MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: July 2, 2006

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July 7, 2006

Health Care Kills in California Prisons

You wouldn’t expect health care in a state prison to be exactly top-notch, but surely we can all agree that a patient dying every week as a result of preventable errors is a bit much. Medical care in California’s bulging lockups is so appalling that last year a federal judge, acting in a case brought by the Prison Law Office, appointed a special receiver to oversee the $1.4 billion system. That receiver now reports that things are even worse than had been thought, detailing, as the Los Angeles Times sums up, “widespread evidence of malpractice and neglect — and proof that inmates suffered not just from incompetence but also from cruelty at the hands of some doctors.” The problems run from the tragic to the farcical – everything from preventable deaths to massive financial mismanagement to forehead-slappers like the officials at San Quentin who ordered expensive diagnostic imaging equipment four years ago that they still haven’t gotten around to unpacking.

Defending the homeland...from Gomez and Ramirez

Writing at Truthdig, Molly Ivins sees the president's apparent tilt toward the enforcement-first approach to immigration reform favored by the House as "the early warning sign that we’re about to get an all-out immigrant-bashing campaign for the fall, complete with xenophobia, racism and blaming the weakest, least powerful people in the country for everything that’s wrong with it."

House Republicans, who know a good socially divisive issue when they see one, are perfectly happy to blame illegal workers for everything. Trade policy, repealing taxes for the rich, corruption in Congress—it’s all done by illegal workers. Everywhere you look in this society, there’s a bunch of people named Gomez and Ramirez, all of them making decisions from the top—in charge of the Pentagon, heading the military-industrial complex, deciding the rich need tax relief, in charge of this stupid war, making decisions on Wall Street.

And, if I understand California Rep. Ed Royce correctly, these Gomez and Ramirez characters are also somehow connected, in unspecified ways, to...well...threats to the homeland. Royce, who is chairman of the International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation, held a hearing today at the Mexican border to belabor his point that America's security depends on swift passage into law of the House's draconian immigration bill. He said:

It's elementary that to defend ourselves against our determined and resourceful enemies, our border must be secure."

Better get used to this sort of thing. House committees will hold hearings outside Washington later this month on, among other things, making English the United States' official language.

Attack on Federal Regulations Continues

Good catch by Think Progress. The president is going to nominate Susan Dudley, a longtime opponent of federal regulations, to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which "manages the federal regulatory process." Among other things, Think Progress finds, Dudley is an opponent of action on global warming, air bags in cars, and stronger regulations for arsenic in drinking water.

But okay, what does this position even mean? According to this executive order, OIRA is tasked with reviewing regulations in other federal agencies to make sure they comply with the president's rules, "such as consideration of alternatives and analysis of impacts, both benefits and costs." Now I can't figure out what sort of impact Dudley could have on federal regulations from this perch, but it's safe to say that the administration's ongoing effort to dismantle the regulatory state will continue apace.

Why Trust Bill Keller?

Jack Shafer has a very good column today about whether the New York Times should've published its story revealing a semi-classified terror-financing story or not. Understandably, he trusts Bill Keller over the Bush administration. Nothing to disagree with there, although I'm agnostic on the question of whether the article actually harmed national security in any way; reports suggest that details of the SWIFT program were already somewhat public, and I don't plan on taking the word of administration officials on this matter.

But there's another article I've been meaning to link to, concerning the merits of the program in question. like William Greider, I wish the government would actually more to monitor overseas financial transactions; it would be nice if something like SWIFT could be used to clamp down on offshore tax evasion, securities fraud, CEOs looting pension funds, etc. As it is, the U.S. government is incredibly lax on the issue. Sadly, bankers and corporations tend to be hugely influential, so terrorist financing is the only thing that is likely to get any attention.

Bergen: Decision To Fold Bin Laden Unit "Blew Me Away"

Coupla none-too-sanguine perspectives on the folding up of the CIA's bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer, the first head of the unit and now a ubiquitous talking head, on CBS:

"To dismantle the unit who chases that individual and that group seems to me a questionable decision."
"We've seen just in the last couple weeks that [bin Laden] can dominate the international media whenever he wants to, and he reached out and replaced [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi with one of his own people. So the idea that he's not in control is simply a pipe dream."

