U.S. Faces More Distrust From World, Poll Shows

“Anti-Americanism since 2002 has deepened, but it hasn’t really widened,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. “It has worsened among America’s European allies and is very, very bad in the Muslim world. But there is still a favorable view of the United States in many African countries, as well as in ‘New Europe’ and the Far East.”

Nonetheless, majorities in many countries reject the main planks of current United States foreign policy and express distaste for American-style democracy, the survey found.

Respondents worldwide not only want the United States to pull its troops out of Iraq “as soon as possible,” but also seek a rapid end to the American and NATO military intervention in Afghanistan, now in its sixth year. The poll found growing wariness toward other major powers as well. Concerns over China’s economic and military might have tarnished its image in many nations, the poll found, and confidence in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has dropped sharply.

The survey was conducted in April and May in the Palestinian territories and in 46 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, and includes more than 45,000 respondents. It found that concern about global warming has soared in the last five years. Most respondents agree that the environment is in trouble and most blame the United States and, to a much more limited degree, China, according to the survey.

Negative views of Iran have intensified, including in some Muslim countries, the survey found, and respondents in almost all countries surveyed expressed overwhelming opposition to acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.

Link

Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts

No surprise here....

As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty.

How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved.

And a local connection.....

Still, a similar pattern was evident in a Minnesota database that was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times this year. As in Vermont, psychiatrists earned on aggregate the most in Minnesota, with payments ranging from $51 to $689,000. The Times found that psychiatrists who took the most money from makers of antipsychotic drugs tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often.

Declassified C.I.A. Archives Detail Illegal Activities

Documents released...

Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A.’s existence.

The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations during the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation during that period. Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the C.I.A. still cannot bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists, Congressional investigators and a presidential commission are not detailed in the papers.

But nothing new to report......

The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype

As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.

Link

The Health Care Debate

I want this post to focus on a comparison of the various Health Care options that are being proposed or implemented by different states and countries.....

Ezra Klein wrote this article discussing the various programs that are in different countries as well as our own VHA

Canada

Canada's is a single-payer, rather than a socialized, system. That means the government is the primary purchaser of services, but the providers themselves are private. (In a socialized system, the physicians, nurses, and so forth are employed by the government.) The virtue of both the single-payer and the socialized systems, as compared with a largely private system, is that the government can wield its market share to bargain down prices -- which, in all of our model systems, including the VHA, it does.

France

It's a common lament among health-policy wonks that the world's best health-care system resides in a country Americans are particularly loath to learn from. Yet France's system is hard to beat. Where Canada's system has a high floor and a low ceiling, France's has a high floor and no ceiling. The government provides basic insurance for all citizens, albeit with relatively robust co-pays, and then encourages the population to also purchase supplementary insurance -- which 86 percent do, most of them through employers, with the poor being subsidized by the state. This allows for as high a level of care as an individual is willing to pay for, and may help explain why waiting lines are nearly unknown in France.

France's system is further prized for its high level of choice and responsiveness -- attributes that led the World Health Organization to rank it the finest in the world (America's system came in at No. 37, between Costa Rica and Slovenia). The French can see any doctor or specialist they want, at any time they want, as many times as they want, no referrals or permissions needed. The French hospital system is similarly open. About 65 percent of the nation's hospital beds are public, but individuals can seek care at any hospital they want, public or private, and receive the same reimbursement rate no matter its status. Given all this, the French utilize more care than Americans do, averaging six physician visits a year to our 2.8, and they spend more time in the hospital as well. Yet they still manage to spend half per capita than we do, largely due to lower prices and a focus on preventive care.

Great Britain

I include Great Britain not because its health system is very good but because its health system is very cheap. Per capita spending in Great Britain hovers around 40 percent what it is in the United States, and outcomes aren't noticeably worse. The absolute disparity between what we pay and what they get illuminates a troublesome finding in the health-care literature: Much of the health care we receive appears to do very little good, but we don't yet know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Purchasing less of it, however, doesn't appear to do much damage.

What's interesting is that many of the trade-offs that our health-care system downplays, the English system emphasizes. Where our medical culture encourages near-infinite amounts of care, theirs subtly dissuades lavish health spending, preferring to direct finite funds to other priorities.

Germany

The German system offers a possible model for those who want to retain the insurance industry but end its ability to profit by pricing out the sick and shifting financial risk onto individuals. The German system's insurers are 300 or so different "sickness funds" that act both as both payers and purchasers for their members' care. Originally, each fund covered only a particular region, profession, or company, but now each one has open enrollment. All, however, are heavily regulated, not for profit, and neither fully private nor publicly owned. The funds can't charge different prices based on age or health status, and they must continue covering members even when the members lose the job or status that got them into the fund in the first place. The equivalent would be if you could retain membership in your company's health-care plan after leaving the company.

