Undernews For 3 March, 2009

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
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Editor: Sam Smith

3 March 2009

WORD

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. - Edward Abbey

SHOP TALK

Sam Smith

Sometime this year the Review will be moving full time to its New England regional headquarters in Freeport, Maine, previously home only for the estivatory editions of summer.

I have deep ties to Maine, going back more than six decades. I have long lived as a geographical split personality, with the phrase bi-coastal meaning in my case Casco Bay and the Potomac River. Wherever my physical presence, part of me was in another place, symbolized by the day when I was quoted in both the Washington Post about Marion Barry and on a Portland TV station about alternative agriculture. My views of the city have always had a touch of tide and pasture in them.

Based on past experience, there is no evidence that this change will in anyway alter the journal's content or its editor's irascibility, so readers have nothing to fear. But as your editor has now covered Washington for all or part of one quarter of America's presidencies, it seems a good time to try something a little different.

Some random anecdotes from these past 50 years can be found here.

In compiling the these tales, I was struck by how few were of federal rather than local Washington. The stories of federal Washington involve power, intrigue and associated conflicts that, dramatic as they may be at one moment, are easily replaced by others a few moments later. The stories of local Washington are stories of real people and places living and struggling in a center of power, intrigue and associated conflicts. These stories survive because they come from heart, culture and community rather than depending on the transitory misadventures of ambition.

My writings about the nation's capital have been grounded in what the theologian Martin Marty described as the need to have a place from which to view the world. Too much of what is written about this city lacks such a place.

I am leaving my birthplace, a town I have loved but also a place in which I have felt increasingly an exile as local values, culture and community faded - not because they lacked merit but because they did not produce enough power or profit for someone.

It is a city of magnificent views and dismal viewpoints, wonderful communities and dubious egos, natural spaces and artificial words. It is a city that too often can't tell the difference between intelligence and wisdom or, as Russell Baker once noted, between being serious and being somber.

It is also a city in which all politics becomes office politics, and where imagination and free thought are restricted to thirty minutes on weekdays and violators will be towed.

Still, Washington has always been an unsortable amalgam of decadence and decency, undeserved profit and unrequited purpose, subterranean conspiracies and high ideals.

Walt Whitman found himself "amid all this huge mess of traitors, loafers, hospitals, axe-grinders, & incompetencies & officials that goes by the name of Washington." Even earlier, Captain Frederick Marry noted, "Here are assembled from every state in the union, what ought to be the collected talent, intelligence, and high principles of a free and enlightened nation. Of talent and intelligence there is a very fair supply, but principle is not so much in demand; and in everything, and everywhere, by the demand the supply is regulated."

One of the things that affects these crosscurrents of felicity and felony is what is happening elsewhere in the nation. As a weak colony filled with professional migrants, DC is a beta edition of both the good and the bad. Just as Washington was once deep into the civil rights and peace movements, today it accurately reflects national values sown in during the Reagan-Clinton-Bush era that caused the disintegration of the republic's economy, its global status and its constitution.

I was born in Washington during the New Deal, for which my father worked. I also went to a segregated public elementary school and lived a segregated life as a child. Thus, from the beginning, I was introduced to the painful contradictions of American democracy.

We left Washington when I was ten but there was an idealism among their friends from that era that I always admired. Years later, my wife and I joined my then widowed mother at a 50th anniversary of the New Deal at the Mayflower Hotel. The median age was probably 75 but I have seldom been in a room with so much energy and enthusiasm. Even the guest speaker, Hubert Humphrey, had a hard time keeping up with his audience.

In all my years in this town, there has only been one other period that has come close: the Great Society. Like the segregated city into which I was born, there were huge inconsistencies, headlined by the Vietnam War, but it was also true that Lyndon Johnson got more good legislation passed in less time than any president in our history. And Washington was once again filled with those who truly cared.

Such moments, however, are not only rare; they are typically born not in Washington but in what is happening elsewhere - such as a depression, civil rights movement, riots or the rise of the 60s counterculture.