And Peter Bergen (who wrote this fine piece for us a few years ago relating how the war in Iraq was diverting essential resources and energy from the hunt for bin Laden and the struggle against violent jihadism), on CNN:

[The decision to close down the unit] blew me away.... I mean... I'm sure there are good bureaucratic reasons for that, but I find it very -- I find it hard to understand that decision.
I mean, here is bin Laden now suddenly popping up with annoying regularity on these audiotapes, Ayman Al-Zawahri releasing more videotapes than Britney Spears, and they're closing down, you know, the bin Laden unit. I don't know -- I think, psychologically, that sends a terrible message.

Ayman Al-Zawahiri in tape that emerged on the first
anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings

Conditions Worsening at Guantanamo?

Hard to believe—and of course possibly untrue—but, according to one detainee, guards at Guantanamo have become "very tough" since three inmates killed themselves last month. (What were they before? Merely no-nonsense?) "We're being pushed, pushed, pushed all the time--don't be surprised if things happen," the Australian prisoner told family members on a phone call. Payback for those ruthless acts of asymmetrical warfare...? (Guardian)

Post-Katrina workers plagued by employer deception, racism, homelessness, and a toxic environment

Dan Nazohni, a member of the White Mountain Apache Nation, was recruited, along with 79 others on his reservation, to do $14-an-hour labor in post-Katrina New Orleans. The broker who did the recruiting was paid $1,600 by the tribal government for gas and incidentals. He then dropped the workers off in New Orleans and disappeared, never to be seen again. The Apache tribal workers were homeless for days, and wound up in a tent city in City Park, where the rent is $300 a month. Nazohni says he has found barely enough work to scrape by.

Gail Duncan works in the kitchen of a New Orleans restaurant, but she cannot afford to rent an apartment. Her family lived for several months in Fort Worth, Texas, but, Duncan says, her daughter was threatened (reason unknown) by the children at her school, and school officials told her to leave the state. Now she and her children sleep on the floor of a relative's public housing apartment.

Mario Fuentes, who does demolition work, traveled to New Orleans from Houston at the end of 2005. After working for four days, the contractors dropped him off at a fast-food restaurant, bought him a hamburger and a cold drink, then drove away and never came back.

Jorge Ramos, a Honduran man from Houston, was part of a team of a dozen tree service workers cleaned up debris in New Orleans' Garden District. They worked twelve hours a day for thirteen days and earned $20,000, but were never paid. They are living in tents in City Park.

These scenarios represent the gist of a report released yesterday by the Advancement Project and the National Immigration Law Project. The report is filled with examples of racism, deception and police harrassment.

The police harrassment concerns the alleged checking of migrant workers for gang tatoos by members of the NOPD. However, an NOPD spokesman says that police officers would never do such checking unless a complaint had been called in.

In addition to being underpaid, denied overtime, not paid at all, and living in cars, tents and flood-damaged buildings, many migrant workers also work in possibly toxic conditions.

The report calls the treatment of workers in New Orleans "a national crisis of civil and human rights." Considering the reaction to the crisis of suffering caused by the U.S. Corps of Engineers during Katrina, it would be near-futile to expect an appropriate reaction to this post-Katrina tragedy.

Neo-Nazis and Other Dangerous Extremists Infiltrating the Military

Oh, great.

Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, the U.S. military has relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists. Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces.

Department of Defense investigators estimate thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," said one investigator. "That's a problem."

So says a new report out from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which says these guys--whose numbers could run into the thousands--are "using their military training to fight wars at home."

Just to give you some flavor...one neo-Nazi, quoted in the report, says, "Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture. We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes." Another observes, "We have pride in our race, heritage, and culture, and we will do anything to prevent it from being destroyed. White man is the creator, the creator of civilizations."

Via the New York Times.