The Veterans Health Administration

Indeed, the VHA's lead in care quality isn't disputed. A New England Journal of Medicine study from 2003 compared the VHA with fee-for-service Medicare on 11 measures of quality. The VHA came out "significantly better" on every single one. The Annals of Internal Medicine pitted the VHA against an array of managed-care systems to see which offered the best treatment for diabetics. The VHA triumphed in all seven of the tested metrics. The National Committee for Quality Assurance, meanwhile, ranks health plans on 17 different care metrics, from hypertension treatment to adherence to evidence-based treatments. As Phillip Longman, the author of Best Care Anywhere, a book chronicling the VHA's remarkable transformation, explains: "Winning NCQA's seal of approval is the gold standard in the health-care industry. And who do you suppose is the highest ranking health care system? Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the veterans health care system outperforms the highest-rated non-VHA hospitals."

What makes this such an explosive story is that the VHA is a truly socialized medical system. The unquestioned leader in American health care is a government agency that employs 198,000 federal workers from five different unions, and nonetheless maintains short wait times and high consumer satisfaction. Eighty-three percent of VHA hospital patients say they are satisfied with their care, 69 percent report being seen within 20 minutes of scheduled appointments, and 93 percent see a specialist within 30 days.

California

Every California resident who meets a residency requirement will be covered.

Benefits will be comprehensive. Coverage includes all care prescribed by a patient’s health care provider that meets accepted standards of care and practice. Specifically, coverage includes hospital, medical, surgical and mental health; dental and vision care; skilled nursing care after hospitalization; substance abuse recovery programs; health education and translation services, including services for those with hearing and vision impairments; transportation needed to access covered services, diagnostic testing, and hospice care.

Consumers choose a primary care physician from among all licensed providers, including solo practitioners, integrated health care systems, or group medical practices. The primary care physician refers consumers to needed specialists.

There are no co-payments or deductibles when the system begins. Two years after the system goes into effect, this policy will be reviewed.

Employers will no longer have the responsibility each year to choose the plans to offer their employees and will no longer have to pass on premium costs to employees. This will save employers time and money and will improve employee relations.

Healthy Americans Act

As the health insurance crisis in America begins to pick up steam, this proposal from the end of last year offers some market driven options for those that are insured and those that are not insured.

The plan, known as the Healthy Americans Act:

-- guarantees private health care coverage that cannot be taken away for all Americans;
-- provides benefits for all Americans equal to those of Members of Congress;
-- provides incentives for individuals and insurers to focus on prevention, wellness and disease management;
-- provides tough cost containment and saves $1.48 trillion over 10 years; and
-- is fully paid for by spending the $2.2 trillion currently spent on health care in America.

Under The Healthy Americans Act individuals will choose from a variety of plans offered in their state providing coverage similar to what is currently available to Members of Congress. State-based Health Help Agencies (HHAs) will guide individuals through the enrollment process. HHAs will provide unbiased information about the state’s competing private health plans that will in turn empower individuals—rather than their employers—to choose the best private plans for them and their families. HHAs also will connect individuals and families with sliding scale premium reduction to ensure everyone can afford care. Most individuals and families will qualify for health care tax deductions.

Also under the Healthy Americans Act, subscribers will not be charged co-pays for preventive services or chronic disease management. Insurers will be able to offer discounts and other incentives based on participation in wellness programs such as nutrition counseling, tobacco cessation and exercise. Primary care physicians will be reimbursed for investing time in chronic disease management and prevention. And with Health Help Agencies publishing consumer-oriented information on every plan’s success in prevention and disease management, insurance companies will ultimately be competing to keep Americans healthy.

For those who already have existing health problems, occupation, gender, genetic information and age will no longer be allowed to impact your eligibility or the price you pay for insurance.

From a Few Genes, Life’s Myriad Shapes

Another interesting piece form the NY Times on Evolution and Science..

Since its humble beginnings as a single cell, life has evolved into a spectacular array of shapes and sizes, from tiny fleas to towering Tyrannosaurus rex, from slow-soaring vultures to fast-swimming swordfish, and from modest ferns to alluring orchids. But just how such diversity of form could arise out of evolution’s mess of random genetic mutations — how a functional wing could sprout where none had grown before, or how flowers could blossom in what had been a flowerless world — has remained one of the most fascinating and intractable questions in evolutionary biology.

Now finally, after more than a century of puzzling, scientists are finding answers coming fast and furious and from a surprising quarter, the field known as evo-devo. Just coming into its own as a science, evo-devo is the combined study of evolution and development, the process by which a nubbin of a fertilized egg transforms into a full-fledged adult. And what these scientists are finding is that development, a process that has for more than half a century been largely ignored in the study of evolution, appears to have been one of the major forces shaping the history of life on earth.