It's one reason I don't worry about leaving Washington: most of the time Washington doesn't make news; it only reacts to it.

And slowly. As Phil Hart once put it, the Senate is a place that does things twenty years after it should have.

Which is why for some three decades, Washington has contributed so little to the nation other than to endorse, codify and promote policies leading to the collapse of the First American Republic. Since 1976 Congress has passed more laws than it did in the previous two centuries. And to what end? To place us in the dismal condition in which we now find ourselves.

I sometimes find myself reciting the lines of Tennessee Williams in Camino Real: "Turn back stranger, for the well of humanity has gone dry in this place. And the only birds that sing are kept in cages."

Those of us who have fought for alternative approaches have constantly been met with contempt and disinterest by those in power, whether in politics or the media. The Review, however, has been around long enough for there to be a scorecard and if you go back 20, 30, 40 years you'll find that those seeking other ways were far ahead of the curve on such issues as civil rights, education, self-government, foreign policy, civil liberties and the environment. It was the capital's elite, and not us, who were extreme and radical - extremely slow and radically wrong. Yet one of the privileges of power is to set standards, even if they are the standards of the slowest kids in the class. Another privilege is never having to say you're sorry. Which is why, beginning in the 1980s, we began to lose the struggle and have been doing so ever since.

Then why have I stayed so long? My fascination and affection for the local city aside, I was spurred by Chancellor Willy Brandt, who fled Germany as a young man in the 1930s, became a Norwegian citizen but returned to his homeland after the war. Asked why he had come back, Brandt said because it was more important to be a democrat in Germany than in Norway. I have long felt, lonely as it often has been, the same way about staying in Washington.

I sometimes describe what I do as drawing pictures on the walls of the Lascaux Caves of our times. Leaving sketches of what democracy and constitutional government once looked like as they galloped through the countryside.

As in Orwell's 1984, it was mainly in cities like Washington that we lost our way. Only ten percent of the people in his book lived in the capital he described. The rest, the proles, still lived largely free of the dismal, cruel dysevolution of which he wrote.

Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University described Orwell's countryside this way:

"The proles were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and optimistic. The proles were also the freest of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased. They could come and go, and talk openly about whatever they felt like without having to worry about the Thought Police. . .

"[Orwell] also concluded that the hope for the future was contained within this group. At several points in the book, Winston, the hero, made a point of mentioning that the proles were the hope for the future and the only ones who could end Big Brother's tyranny, since they were the only group still allowed to have feelings and opinions. . . "

Similarly, you can still find a noticeably freer America simply by leaving the major centers of our post-constitutional society - away from those places where the most honored have done us the most damage.

The geographical parochialism of those who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still hospitable to dreams and perhaps even to the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Further, the difficulty that large cities will have adapting to a dramatically different economy and ecology adds to the appeal of places like Maine - places skilled in survival, kinder to the environment and still appreciative of freedom.

One also finds in such places not only a deep culture of the past but one increasingly invigorated by those - in the best tradition of immigrants - courageous and imaginative enough to have moved there. In such ways such places offer not only a recovery of what one may have thought had disappeared forever but the possibility of another beginning in a land that has badly gone astray.

I shall report from time to time on how it's going.

Some unofficial moments in an official city

FLOTSAM & JETSAM

POLICY WITHOUT PROMISE

Sam Smith

Sometimes, watching Barack Obama at work, I'm reminded of an American Idol contestant who has learned all the tunes and the moves, but not how to make them swing.

It's far from his problem alone, of course. Washington in the past few months has spent more time and more money with less effect that at any point in our history. Republican or Democrat, Congress or the White House - it doesn't seem to make any difference.

While the financial markets are, to be sure, limited indicators of cultural and political change, their indifference to an unprecedented infusion of public funds is startling. And they do have a history of hinting at what things will be like a half year from now and it doesn't look pretty.

Months down the pike we will find out if they underestimated the effects of the bailout, but right now they're among the best numbers we have and, besides, they are probably closer to the mindset of the average American that at any point in the recent past. When Warren Buffett and the typical worker could sit down at a bar and commiserate, you know things are bad.

