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July 29, 2006

More Iraq War Lies: Auditors Reveal Huge Reconstruction Cost Overruns Concealed from Congress

In a classic “take out the trash” maneuver, a federal audit released late Friday reveals, as Jamie Glanz of the New York Times reports,

“The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress.

(For those not familiar with the term, “taking out the trash,” means quietly dumping truly embarrassing news on Friday evening, because, to quote the “West Wing” episode that discusses the phenomena, on Saturday, “no one reads the paper.”)

Indeed, to say these findings were released at all is an overstatement, as they were buried in an audit of the Basra hospital project touted by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. The audit—which was conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress and the Pentagon—found that the cost of hospital project, which was contracted out to San Francisco-based multinational Bechtel for $50 million, could, as the Times reports, “rise as high as $169.5 million, even after accounting for at least $30 million pledged for medical equipment by a charitable organization.” The United States Agency for International Development, or AID, intentionally hid these cost overruns (as well as those for other projects) from Congress, by reclassifying them as overhead, or “indirect costs.” An AID contracting officer cited in the audit notes that the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”

Bechtel is almost as notorious as Halliburton for its ties to the administration, its ability, (as we’ve reported), to game no-bid Iraq reconstruction projects, its move to (again, as we’ve reported) privatize water systems across the world, oh, and the Big Dig.

But leaving aside all that, the really ominous part of the auditors' findings were spelled out by the Washington Post:

· There is no overall plan for transferring U.S.-initiated reconstruction projects to Iraqi government control and no schedule for when they will be completed.

· A planned first-responder network -- intended to allow Iraqis to call for help in the event of emergency -- is ineffective because of communications problems that prevent most dispatch centers from receiving calls from civilians. By the end of the year, more than $218 million will have been spent on the program.

· The United States has devoted little time or money to a program aimed at rooting out corruption in the Iraqi government.

But of course. Rooting out corruption would set a dangerous precedent.

July 28, 2006

Peacekeepers in Lebanon

The Los Angeles Times has a good piece on the wholly ineffective 2,000-strong UN peacekeeping force that has been in southern Lebanon for a long while. Most notable, the peacekeepers currently have to worry about Hezbollah fighters who sidle up beside UN bases and fire off rockets towards Haifa and Nahariya in the hopes that Israel will retaliate and blow up some peacekeepers, as happened on Tuesday. But this part, explaining why the existing UN force never reined in Hezbollah in the first place, seems important:

The U.N. observers sat by while an unchecked Hezbollah consolidated political control over the south, built up its arsenal and girded itself to do battle once again with the nemesis across the border.

They had no choice, they say: Hezbollah could be tamed only with the use of force, which is not part of their mandate.

"You have to be able to impose international will," Pellegrini said. "You need heavy weapons and strong rules of engagement."

But this is the bind that will face any military that tries to tangle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon: The organization will fight fiercely to keep its guns, and its widespread grass-roots popularity makes the militia capable of mounting a fierce insurgency.

The peacekeepers couldn't be here, U.N. officials acknowledge, if Hezbollah didn't tolerate them. And if they were cracking heads, they would no longer be tolerated.

That seems believable. These days, everyone seems to be calling for a more effective international force to come in and stabilize southern Lebanon. But a "more effective" force that tried to tame Hezbollah could well mean war against the group's militia—and if the United States can't defeat an insurgency in Iraq, what makes anyone think that, say, European troops can pacify Hezbollah in southern Lebanon? Some sort of negotiated peace will likely be the only way forward, but that possibility seems quite distant at the moment.

Military Purging Its Arabic Linguists

This makes a lot of sense: "A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, though he says he never told his superiors he was gay and his accuser was never identified." Right, because the Army has way too many Arabic language specialists just sitting around. Oh, wait.

This isn't the first time either; a report in 2005 found that the Army has discharged 26 Arabic and Farsi linguists for being gay. Whether any of them actually had the privilege of facing their accusers is unclear.

GOP Plays Games with Minimum Wage Bill

Ezra Klein notes that Senate Republicans are now trying to put Democrats in a corner by putting forward a bill that would both raise the minimum wage and repeal the estate tax on multimillion dollar estates. That way, the thinking goes, Republicans can inoculate themselves against charges that they're opposed to raising the wage floor for low-income workers.