For starters, evo-devo researchers are finding that the evolution of complex new forms, rather than requiring many new mutations or many new genes as had long been thought, can instead be accomplished by a much simpler process requiring no more than tweaks to already existing genes and developmental plans. Stranger still, researchers are finding that the genes that can be tweaked to create new shapes and body parts are surprisingly few. The same DNA sequences are turning out to be the spark inciting one evolutionary flowering after another. “Do these discoveries blow people’s minds? Yes,” said Dr. Sean B. Carroll, biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The first response is ‘Huh?’ and the second response is ‘Far out.’ ”

“This is the illumination of the utterly dark,” Dr. Carroll added.

For G.I.’s in Iraq, a Harrowing Day Facing a Trap

Account of the daunting task many of the soldiers face in Iraq as they encounter House bombs trying to secure an area.

The enemy was a phantom who never showed his face but transformed a neighborhood into a network of houses rigged to explode.

And the soldiers from Comanche Company’s First Platoon confronted this elaborate and deadly trap.

The platoon’s push began shortly after 4 a.m. on Saturday, as American forces continued their effort to wrest the western section of this city north of Baghdad from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Tracer rounds zipped through the air as the soldiers fired antitank weapons, mortar shells and machine guns at the abandoned houses they planned to inspect across the street.

They calculated that the firepower would blow up any bombs the insurgents might have planted in the houses, while providing cover so the first squads could move south across the thoroughfare.

The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap.

Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive

Iraqi soldiers handed out food and water to residents of Baquba Friday in a humanitarian mission organized by the United States Army

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

In his news conference, General Odierno offered the broadest assessment yet of the multipronged American offensive around Baghdad that got under way this week, using the additional troops sent to Iraq as part of Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Despite the flight of the Qaeda leaders from Baquba — a pattern that appears to have been replicated in other areas included in the new offensive, including Qaeda strongholds along the Tigris River south of Baghdad — he adopted an upbeat tone, saying the offensive held “a good potential” for reducing the Qaeda threat to the point that American force levels in Iraq could be reduced by next spring.

First, he said, American and Iraqi troops would need to sustain their crackdown long enough for Iraqi forces to move into neighborhoods cleared of Qaeda fighters and hold them. This is a pattern American commanders have tried unsuccessfully before, as in a failed attempt to secure wide areas of Baghdad last summer. But General Odierno said Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding an additional 7,500 soldiers to their overall strength every five weeks.

Link

'A Different Understanding With the President'

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Link

CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

Link

Sectarian Fears Percolate in an Iraqi Town

BAQUBA, Iraq, June 21 — After two days of clawing their way toward insurgent strongholds in western Baquba, American troops on Thursday began one of the most delicate phases of the operation: reintroducing the city’s residents to their own army.

For the first time since the assault began, Iraqi soldiers joined the operation in significant numbers. What made the task especially complex was that many of the Sunni residents had little trust for the Shiite-dominated army, a message that became clear during Company A’s sweep through the northwestern part of the city.

The Sunnis have bad recent experiences with the Iraqi Army. The commander of Iraq’s Fifth Division, a Shiite, was replaced by the government this year after American officers accused him of pursuing an overtly sectarian agenda by arresting and harassing Sunnis.

In the face of American pressure, the government rearranged its military command here in Diyala Province. But some residents still have unhappy memories of Iraqi soldiers, who they say ransacked their homes when conducting searches and were generally abusive. Feelings are raw.

Many residents say they feel as if they have been caught between fighters from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Shiite militias and an Iraqi security force that they believe looks at them as little more than insurgents’ allies.

“They used bad words against people,” said a young man in the Mufrek neighborhood, referring to the Iraqi Army.

Still, the Iraqis’ role is essential. The nearly 500 Iraqi soldiers who hit the streets on Thursday represent a fraction of the 2,500 American soldiers who are involved in the Baquba operation, but they nonetheless add to a force that is scouring homes and streets for insurgents, arms caches and the seemingly ever-present buried bombs.

More important, the Iraqi forces represent a critical element of the long-term strategy to maintain control of the city. When the Americans eventually pull back from Baquba, there needs to be some kind of Iraqi force in place to prevent the insurgents from filtering back. The Americans have dominated the assault, but it is the Iraqi security forces that must consolidate the gains.

That mission has proved to be a daunting one for the Iraqis in Baghdad, where the policy of “clear, hold, build” has faltered in the past.

Capt. Kevin A. Salge, the commander of Company A for the First Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, led his soldiers on Thursday on a sweep for insurgent fighters in the northwest section of the city. The Iraqi company that joined the operation essentially doubled the number of troops involved.

They also compensated somewhat for the shortage of interpreters that emerged when half of Company A’s translators declined to venture north from Baghdad for this operation.

