THE FULCRUM

The four Iraqis contend U.S. authorities have failed to review whether superiors bear criminal responsibility for the abuse at the prison that was disclosed this year. Several U.S. investigations of the scandal have cited failures of leadership in general terms, but so far, only low-ranking soldiers have been charged or convicted.

Near-record crowds turned out for the holiday shopping season's Thanksgiving weekend kickoff, bringing with them unexpectedly robust sales gains to many malls and retail chains across the country.

Except, surprisingly, at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

[snip]

...J.C. Penney Co. and Sears, Roebuck & Co. also remained cautious about overall holiday sales, despite dazzling customer turnout.

High-end retailers continued their months-long streak of strong sales. Joanne Teichman, owner of Ylang-Ylang, a Dallas jewelry boutique, said Friday's sales were 20% ahead of the same day a year ago. "At the higher-end designer brands, there is no price resistance," she said.

At Saks Fifth Avenue, a unit of Saks Inc., demand was hot for brooches, fur-trimmed capes and mufflers and a Dolce & Gabbana snakeskin handbag and coordinating zodiac-sign buckle. The handbag and buckle sell separately for $1,095 and $480, respectively. "We're having real trouble keeping them in stock," said Ron Frasch, chief merchant. "We bought a lot of it, but we will definitely sell out."

With Congress's completion of its work on the 2005 budget this week, President Bush and Congressional leaders have achieved a significant victory in the battle for spending discipline in Washington.

Pentagon officials have drafted a secret order telling U.S. Special Forces to be prepared to conduct clandestine operations against terror groups, many with ties to al Qaeda in the Middle East and Asia, according to military and civilian officials.

[snip]

If adopted, the Pentagon document would lay the groundwork for special-forces operations against terror groups in countries where the military hasn't been active, possibly including missions in nations friendly to the U.S., officials said. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top aides want special-operations troops to have greater involvement in jobs traditionally handled by the CIA. The missions under consideration range from intelligence gathering to apprehending individual terrorists to lethal attacks, people involved said.

The officers said the exact number of extra troops needed is still being reviewed but estimated it at the equivalent of several battalions, or about 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq fell to nearly 100,000 last spring before rising to 138,000, where it has stayed since the summer.

To boost the current level, military commanders have considered extending the stay of more troops due to rotate out shortly, or accelerating the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is scheduled to start in January. But a third option—drawing all or part of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on emergency standby in the United States—has emerged as increasingly likely.

In discussing battle plans, commanders here did not want to telegraph the areas U.S. forces might be focusing on for their next offensives. But some of the potential targets can easily be discerned by mapping the locations of attacks on U.S. forces, including areas in or around the restive cities of Mosul, Ramadi, Baqubah, Samarra and Baghdad.

At the same time, officers cautioned against expecting anything on the scale of Fallujah, which involved more than 10,000 U.S. troops and about 2,500 Iraqi forces.

“They’re not going to be big operations like Fallujah, because there’s no place else in Iraq where the situation is like what it was there,” one commander said.

In its latest report, published last week, the BLS could say only that 16,091 workers were laid off because of job relocations in the third quarter. It couldn't say how many jobs had shifted within the U.S. or were shipped overseas.

In 13 of the 95 cases involving job relocations during the third quarter, "the employer could not say anything beyond, 'I laid off 100 people in this layoff. I did move work, but I can't tell you how many of these 100 were due to the movement of work to X, Y and Z,' " says Lewis Siegel, who directs the BLS's mass-layoffs statistics program. The bureau concluded that that proportion was too high to provide a "meaningful" count.

Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. soldiers, stormed one of the major Sunni Muslim mosques in Baghdad after Friday prayers, opening fire and killing at least three people, witnesses said.

North Korea's state media on Wednesday broke with the rigid codes it employs in referring to Kim, dropping the highest honorific title of "great leader" from a report on his visit to a military base. Although the term was again picked up in later broadcasts, it marked the first such omission in coverage of an official Kim event since he inherited the title from his late father -- North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung -- a decade ago, according to Japan-based Radiopress Inc. which monitors North Korea's official media.

The United States has intelligence that Iran is working to adapt missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon, further evidence that the Islamic republic is determined to acquire a nuclear bomb, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Wednesday.

Separately, an Iranian opposition exile group charged in Paris that Iran is enriching uranium at a secret military facility unknown to U.N. weapons inspectors. Iran has denied seeking to build nuclear weapons.