At any rate, it's a cheap gambit, and hopefully the Democrats will oppose it (repealing the estate tax would be, as we've pointed out before, disastrous for the poor, by putting programs such as Medicaid and Social Security under risk). But I also want to point out the paucity of the minimum-wage increase under discussion here. The current proposal would hike the minimum from $5.15 an hour, the level set in 1997, to $7.25 an hour by 2007.

That sounds like a big hike, but it's really not. As Dean Baker notes, due to inflation, $7.25 an hour in 2007 is equivalent to about $5.30 back in 1997. So this "hike" will really just ensure that the minimum wage goes back up to its inflation-adjusted 1997 level. It's not much of an increase, in real dollar terms, at all.

Media Dropping the Ball on Lebanon, Afghanistan

From the annals of media criticism. Greg Mitchell says that the U.S. media has been shamefully silent on the United States' deep involvement in the Israel-Lebanon war, its role as arms merchant to Israel, or the possible consequences of this alliance. "Fox News, for example, seems to be more concerned about Hezbollah agents sneaking over the Mexican or Canadian borders into the U.S."

Meanwhile, Sherry Ricchiardi of the American Journalism Review notes that Afghanistan has now become "The Forgotten War" in the U.S. press, despite the fact that the Taliban is dangerously resurgent there and conditions are becoming worse and worse in the country. Few news organizations maintain a constant presence there anymore, with the exception of the New York Times and some of the wire services. One can only imagine that the same thing may inevitably happen to Iraq, as the media turns its short-attention span to the next war-of-the-hour and ignores everything else.

On a related note—and this isn't necessarily criticism of the press, although it could be—Paul McLeary has an interesting post on how Hezbollah has been cultivating relationships with reporters as part of its broader media strategy. See also this piece about Israel's "cyber-soldiers," who are flooding chat rooms and online forums to counter anti-Israeli sentiment on the internet.

Who's Committing War Crimes?

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies takes up the question of what war crimes Hezbollah and Israel might be committing in the current war. For Hezbollah's part, firing rockets into Israeli cities seems to be the chief war crime (unless, of course, one believes Hassan Nasrallah that they're being aimed at military targets); rightly or wrongly, it's unlikely that the group would ever be indicted for crimes of "aggression," and it's not always clear whether Hezbollah fighters are committing the crime of "sheltering" by mixing among civilians. In some places, they appear to be doing so, in others, it's more ambiguous.

On that point, I'd note Mitch Prothrero's report in Salon arguing that it is extremely unlikely that Hezbollah fighters are actually mixing in with civilians in Lebanon—partly because they fear they'll be betrayed by the general population—in which case Israel is certainly committing a war crime by bombing civilian neighborhoods without any clear military targets. Moreover, Human Rights Watch has condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs, which are "unacceptably inaccurate," in civilian areas. At this point, the legal questions hare are probably moot, since it seems that neither side will ever see a day in court, but it's still worth pointing out.

Update: See also the New York Times yesterday, in which Israel's Justice Minister, Haim Ramon, announced that "all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are in some way related to Hezbollah." "In some way related"? Hezbollah, of course, is more than a militia, and employs some 250,000 Lebanese in various capacities, including schools, grocery stores, and orphanages.

More: More background from Human Rights Watch.

Bush Administration Goes After Suicide Hotline

Score one more for "compassionate" conservatism. 1-800-SUICIDE, a suicide-prevention hotline that over 2 million teenagers have called over the past three years, is now having its funding cut by the Bush administration. The hotline is being folded into the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Protection Agency (SAMHSA), a federal agency which "would have direct access to confidential data on individuals in crisis."

The problem, as Pam Spaulding points out, is that a lot of gay and lesbian youths use the suicide hotline—seeing as how they're two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than other young people. But the Bush administration and SAMHSA, for their part, have actively sought to dissuade research on suicide prevention among GLBT youths, going so far as to try to squelch a conference on the subject. SAMHSA has also suggested wholly ineffective "faith-based" methods for suicide prevention, backing down only after an outcry from mental health experts. So the fact that this agency, and this administration, will now run the hotline and collect data on the individuals who call is very upsetting. Here's a website with more information.

Update: New Bush Lebanon Plan

Another Bush Flip Flop?

