Great Lakes Danger Zones?

An exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states was supposed to be released last July, but the Bush administration has kept it under wraps - reportedly because it contained such potentially "alarming information" as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates.

The Center for Public Integrity published key excerpts of the report that top officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thought was too hot for the public to handle.

Click here to read the investigation.

The Center is receiving tremendous recognition to our report, Iraq: the War Card - Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War. In only two weeks since its release, it has already generated a great deal of worldwide news coverage and citizen response.

Here are a few things people are saying about it:

• "Sure to evoke passionate responses from supporters and opponents of the Iraq war..." (USA Today)
• A nonprofit group pursuing old-fashioned accountability journalism..." (The Washington Post)
• The Center "has done a real service to place nearly 1,000 of these in one easy-to-access location..." (Daily Kos)

To Torture Or Not To Torture

CIA Director Michael Hayden has acknowledged for the first time publicly that the agency had used the tactic of waterboarding on at least three prisoners nearly five years ago. Waterboarding is an interrogation practice in which, "the victim's lungs fill with water until the procedure is stopped or the victim dies." As Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism specialist who taught at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in California, told Congress, "Waterboarding is a long-standing form of torture used by history's most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia." Yesterday, "after years of dodging and dissembling, the Bush administration boldly embraced" its record of torture and said it would "definitely want to consider" using it again. "It will depend upon circumstances," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, adding that future acts of waterboarding would "need the president's approval," and the White House would notify "appropriate members of Congress."

LEGAL PARSING: In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. "Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago." Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said in an interview this month, "There's just no doubt in my mind -- under any set of rules -- waterboarding is torture." But inside the Bush administration, such clarity has succumbed to legal parsing. "I would feel" waterboarding was torture "if it were done to me," Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Congress recently. But Mukasey, who promised to lead a legal review of the practice before being confirmed, is now refusing to brief Congress on the legality of waterboarding. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told the New Yorker in January, "Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture." But McConnell said his comments should not be interpreted to reflect an official administration position. When he said waterboarding was "torture," McConnell explained to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), he meant he just personally didn't like water up his nose.

FROM DENIAL TO OPEN ADVOCACY: For years, the White House had done its best to deny the obvious: that it had employed waterboarding against prisoners. When Vice President Dick Cheney told a conservative talk radio host in Oct. 2006 that it would be a "no-brainer" to "dunk" an individual in water if it would save lives, the White House tried to dispel any notion that Cheney was embracing waterboarding. Now the White House strategy has changed -- "the administration has apparently decided that this is a debate they can win out in the open." The switch comes as Congress is considering legislation that "if passed, would require all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to abide by the Army Field Manual's prohibition against waterboarding." The White House said yesterday it wants to retain the option to use waterboarding, even while President Bush has frequently claimed "we do not torture." "Torture is illegal," Fratto said after McConnell's testimony. "We don't torture -- we maintain and as we have said many times that the programs have been reviewed, and the Department of Justice has determined them to be legal."

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SENATE: In December, the House passed an amendment that extends the current prohibitions in the Army Field Manual against torture to U.S. intelligence agencies and personnel. Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Christopher Bond (R-MO) has said he would lead an effort to remove that requirement when the legislation reaches the Senate floor. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who in the past has made a series of statements against the use of waterboarding, has placed a hold on the anti-waterboarding bill. A number of key Republican swing votes -- including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) -- will likely make the difference if the bill comes to a vote. McCain has previously called waterboarding a "horrible, odious" technique that "should never be condoned in the U.S."

Citizens United Sets It Sights On Obama

InfoCision Management Corporation client Citizens United has produced a film now in distribution attacking Hillary Clinton called “Hillary, the Movie”. Citizens United has embarked on a legal battle to advertise their film unconstrained by campaign finance laws. A Federal District Court ruled that the group could not air advertisements without attaching a disclaimer and disclosing their donor list. Claims that the film should be treated as a documentary prompted "outright laughter from the judges".[2] Citizens United now has its sights set on a new target: Barack Obama.

The group has budgeted about $1 million to produce a documentary film about Mr. Obama that is set to be distributed this summer. At the moment, Citizens United has its researchers poring over Mr. Obama’s records as a community organizer, state legislator and United States senator in the same way that it lied and disregarded Mrs. Clinton’s record. And with the absolute purpose of playing upon the ignorance of the people InfoCision will be calling for donations to get the barely literate suckers to cough up their last dime.