Sorry about that 16 months of your life; here's a pair of sneakers

There will be many more of these stories. As people begin walking out of Gitmo and the other terror war jails, blinking and trying to figure out if what they just went through was real, we'll hear over and over again how they were detained on some tip, hint, or clue that would prove to be worthless; how their interrogators first thought they'd caught some terror kingpin, only to lose interest when they realized their prisoner was a foot soldier at best, just an unlucky farmer at worst; how there were fewer and fewer interrogations, but still they were not released, for months or years, until some day they were given a pair of white shoes (what an odd souvenir) and a letter saying they were not deemed a threat by the United States, and put on a plane, and told when it landed that they were free. (Read Emily Bazelon's Mother Jones story on tracking the families of detainees here, and her investigation of torture at Bagram--which also notes the peculiar white-shoe detail--here).

And the awful thing here is, even if you stipulate that maybe, after a bloody attack, it's conceivable that a government would arrest anyone it has reason to believe might be connected to that attack or planned future attacks; even if some people might consider it useful to interrogate those people in secret offshore prisons where they are kept in dungeons and humiliated or worse; even then, why, why keep them locked up for so long after you know for sure that you're not getting any intel out of them?

July 6, 2006

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Globe? Organic Food and the Global Economy

"Organic" ain't what it used to be. As Michael Pollan notes in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (excerpted in the last issue of Mother Jones), what started out a quarter century ago as a reform movement is now well on its way to becoming a full-on industry, worth $14 billion at the last tally. People will disagree, of course, about whether this is a good thing. Some, like Joel Salafin, a local-food evangelist profiled by Pollan, sees the big organic companies like Whole Foods as, in Pollan's words, "part of an increasingly globalized economy that turns any food it touches into a commodity, reaching its tentacles wherever in the world a food can be produced most cheaply and then transporting it wherever it can be sold most dearly."

Well, good or bad, it's happening. For evidence, see this piece out today from AP. After noting that demand for organic food is outstripping supply (sales have grown 15-21 percent a year), that mainstream supermarkets are getting in on the act, and that the number of organic farms (10,000) is on the rise, though not fast enough to meet supply, the piece touches on the increasing globalization of Organic Inc.

As a result [of the lagging growth in the number of organic farms] organic manufacturers are looking for ingredients outside the United States in places like Europe, Bolivia, Venezuela and South Africa. ...
The makers of the high-energy, eat-and-run Clif Bar needed 85,000 pounds of almonds, and they had to be organic. But the nation's organic almond crop was spoken for. Eventually, Clif Bar found the almonds — in Spain. But more shortages have popped up: apricots and blueberries, cashews and hazelnuts, brown rice syrup and oats.
Even Stonyfield Farm, an organic pioneer in the United States, is pursuing a foreign supplier; Stonyfield is working on a deal to import milk powder from New Zealand.
"I'm not suggesting we would be importing from all these places," said Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm Inc. "But for transition purposes, to help organic supply to keep up with the nation's growing hunger, these countries have to be considered.

I leave to more sensitive souls the question of whether this development destroys the mystical communion folks have with their chicken dinners. I will say, though, that while there's obviously no inherent reason why the organic food "industry" should be immune from the dynamics of the global economy, the organic "movement," premised as it is on concern for the natural environment, runs into the problem that transporting food--even within the United States--burns up a whole lot of fuel. When a renegade movement is tamed, ironies abound...

Blogosphere--the wild blue yonder

“Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

Like the name? "How About Those Blogs?!" would flow better from the tongue, but for $450,000, you have to have a killer name for your study. “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information" (hereafter to be referred to as AOBLAIWLTDRCI) is a three-year project of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dr. Brian E. Ulicny says “It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns."

The researchers plan to develop an automated tool that tells analysts what topics bloggers are interestd in at any given time. If this sounds something like a search engine, the scientists agree, but say it is more focused. Says Ulicny:

Blog entries have a different structure. They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself, such as a news event. It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story.

What does the Air force hope to do with the results of AOBLAIWLTDRCI?

The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analyst. Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace.

The United States of Incarceration

Why go all the way to Guantanamo to find an unjust, broken prison system when we have one right here in the USA? That's the question cartoonist Mark Fiore takes up this week. (Click on the image to view. You need Flash.)

