President George Bush was set for a collision with his own Republican party yesterday after ignoring demands for a new Iraq strategy that would bring US troops home.

In a speech on a visit to Cleveland, Ohio, Mr Bush shrugged aside Republican criticism over the last fortnight that his "surge" strategy is not working. He refused to offer any concessions to disenchanted Republicans and insisted it was too early to judge the "surge", his deployment of an extra 30,000 US troops.

Article continues He said: "You have got all the troops there a couple of weeks ago... They have just showed up and are beginning operations in full and you have people in Washington saying 'Stop'." He added: "I believe it is in this nation's interest to give the commander a chance to fully implement [the strategy] and Congress should wait."

In a direct rebuff to his critics in Congress, he said: "Troop levels will be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington DC." But the Republican revolt continued to grow, with new senators going public to express their scepticism with the "surge".

One of the few boosts for Mr Bush came from senator John McCain, fresh from a visit to Iraq, who expressed support for the president and said he had seen signs that the "surge" was working. "From what I saw and heard while there, I believe that our military, in co-operation with the Iraqi security forces, is making progress in a number of areas," he said.

• LA Times - "U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves. Iraqis continue to flee their homes, leaving mixed areas and seeking safety in religiously segregated neighborhoods. Some 32,000 families fled in June, alone, according to the figures compiled by the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations and the Iraqi government that are due to be released next week. U.S. forces have staged offensives to push insurgents out of some safe havens. But many of the insurgents have escaped to new areas of the country, launching attacks where the U.S. presence is lighter. And there has been no sign of any of the crucial political progress the administration had hoped to see in Iraq."

• WaPo - "Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said... that despite growing Republican discontent with the Iraq war, convincing [Republican] members to support withdrawal legislation remains a daunting challenge that so far has netted few results."

  "Obviously there are folks who want the war to end today, and all the troops to be home tomorrow. And even though I think that is a worthy goal, it is not a realistic goal," said Durbin. A major redeployment of troops will have to be done gradually and in a responsible manner, he noted. "We also understand that just leaving cold turkey, with everything gone, could have the whole region descend into chaos," Durbin said.

• Reuters - "U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced a new firestorm on Tuesday sparked by a report he... misled lawmakers in 2005 about civil liberty violations by the FBI. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, responded by promising that Gonzales would face tough questions about this and other matters at a hearing planned by his panel later this month. And Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee, renewed calls for Gonzales to resign and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to determine if he had misled Congress, 'a serious crime.'"

• The Hill - "Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) has not ruled out selling a disputed piece of land back to the organization that he and two investment partners bought it from, even though a grand jury last week found that it was sold illegally."

• NY Times - Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona "said White House officials would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues because of political concerns. Top administration officials delayed for years and attempted to 'water down' a landmark report on secondhand tobacco smoke... He was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he gave, Dr. Carmona said. He was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings, at least one of which included Karl Rove"."

• NY Times - "Two senior advisers to Senator John McCain... announced today they were leaving his presidential campaign... This latest news from the McCain campaign... came at the same moment... McCain took the floor of the Senate to speak about his latest trip to Baghdad." "I'd describe the campaign as going well. I'm very happy with it," McCain said.

• The Hill - "Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) was Capitol Hill's invisible man yesterday, lying low even as his ties to the notorious "D.C. Madam" threatened to become a political crisis for the conservative lawmaker... Vitter was nowhere to be found yesterday, and most sources believed the freshman senator remained in Louisiana to avoid the press onslaught."

• Globe and Mail - "The jury in the Conrad Black trial told the judge today that it cannot reach a unanimous verdict on 'one or more counts.' ...Black and three other former executives of Hollinger International Inc. -- John Boultbee, Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis --face charges relating to allegations they took more than $60-million (U.S.) from Hollinger by skimming off payments related to non-competition agreements signed when the company sold newspaper titles."

• Star Tribune - "An antiwar surge targeting Sen. Norm Coleman continued Tuesday as [Democratic] hopefuls Al Franken and Mike Ciresi pressed the Republican to break with President Bush on the war in Iraq... The candidates' statements and letters come as two separate ad campaigns attacking Coleman's continued support of the war hit the Minnesota airwaves, part of a Democratic effort nationwide to turn up the heat on pro-war Republicans."