Mindful of the strained relationship between the residents and the security forces, the American military seeded the Iraqi soldiers in their own units instead of giving them their own sector to clear. The thought was that this would alleviate some of the residents’ concerns and also enable the Americans to exert more control over the Iraqi soldiers.

“The large Sunni areas distrust the I.A. because of the number of Shias that are in the army,” said Sgt. First Class Eric Beck, using the abbreviation for the Iraqi Army. He added that there was a risk that the Iraqi troops would be too harsh on residents if they were not supervised by the Americans

Link

Study Says Eldest Children Have Higher I.Q.s

The eldest children in families tend to develop slightly higher I.Q.s than their younger siblings, researchers are reporting, based on a large study that could effectively settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between I.Q. and birth order.

The difference in I.Q. between siblings was a result of family dynamics, not biological factors like changes in gestation caused by repeated pregnancies, the study found.

Researchers have long had evidence that first-borns tend to be more dutiful and cautious than their siblings, early in life and later, but previous studies focusing on I.Q. differences were not conclusive. In particular, analyses that were large enough to detect small differences in scores could not control for the vast differences in the way that children in separate families were raised.

The new findings, which is to appear in the journal Science on Friday, are based on detailed records from 241,310 Norwegians, including some 64,000 pairs of brothers, allowing the researchers to carefully compare scores within families, as well as between families. The study found that eldest children scored about three points higher on I.Q. tests than their closest sibling. The difference was an average, meaning that it showed up in most families, but not all of them.

Three points on an I.Q. test, experts said, amount to a slight edge that could be meaningful for someone teetering between an A and a B, for instance, or even possibly between admission to an elite liberal-arts college and the state university, some experts said. They said the results are likely prompt more intensive study into the family dynamics behind such differences.

“I consider this study the most important publication to come out in this field in 70 years; it’s a dream come true,” said Frank J. Sulloway, a psychologist at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California in Berkeley.

Dr. Sulloway, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, added, “There was some room for doubt about this effect before, but that room has now been eliminated."

Link

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind

James Alexander, a student at Piedmont Avenue Elementary in Oakland, Calif., practiced being mindful, using a technique he learned in class.

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson.

The techniques, among them focused breathing and concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”

Link

The Last Throes Of The Occupation?

Smoke billows from the site of an explosion in at a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad, 19 June 2007.

Rudy missing in action for Iraq panel

When faced with the choice to be part of the influential Iraq Study Group and gain much needed Foreign Policy experience or earn millions of dollars through speaking engagements, Rudy chose the money.

WASHINGTON -- Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited "previous time commitments" in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

Giuliani failed to show up for a pair of two-day sessions that occurred during his tenure, the sources said -- and both times, they conflicted with paid public appearances shown on his recent financial disclosure. Giuliani quit the group during his busiest stretch in 2006, when he gave 20 speeches in a single month that brought in $1.7 million.

On one day the panel gathered in Washington -- May 18, 2006 -- Giuliani delivered a $100,000 speech on leadership at an Atlanta business awards breakfast. Later that day, he attended a $100-a-ticket Atlanta political fundraiser for conservative ally Ralph Reed, whom Giuliani hoped would provide a major boost to his presidential campaign.

In Ethiopia, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality

What goes on here seems to be starkly different from the carefully constructed up-and-coming image that Ethiopia — a country that the United States increasingly relies on to fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa — tries to project.

In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.

It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip — and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat.

The Bush administration, particularly the military, considers Ethiopia its best bet in the volatile Horn — which, with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for terrorism.

But an emerging concern for American officials is the way that the Ethiopian military operates inside its own borders, especially in war zones like the Ogaden.

Link

Iran Strategy Stirs Debate at White House

The debate continues between Rice and the Administration.

The debate has pitted Ms. Rice and her deputies, who appear to be winning so far, against the few remaining hawks inside the administration, especially those in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who, according to some people familiar with the discussions, are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

In the year since Ms. Rice announced the new strategy for the United States to join forces with Europe, Russia and China to press Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Iran has installed more than a thousand centrifuges to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that 8,000 or so could be spinning by the end of the year, if Iran surmounts its technical problems.

Those hard numbers are at the core of the debate within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should warn Iran’s leaders that he will not allow them to get beyond some yet-undefined milestones, leaving the implication that a military strike on the country’s facilities is still an option.

Even beyond its nuclear program, Iran is emerging as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and in Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas, which now controls the Gaza Strip.

The Loose Reins on U.S. Teenagers Can Produce Trouble or Entrepreneurs

The Youthful Entrepreneur.

The fact that American schooling is less disciplined than that in other countries gives young creators the time and the energy to accomplish something outside their formal education. Despite his intellectual talents, Ben, in his book, admits that he received indifferent grades and had little emotional attachment to most of his formal schooling. Whenever he could, he used sick days to set up meetings for his business.