Why hasn't it all worked better? One question that keeps coming back: what if the government suddenly banned all gambling and Las Vegas went under? How would you bring that city back?

While the government, of course, hasn't banned gambling in the financial markets - it hasn't even repealed recent legislation that let it get out of hand - the problem is both similar and much harder. If it was just a normal recession, our problem would be to get people working again. But in our case, working at what: creating another mythical financial bubble? Can you really replace massive betting with non-existent dollars on non-existent assets by weatherizing homes and building windmills?

Add to this the fact that an uncertain amount of the capital that has been lost was not only imaginary but came originally from the laundering of large amounts of illegal monies from things like the drug trade and the Russian mob, and the complexity grows. Adam Smith didn't have to deal with that.

The government - Bush and Obama, Congress and the White House - have approached the matter with what might be called a solution bubble, which is to say if you make the solution grandiose enough, no one's really going to know what's going on so, with luck, you can create what might be called a hedge fund of hope. As noted here before, Tim Geithner has essentially applied Bernie Madoff's principle to the federal budget: give us your money, don't ask questions, and we'll take care of it for you.

But the problem is not really political and it's not moral. It's more likely a reflection of education, class and culture. Harvard trained lawyers and MBAs think differently than much of America. They are skilled in theories, abstractions, and the subsidiary effects of action taken at seemingly remote distances. They are more interested in algorithms than in anecdotes, in philosophy over pragmatism and in the intellectual over the empirical.

There are times when such people can be helpful but a near depression is not one of them.

Imagine how different the plan for recovery would have been if it had been conceived by mayors and not senators, small business people and not attorneys, and those who knew how to instill hope among millions and not just in the elite corners of the nation's capital.

That's not how Washington is run these days, however. The number of lawyers in town has soared, small business people are virtually non-existent, and the planned measures are being described by a media that earns enough that it even worries publicly about its own taxes at White House news briefings.

And it's not just the bank bailout, although some of that has been grotesque. There has also been a generalized tendency to create abstract, even ethereal, solutions and to ignore practical approaches that could, for example, change the expectation of small businesses, whose role in job creation is constantly underrated in Washington and the media. If one half of all small businesses currently with a payroll added one employee that would produce about 3 million new jobs, almost matching those promised by Obama to be created or, in his slick escape hatch, "retained."

Obviously that's not likely to happen under any circumstances, but it gives an insight into a portion of the economy that has been hardly mentioned in the bailout.

Beyond actual change in employment is the psychological factor. I already find myself checking to see what businesses have closed on familiar blocks. And if a local business owner tells me how bad times are, I'm as likely to think I'm talking to an expert as I would be reading the Washington Post op eds.

To get the economy going, everyone has to have enough confidence to take a risk or two, to spend instead of hoard, to enjoy a night out instead of leftovers. There is little encouragement for this in what has been going on in Washington.

To be sure, the semiotic sales pitches are there. Like the constant comparison to the New Deal, when the actual similarities are minimal at best. Here, for example, Wikipedia's description of what just one Roosevelt aide - and a mere social worker at that - did in the early days of the New Deal:

[][][]

In March 1933, Roosevelt summoned [Harry] Hopkins to Washington as federal relief administrator. Convinced that paid work was psychologically more valuable than cash handouts, Hopkins . . . supervised the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration. . .

FERA, the largest program from 1933-35, involved giving money to localities to operate work relief projects to employ those on direct relief. CWA was similar, but did not require workers to be on relief in order to receive a government sponsored job. In less than four months, the Civil Works Administration hired four million people, and during its five-months of operation, the CWA built and repaired 200 swimming pools, 3,700 playgrounds, 40,000 schools, 250,000 miles of road, and 12 million feet of sewer pipe.

The Works Progress Administration, which followed the CWA, employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 of highways and roads. The WPA operated on its own, and selected projects with the cooperation of local and state government but operated them with its own staff and budget. Hopkins started programs for youth (National Youth Administration) and for artists and writers (Federal One Programs).