• Reuters - "The number of people in California, already the most populous U.S. state, will rise to 60 million by 2050 from 36 million now, and Hispanics will be in the majority by 2042, a state report released on Monday forecast."

• WaPo - "Doug Marlette, 57, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, comic strip artist and outspoken defender of free speech, died July 10 in northern Mississippi when a car in which he was riding skidded off a rain-slicked road and struck a tree."

• Oregonian - "With temperatures today expected to break 100 degrees for the first time in almost a year, officials are advising people to stay out of the heat and also are bracing for a surge of activity on local rivers. The forecast high of 101 degrees at Portland International Airport would shatter the record for the date -- 91 degrees in 1990."

• BBC News - "A mortar and rocket attack on Baghdad's heavily-protected Green Zone has killed three people, Iraqi police said. Two Iraqis and one Filipino were killed and about 25 people wounded, Iraqi officials said. Police said up to 30 rockets and mortars were fired into the zone which houses the government and parliament and many foreign embassies."

• IHT - "Lebanese are being squeezed today, no longer by the fear of bombs, but by the realities of checkpoints and roving patrols of soldiers. At nearly every step, civilian life intersects with the martial: Brides must pass through metal detectors at hotels on the way to their own weddings; parking attendants search car trunks for bombs; mall security guards examine the contents of pocketbooks... After the war with Israel a year ago, United Nations officials marveled at how quickly this city, and this country, got back up and running. But now optimism is in short supply. Lebanon is grappling with a massive political crisis, the rise of Al Qaeda-style militancy and a seemingly endless stream of bombings and assassinations."

• BBC News - "Pakistan's army says an operation to flush out militants from a mosque in Islamabad is in its final stages - 24 hours after troops stormed the complex. During a day of heavy fighting, the Red Mosque's militant cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi and some 50 of his supporters were killed, the army said. It said eight soldiers also died, and some 50 women and children were freed."

• NY Times - "Shootings, beheadings, burnings and bombings: these are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of Afghanistan's public schools. To take aim at education is to make war on the government... The Ministry of Education claims that 6.2 million children are now enrolled... there is no doubt that attendance has multiplied far beyond that of any earlier time... In the southern provinces where the Taliban are most aggressively combating American and NATO troops, education has virtually come to a halt in large swaths of the contested regions... By the ministry's estimate, there have been 444 attacks since last August."

• Reuters - "China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand. The Supreme People's Court approved the death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, who was convicted of taking bribes worth some 6.5 million yuan ($850,000) from eight companies and dereliction of duty".

• SMH - "The effectiveness of Australia's $1 billion law and order operation in the Solomon Islands was undermined yesterday by the swearing-in of the fugitive lawyer Julian Moti as the country's Attorney-General."

• WaPo - "The Aral Sea, its sustaining rivers diverted to the irrigation of cotton fields, was for decades on an irrevocable course to death and desert... But now the sea, or at least a rump part of it, is coming back... because an eight mile-long dam now blocks a narrow channel through which water drained freely from the northern sea to the southern. Water that the Syr Darya River delivers into the northern sea is building up, slowly expanding its shores... The much larger southern parts of the Aral are still dying".

• SMH - "Zimbabwe's economy is nearing paralysis as petrol stations across the country run dry. President Robert Mugabe's regime has ordered all retailers to cut fuel prices by 60 per cent, a move which forces them to sell petrol at a loss. As a result, service stations across the nation have stopped selling altogether and petrol is only available on the blackmarket - at five times the official price."

• BBC News - "African nations have taken the biggest steps in reducing corruption over the past 10 years, the World Bank has said. A report measuring the quality of government in 212 countries from 1996 to 2006 found Africa had shown the greatest improvement. The report judged whether countries had free media, political stability, the rule of law and control of corruption."

• Independent - " The bus carrying 50 tired and grimy miners had just left La Loma mine when gunmen forced it to stop and dragged two union leaders off. One was shot dead on the spot, the gunmen pumping four bullets into his head. The other was tortured and then killed. Six months later another union leader who had come to the mine was also assassinated."

