. Hubbell quit, Mrs. Clinton and other top administration officials met privately at the White House to arrange for him to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees at a time his cooperation in the Whitewater probe could have resulted in charges against the then-first lady.

The records said Mrs. Clinton took an active role in White House efforts to "take care of" Mr. Hubbell financially, helping to locate campaign supporters who divvied up more than $450,000 over the next nine months mostly for consulting work he never did. . .

Mr. Hubbell pleaded guilty in December 1994 to mail fraud and income-tax evasion in the theft of $482,410 from his Rose firm clients and partners and failing to pay $143,747 in taxes. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison, serving 16 before being released.

The Whitewater probe ended on March 21, 2002, when Independent Counsel Robert W. Ray, who succeeded Mr. Starr, concluded in a final report there was "insufficient evidence" to bring charges against the Clintons. But the report also said statements by the Clintons to investigators were "factually inaccurate" and that White House delays in the production of evidence and the "unmeritorious litigation" by its lawyers "severely impeded the investigation's progress."

MAKING IT EASIER TO FIND RON PAUL SUPPORTERS

PAULVILLE The goal of Paulville is to establish gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters and or people that live by the ideals of freedom and liberty. The process is forming a co-op of people buying shares in the community and these people would be granted land use at a minimum of 1 acre per share, for as long as they homesteaded the land. The community would be privately held by the co-op to establish private property for the general community thus preserving the community is 100% freedom and liberty lovers. The community votes on all community efforts, such as utilities etc. However no one is forced to consume these utilities and or pay for them, AKA people can be off grid on their share of land. This is in line with the ideals that you're free to live your life the way you want and not be forced to do or pay for other people's life styles you may not agree with. These communities are not for the faint at heard they will start as undeveloped land in non city locals, as this is the way to secure large tracts of land needed for these efforts.

However the goal is a minimal financial outlay of around $500 per share to establish this community.

URBAN FARMING GROWS INTO A BUSINESS

TRACIE MCMILLAN, NY TIMES For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block. This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles. . .

The city's cultivators are a varied lot. The high school students at the Added Value community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, last year supplied Italian arugula, Asian greens and heirloom tomatoes to three restaurants, a community-supported agriculture buying club and two farmers' markets.

In the South Bronx a group of gardens called La Familia Verde started a farmers' market in 2003 to sell surpluses of herbs like papalo and the Caribbean green callaloo. . .

The city's success with urban farming will receive international attention on Saturday when, during an 11-day conference in New York, 60 delegates from the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development are scheduled to visit Hands and Hearts, the Bed-Stuy Farm and two traditional community gardens in Brooklyn.

There was not always so much enthusiasm for city farming, though.

John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental officials dismissed the idea. " 'Oh, you could never grow enough stuff with the urban markets,' " he said he was told. 'That can't be done. You have to have farmers.' "

But local officials have come around. . .

On a fringe of Philadelphia, a nonprofit demonstration project used densely planted rows in a half-acre plot and generated $67,000 from high-value crops like lettuces, carrots and radishes.

In Milwaukee, the nonprofit Growing Power operates a one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats - and grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.

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