[][][]

Note the speed with which things happened, the variety of programs, the grant of money to localities to do what they thought best, and the huge number of people employed as a result. Finally, and not least important, note how everyone could tell what was going on and how it would help their community or some other.

An ecology of excitement, real improvement, real jobs and things anyone could see and appreciate was part of the magic of the New Deal and part of what is sorely absent from the current bailout, where - when some of the above was proposed - it was cast aside as pork.

Well before the current crisis (albeit while it was quietly getting ready to burst upon us), I suggested a number of programs of a similar quality: specific, useful and easy to comprehend. For example:

- Returning credit card interest rates to the limits of the 1980s.

- A shared equity program in which federal, state and local government would help new and lower income homeowners by becoming co-owners and getting back its share plus any profit on resale.

- A massive railroad building program to bring the U.S. up to the levels of other developed countries and create new economies along new routes.

Instead, during the bailout debates, interest rates were hardly mentioned, the direct participation of the feds in home purchases came reluctantly, and building high speed rail service for the business elite swallowed most of the rail money in the stimulus package. Similarly, sound New Deal ideas like letting bankruptcy courts rewrite home loans still struggle for political acceptance. Revenue sharing - i.e. letting many bailout choices be made at the state and local level where change could be more easily judged, seen and felt - was suppressed with Obama even warning governors and mayors about the reports they would have to file with the feds. This despite the fact that there is no proof that state or local government are more inefficient or corrupt than the feds on such programs.

In the end, our wallets were emptied some more and we were left, in the words of Peggy Lee, thinking, "Is that all there is?"

We find ourselves with policies short on practicality, money desperately needed by the little guy ending up with banks and insurance companies, promises without visible dimensions, and solutions without soul.

The answers we have been given provide plenty of material for economists and columnists but far too little that can be deposited in a personal checking account. Finally, it don't mean a thing if it don't have that swing and we sadly find ourselves with huge growing deficits and still so little to dance about.

PAGE ONE MUST

DESPITE HEAVY SUPPORT IN POLLS, SINGLE PAYER ADVOCATES BARRED FROM OBAMA HEALTH SUMMIT

On Thursday, the White House will host a summit on how to reform the healthcare system. The 120 invited guests include lobbyists for various interest groups including the private-for-profit insurance industry, some members of Congress including Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus who has already ruled single payer “off the table,” and various others concerned with healthcare. No single payer advocates have been invited to attend.

SINGLE PAYER POLL RESULTS

ANOTHER OBAMA APPOINTEE IN TROUBLE

NT Daily News - The man who is President Obama's newly minted urban czar pocketed thousands of dollars in campaign cash from city developers whose projects he approved or funded with taxpayers' money, a Daily News probe found. Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion often received contributions just before or after he sponsored money for projects or approved important zoning changes, records show. Most donations were organized and well-timed.

In one case, a developer became a Carrion fund-raiser two months before the borough president signed off on his project, raising more than $6,000 in campaign cash.

In another, eight Boricua College officials came up with $8,000 on the same day for Carrion three weeks before the school filed plans to build a new tower. Carrion ultimately approved the project and sponsored millions in taxpayer funds for it.

CALIFORNIA DECLARES WATER EMERGENCY

Reuters - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.

As many as 95,000 agricultural jobs will be lost, communities will be devastated and some growers in the most economically productive farm state simply are not able to plant, state officials said, calling the current drought the most expensive ever.. . .

He called on urban water users to cut consumption by 20 percent and state agencies to implement a water reduction plan. Meanwhile, the state of emergency will let planners fast-track some infrastructure building.

NETANYAHU POISED TO APPOINT LIEBERMAN FOREIGN MINISTER

Tikun Olam - The unthinkable happens rather frequently in Israeli politics. Ariel Sharon weathered banishment from politics to return as prime minister. Many Israelis thought it wouldn't be possible considering the humiliation of Sharon's fall from power after Sabra and Chatilla. But he managed a triumphal return. No one thought it possible that a sitting prime minister could be as venal as corrupt as Ehud Olmert has turned out to be nor that he would be brought down by putting his hand in the cookie jar once too often.