The longstanding criticism of the American school system is that even in the better schools, too many students just “get by” rather than engage in a rigorous curriculum. This academic leniency is bad for many average or subpar students, but it also allows some students to flourish. Relatively loose family structures have similar effects; American children are especially likely to be working on their own projects, rather than being directed by parents and elders.

Compared with those in other countries, American children play a much more influential role in society and enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy. American fast food, with its fatty, sweet and bland tastes, is geared toward children, as are many American movies and television shows. Teenagers receive higher allowances, have greater access to credit cards, and have more money to spend on culture, or, in some cases, to spend on starting a business. American labor markets are flexible enough to create a large number of jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. Teenagers are more likely to acquire work experience, and they are more likely to earn a small amount of capital for financing a start-up enterprise.

Palestinian Split Poses a Policy Quandary for U.S.

This NY Times News Analysis discusses the idea that Israel and the US may consider dealing with Fatah and Hamas controlled areas as two separate entities.

JERUSALEM, June 16 — With the two Palestinian territories increasingly isolated from each other by a week of brutal warfare between rival factions, Israel and the United States seem agreed on a policy to treat them as separate entities to support Fatah in the West Bank and squeeze Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The idea is to concentrate Western efforts and money on the occupied West Bank, which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction control, in an effort to make it the shining model of a new Palestine that will somehow bring Gaza, and the radical Islamic group Hamas, to terms.

As Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, who arrives in the United States on Sunday to meet with American officials, said, a Fatah government, shorn of Hamas, “can be a new opening.”

After the failure of the Palestinian unity government, Mr. Olmert said in an interview with The New York Times, “I suggest we look at things in a much more realistic manner and with less self-deceit.”

But like all seemingly elegant solutions in this region, this one has many pitfalls. It is entirely unclear whether Hamas would sit still during such an effort, whether Mr. Abbas would be willing to ignore the 1.5 million residents of Gaza or whether the separation strategy would gain the crucial support of the Arab world.

Photo of the Day

Fatah gunmen attacking Hamas offices in Nablus today.

Palestinian President Dissolves Government

Things continue to get worse in the Middle East as Palestine continues an all-out civil war between Hamas and Fatah. Just another reason why we need to remove ourselves from this region.

JERUSALEM, June 14 — The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, dissolved the unity government today, dismissing the prime minister, Ismail Haniya of Hamas, and announced the establishment of a temporary emergency government until new elections can be held.

Mr. Abbas, who belongs to Fatah, also declared a state of emergency in measures that were announced by his aides in Ramallah and Gaza.

The decisions were taken as Mr. Abbas faced the further collapse of his power as fierce clashes continued and Hamas fighters took over the headquarters of Fatah’s Preventive Security forces and the military intelligence building in Gaza City.

Today’s assaults on Fatah put Hamas close to full control of Gaza. Only the presidential compound of Mr. Abbas and the Suraya headquarters of the National Security Forces, the Palestinian army, remained under Fatah’s control. But Hamas had surrounded Al Suraya, calling on the occupants to surrender, and the compound was under attack today.

Mr. Abbas came under pressure from within Fatah and from some of his other allies to suspend participation in the so-called unity government with Hamas, which began in March, and to declare a state of emergency.

Post-traumatic Iraq syndrome

With the War lost, Christopher J. Fettweis takes a look at what losing actually means. The one flaw he makes as most have done is over-rating the importance of the region. As Oil exports from the region to the US continue to decline over time, the region becomes less and less significantly important.

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history. Vietnam was a much greater moral disaster, of course, and led to far more death and destruction. But, just as the war's critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned out to be strategically irrelevant. Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance of Cold War power did not change.

Iraq has the potential to be far worse. One of the oft-expressed worst-case scenarios for Iraq — a repeat of Lebanon in the 1980s — may no longer be within reach. Lebanon's simmering civil war eventually burned itself out and left a coherent, albeit weak, state in its ashes. Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrollable, lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most vital region in the world.

Blue Dogs Take Aim At Record Deficits

Blue Dog Democrats who helped the Democrats retake Congress last fall are now focused on pushing the issue of a balanced budget to the top of the list for Congressional issues.

The Blue Dog Coalition, a band of more than 40 House Democrats committed to fiscal discipline, plans to introduce legislation today that would impose caps on some spending, enshrine pay-as-you-go rules in federal law and authorize automatic spending cuts to enforce them. The group also wants to amend the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget and to create an array of budget provisions that would focus more attention on what it sees as pork-barrel spending.

Palestinian Leaders Targeted in Rising Violence

Things are beginning to really break down in Palestine as fighting grows towards a civil war.