  The men, members of the Sintramienergetica union, had been trying to improve the appalling and unsafe working conditions at a United States-owned mine, which sends huge amounts of coal from Colombia to Europe and North America.

  Six years later, a federal court in Birmingham, Alabama, is trying the privately owned coal company, Drummond, for war crimes. This week it heard evidence that the company ordered those killings in March 2001.

• LA Times - In Baja, Mexico, "population growth in the Los Cabos region is placing the rich marsh under assault, environmentalists say. To build the newest big tourist project, a marina called Puerto Los Cabos, developers carved out a huge chunk of the estuary... Environmentalists are fighting to stop the project, which is to eventually include hotels and golf courses. They argue that the excavation of the marina probably has already contaminated the area's freshwater aquifer, a charge the developers dispute. The full project could further affect the wildlife habitat."

• Spiegel - "About 390 CIA-run flights through German airspace were in violation of German law, and Berlin could have collected millions of euros in fines. Now internal investigations could make things embarrassing for Gerhard Schröder's government as well as the United States."

• Independent - "Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has warned that the disappointment of Kosovo's hopes for imminent independence could provoke fresh violence in the province and elsewhere in the Balkans. 'Any further delay will have a very negative impact on peace and security, not only in Kosovo,' he said. The Serbian province with an overwhelmingly Albanian population had been promised "supervised" independence under a UN plan... after lengthy consultations with leaders in Serbia and Kosovo."

• Guardian - "Protestant churches yesterday reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they were mere 'ecclesial communities' and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion."

• DW - "Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski won a reprieve Tuesday when a disgruntled coalition partner backpedaled on a threat to leave the government -- a move that would have likely brought down the administration. Leaders of the Samoobrona (Self-Defense) party had threatened to pull out of the governing coalition as retribution for Kaczynski's decision Monday to dismiss party head Andrzej Lepper from his posts of deputy premier and agriculture minister in the wake of a corruption scandal."

• Guardian - "It has been one of the central claims of those who challenge the idea that human activities are to blame for global warming. The planet's climate has long fluctuated, say the climate sceptics, and current warming is just part of that natural cycle - the result of variation in the sun's output and not carbon dioxide emissions. But a new analysis of data on the sun's output in the last 25 years of the 20th century has firmly put the notion to rest. The data shows that even though the sun's activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate."

• Oregonian - "Rep. Earl Blumenauer may work on Capitol Hill, but he has a virtual office in the blogosphere. The Portland Democrat checks his BlackBerry for e-mails that alert him automatically when his name is mentioned on a blog. He carries a digital recorder so he can dictate entries for his staff to post on prominent political blogs. He's speaking at a national convention of bloggers next month".

  "So much of what happens in this business, you are actually insulated from people's reactions," said Blumenauer. "You're in structured meetings on particular subjects. I have found that this is an extraordinarily interesting way to have interaction."

  [...]

  Blumenauer said he reads both the positive and, well, not-so-positive blog entries about himself. "I have been flamed on occasion where people just have some scathing entries," he said. "It's pretty unvarnished. It's real time reaction."

• Bush has 558 days left. 3,607 U.S. confirmed deaths in Iraq. Over $442,100,000,000 spent on the Iraq war.

A 28-mile stretch of the Sonoran desert that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border west of the city of Nogales, Arizona, is a sun-baked battleground. Pronghorn antelope, javelina, rattlers, a few pigmy owls, and even jaguars compete for scarce resources amidst the saguaro, mesquite, and prickly pear.

Also struggling for survival in the parched landscape are hundreds of migrants who hike the miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads pursued by border patrol officers, security contractors, and law enforcement agents. Many of the would-be immigrants are captured, processed and deported; some are identified as criminal aliens and detained; others make it into the U.S. to take low-wage jobs; and hundreds more die every year in the searing desert heat.

A new predator is on the horizon. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued task orders to physically and electronically seal this stretch of the desert under a multi-billion dollar contract named the Secure Border Initiative Net (SBInet) to curb the flow of undocumented immigrants, drugs, and potential terrorists by 2013. This first $20 million pilot phase, which is named Project 28 after the length of this part of the desert that it is supposed to cover, was to be completed by mid-June 2007.