The big question in the Bush-Blair scenario-- announced Friday morning -- for setting up an international force to augment the Lebanese army along the Israel-Lebanon border is what countries would be involved. Recently Condi Rice had floated a scheme involving military units from Egypt and Turkey. The French, long involved with Lebanon, could provide members, even taking the lead. Chirac, in an interview in LeMonde yesterday, made it clear that any NATO presence in an international force would be widely viewed as an "armed wing of the West", and hence not acceptable. Putting US soldiers between the two combatants would risk a devastating political fallout at home. The very thought of a GI getting shot by Hezbollah, let alone by the Israelis, would plunge the already confused Bush government into a nightmare.

Anyhow, in typical Bush fashion, there is a loophole in the plan. "Prime Minister Blair and I believe that this approach gives the best hope to end the violence and create lasting peace and stability in Lebanon," Bush said this morning. Then the president added he was sending Rice, who previously put herself on record against a ceasefire, to the region with "instructions to work with Israel and Lebanon to come up with an acceptable U.N. Security Council resolution that we can table next week." The word "acceptable" gives the president plenty of wiggle room.

South Dakota Back in Execution Business

Next month, South Dakota is slated to carry out its first execution in almost 60 years. The victim, Elijah Page, was convicted along with two other men of an especially ugly murder. Still, according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, he has some pretty heavy mitigating circumstances in his background: "his mother often would allow drug dealers to molest Page in exchange for drugs and his step-father once used him as a human shield in a drug-related shoot out. Warren Johnson, the judge who presided over Page’s punishment trial, stated, 'Most parents treated their pets better than your parents treated you.'"

But don't get the idea that South Dakotans don't respect human life. This is the state, don't forget, that will soon vote on whether to uphold a ban on all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. If that ban is upheld, doctors performing abortions might be open to murder charges.

Army Morale: "It sucks."

Washington Post:

"Think of what you hate most about your job. Then think of doing what you hate most for five straight hours, every single day, sometimes twice a day, in 120-degree heat," [said Army Staff Sgt. Jose Sixtos in Baghdad]. "Then ask how morale is."
Frustrated? "You have no idea." [...]
"It sucks. Honestly, it just feels like we're driving around waiting to get blown up. That's the most honest answer I could give you," said Spec. Tim Ivey, 28, of San Antonio.

Interestingly, though, a recent Stars and Stripes survey found that two-thirds of U.S. troops serving in Iraq say they believe the cause they're fighting for is worthwhile. But: "Responses appeared to track with military rank. Eight-eight percent of senior officers, for example, ranked both unit and personal morale as high or very high. Among junior enlisted servicemembers, 49 percent rated unit morale as high or very high and 66 percent gave that same rating to their own personal morale."

Oddly, fifty-five percent called the mission in Iraq "very clear." Perhaps they could fill us in...?

The Essential Barbarism of War from the Air

Just posted at Mother Jones (via Tomdispatch): Tom Engelhardt, in a terrific essay, takes up the subject of war from the air, setting the Israeli campaign against Lebanon in the context of history. He traces the rise of air power and notes its tendency, always, to concentrate its destruction on the civilian structure of a society. It's an essentially barbaric form of warfare, he writes, and no less so for having become real-time TV entertainment.

He concludes:

"As air wars go, the one in Lebanon may seem strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it is historically anything but unique. It might even be said that war from the air, since first launched in Europe's colonies early in the last century, has always been essentially directed against civilians. As in World War II, air power -- no matter its stated targets -- almost invariably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its damage is anything but 'collateral,' never truly 'surgical,' and never in its overall effect 'precise.' Even when it doesn't start that way, the frustration of not working as planned, of not breaking the 'will,' invariably leads, as with the Israelis, to ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which, if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will bring down not society's will, but society itself.
"For the Lebanese prime minister what Israel has been doing to his country may be 'barbaric destruction'; but, in our world, air power has long been robbed of its barbarism (suicide air missions excepted). For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but it's not barbaric. For that you need to personally cut off a head.

Read the piece in full here.

Roundup: War in the Middle East

July 28, 2006

No Magic Wand, says White House: At the White House briefing Thursday, a reporter asks, "I just want to follow up on you saying that Secretary Rice had significant victories in Rome. How can you say that when she came away with no cease-fire?" Press Secretary Tony Snow replied, "Because, Ed, you're laboring under the presumption that she was supposed to come with a magic wand and say a cease-fire. What she has said is, what on earth is the good of having another empty-handed cease-fire in the Middle East? What is the purpose of having something that is not enforceable at this juncture and is not realistic?"
Read the entire exchange.

