Really, I don't have time to blog this, but of course I am paying some attention. Lucky for me, some other good blogger has already gotten the essence:
"Their overriding goals at that time (late 2003) would have been clear: protect the President and the Vice President, and delay the case beyond the 2004 elections. " which is exactly what Judith's trip to jail [Did she pass go? Did she collect the $200?] got them. Whatever happens to Libby, Bush and Cheny and the neocons are still in power.
Daily Kos: The Irony of Plamegate: The System Worked: "But one other thought is gnawing at me, and crowding out all of the others: the idea that this outcome is exactly what the Bush Administration hoped to get, back in mid/late-2003 when they first realized that they had screwed up, and they first realized that this episode had the chance to unmask and expose their venality and lies - not just about Valerie Plame, but about the entire leadup to the war in Iraq."

Busy here with studying, and not even enough time to follow the fall of cheney. But lets not let that blind us to the right, as it were.
Gunning for the Poor: "A revolt of House conservatives has persuaded that body's Republican leadership to offset the increased federal spending going to rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast by reductions in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the indigent. If things go according to plan, this week the House will begin to cut $50 billion from those efforts."

LA times here begins a series on working Americans. They focus on the idea that financial risks have been shifted to the workers as numerous safety nets have been shredded.
If America Is Richer, Why Are Its Families So Much Less Secure? - Los Angeles Times: "A broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil � stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions, short unemployment spells, long-lasting unemployment benefits and well-funded job training programs � have been scaled back or have vanished altogether.

'Working Americans are on a financial tightrope,' said Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, who is writing a book called 'The Great Risk Shift.' 'Business and government used to see it as their duty to provide safety nets against the worst economic threats we face. But more and more, they're yanking them away.'"

So right after we have lost track of the victims of Katrina, after the pictures on our TV screens have faded, the Republicans seem to have forgotten all about the poor. They are still trumpeting tax cuts for the rich, and program cuts for the poor, who sill have enven less access to health care, housing, and food stamps. Great Ideas, Guys.
House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending: "Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other GOP leaders quashed demands within their party for budget cuts to pay for the soaring cost of hurricane relief."

Was it racism?
For weeks we have been hearing charges of racism in connection with the response to Katrina. “President Bush doesn’t care about black people.” “It wasn’t’ about race, it was about class.” Laura Bush called charges of racism “disgusting.”

So was it racism? If so, where can we locate it? If not, why do the charges seem to touch such a nerve?
As a historian, my job is to making meaning of disparate facts. So, first of all, what is racism? According to philosopher, and holocaust survivor Albert Memmi, racism is a distinct process, with four steps:

1. stressing the real or imaginary differences between the racist and his victim
2. assigning values to these differences to the advantage of the racist and the detriment of his victim
3. trying to make them absolutes by generalizing from them and claiming that they are final
4. Justifying any present or possible aggression or privilege.

If racism was involved, I argue that the location was the Superdome: it was in response to the suffering of the people stuck there that the charges of racism first erupted, and it was in the superdome itself that the rumors of violence swirled. These stories spread as rumors, and were repeated by the mayor and more important the police commissioner. The national guard was cowering behind a partition, afraid to aid the storms evacuees in the hellish darkness. They insisted on waiting until they had a 1000 man swat team, and when they did get in, they found no thugs, only old people dying of heat exhaustion and dehydration
So why were the stories so believable? And why was the police chief spreading them, and why was even the mayor spreading them? Did “city officials” tell the busses waiting on the outskirts of the city, that it was “too dangerous” to evacuate those waiting in line in front of the convention center?
Those held in the superdome were victims of the believability of a story, a series of rumors, that led everyone to picture a hell-hole full of gun toting thugs and child rapists, instead of a hell hole of heat and darkness swallowing poor families who were trying to keep their loved ones alive. The different imagined picture actually created the emergency, and the feat and exacerbated the condition in the superdome, and delayed the aid. They were victims of racism.

NOLA.com: T-P Orleans Parish Breaking News Weblog: "As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know."