JERUSALEM, June 12 — Gunmen of Hamas and Fatah, ignoring pleas from Egypt and from the Palestinian president, sharply escalated their fight for supremacy in Gaza today, with Hamas taking over much of the northern Gaza Strip.

Both sides accused the other of attempting a coup in what increasingly began to look like a civil war. Hamas demanded that security forces loyal to the rival Fatah movement abandon their positions in northern and central Gaza, while Fatah’s leaders met in the West Bank to decide whether to pull out of the national unity government and even the legislature in protest.

The unity government, negotiated in March under Saudi auspices, put Fatah ministers into a Hamas-led government in an effort to secure renewed international aid and recognition and to stop already serious fighting between the two factions.

But the new government has failed to achieve either goal, and it appeared to many in Gaza that the gunmen were not listening to their political leaders. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, is considered under increasing pressure to abandon the unity government he championed and once again try to order new elections, which Hamas has said it will oppose by any means.

“Tonight we may find ourselves at the beginning of a civil war,” said Talal Okal, a Gazan political scientist. “It’s not a civil war yet, but it is going in that direction. Maybe today or tomorrow. If Abbas decides to move his security forces onto the attack, and not to only defend, we’ll find ourselves in a much wider cycle.”

War Takes Up Less Time on Fox News

Hard to believe it is true, but FoxNews is not giving the war nearly as much attention as other cable networks. I guess they don't want to lose viewers who were pro-war.

On a winter day when bomb blasts at an Iraqi university killed dozens and the United Nations estimated that 34,000 civilians in Iraq had died in 2006, MSNBC spent nearly nine minutes on the stories during the 1 p.m. hour. A CNN correspondent in Iraq did a three-minute report about the bombings.

Neither story merited a mention on Fox News Channel that hour.

That wasn't unusual. Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months of the year, and considerably less than CNN, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The difference was more stark during daytime news hours than in prime-time opinion shows. The Iraq war occupied 20 percent of CNN's daytime news hole and 18 percent of MSNBC's. On Fox, the war was talked about only 6 percent of the time.

The independent think tank's report freshens a debate over whether ideology drives news agendas, and it comes at a delicate time for Fox. Top Democratic presidential candidates have refused to appear at debates sponsored by Fox. Liberals find attacking Fox is a way to fire up their base.

"It illustrates the danger of cheerleading for one particular point or another because they were obviously cheerleaders for the war," said Jon Klein, CNN U.S. president. "When the war went badly they had to dial back coverage because it didn't fit their preconceived story lines."

Fox wouldn't respond to repeated requests to make an executive available to talk about its war coverage.

So how to explain the divergent priorities? Different opinions on what is newsworthy? A business decision?

A mere coincidence?

Fox News Channel viewers argue that their favorite network is simply the most fair. Fox has long objected to suggestions that its newscasts go through a conservative filter. Surveys have shown its audience is dominated by Republicans.

Crazy guys, crazy election, enjoy it while it lasts

Nice take on Rudy from Andrew Sullivan's Column in the London Times...

Former New York mayor Giuliani is always entertaining, and he hasn’t disappointed. The most remarkable aspect of his candidacy is its complete immunity from anything that has actually happened in the last five years. For Rudy, it’s still 9/12 and always will be. And why not? He hasn’t felt so significant since – although his speaking fees have. He has no qualms about Iraq. It’s simple, after all. We just have to win.

His entire analysis of the war on terror can be reduced to the notion that we stay “on offense”. Offense means anything aggressive, it appears. He wouldn’t rule out a nuclear strike on Iran, for example. He endorses “any methods necessary” to extract information from anyone who might seem like a terrorist.

He spoke of two recent terror plots – one involving a handful of loons who wanted to invade a military base, another a crew of Caribbeans who dreamt of blowing up JFK airport (they had no weapons and no firm plans) – as if they were an imminent threat to America’s very existence.

As his eyes flash through his wire-rim glasses, and he bobs up and down on his shiny corporate shoes, you can just see him drooling over the chance to fire a few missiles, round up a few immigrants, strip a few more Americans of habeas corpus rights and nuke Tehran. This is the man, remember, who banned ferret-ownership and jaywalking in New York City. Next stop: Falluja. Piece of cake.

The Poverty Platform

John Edwards campaign based around the poverty issue will be an interesting litmus test to see just how well that issue resonates in today's climate as it did under LBJ and under FDR.