Citizens United was co-founded by Floyd Brown^[1] in 1988 and currently headed by David Bossie. Its offices are on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., near the White House. It has run smear ads of President Clinton's record on terrorism, and ads praising President Bush's terrorism record. Citizens United filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against Fahrenheit 9/11 using the same law it is now fighting against. "Obama is a completely clean slate,” David Bossie has said, “We will develop the image that we want the people to see. We’re doing the hard work of the research right now. The American people don’t know much about Obama, except that they like his speaking style.”

The Progress Report Of Not Much Progress

President Bush took office in 2001 with an advantage few presidents have enjoyed: a $236 billion budget surplus. But Bush quickly "blew through" President Clinton's surplus. Now the next administration will have to pay the price for Bush's fiscal irresponsibility. With his new budget, Bush is trying to create the appearance of compensating for his fiscal exuberance, terminating or reducing 151 government programs -- while still producing near record deficits. While Bush's budget plan "has little chance of surviving in a Democratic Congress," he is in effect washing his hands clean of his economic mismanagement, delaying "until 2009 decisions on how to cope with short- and long-term financial problems." The next president will "inherit a fiscal meltdown,"Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) said. Conrad and Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) are considering setting up "a bipartisan commission to help the next president and Congress deal with these issues, possibly through legislation."

IRRESPONSIBILITY OF BUSH'S TAX CUTS:
In 2001, Bush said his tax cuts would cost the government $1.3 trillion, but his 2009 budget -- which calls for making his signature tax cuts permanent -- indicates they would "cost the government more than $2 trillion in their second decade." Extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would give the top one percent of households more than $1.1 trillion in benefits over the next decade, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities -- more than the entire amount the government spends on elementary and secondary education or veterans' medical care. Without offsets, permanent tax cuts would increase deficits and add to national debt, "essentially doubl[ing] the size of the debt in 2050." Not surprisingly, Bush has not proposed adequate measures to pay for the cuts. Conrad noted the irony of preserving Bush's tax cuts while proposing devastating blows to Medicare and Medicaid. "We believe that is a very odd sense of priorities. That is not a sense of priorities that are shared by the American people," he said. The budget also includes $19.7 billion for SCHIP funding, but this would not "allow states to cover more uninsured children" and is still inadequate to maintain current programs.

EXORBITANT DEFICIT AND DEBT:
"Slumping revenues and the cost of an economic rescue package will combine to produce a huge jump in the deficit to $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, the White House says, just shy of the record $413 billion set four years ago." This deficit will undoubtedly hamstring future administrations. For example, budget experts "agree that there is not enough money to be had" from conservative approaches to cut "wasteful federal spending." But the White House remains cheerful. "This budget is one that keeps spending under control," Bush trumpeted. And while Bush has attempted to embrace fiscal conservatism by cutting earmarks, his budget would only cut pork by $18 billion, a number "so small as to be of symbolic importance." Furthermore, unless the "economy rebounds" and revenue pours in, "deficits will push the cumulative federal debt past $12 trillion in the next five years." "I would suggest to you the debt is the threat," Conrad stated, saying Bush will likely see an "almost a doubling of the national debt on his watch."

THE SECRET BUDGET:
The "budget achieves balance by 2012," Bush said yesterday. But the forecast is likely to be worse than what the White House is saying. To achieve its deficit goals, the White House predicts the economy will grow at 2.7 percent rate this year, "higher than what private sector economists" anticipate and a full point higher than the Congressional Budget Office's projections. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-SC) said a more likely scenario is a "deficit that remains in the $200 billion range in 2012." Moreover, billions in spending are unaccounted for in the budget. For example, Bush budgeted $70 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- but only accounted for costs up to the first half of FY2009. In reality, around $200 billion is expected to be spent. Furthermore, Bush did not take into account the costs "of assuring that higher alternative minimum tax rates originally aimed at several hundred very wealthy people don't hit tens of millions of middle-income earners." Conrad accused Bush of "hide-the-ball budgeting." Gregg concluded that this budget is "not a serious budget."

Wal-Mart And Salmonella

In February 2007, the Center for Disease Control confirmed the presence of the dangerous germ salmonella in recalled peanut butter sold under the Wal-Mart Stores house brand Great Value. ConAgra Foods Inc. had recalled all Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter made at its Sylvester, Ga., plant after federal health officials linked the product to a salmonella outbreak that had sickened at least 329 people from 41 states. [USA Today, 2/23/07]

See You On Rooftops

Driven To Drink