Dear blog followers,
I have had to cut back in order to "Focus" on my up-coming comprehensive exams for the Phd. (in U.S. History) But sometime I can't help myself-so herewith,
Representations of Fashion: Runway Remake
a href="PARIS
At John Galliano's spring runway show over the weekend, it was difficult to gauge whether the audience responded most raucously to the fat lady in the black strapless gown with the mountain of ruffles barely containing the deep valley of her cleavage, or the midget in the pale pink jacket with the bows jutting out from her child-size shoulders, or the old woman in the gray blazer with her fedora pimped to the side.">Citizen Models: "PARIS
At John Galliano's spring runway show over the weekend, it was difficult to gauge whether the audience responded most raucously to the fat lady in the black strapless gown with the mountain of ruffles barely containing the deep valley of her cleavage, or the midget in the pale pink jacket with the bows jutting out from her child-size shoulders, or the old woman in the gray blazer with her fedora pimped to the side."
"The Saturday night show was set against a backdrop that called to mind the confluence of a carnival sideshow and a burlesque theater. There was a Thumbelina-size woman in jeans and a nearly transparent blouse and a gentleman in yard-long, auburn dreadlocks who looked like a Rastafarian Rumpelstiltskin. Redheaded twin girls wore complementary gold party dresses. The models, as always, were chosen for their unusual physical attributes. But instead of selecting only aberrantly tall young women who weigh 110 pounds, there were beanpole men, tiny old folks, models with jet-black skin and others almost as pale as an albino. The extremes of humanity were drawn together in a celebration of diversity. It was fashion taking on some of its worse biases: fat, old and ugly.

And it was uncomfortable."

"Wingnuts vs Toadies"
Harriet? People have been asking for my opinion,
I am going with josh marshall on this one. Enjoy the show.
Media Notes Extra: "Certainly one thing to do is sit back and relish the brewing fight between the principled wingnuts and the confirmed Bush toadies. At the same time, it must be occurring to at least some Dems that, at least in ideological terms, they could likely do far worse than Miers."

what else can I say? Naturally this is not in a US paper.
Independent Online Edition > Americas : app4: "Relief efforts to combat Hurricane Katrina suffered near catastrophic failures due to endemic corruption, divisions within the military and troop shortages caused by the Iraq war, an official American inquiry into the disaster has revealed. "

Abortion is no longer the issue. That has been my personal growing feeling for some time, and I am happy to see this confirmation in the NYT. No matter what happens, we can never put the right to abortion back into the back-alley closet. It just will not go quietly into the night and stay hidden. I am sure that even the right wing pro-lifers know this, and all but the true cult followers know that their ride on the red herring of abortion politics is coming to an end. Of course, you can see this in the new emphasis on same sex marriage, immigration, and english only, among other issues. What's next? I wish I knew.
Abortion Might Outgrow Its Need for Roe v. Wade - New York Times: "Even if the court restricts or eliminates the right to an abortion, the often-raised specter of a return to back-alley abortions is not likely to be realized, said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, president of Gynuity Health Services, a nonprofit group that supports access to abortion. 'The conditions that existed before 1973 were much different than what they are in 2005,' she said. 'We have better antibiotics now and better surgical treatments.' "

Quid Pro Quo: the central concept of DeLay's protection racket was esentially the same as Soapy Smith's deal with Denver Republicans to control the police commission in 1889.
Post Bosses Get An Earful: "The central vision of DeLayism is of a political system whereby business gains almost total control over the Republican agenda, and in return the GOP gains unlimited financial influence over the electoral process.'"

Back to the big raketeering gang in the house:

Post Bosses Get An Earful: "Newsweek's Jonathan Alter eviscerates what he calls Tom DeLay's 'House of Shame':"
"Never before has the leadership of the House been hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for ordinary people. These folks borrow like banana republics and spend like Tip O'Neill on speed.

"I have no idea if DeLay has technically broken the law. What interests me is how this moderate, evenly divided nation came to be ruled on at least one side of Capitol Hill by a zealot. This is a man who calls the Environmental Protection Agency 'the Gestapo of government' and favors repealing the Clean Air Act because 'it's never been proven that air toxins are hazardous to people'; who insists repeatedly that judges on the other side of issues 'need to be intimidated' and rejects the idea of a separation of church and state; who claims there are no parents trying to raise families on the minimum wage--that 'fortunately, such families do not exist' (at least Newt Gingrich was intrigued by the challenges of poverty); who once said: 'A woman can't take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure.' I could go on all day. Congress has always had its share of extremists. But the DeLay era is the first time the fringe has ever been in charge."
But, parent;hetically, the most corrupt House in history? that may take some qualification.