In that last campaign, in 2004, Edwards, running as the unflappable optimist in the Democratic primaries, wrote an inspiring book about his days as a plaintiff’s lawyer; this time, his unusual entry into the now-standard field of campaign books is called “Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream,” a collection of bleak and technical essays by leading liberal academics. In 2004, when Edwards repeated endlessly that he was the son of a millworker, he sounded proud and hopeful; now, when he brings up his humble beginnings, it’s mainly to suggest that he knows what it’s like to be one layoff or one X-ray away from destitution. This kind of grim “twilight in America” approach hasn’t been very successful for Democrats in recent decades. And yet Edwards could be poised to profit from the current moment in Democratic politics. Over the last few years, the party’s labor leaders and its left-leaning intelligentsia — Ivy League academics, columnists, economists — have become increasingly agitated about the ever-widening disparity between a tiny slice of wealthy Americans and the growing ranks of the working poor. These progressives see in Edwards’s campaign a test case for what they hope will be a more anticorporate, antitrade message for the Democratic Party.

The significance of what Edwards is saying, though, goes well beyond messaging and tactics. As the first candidate of the post-Bill Clinton, postindustrial era to lay out an ambitious antipoverty plan, he may force Democrats to contemplate difficult questions that they haven’t debated in decades — starting with what they’ve learned about poverty since Johnson and Kennedy’s time, and what, exactly, they’re willing to do about it.

If you’ve recently flipped to Lou Dobbs on CNN or opened the pages of a liberal political journal like The American Prospect, you might have the impression that America in the Bush years has slipped into a kind of Dickensian darkness, a period of unbridled greed and economic deprivation on a scale not seen in this country since the Great Depression. Like so many things in politics, this has some basis in truth, but only some. To compare Bush’s America with Herbert Hoover’s — or Lyndon Johnson’s, for that matter — is to engage in not very helpful hyperbole. According to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the average income of an American taxpayer in 1929, using today’s dollars, was about $16,000 a year; the entire middle class, in other words, was poor by modern standards. It’s true that the official poverty rate, while fluctuating quite a bit, is pretty much unchanged from where it was 40 years ago (it was 14.2 percent in 1967, compared with just under 13 percent at last count), but it’s also true that what we call poverty has changed strikingly. When Johnson stepped onto that front porch in Inez, there were still rural poor who had no electricity, no running water, no primary-school education. Now most rural towns have access to satellite TV, and even the worst of the housing projects built in the 1960s — though thoroughly horrid places to live — come with solid roofs and indoor plumbing.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs Will Not Be Reappointed

More changes to the military leadership as the debate on Congress heats up and progress is still mixed at best. Pace becomes the next political casualty of war.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the decision was reached in order to avoid bitter hearings in a Democratic-controlled Senate that is already confronting the White House over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I have decided that at this moment in our history, the nation, our men and women in uniform, and General Pace himself would not be well-served by a divisive ordeal in selecting the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Mr. Gates said.

The defense secretary stood alone at a Pentagon podium in making the announcement, and he spoke in somber tones in describing how he fully had intended to recommend General Pace be offered a second two-year term as chairman, only to change his mind over the last few weeks after consulting with senior senators of both parties.

Iraqi Kurdistan's Downward Spiral

Things are not going as well as has been initially reported in Northern Iraq as many hoped the Kurds would be able to help build a functioning democracy....

During my trips in Iraqi Kurdistan, I see how grateful ordinary Kurdish citizens are to the U.S. government and American people for the establishment of the safe haven in 1991, the no-fly zone, and Iraq's liberation. But the mood is changing. Today, the Kurdish parties misuse U.S. assistance and taxpayers' money. Rather than support democracy, the Kurdish party leaders use their funding and their militia's operational training to curtail civil liberties. What angers Kurds is the squandered leverage. Instead of demanding rule-of-law, the White House has subordinated democracy to stability not only in Baghdad and Basra, but in Iraqi Kurdistan as well. Rather than create a model democracy, the Iraqi Kurds have replicated the governing systems of Egypt, Tunisia or, perhaps even Syria.

It is true that such abuse of power is not rare in the Middle East, but Iraqi Kurds want more. They have listened to the rhetoric of the White House but see corruption in the Kurdistan region enabled, at least indirectly, by the United States. On Kurdish party-controlled television, they watch U.S. diplomats dining with KDP and PUK leaders at their palaces and private resorts. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or other senior U.S. diplomats visit, they do not challenge the Kurdish leadership on human rights abuses. Kurds wanted real democracy, like that in the U.S. and other Western democracies and not Potemkin democracy. Ultimately, Washington may pay a price for not holding Iraqi Kurds to a higher standard. While Erbil and Washington enjoy an alliance of convenience today, interests change. Undemocratic regimes in the Middle East are, at best, inconsistent allies.

How big will the iPhone be?

Anticipation for the phone is reaching a fever pitch and is looking to change the entire marketplace for smart phones and Wall Street has taken notice.

Russia's Apolitical Middle

The Russian middle class has seen solid economic growth giving them better financial lives, but their improved financial status has turned them away from the political process and become more and more apathetic towards President Putin and his policies.