[snip]

Powell appears to be saying the Iranians are working very hard on this capability," Cirincione said. He said Powell's comments were striking because the International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that it had not seen any information that Iran had conducted weapons-related work.

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?

When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?

Republicans in Congress neared agreement on a year-end budget bill that would dramatically slow the growth in federal support for education and nondefense scientific research to meet strict spending targets set by the White House.

Instead the administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth, according to several people who are advising the White House or are familiar with the deliberations.

The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral. To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said.

Why don't Republicans want every vote counted?

So coalition forces strike the city of Fallujah, and Iraqi insurgents respond by attacking in Mosul, Baquba, Kirkuk and Suweira. This, we now hear, proves that the more insurgents the U.S. kills, the stronger the insurgency grows. Call it the Obi-Wan Kenobi school of international relations: Strike him down, and he'll only become more powerful.

In real warfare, of course, killing the enemy means there are fewer enemies to kill. And in one week in Fallujah, and at the cost of some 40 American soldiers' lives and several Iraqi ones, about 1,200 insurgents were killed and another 1,000 taken prisoner. The insurgents have been denied their principal sanctuary. Their torture chambers -- a stark indication of what they intend for all of Iraq if they're allowed to prevail -- lie exposed.

Beyond whatever tactics the Iraqi insurgents may employ, their strategy is to convince Americans that there is no bottom; that their cause enjoys huge popular support; that it feeds off the resentments that "occupation" inevitably engenders; and that it can go on undeterred by whatever damage U.S. forces inflict.

"[W]hen a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental--men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... [A]ll the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre--the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun,
July 26, 1920

U.S. and Iraqi forces found themselves fighting in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqouba and other regions on Monday while in Fallujah diehard insurgents held out to the last in the week-long battle.

Pyrrhic victory \PIR-ik\, noun:
A victory achieved at great or excessive cost; a ruinous victory.

A Pyrrhic victory is so called after the Greek king Pyrrhus, who, after suffering heavy losses in defeating the Romans in 279 B.C., said to those sent to congratulate him, "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone."

"They deployed two fucking TANKS to counter an anti-war protest in LA"

I am absolutely speechless. We look like China. We look like the Soviet Union. They just sent two tanks to counter a peaceful protest in the second largest city of America. Good God. And where is the media coverage? They just sent TANKS to counter peaceful protesters. That kind of an outrageous challenge to the protesters could have easily sparked violence.

People, please, contact your local media, call any reporters you know, tell them about this. This is a huge story. This is absolutely scary shit. Sending tanks to confront peaceful protesters in an American city in 2004. Who the fuck are we anymore?

A car bomb exploded near a police patrol in busy central Baghdad on Thursday, killing 17 people and wounding 20, police said.

A police source said the blast missed a convoy of suburban cars of the kind used by foreign security contractors, which had just passed through the commercial Saadoun Street district.

Two U.S. helicopters were shot down near Fallujah on Thursday as fighting in the insurgent stronghold continued.

U.S. soldiers search for insurgents in Fallujah. Military officials said the Super Cobra helicopters were shot down in separate incidents and the crew members have been rescued.

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
John Ashcroft, November 9, 2004

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

On January 20th, 2005, we're calling for a new kind of action. The Bush administration has been successful at keeping protesters away from major events in the last few years by closing off areas around events and using questionable legal strategies to outlaw public dissent. We can use these obstacles to develop new tactics. On Inauguration day, we don't need banners, we don't need signs, we don't need puppets, we just need people.

We're calling on people to attend inauguration without protest signs, shirts or stickers. Once through security and at the procession, at a given signal, we'll all turn our backs on Bush's motorcade and continue through his speech and swearing in. A simple, clear and coherent message.

He said the president properly determined that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda members. "The judge has put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war," Corallo said in a statement.

Can a group of people who overwhelmingly believe in the "virgin birth" and the coming "rapture" but are purposely blind to the irrefutable evidence of evolution be considered rational?

Military spending remained the fastest-growing component of the U.S. budget in fiscal year 2004, but the rate slowed somewhat, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO said defense spending grew at an annual average rate of 15% in 2002 and 2003 as the military launched operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Overall, "defense outlays in 2004 were 55% higher than in 2000," the CBO said in a new report detailing aspects of the previously reported $413 billion budget deficit for fiscal year 2004, which ended Sept. 30.

