I've subscribed to Salon.com since it became a subscription website. Salon publishes some of the best political commentary, anywhere. Its reporters often prove themselves among the best, anywhere. Its coverage of Bush administration crimes, the Walter Reed scandals, and the still emerging Arlington National Cemetery scandal have been invaluable. So, it is painful to read Salon's puerile coverage of the re-emergence of Sarah Palin. Salon's coverage is a lesson in how not to cover Sarah Palin.

First, Sandra Tsing-Loh writes a mind-numbingly inane puff piece, that starts off with an attempt at folksy cutesy humor, before taking a weak stab at exposition:

Um.

So, because there haven't been a lot of women on the national political stage, that means we're to grade this woman's book on a curve? And comparing Palin to Albright and Pelosi gets to the nub of what's wrong with Tsing-Loh's entire approach. Because even if a television foof did in an interview with Albright what television foofs are supposed to do, and even if few read Pelosi's book, the fundamental difference between them and Palin is that they can talk circles around most people, when it comes to matters of public policy, while Palin's attempts to discuss public policy inevitably make one feel one has been spinning in circles. Albright and Pelosi are people of great substance and intellect. They work at it. They value intelligence and knowledge. They might occasionally play the media game, but they are most at home when they are discussing and working in the complexities of policy. One cannot control the public's reaction, however much one may try. But one can control what one has to present to the public. Albright and Pelosi present depth and complexity. Palin does not.

So what's refreshing is that Palin seems unafraid to express herself, warts and all -- informal campaign motto: "Heels on! Gloves off!" -- and the book just goes where it goes.

It's refreshing for a national politician to ramble openly? The substance of that rambling doesn't matter? Is there any celebrity in any genre of superficial pop culture that isn't capable of rambling openly about whatever they want to ramble about?

Tsing-Low then proceeds to ramble into anecdotes from the book that have nothing to do with anything. Personal anecdotes. Cutesy folk tales. Tsing-Loh even attempts to play snarkily folksy in her descriptions. As if this is all about having a good time. As if Palin's re-emergence on the national stage is no different than that of any celebrity attempting a come-back. Tsing-Loh buys into the Alaska myth, and buys into the rugged individualist myth, in a simplistic manner reminiscent of the corporate media's buying into the myth that a man who has never been seen riding a horse was a rancher. Which is doubly ridiculous, given that even if these myths were true, they should be irrelevant to what qualifies one to be a national political figure. By the end of the review, one has gleaned nothing other than that Tsing-Loh wants to play along. One has learned nothing about the subject of the review, and plenty about the reviewer.

The other Salon article is by Amanda Fortini:

Say what you want about Palin or her positions (and, in the past, I have), it takes scrappiness and guts to strike back at the old-boys' network that anointed you by publishing a book, so soon after the campaign, detailing your frustrations and disillusionments. We might want to take a long breath before discounting her. As Gwen Ifill recently said on "This Week": “You can not underestimate the degree that women will be drawn to her story.” We don’t hear many real-life fairy-tales of American female success, which makes the few that exist intrinsically compelling.

We probably don't hear many real-life fairy-tales of American female success because there are no real-life fairy-tales. There's no Great Pumpkin. There's no Santa Claus. I hope I'm not ruining anyone's day! We hear plenty of real-life stories of real American female success, because there are so many successful American women, involving so many real definitions of success. Palin has become wealthy and famous primarily because she is relentlessly greedy and selfish. In that, she's a good Republican, with standard Republican values. She has no apparent talent other than that of self-promotion. She hasn't ever worked hard at anything substantive, and it is, in fact, wealthy and famous because the old-boys' network pettily saw in her an opportunity to capitalize on what they saw as a simplicity in the motivation of female voters. The calculation was as condescending as is possible: a) Hillary Clinton is a woman, Palin is a woman, b) Hillary Clinton's supporters supported her because she is a woman, and they therefore will switch to supporting Palin, because Palin is a woman. That cynical and misogynistic political calculation is the only reason most people ever heard of Sarah Palin.

There is nothing at all scrappy or gutsy about Palin's attempting to cash in on her moment in the public spotlight. Joe the Plumber attempted the same. That McCain's team treated Palin so disrespectfully speaks to their own motives and values. Palin took advantage of those motives and values to further her own. Perhaps she is stupid enough to believe her own hype. Certainly, she is not smart enough to realize she is not smart. Palin was an embarrassment on the national stage. More than a year after she was foisted in front of us by the pathetic John McCain, some 60% of the public still sees her as unqualified to be president. The public is not that stupid. The public recognizes such obvious stupid. And for all the legitimate criticism of the sexism involved in some of the criticism of Palin, the bottom line is that people reject her as a serious person primarily because she is not a serious person. It has nothing to do with her looks or her family, subjects about which I do not write. It has to do with the fact that she has never stuck with a job, has never accomplished anything substantive other than self-promotion, has a long record of quitting schools and jobs before she has finished that with which she was tasked, and proved herself astonishingly ignorant on matters of public policy.