The question is why the middle class matters. Is it about more than improved living standards? Is it, as some speculate, conducive to greater demand for the rule of law, a democratic polity and better governance?

Such demand is not found in today's Russia. As the Kremlin has steadily expanded and tightened control over the public realm -- stripping other institutions of authority and restricting people's political rights -- the "burgeoning middle class" has shown as little yearning for political participation as has the vast majority of the rest of the population. As with the majority overall, those in the middle-income group have accepted the paternalism of Vladimir Putin's government and remained apolitical and apathetic. They have not taken action to reclaim the territory encroached upon by the Kremlin.

This doesn't mean that the quasi-middle class is fond of the Kremlin's ways or the quality of its governance. But it's a long way from grumbling in workplaces -- or even in op-ed columns and blogs -- to getting politically involved.

And why should they get politically active, or even vote, for that matter? It is assumed -- quite rightly -- that in a Kremlin-controlled political environment, elections are devoid of meaning. But those in the middle class don't mind being unrepresented; as long as life is good, their non-participation suits them fine, just as it does the state.

Cheney vs. Rice: A Foreign-Policy Showdown

The battle continues between Cheney and Rice.

Rice has more directly clashed with Cheney's office on issues like Mideast peace, where according to administration sources who declined to be named discussing internal deliberations, she's found herself stymied in efforts to push for more engagement with Syria and the Palestinian radical group Hamas. A senior White House official concedes that even on what should be the simplest-to-achieve deal—a new relationship with Syria that would help stabilize Iraq—Cheney's office is blocking Rice's efforts to bring Bush around. The secretary has also fought with the veep's office in seeking to soften detention policies at Guantánamo. In the interview, however, Rice insisted her relationship with Cheney himself is good. "The vice president has never been somebody who tries to [undermine others] on the sidelines, behind the scenes. He really doesn't," she said. "In fact we have a kind of friendly banter about it, in which I'll tease him about the image that he doesn't like diplomacy."

Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal

Sgt. Charles White spoke with Iraqis about conditions in their neighborhood during a patrol of the Shaab district in Baghdad(NYT)

New review and assessment of the Surge after three months. The outlook is quite bleak as progress has not really been achieved in most of Baghdad. Some quotes from the article.

The operation “is at a difficult point right now, to be sure,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division, which has responsibility for Baghdad.

In an interview, he said that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly.

That is forcing American commanders to conduct operations to remove insurgents from some areas multiple times. The heavily Shiite security forces have also repeatedly failed to intervene in some areas when fighters, who fled or laid low when the American troops arrived, resumed sectarian killings.

“Until you have the ability to have a presence on the street by people who are seen as honest and who are not letting things come back in,” said General Brooks, referring to the Iraqi police units, “you can’t shift into another area and expect that place to stay the way it was.”

Britain Will Be Out of Iraq in a Year

From the looks of this article, Britain is planning to have a unilateral withdrawl from Iraq within a year.

A senior military official told The Sunday Telegraph: "Britain is not physically capable of fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time. The question is: which do we give up? The Government and the defence chiefs have decided that we should give up Iraq.

"There is an agreed timetable, a glide path, which will see a complete unilateral withdrawal in 12 months."

U.S. Not Pushing for Attack on Iran, Rice Says

Looks like Condi Rice is gaining more power inside the administration as we see that Diplomacy may actually win out over military action.

MADRID, June 1 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought today to minimize any sense of division within the Bush administration over Iran after the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency delivered a pointed new warning against what he called the “new crazies” pushing for military action against Tehran.

“The President of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course,” Ms. Rice said here. “That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, and by the vice president of the United States.”

At the same time, President Bush today strongly criticized the Iranian government for holding four American citizens, and demanded their release.

Ms. Rice’s assurance on U.S. strategy came as senior officials at the State Department are expressing fury over reports that members of Vice President Cheney’s staff have told others that Mr. Cheney believes the diplomatic track with Iran is pointless, and is looking for ways to persuade Mr. Bush to confront Iran militarily.

In a news conference today, Ms. Rice maintained that Vice President Cheney supports her strategy of trying to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions through diplomacy. A senior Bush administration official separately denied that there is a deep divide between Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney on Iran.

Link

Iraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

Some insight into the brutal history that has plagued Iraq as a country through the years in this New York Times article.

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

“Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’ ” Razzaq said. “It has always been that way in Iraq.”

With Korea as Model, U.S. Ponders Long Role in Iraq

Things are looking more and more like there will be a very long term military presence in Iraq.

President Bush has long talked about the need to maintain an American military presence in the region, without saying exactly where. Several visitors to the White House say that in private, he has sounded intrigued by what he calls the “Korea model,” a reference to the large American presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South.

Here is the New York Times Article.