Now, we are about to enter another one of those Alice in Wonderland moments in the annals of Israeli politics. Bibi Netanyahu is vetting his planned governing coalition and among the eye-popping appointments will be Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister. . .

How, I wondered, would Bibi have the temerity of bucking such a warning from Washington? Well, Bibi's either got balls or he's a fool. He's going to put forward a genuine Israeli racist thug as the country's next foreign minister. . .

One wonders what message it will send to the world community that Israel's chief messenger is previously convicted of physical assault and under investigation for money laundering. . .

When one considers that the incoming justice minister, Daniel Friedmann, owes the renewal of his tenure to Lieberman, one wonders how any investigation of Lieberman can be considered full, rigorous and independent. . .

This certainly complicates the Obama administration's dealings with Lieberman and the incoming Israeli government. The president has made a priority of rebuilding our relations with the Muslim world. Yet, Israel has chosen a politician who openly espouses disenfranchising and even expelling Israeli Arabs from Israel. . .

There is a silver lining in all this: the more extreme Netanyahu's government the more quickly it is likely to fall. Either the Israeli people will tire of an extremist government doing nothing to advance the peace process; or one or another of the wacko factions he's embraced will give him the old heave ho when he's insufficiently true to rightist principles. If Netanyahu embarrasses himself and his Party enough, then the Israeli people may turn to a more centrist alternative for their next government that might conceivably advance the prospects for peace.

OBAMA FURTHERS THE MYTH ABOUT SHOOLS AND JOBS

Gerald Bracey, Huffington Post - Obama said [in his speech to Congress], "Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education." Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings. . .

There are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:

1. The definition of "more than a high school diploma" is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on- the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require "short term on the job training." That's one week to three months.

2. The "fastest-growing occupations" account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. . .

Because test scores no longer work to prove American school failure, the statistic of choice to prove what a lousy job we're doing is the graduation rate. . . The dropout rates across nations are, so far as I can tell, incomparable, since secondary school programs in other nations range from two to five years. In other nations, once students finish the equivalent of 8th grade, they are tracked into vocational, technical or pre-college programs whereas American students go to comprehensive high schools (although, as we all know, there is plenty of informal tracking within those). . .

The World Economic Forum, and the Institute for Management Development, two Swiss think tanks, rate the U. S. as the most globally competitive nation in the world, IMD using 50+ nations, WEF, 135. What things will look like when their new rankings emerge from the current catastrophe this fall is hard to say. But looking at tests, high-scoring Iceland is an economic basket case. High-scoring France is on strike. And even higher-scoring Japan, the idol that "A Nation At Risk" prostrated itself to in 1983 because its test scores surely ensured economic prosperity, endured a "lost decade" of recession starting around 1990 and, in 2007 was in recession once again. Japan's students still ace tests. When will we ever learn?

THE PHANTOM FILIBUSTER

David E. RePass, NY Times - Most Americans think of the filibuster (if they think of it at all) through the lens of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" - a minority in the Senate deeply disagrees with a measure, takes to the floor and argues passionately round the clock to prevent it from passing. .

To reduce deadlock, in 1917 the Senate passed Rule 22, which made it possible for a supermajority - two-thirds of the chamber - to end a filibuster by voting for cloture. The two-thirds majority was later changed to three-fifths, or 60 of the current 100 senators.

In recent years, however, the Senate has become so averse to the filibuster that if fewer than 60 senators support a controversial measure, it usually won't come up for discussion at all. The mere threat of a filibuster has become a filibuster, a phantom filibuster. Instead of needing a sufficient number of dedicated senators to hold the floor for many days and nights, all it takes to block movement on a bill is for 41 senators to raise their little fingers in opposition. . .