Collective Punishment in Gaza

Over at the Progressive, editor Matthew Rothschild denounces Israel's decision to collectively punish the Palestinians in Gaza--Israeli forces have targeted bridges and the area's sole power plant--in retaliation for the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and he criticizes the Bush administration for averting its gaze. Predictably, the piece has elicited some strongly worded reader feedback. Agree or disagree with his analysis--though at a minimum it's hard to see how the Israeli response is remotely "proportionate"—but do take a look.

Iraq Will Cost $1.27 Trillion and the Army Can't Afford to Pay Its Electric Bills

Here's one to file under "If we're the most powerful nation in the history of the world, then how come...?" AP reports that "a diversion of dollars to help fight the war in Iraq has helped create a $530 million shortfall for Army posts at home and abroad, leaving some unable to pay utility bills or even cut the grass."

From which follows a sorry litany of deprivations, including these:

In San Antonio, Fort Sam Houston hasn't been able to pay its $1.4 million monthly utility bill since March, prompting workers in many of the post's administrative buildings to get automated disconnection notices.
Fort Bragg in North Carolina can't afford to buy pens, paper or other office supplies until the new fiscal year starts in October.
And in Kentucky, Fort Knox had to close one of its eight dining halls for a month and lay off 133 contract workers.

Iraq sucking up disproportionate funds is not the whole problem, though. Also at work is good old-fashioned incompetence. "It makes me worry if the Pentagon can't do its accounting well enough to find money for its electric bills," [Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution] said. "It just boggles my mind a little bit."

(Oh, and per this piece in the The American Prospect, the Iraq war looks like it'll end up costing $1.27 trillion.)

Is Congress Doing Enough to Clean Itself Up? Can You Guess?

Six months ago, Jack Abramoff pled guilty to conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion, upon which members of Congress, evincing much faux outrage, lamented the corrupting influence of lobbyist-paid travel, meals, and gifts, and the immorality of earmarking, and issued loud calls for wholesale ethics reform.

It's now July, and, as the Washington Post recently reported, the "call for lobbying changes is a fading cry." (Which is another way of saying lawmakers were never interested in reform and have all along assumed the public would lose interest in the subject, allowing them to resume business as usual.)

[Lobbying reform] legislation has slowed to a crawl. Along the way, proposals such as [Speaker Dennis] Hastert's that would sharply limit commonplace behavior on Capitol Hill have been cast aside. Committee chairmen once predicted the bill would be finished in March, but the Senate did not pass its ethics bill until March 29 and the House passed its version May 3. The House has yet to name negotiators to draft the final package.
Legislators and public-interest group advocates say the most likely result this year is a minimalist package that would allow members to say they have responded to the Abramoff situation and other scandals but would do little to crimp their ability to accept lobbyist favors.
The change, these people say, reflects a calculation that the political storm has mostly passed and that the need for more intrusive efforts to alter the congressional culture and the lobbyist-lawmaker relationship is less urgent.

Of course, how urgent the efforts are is a direct function of how much heat representatives get from the folks back home. In an admirable attempt to gauge the public mood and send a message to Capitol Hill, the Sunlight Foundation has just posted an online poll asking Americans if they think Congress is doing enough to address ethics and lobbying reform. You can do your bit by taking the poll here.

Cheney Profiting Off Bad News?

Where's Dick Cheney investing his money these days? See here. Apparently he's betting that the Bush administration's large deficits will drive down the dollar, drive up interest rates, and cause inflation. Who knew?

Censoring the Military Embeds

One could devote a lifetime—or at least the better part of a year—to chronicling all the propaganda-like tricks the Bush administration and the military have pursued over the past few years. Here's a new one, courtesy of Rod Norland, Newsweek's former bureau chief:

The military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story — they use the word slant — what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don't like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with the work they had done on embed.

What's fun here is that the two sides in the ongoing debate over the Iraq war can see this development with radically different eyes. The pro-war camp—that is, the camp that believes that the war's basically going well despite some setbacks, and that we can pacify Iraq and "win" if only the American public would just backbone up for the long haul, and that only the media can "lose" this war by reporting too much bad news and causing people to doubt the wisdom of the occupation—well, they'll likely applaud this decision and say that the military has no obligation to take on reporters working at cross-purposes with the war effort.