Moral Grounds for Killing Civilians: Asa Kasher, author of the Israeli military’s code of ethics, says killing civilians in southern Lebanon can be "morally justified."

"I don't know what the truth is about the circumstances," Kasher stressed. "But assuming that we warned the civilians and gave them enough time to leave, and that the civilians who remained chose, themselves, not to leave, then there is no reason to jeopardize the lives of the troops," he told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Moshe Keynan, father of a soldier killed in another conflict, was quoted by the paper as saying he was angry with the IDF for jeopardizing soldiers' safety to protect civilians. "We need to worry that our kids return to their parents and we need to worry about our family and sons and wives, not how we look on BBC."

Need cash? Want a car? Israeli psyops operating out of a radio station in the south of Lebanon are offering gifts for tips on Hezbollah’s activities. Tipsters are encouraged to call from phones from areas where they are not known and can’t be easily traced. Residents of southern Lebanon received warnings to get out of their houses and head north in telephone calls from exchanges in Canada and Italy, and traced back to Israeli intelligence.

July 27, 2006

A Moment of Truth for Electronic Voting

A third of the nation's 8,000 voting jurisdictions are using electronic voting for the first time this November. How are their systems expected to perform? Patchily, according to a committee of National Research Council experts.

"Some jurisdictions -- and possibly many -- may not be well prepared for the arrival of the November 2006 elections with respect to the deployment and use of electronic voting equipment and related technology, and anxiety about this state of affairs among election officials is evident in a number of jurisdictions." (Washington Post)

The panel's chairman called the November midterms "a moment of truth for electronic voting," and the analysis a "caution sign, not a stop sign, but not a clean bill of health for a technology that everyone recognizes there may be problems with."

For more on those problems--machines can screw up and are vulnerable to hacking--see this and this, and this.

Public Ready to Withdraw from Iraq

The New York Times poll about Iraq is pretty stunning. 56 percent of respondents think the United States should "set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq". A whopping 72 percent think the war in Iraq is "making the U.S. image in the world… worse." And 41 percent think the U.S. presence in Iraq is leading to "less stability" in the Middle East (as opposed to a mere 25 percent who thinks it's leading to "greater stability.")

At this point, it appears that any candidate—Democrat or Republican—who truly believes that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of the very bad options available has no political reason for refraining from saying so. Meanwhile, on the partisan front, 42 percent of respondents thought that Democrats were "more likely to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq," compared to 36 percent who thought Republicans were more likely to do so. I wonder how those numbers would change if Democrats came out more strongly in favor of a timetable for getting out.

I also wonder how to square this with the fact that, according to a poll published a few days ago, over half the people in this country falsely believe Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and 55 percent of respondents believe that "history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq." Maybe they can be reconciled. Maybe polls just show that people are usually quite confused.

Is Europe Afraid of Lebanon?

Hmmm… Harold Meyerson writes that Europe should "put up or shut up" and deploy peacekeepers in southern Lebanon to secure the borders and stop the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Okay, but is this realistic? Would a European force actually be able to stop Hezbollah from firing missiles into Europe? He doesn't say.

What if Hezbollah defies this much-heralded international force, or what if they start waging a guerrilla war against the peacekeepers to try to drive them out? Should Europe stay? Should Europe fight? Should they try to wage a counterinsurgency battle against Hezbollah? Is that realistic? If European countries are really just refusing to deploy troops to Lebanon out of sheer cowardice, that's one thing, but if they have serious objections to deploying troops there, because they're afraid of getting caught in a situation similar to what the United States faces in Iraq, well, that deserves a hearing, no?

IHCIA not a Congressional priority

A couple of days ago, New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman stood on the Senate floor and told terrible stories of Native Americans in his state who could not get health care. Native Americans are five to seven times more likely to get diabetes, and they are also more likely than other Americans to get tuberculosis, yet their healthcare choices are very limited.

Bingaman talked about a little girl who died because she could not get treatment, and then talked about a man who had run out of insulin, but when he went to the only available clinic, there was none there and the doctors were unable to get any for at least twenty-four hours. Patients who need serious or emergency treatment have no hospital, and often have no transportation to take them to one.

The Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA) was passed in 1976. IHCIA expired in 2000, and Congress has yet to renew it, despite putting about $3 billion a year into it. Native American advocates say this sum is too low, and that the lack of reauthorization make future funding uncertain.