Power and Influence, biz as usual
DeLay's Influence Transcends His Title: "DeLay in his decade of steering the Republican caucus dramatically -- and in many cases inalterably -- changed how power is amassed and used on Capitol Hill and well beyond.
Proteges of the wounded Texan still hold virtually every position of influence in the House, including the office of speaker. DeLay's former staff members are securely in the lobbying offices for many of the largest corporations and business advocacy groups."
But even more than people, DeLay's lasting influence is an ethos. He stood for a view of Washington as a battlefield on which two sides struggle relentlessly, moderates and voices of compromise are pushed to the margins, and the winners presume they have earned the right to punish dissenters and reward their own side with financial and policy favors.

His take-no-prisoners style of fundraising -- in which the classic unstated bargain of access for contributions is made explicitly and without apology -- has been adopted by both parties in Congress, according to lawmakers, lobbyists and congressional scholars. Democrats, likewise, increasingly are trying to emulate DeLay-perfected methods for enforcing caucus discipline -- rewarding lawmakers who follow the dictums of party leaders and seeking retribution against those who do not.

The big protection racket- view from over the pond
Will Hutton in the Observer
The Observer | Comment | Something stinks in America: "DeLay's indictment is symptomatic of a conservative over-reach and endemic corruption that will trigger, at the very least, a retreat and maybe even more. "
The story begins in the murky world of campaign finance and the grey area of quasi-corruption, kickbacks and personal favours that now define the American political system. American politicians need ever more cash to fight their political campaigns and gerrymander their constituencies, so creating the political truth that incumbents rarely lose. US corporations are the consistent suppliers of the necessary dollars and Republican politicians increasingly are the principal beneficiaries. Complicated rules exist to try to ensure the relationship between companies and politicians is as much at arm's length as possible; the charge against DeLay is that he drove a coach and horses through the rules.

If DeLay were another Republican politician or even a typical majority leader of the House, the political world could shrug its shoulders. Somebody got caught, but little will change. But DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.

The K Street Project is little known outside the Washington beltway and its effectiveness as a political stratagem is only possible because of the unique importance of campaign finance to American politics. DeLay, together with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and some conservative activists, notably the ubiquitous Grover Norquist who runs the anti-state, anti-tax lobby group 'Americans for Tax Reform', conceived the notion 10 years ago that they should use the Republican majority in the House as a lever to ensure that the lobbyists, law firms and trade associations that inhabit Washington's K Street, heart of the industry, should only employ Republicans or sympathisers. To be a Democrat was to bear the mark of Cain; K Street was to be a Democrat-free zone.

This, if it could be pulled off, would have multiple pay-backs. Special-interest groups and companies have always greased the palms of American law-makers and because of lack of party discipline, they have had to grease Democrat and Republican palms alike to get the legislation they wanted. DeLay's ambition was to construct such a disciplined Republican party that lobbyists would not need Democrats, and so create an inside track in which the only greased palms from legislators to lobbyists would be Republican.

Lobbyists, law firms and trade associations should be told not to employ Democrats, so progressively excluding them from access to the lucrative channels of campaign finance. Democrats would become both poorer and politically diminished at a stroke and the Republicans would become richer and politically hegemonic.

It has worked. The most influential Washington lobbyist is Barbour, Griffiths and Rogers; it employs not a single Democrat. Last year, in a classic operation, House Republicans let the Motion Picture Association of America (the film industry lobby group) know that appointing a Democrat, Dan Glickman, as its head would mean $1.5 billion of tax relief for the film industry was now in peril. Glickman staffed up the MPAA with Republicans, but the threat remains. In 2003, the Republican National Committee could claim that 33 of the top 36 top-level K Street positions were in Republican hands. Today, it's even closer to a clean sweep.

Corporations get their rewards. The oil and gas industry now gives 80 per cent of its campaign cash to Republicans (20 years ago, the split was roughly 50-50), and influence on this year's energy bill was a classic sting. American petrol can now contain a suspected carcinogen; operators of US natural-gas wells can contaminate water aquifers to improve the yields from the wells; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is open to oil exploration - concessions all created by DeLay's inside track. And to provide ideological juice, there's a bevy of think-tanks, paid for from the same web of contributions, cranking out the justification that the 'state' and 'regulation' are everywhere and always wrong.