The anti-war camp, of course, will say that accurate reporting is necessary so that the public can see that this war is an utter failure and our continuing presence only making things worse and getting people killed, and that having the military censor the media will only obfuscate that reality and prolong our futile presence in Iraq. I'm certainly of that camp, and think the accuracy of those "cheerleading" journalists who would no doubt be approved by military censors tends to leave much to be desired… Needless to say, this isn't a good development at all.

A Picture of Iraqi School Life

Today's Washington Post features a riveting article on a subject little-broached in the American media—namely, the everyday lives of Iraqis, in this case Iraqi university students. The picture is not a pretty one:

The letter was slipped under the dean's office door, in an envelope slightly bulging from the AK-47 bullet tucked inside.

"You have to understand our circumstances. We cannot perform well on the exam because of the problems in Baghdad. And you have to help," the letter began, said its recipient, A.M. Taleb, dean of the College of Sciences at Baghdad University. "If you do not, you and your family will be killed."

It's finals time in Iraq. Black-clad gunmen have stormed a dormitory to snatch students from their rooms. Professors fear failing and angering their pupils. Administrators curtailed graduation ceremonies to avoid convening large groups of people into an obvious bombing target. Perhaps nowhere else does the prospect of two months' summer vacation -- for those who can afford it, a chance to flee the country -- bring such unbridled relief.

The article reports that female students at the university have been targets of intimidation, forced to dress and act more conservatively lest they come under attack by the religious extremists increasingly prevalent on the campus. It's not news that Iraqi women have suffered disproportionately from the violence engulfing their country. A report published by Human Rights Watch last October declared, "The violence and lack of security has had a major impact on Iraqi women, who once enjoyed a public role in the country's social and political life." Meanwhile, allegations of the abuse of Iraqi women by American soldiers had surfaced long before the recent investigation into an alleged rape and murder in Mahmudiya.

Global warming tied to forest fires

A government-supported study hits the internets today connecting global warming to the increase, in recent years, in the number of large western wildfires.

AP reports:

Beginning about 1987, there was a change from infrequent fires averaging about one week in duration to more frequent ones that often burned five weeks or more, [researchers] reported. The length of the wildfire season was extended by 78 days.

The researchers said the changes appear to be linked to annual spring and summer temperatures, with many more wildfires burning in hotter years than in cooler years.

They also found a connection between early arrivals of the spring snowmelt in the mountainous regions and the incidence of large forest fires. An earlier snowmelt, they said, can lead to an earlier and longer dry season, which provides greater opportunities for large fires.

Says one researcher, "The increase in large wildfires appears to be another part of a chain of reactions to climate warming," while another calls the findings "one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States."

As the AP story notes, researchers say part of the increase is likely a function of natural fluctuations, but evidence also links it to the effects of human-induced climate warming. The report appears today in the journal Science.

While we're on the subject, check out Mother Jones' recent special issue on global warming.

Good news for whales (for a change)

We've been pretty short on good oceans-related news of late, but here's an exception! On Monday a district judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the use of high-intensity sonar by the U.S. Navy during its war games now taking place off Hawaii. She gave the Navy and the Natural Resources Defense Council until July 12 to meet and discuss a possible settlement ahead of a July 18 hearing. (NRDC and other organizations filed suit asking for the restraining order last week.)

As we've reported in the past, Navy sonar has been directly implicated in mass strandings and deaths of whales, dolphins, and other marine species.

(Note: Before anyone asks, these here marine mammals are not really wearing ear muffs; the image has been photoshopped.)

The decision comes three days after the Pentagon saw fit to declare the Navy exempt from the Marine Mammals Protection Act, which requires that steps be taken to avoid harm to marine mammals.

In her ruling, District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper wrote that environmentalists had submitted "considerable convincing scientific evidence that the Navy's use of...sonar can kill, injure and disturb many species, including marine mammals."

A bad day for gay marriage

Yesterday was a big (bad) day for the cause of gay marriage rights. Georgia's top court reinstated the state's constitutional ban on same. New York's highest court decided that same-sex marriage is not permitted under state law. And a conservative group, American Family Association of Michigan, sued to stop Michigan State University from offering health insurance to the partners of gay and lesbian workers. The group hopes to establish a precedent blocking domestic partner benefits at other state universities.