The U.S. Senate only recently restored funding for the Urban Indian Health Program, which George W. Bush has proposed be eliminated in the 2007 budget.

The IHCIA reauthorization that is being proposed includes funding to recruit and train healthcare professionals, provide mental health treatment and mental and behavioral health education, and provide disease preventon and cancer screening. But Congressional interest in reauthorizing IHCIA, as usual, is low. In the meantime, the Indian Health Service estimates that two-thirds of health care needed by Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is denied.

In related news, Dine Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment announced today that it will, along with Dooda Desert Rock Committee, oppose the approval of an air quality permit for the Desert Rock power plant in northwestern New Mexico.

From the announcement:

Two existing plants in the vicinity have been called two of the worst point-sources of pollution in the U.S. by the EPA, spewing concentrations of a number of pollutants proven to be damaging to human health and the environment. The health of neighboring residents has already been compromised by their exposure to these toxins; it would be genocidal to subject them to more pollutants in their already overburdened community. Despite the talk of so-called reduced power plant emissions, the San Juan County area simply cannot afford the increased emissions levels that will result from Desert Rock.

The announcement goes on to say that "The U.S. government spends twice as much per capita ($3800) on health care for federal prisoners as it spends for Native Americans."

Venezuela Buys Arms from Russia, Hints at a Nuke Program

Uh-oh:

[Guardian] Russia signed a £1.6 billion [$3 billion] arms deal with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela today, risking a confrontation with the U.S., which has imposed an arms embargo on the South American country.
The outspoken Venezuelan president, who has claimed that America wants to assassinate him and pledged cheap heating fuel for London's poor, also told reporters in Moscow that his country could develop its own nuclear program.

Earlier this month, Chavez looked deep into the soul of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at an African Union summit and liked what he saw. "Doesn't Iran have the right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful means?" he asked--rhetorically--while Ahmadinejad returned the compliment by lashing out at "bullying powers" who "think the countries and nations of the world must be their slaves. I know how the oppressed people of Africa and Latin America have suffered." Good thing we have so much leverage with both these countries.

What's Wrong With the Child Custody Protection Act

Yesterday, the House and Senate passed the Child Custody Protection Act, which would make it a federal crime to transport a pregnant minor across state borders for an abortion without parental consent, and allow parents to sue abortion providers if their daughters go to a clinic without permission. Today in the American Prospect, Helena Silverstein and Wayne Fishman take the time to explain what's wrong with this law.

Thirty-four states have laws in effect that require either parental consent or notification before a minor can get an abortion. The official purpose of the CCPA is to bolster these state laws. After all, what good is it for, say, Pennsylvania to require parental consent if grandma or boyfriend can just take missy to New Jersey? It's a fair enough point.

But here’s another fair point: Not all families are well functioning, and missy might have very good reason to think that dad would unleash some righteous whoop-ass on any daughter of his who is even sexually active, never mind one who wants an abortion. So a minor’s wellbeing can be put at risk by making it more difficult for her to get an abortion without parental involvement -- for instance, by going out of state.

Now some supporters of parental notification laws argue that if a pregnant minor is really in trouble with her parents (because they're abusive, say, or because the girl's father was the one who got her pregnant), then she can just go get a "judicial bypass" from the courts that would allow her to get an abortion without notifying her parents.

But as Silverstein and Fishman point out, the judicial bypass system is a complete and utter mess. In Alabama and Tennessee, "nearly half of the courts charged with implementing the bypass mechanism were unprepared to do so." And many judges, unaware of their responsibilities, simply refuse to give pregnant minors a waiver to get an abortion for ideological reasons. So often there's no escape, and the CCPA is, in effect, bolstering a court system that doesn't work.

What You Don't - and Won't - Know About Iraq Casualties

How many Americans have really been killed in Iraq? No one knows, because the Army won't release information on private security contractors involved in shooting incidents. Yesterday a federal judge, ruling against a Los Angeles Times FOIA request, declared that policy was a legitimate means of keeping information from insurgents - even though the Army does release the names and locations of regular soldiers involved in shootings. This fits right into the Bush administration's pattern of downplaying casualties, including tricky dodges like undercounting soldiers injured in battle who aren't actually shot.

Iraq War vs. Drug War

Seems the war in Iraq is undermining the Bush administration's war on drugs. While alcohol is harder to find because of harassment from Islamic extremists, "illegal narcotics are available everywhere in Iraq and anyone can get products containing amphetamines and codeine from any pharmacy or sidewalk throughout Iraq," says a local health official.