Yet despite the sharp increase in those receipts in 2004, they were still about 9% below their peak in 2000, in large part because of the tax incentives for business investment enacted in 2002 and 2003," the CBO added.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was ...

"It has become impossible for MSF as an organization to guarantee an acceptable level of security for our staff, be they foreign or Iraqi," said Gorik Ooms, general director of the organization in Belgium.

W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman.

The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

Big business is counting its blessings -- and anticipating more -- in the wake of President Bush's re-election.

The Bush administration had already proved itself to business in its first term when it enacted three rounds of tax cuts, eased environmental regulation, filled cabinet agencies with business-friendly appointments, and backed legislation to boost domestic energy production. Now, many companies and industries expect specific gains from new federal policies and programs, and the Republican Party's stronger hand in Congress will mean that those legislative proposals will face relatively fewer hurdles.

[snip]

In the next four years, drug makers, health-care companies and financial-service concerns expect to benefit from Bush efforts to rein in legal costs and extend dividend and capital-gains tax cuts. Wall Street companies are looking for a flood of new investment if Mr. Bush succeeds in opening the Social Security system to privately owned accounts. Fast-food chains are less worried about a higher minimum wage and auto makers about tighter fuel-economy standards -- both areas where a Kerry administration planned to make changes.

Many industries invested heavily in the Bush campaign as much to avert a victory by Sen. John Kerry as to help ensure four more years for Mr. Bush. Health-care and drug companies contributed $26 million to Mr. Bush and the Republican Party, knowing the Massachusetts Democrat planned to have the federal government bargain directly with drug makers on Medicare prices and allow drug imports from Canada.

While Congressional Democrats will probably continue their push for such measures, Mr. Bush's victory, along with Republican gains in the House and Senate, greatly diminish the Democrats' chances.

"This was a meaningful mandate, and we can expect aggressive action on the Bush agenda," said Tom Gallagher, a Washington policy analyst for ISI Group, a New York investment firm. Mr. Gallagher's company put together a "Bush index" of stocks and industries that would be expected to do well in a second term; they include health care, insurance, defense, energy and utilities.

... Mr. Gallagher reasons that Mr. Bush's combative foreign policy would lead to "increasing short-term geopolitical risk ... causing some investors to seek protection" in gold.

Hungary to Withdraw Troops From Iraq
Defense Minister Says Country Waited for U.S. Elections Results Before Deciding

• We don't care that our children - and yours - will continue to die in wars of our aggression.


• We don't care that the richest Americans will soon own everything.


• We don't care that corporations have assumed control over much of the country.


• We don't care that the neediest among us will starve, live on the street, or have no access to medical care (unless you profess faith to "our" god - maybe).


• We don't care that our children and yours will live in a filthy, polluted world.


• We don't care that women all over the world, especially here at home, have no choice in their reproductive life.


• We don't care what that half of the country that didn't vote for us thinks, says or wants.


• We don't care that segments of our population are discriminated against because of who they are.


• We don't care what the world thinks of our actions even though they affect you directly or indirectly.

Bush is a divisive wartime figure. So were Lincoln, Churchill and Roosevelt.

A sheriff's deputy tackled, punched and arrested a US journalist for taking pictures of people waiting in line to cast early ballots in West Palm Beach, local media reported.

A sheriff's spokesman said later the deputy was enforcing a new county rule prohibiting reporters from interviewing or photographing voters lined up outside the polls, the Palm Beach Post said.

[snip]

Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Teresa LePore did not comment on the incident or the new rule, which had not been previously announced. LePore gained notoriety as the creator of the infamous butterfly ballot that confused thousands of voters in the chaotic and controversial 2000 election.

As you saw in my previous post, AP said:

Voter turnout is likely to be higher than in recent presidential elections - especially among young voters - in a very close race, weekend polls suggest.

Couple that with what Zogby said this morning:

The real news here is that 18-29 year olds favor Kerry 64% to 35%, with 1% for Nader -- and 0% undecided. When I see a low undecided number it means that group is going to vote. I am factoring this group to be 12% of the total vote -- but it could be higher. Each point it goes higher translates into two-thirds of a percent for Kerry -- if these numbers hold up.

The higher the voter turnout among young voters, then the more likely it will be for Kerry to win.