July 5, 2006

What do they do, sell the stuff on Ebay?

It's always fun, the annual roundup of gift-giving to U.S. officials from foreign dignitaries; under current ethics rules, presents worth more than $305 are considered property of the U.S. government while those less than that are the recipient's to keep, though exactly what you'd do with "a 16-inch bronze statuette of an Arab man helping a woman from a bath, mounted on a black-slate base, valued at $300" is not entirely clear (you'd have to ask former CIA head George Tenet, who got the artwork from an unnamed foreign official). Hillary Clinton turned a Versace wallet she was given in India over to the State Department, whose rummage sales must be something to see. Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, didn't get to keep the $380 aromatherapy gift set he got from the Jordanian royals around Christmas '04. Pity that.

Oceans getting more acidic, threatening corals

In news of ocean degradation unrelated to Rep. Richard Pombo, a new report finds that all this CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere is making the world's oceans more acidic, threatening to destroy coral reefs and "creatures that underpin the sea's food web." One climate scientist calls the trend "the single most profound environmental change I've learned about in my entire career."(Washington Post)

For more on the sorry state of our oceans, see Mother Jones' recent cover story here. Learn what you can do to turn the tide here. And find out more about coral reefs here and here.

Will Bush flip-flop on immigration?

Joe Klein is going to be terribly disappointed. Here he is writing in May about the split between the White House and the Congressional GOP over immigration policy. The column ran under the headline, "Bush Is Smart on the Border--and the G.O.P. Isn't"

George W. Bush's position on immigration has been consistent and honorable, even when he was clawing his way toward the Republican nomination in 2000, facing conservative audiences who inevitably asked hostile questions about the Mexicans coming across the border. ... He stood by his principles again last week in his prime-time speech, promising to make a greater effort to protect the border while refusing to cave to conservative pressure against a pathway toward citizenship for the 12 million illegals already here. ...[I]t is never easy going against your party's base. ...
[T]he strongest feelings against immigrants tend to come from the places—red-state rural counties—where immigrants don't exist: 59% of voters in counties where immigrants make up less than 5% of the population believe that all illegals should be deported. That constituency is as ancient as the Republic, perennially exploited by unscrupulous politicians who are willing to play to their racial fears—the Democrats for a century after the Civil War, the Republicans ever since.

Today comes word that Bush is signalling, as the New York Times puts it, "a new willingness to negotiate with House Republicans in an effort to revise the stalled [immigration] legislation before Election Day.

Republicans both inside and outside the White House say Mr. Bush, who has long insisted on comprehensive reform, is now open to a so-called enforcement-first approach that would put new border security programs in place before creating a guest worker program or path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally. ...
Polls show the public is deeply troubled by the problem of illegal immigration, and Mr. Bush, who has made the issue his domestic policy initiative, is eager for a victory on Capitol Hill. But a carefully constructed White House strategy to prod the House and Senate into compromise collapsed last month when skittish House Republicans opted for field hearings instead. ...
One major question is whether Mr. Bush would give up on a path to citizenship for some of the estimated 11 million to 12 million people living here illegally. He has said repeatedly that it is impractical to deport those who have lived in the United States for a long time and built lives here; the Senate bill permits some longtime illegal residents to become eligible for citizenship if they learned English and paid taxes and a fine. ...
Whether Mr. Bush would accept that is not clear. Aides to Mr. Bush, including Karl Rove, the White House chief political strategist, and Tony Snow, the press secretary, say he remains adamant that any bill must address the status of the immigrants who are here illegally.
But one Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship.

And if he does, immigration reform will die this year, and it'll be much harder to make a case for Bush's "consistency and honor" on the issue.

Hillary Clinton: No-mentum for an Independent Lieberman run

Sen. Clinton, as reported by AP:

I've known Joe Lieberman for more than 30 years. I have been pleased to support him in his campaign for reelection and hope that he is our party's nominee.
But I want to be clear that I will support the nominee chosen by Connecticut Democrats in their primary. Ibelieve in the Democratic Party, and I believe we must honor the decisions made by Democratic primary voters.

The Lamont folks are loving it, of course.