"War is a total failure of the human spirit."

Dahr Jamail is filing daily dispatches for Mother Jones from Beirut. Read his latest here.

Who's Arming Israel? Take a Guess.

Until a few days ago, there was room for debate over the extent to which the United States was to blame for the tragedy unfolding in Lebanon. Then came the administration’s decision to expedite a shipment of laser-guided bombs to Israel, followed by Condoleezza Rice squelching calls from Europe and Arab nations for a ceasefire in Lebanon. Anyone who still doubts that the U.S. has blood on its hands is either delusional or, as Fouad Siniora said yesterday, none too concerned with Lebanese blood.

But American culpability for Israel’s actions goes deeper than that. A report published yesterday by Foreign Policy in Focus entitled "Who’s Arming Israel?" sheds light on one aspect of this support. "During the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing—the Pentagon's biggest military aid program—and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries." The jet fuel and bombs that have been offered in July are drops in the bucket by comparison.

The report’s authors describe this military support for Israel in order to argue that the United States has a lot of leverage over its ally—enough to stop its vicious campaign against Lebanon whenever it wants. But there is another point as well: by not only supporting but facilitating Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, the United States is guaranteeing that the fires of anti-Americanism will keep burning for years to come—and not just in the Middle East. In what world body will the U.S. ever receive welcome reception of its aims and ideals after this shameful spectacle?

In an interview with Mother Jones last week, University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer placed this point in a broader context:

It's not just bin Laden—people in the Islamic world more generally are deeply hostile to the United States because we support Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. As a consequence, huge numbers of people in the Middle East tend to be more sympathetic to bin Laden than would otherwise be the case. As long as the United States continues to support Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, it will be impossible to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Islamic world and solve the terrorism problem.

Another Democratic Election Agenda?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't the Democrats already laid out an election agenda? They unveiled the grammatically implausible "Together, America Can Do Better" slogan last October, and that was fun. And then back in May the Post found the Democrats announcing that they would "raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls" if they get elected this fall. That sounds like an agenda to me.

But now the AP's reporting that today is really the day that House and Senate Democrats are laying out their election agenda, which includes pushing for a minimum wage hike and pressing for "tough, smart" national security. The latter sounds dubious to me; at the moment, Democrats have decided to back Israel to the hilt in its offensive against Lebanon, supporting a war that is neither tough nor smart. Odds are that a Democratic foreign policy will entail some version of "progressive realism," meaning that the U.S. will still meddle abroad and tell other countries what's best for them, but it will all be marginally more competent than the Bush administration's catastrophic foreign policy. Sounds exciting.

U.S. Stem Cell Research Falling Way Behind

USA Today -- which has been excellent on the stem cell debate -- reports today that researchers from top U.S. institutions are (surprise!) stymied in their research efforts by inadequate funding. The piece cites an April article in Nature Biotechnology that found U.S. embryonic stem-cell research papers dropped from 36 percent of all such publications in 2001 to 26 percent in 2004. Says the lead author:

"We probably can expect this veto to make closing the gap we documented in our study more of a challenge to U.S. researchers. It wouldn't be surprising if we see more U.S. human embryonic stem-cell researchers, including some of the top researchers, moving abroad."

The journal reported that this month 15 percent of stem-cell "principal investigators" had received job offers overseas, a rate more than five times higher than for other biologists. In 2004, American biologists put out only 20 studies on stem cell research, half the number published by their colleagues outside the U.S.

Exxon Posts $10 Billion Quarterly Profit

Reuters: Shares of Exxon-Mobil have jumped to an all-time high on word that the company posted a quarterly profit of more than $10 billion (a 36 percent jump), thanks largely to high oil prices. Tyson Slocum, Public Citizen's energy guy, told the Institute for Public Accuracy: "We're getting so little bang for our buck. In Europe, they do pay more for gas, but much of it is made up of taxes that subsidize mass transit, so they're getting something very tangible for their money. We don't get anything like that for the prices we're paying. We need to tax these windfall profits that companies like Exxon are posting and make investments into getting off our oil addiction."

Expect Exxon, rather, to spend some of this bounty on its strenuous PR effort to deny the reality of global warming, as documented by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones.

(And see here for an interactive chart of 40 Exxon-funded public policy groups that seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat.)