The phantom filibuster is clearly unconstitutional. The founders required a supermajority in only five situations: veto overrides and votes on treaties, constitutional amendments, convictions of impeached officials and expulsions of members of the House or Senate. The Constitution certainly does not call for a supermajority before debate on any controversial measure can begin.

And fixing the problem would not require any change in Senate rules. The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority's bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin.

Some argue that this procedure would mire the Senate in one filibuster after another. But avoiding delay by not bringing measures to the floor makes no sense. For fear of not getting much done, almost nothing is done at all. And what does get done is so compromised and toothless to make it filibuster-proof that it fails to solve problems. . .

It is up to Mr. Reid. He can do away with the supermajority requirement for virtually all significant measures and return majority rule to the Senate.

PASSINGS: PAUL HARVEY

Sam Smith - I belong to a small subset of people who didn't agree with Paul Harvey most of the time but still loved to hear him say it anyway. It was like having a living Music Man doing his thing on your car radio.

I also suspect that he played a far greater role in bringing the Vietnam War to a close then most realize. He had been a strong advocate of the war until 1970, when his son became a conscientious objector, at which point he even wrote Richard Nixon in opposition. Harvey at that time had more listeners than just about anyone in the country.

My favorite Paul Harvey report went something like this (be sure to pause at the dots):

Up in Bingingham NY last night, little ten year old John Roberts playing Little League baseball. . .

Came up to bat. . .

Hit a ball straight into center field. . . .

Made it to first. . . .

Rounded second. . . .

Spun around third. . . .

Slid home. . . .

He was safe. . .

(long pause)

And dead. No, don't ask me, there'll be an autopsy tomorrow.

Now page 3. . .

CALIFORNIA NEAR WATER RATIONING

Reuters - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.

As many as 95,000 agricultural jobs will be lost, communities will be devastated and some growers in the most economically productive farm state simply are not able to plant, state officials said, calling the current drought the most expensive ever. . .

He called on urban water users to cut consumption by 20 percent and state agencies to implement a water reduction plan. . .

THE BILL MOYERS YOU DON'T HEAR ABOUT

Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald - Of all the second acts in American public life, none has amazed me more than that of Bill Moyers. He spent the first decade of his adult life as one of Lyndon Johnson's dirtiest henchmen. His work on Johnson's vicious 1964 presidential campaign is probably worth an entire book by itself: Moyers helped thwart the seating of an integrated delegation from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and asked the FBI to investigate 15 members of the Senate staff of Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater. Other low lights include Moyers giving the FBI the okay to spread dirty stories about Martin Luther King's sex life, and his ongoing role spinning fanciful tales about the war in Vietnam as Johnson's press secretary from 1965 to 1967.

Yet somehow none of that has stopped Moyers from posing as the conscience of the American press for most of the past four decades, mostly in various screechy PBS shows. Without any apparent sense of irony, he viciously excoriates the U.S. press for its supposed subservience to the White House on Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror. Amazingly, when Moyers is ranting that the Bush administration fabricated everything about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, nobody ever asks him about the Johnson administration's fantastical account of the imaginary 1964 attack in the Tonkin Gulf that became the excuse for the Vietnam war, an account he helped to construct. Everything about Moyers' years with Johnson has somehow vanished down the memory hole.

Now another load of Moyers' dirty laundry has appeared on the clothesline. The Washington Post published a story based on newly revealed documents that show that the FBI investigated rumors that Johnson aide Jack Valenti (later the head of the Motion Picture Association of America) was gay. The documents also show that Moyers asked the FBI to investigate two other Johnson administration figures who were "suspected as having homosexual tendencies."

Moyers, questioned about the documents by Post reporters, replied that his memory was hazy. Don't worry, Bill; if past history is any indication, pretty soon our memories will be hazy, too.