The SBInet contract was awarded in September 2006 to Boeing of Seattle, the company best known for its wide-bodied aircraft that dominate the world's airline fleets. The company is also a major military contractor, manufacturing warplanes like the F-18 Hornet, the F-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 as well as the Brimstone, Hellfire and Tomahawk missiles.

i.e., "43rd  Regime Missed All Targets", self-created targets, at that!
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/09/ap3896748.html  

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.
...
The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said.

"The facts are not in question," the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion. "The real question is how the White House proceeds with a post-surge strategy in light of the report."

The report, required by law, is expected to be delivered to Capitol Hill by Thursday or Friday, as the Senate takes up a $649 billion defense policy bill and votes on a Democratic amendment ordering troop withdrawals to begin in 120 days.
...
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow on Monday tried to lower expectations on the report, contending that all of the additional troops had just gotten in place and it would be unrealistic to expect major progress by now.

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6328941  

But Rove expressed no regret about the widely unpopular war in Iraq.
...
Another member of the audience asked Rove about the controversial detention camp the United States keeps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"The president would like to close Gitmo," said Rove, who also declined to give a timetable for the camp's closure, saying it is holding "bad people" who will have to be detained elsewhere.

He downplayed the poor treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo that has been widely publicized.

"Our principal health problem down there is gain of weight, we feed them so well," he said as many in the audience shook their heads and groaned in unison.

Dammed Isaacson probably enjoyed it.  Now the Aspen Institute is just another deadly tank think.


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

For those who grind their ideological axes on these numbers, the increase in measured inequality since the 1970s is proof that the new, more competitive, more entrepreneurial economy of recent decades (which also happens to be less taxed and less unionized) has somehow failed to provide widespread prosperity. According to left-wing doom-and-gloomers, only an "oligarchy" at the very top is benefiting from the current system.

Hogwash. This argument can be disposed of with a simple thought experiment. First, picture the material standard of living you could have afforded back in 1979 with the median household income then of $16,461. Now picture the mix of goods and services you could buy in 2004 with the median income of $44,389. Which is the better deal? Only the most blinkered ideologue could fail to see the dramatic expansion of comforts, conveniences and opportunities that the contemporary family enjoys.

Much of the increase in measured inequality has nothing to do with the economic system at all. Rather, it is a product of demographic changes. Rising numbers of both single-parent households and affluent dual-earner couples have stretched the income distribution; so, too, has the big influx of low-skilled Hispanic immigrants. Meanwhile, in a 2006 paper published in the American Economic Review, economist Thomas Lemieux calculated that roughly three-quarters of the rise in wage inequality among workers with similar skills is due simply to the fact that the population is both older and better educated today than it was in the 1970s.

It is true that superstars in sports, entertainment and business now earn stratospheric incomes. But what is that to you and me? If the egalitarian left has been reduced to complaining that people in the 99th income percentile in a given year (and they're not the same people from year to year) are leaving behind those in the 90th percentile, it has truly arrived at the most farcical of intellectual dead ends. <...>

The problem is not lack of opportunity. If it were, the country wouldn't be a magnet for illegal immigrants. The problem is a lack of elementary self-discipline: failing to stay in school, failing to live within the law, failing to get and stay married to the mother or father of your children. The prevalence of all these pathologies reflects a dysfunctional culture that fails to invest in human capital.

Other, less acute deficits distinguish working-class culture from that of the middle and upper classes. According to sociologist Annette Lareau, working-class parents continue to follow the traditional, laissez-faire child-rearing philosophy that she calls "the accomplishment of natural growth." But at the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, parents now engage in what she refers to as "concerted cultivation" -- intensively overseeing kids' schoolwork and stuffing their after-school hours and weekends with organized enrichment activities.

This new kind of family life is often hectic and stressful, but it inculcates in children the intellectual, organizational and networking skills needed to thrive in today's knowledge-based economy. In other words, it makes unprecedented, heavy investments in developing children's human capital.

To not paraphrase Marie Antoinette: "Let them send their kids to Montessori schools."

This was in the Wall Street Journal.  This is what the upper-middle class to rich will tell themselves to assuage any potential sense of guilt over the growing inequality in the U.S.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.