But central to the operation is DeLay's mastery of the party in the House. To get two more Republican votes in his pocket, he organised a gerrymander in Texas to create two more seats in the 2004 election and gave the Republican campaign there some extra campaign money. The trouble was, alleges the DA, the cash from Washington originally came from Texan companies, which are forbidden directly to back individual candidates and that DeLay devised the illegal scheme.

DeLay vigorously insists he's the victim of a partisan stitch-up, surely a case of the biter bit? Yet the scope for misdirection of political funds is huge. Michael Scanlon, DeLay's director of communications for six years, is under criminal investigation together with partner Jack Abramoff for the way they used $66 million, paid by 11 casino-owning native American tribes over three years into their K Street operation, and which seems to have financed, among other extraordinary expenditures, a DeLay golf trip to Scotland. Nobody checks too much on how their money is deployed as long as it brings results - access, tax breaks and legislative concessions. DeLay, Scanlon and Abramoff belong to the same culture.

In Congress, moderate Republicans don't want guilt by association and companies value their reputation. The K Street Project stinks, along with all those associated with it. So far, the US media have been supine. DeLay's tentacles, and those of Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, have cowed media owners into the same compliance; if they want favours, best advance the Republican cause like Murdoch's Fox News. American newsrooms are fearful places.

Two Americas: New Deal programs as "affirmative action for whites"
History News Network:During Jim Crow's last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.

Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education, homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle class. At no other time in American history had so much money and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing its education, entering the workforce and forming families.

But most blacks were left out of all this. Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions and took advantage of American federalism to ensure that national policies would not disturb their region's racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions and access to labor unions. Benefits for veterans were administered locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal government. Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for example, only two were offered to black veterans.

Is he kidding: shades of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson?
USATODAY.com - Bush sees progress in Iraq war effort: "Bush sees progress in Iraq war effort
WASHINGTON (AP) � President Bush said Saturday he is encouraged by the increasing size and capability of the Iraqi security forces,"
The upbeat remarks in Bush's weekly radio address came two days after the top commander in Iraq said only one Iraqi battalion is ready to fight without U.S. support

Vietnam Redux?
I have to let you know that I have been reading Marilyn Young's stunning, and depressing account of the vietnam wars beginning with the withdrawal of the French after dien-bien phu. That the US foreignpolicy establishment never could admit that the US forces were the problem there is so appalling, and defines the last half of the twentieth century. While others default to the old foreign policy excuse for whatever you want to do, "realism" Robert Dean, in his masterful "Imperial Brotherhood" explains it as misplaced masculinity. Nevertheless, I have been waiting and waiting for our current military leaders to wake up and realize that when the iraqui militants say that US forces are the probelm, they mean it. But more important, the old vietnam military methods of securing a town, destroying a village to save it, seem to be back in play. The surprising thing, is that only the LA Times has this story.
U.S. Generals Now See Virtues of a Smaller Troop Presence in Iraq - Los Angeles Times: "WASHINGTON � The U.S. generals running the war in Iraq presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem."
During a trip to Washington, the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East.
For all these reasons, they said, a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops was imperative.

American officials backtracked on their expectations of what the U.S. military can achieve in Iraq months ago. But this week's comments showed that commanders believe a large U.S. force in Iraq might in fact be creating problems as well as solutions.

"This has been hinted at before, but it's a big shift for them to be saying that publicly," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It means they recognize that there is a cost to staying just as there is a benefit to staying. And this has not really been factored in as a central part of the strategy before."

Old Fraud: followup.
2 Accused of Aiding Fraud at Adelphia - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (AP) - The Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday accused two Deloitte & Touche accountants who audited the books of the cable TV operator Adelphia Communications Corporation of aiding the company's accounting fraud in 2000.
The S.E.C. announced the administrative action against the accountants, Gregory Dearlove and William Caswell, on charges of improper professional conduct.
Mr. Caswell agreed to settle the case by being barred for at least two years from auditing a public company. He neither admitted nor denied the allegations. "