Indegay Forum - These revelations once again remind us that empathy for the dignity of gay people does not always fall along partisan political lines. Whereas Barry Goldwater, one of the crucial figures in the birth of the conservative movement, could have easily exploited the Jenkins scandal in the presidential campaign, he refused to discuss it. In his memoir Goldwater wrote, "It was a sad time for Jenkins and his family. Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends, or lasting principle, are more important." Goldwater, today remembered by most liberals as a fire-breathing Neanderthal, later became an outspoken opponent of the ban on gays in the military.

Contrast Goldwater's behavior to that of Moyers, who abused his power in office to hunt down and expose the gays in his midst. . . To be sure, Moyers's behavior at the time took place within a social milieu far more repressive than today's. It wasn't until 1973, after all, that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders. Gays were banned from working in the federal civil service until 1975. And gays were barred from having security clearances, amazingly, until 1995. That Moyers engaged in Nixonian dirty tricks with the aim of embarrassing and ruining the careers of gay people, while despicable, was something that many officials in his position probably would have done, given the mores of the era.

But what makes Moyers's contemptible behavior relevant is that even to this day he has yet to acknowledge wrongdoing, never mind apologize. That Moyers has since become a supporter of gay rights is irrelevant. . .

DUNCAN WANTS TO CUT STUDENT'S SUMMER VACATION

CNN - Arne Duncan, the Cabinet secretary charged with overhauling America's educational system, is studying programs that keep kids in school longer to boost their academic achievements. "When I go out and talk about that, that doesn't always make me popular with students. They like the long summers," Duncan said in an interview Wednesday with CNN. But Duncan said American students are "at a competitive disadvantage" because the United States has shorter school years than other countries such as India and China.

RIAA CUTTING BACK ON STAFF

Tech Dirt - Details have been spilling out over the last few days that the RIAA has been making pretty massive cuts to staff. We already knew that EMI was cutting back on its support, and it seems that with the rest of the RIAA's major label supporters also having economic troubles, the writing is on the wall that the RIAA is about to go through a major transformation. . .

The real issue is that the RIAA has basically managed to run one of the dumbest, most self-defeating strategies over the last decade. Rather than helping major record labels adjust to the changing market, it continually, repeatedly and publicly destroyed its own reputation and the reputation of the labels -- each time shrinking their potential market by blaming the very people they should have been working to turn into customers. . .

It was evident to pretty much anyone who took the time to understand the issues back in the mid- to late-90s, that the internet represented an opportunity to those who embraced it. The RIAA's decision to fight progress and its own customers at every turn has been nothing short of a complete disaster. That the group is now being gutted is the inevitable result of a poor strategy that could have easily been avoided.

OBAMA PROMISES TO OBSERVE TWO-THIRDS OF HIS IRAQ PROMISE

Kevin Connolly BBC - On the campaign trail Mr Obama pledged to remove troops in 16 months. America's combat mission in Iraq, which cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, which broke homes and hearts, which angered enemies and alienated allies, will end by August 2010.

That means that tens of thousands of soldiers serving in what the US military calls "combat brigades" will be home 19 months from now.

America and Iraq have a bilateral agreement which envisages the withdrawal of all US forces by the end of 2011. . .

America will retain a substantial residual force in Iraq for many months after the August 2010 deadline, and the scope of its mission is far from clear. . .

Some Democrats are already irritated by the scale and length of that residual deployment, which was not mentioned in Mr Obama's campaign speeches, but he is adamant that he is doing the right thing. . .

Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle - A great majority of Americans approve of President Obama's early performance in office, but some of his staunchest supporters on the left are criticizing his troop surge proposal for Afghanistan and the withdrawal plan for Iraq that he's set to announce today at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald -- whose anti-McCain viral videos helped shape the campaign narrative in Obama's favor -- released the first of a series of documentary online videos that urge Americans to rethink Afghanistan and has called for congressional hearings on the surge. Historian-activist Howard Zinn, a liberal eminence grise, called Obama's plan to send 17,000 additional troops there "disastrous.". . .

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday she didn't see any justification for 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq. Usually supportive MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow said this week that Obama's plan "looks very much more like a Bush plan than it did like a Barack Obama-the-campaigner plan.". . .

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