If one looks back on her public polling, people were, initially, inclined to like Palin. The more they saw of her, the less they liked. That wasn't because they were mean or sexist, or because the McCain campaign or the media mistreated her. That was because Palin does not belong on the national political stage.

As the vice-presidential candidate, she showed, despite her postgame spin, little real knowledge of matters non-Alaskan, and at least for the span of the campaign, she didn’t seem bent on acquiring much more. Her current desire for visibility, the motives for which remain unclear, suits our age of reality television, this moment in American life when fame for fame’s sake is the ultimate goal. One might argue that Palin’s ambition, which some have branded simple narcissism, allowed her to forget her own unreadiness for the presidency and accept the nomination in the first place.

That's the best part of the article. Because it's valid. But Fortini then veers off into trivial garbage:

It wasn’t only that she looked older, the creases around her mouth having deepened, it was also that, no longer under the shadow of McCain and his handlers, she came off as natural, confident, good-humored and even, at times, articulate. Though her tendency to ramble persisted, she wasn’t as awkward and garbled as in the past. She was also disarmingly honest.

She looks older, and is more comfortable in the spotlight? So? Fortini's examples of Palin's new maturity in the spotlight all have to do with personal matters and personal reactions. Such examples could pertain to any generic celebrity who took a moment to adjust to fame. Which many do. But we're talking about a national political figure, aren't we? Isn't the standard supposed to be just a tad higher? Didn't we all scoff at Bush for many of the reasons we scoff at Palin- until the media muddled the public perception of who and what Bush was, playing a decisive role in allowing him to become president, and then to abuse that office in pretty much every possible way?

Fortini then goes on to discuss Palin's public act, again appearing to make valid points, before again descending into the trivial.

She was given about seven seconds to learn her role and then, after eight seconds, patronized and mocked. The reasons she performed so poorly are the very reasons her fan base loves her. If, over the next three years, her performance improves as much as it appears to have in just the last year, the conventional rap about her rustic idiocy may come off as mean-spirited and archaic.

Once again: the improvement in her performance, as described by Fortini, is all on the surface. It's all about Palin's ability to negotiate the superficialities of our superficial media. Palin still has yet to demonstrate any understanding of policy. When talking actual politics, Palin still is all about stereotypes and talking points. She is as ridiciulous as was Bush. Which remains the most apt political comparison. Palin may not have been born into a political machine, but she now is part of one. They package her and protect her, and even successfully foist her off on the corporate media as someone worthy of public attention. And the corporate media play along, still praising or criticizing Palin for reasons that are all about theater, and that should be irrelevant when analyzing politicians. Fortini buys into that, in every way. She mentions the extremism of Palin's political views, but only in passing; and she doesn't at all mention that Palin still has yet to prove herself capable of engaging in a thoughtful conversation on any substantive political issue. Palin's entire career has proved that she has neither the interest nor the focus to develop such a capability. Imagining her in a political debate with someone as smart and knowledgeable as President Obama is almost painful. Nothing about the new Palin is any different from the Palin who so dramatically imploded, every time she was forced into substantive conversations.

We expect the corporate media to both praise and criticize Palin for the most superficial reasons. We expect better from the alternative media. Salon's Joan Walsh already offered the type of insightful commentary we expect from Joan Walsh. Why Salon then chose to follow that with two pieces of such embarrassing shallowness is anyone's guess. Salon often is a superb website, and often defines what makes alternative media so important; but with their coverage of Palin, they are giving us much too much of more of the same.

That was the Republican then, fine, after ten Democratic months of Congress are matters demonstrably different? Okay okay, the Republicans blew the place up, that’s why the little people swamped their losing ludicrous asses out of office, how are the fixes going? We have economy/finance, healthcare, energy/climate, war, civil liberties and infrastructure on the Total Critical list. What has Congress tangibly done with the list this year? ¹

Just as a brief aside, the risks our Congressional fools are taking with healthcare mandates are breathtaking, get this wrong and all the little people will see is the enabling of more industry crooks, this time insurance companies instead of drug companies. It’s not an obscure industry perk with a tax break, it bleeds real cash in real time from the pocket of every American, ‘n by God and baby Jesus there will be unholy hell to pay if all it does is pay off crooks.

All right, all right, at least as Thanksgiving is almost upon us Congress appears to have undertaken some political sanity and saintly Christian compassion by making serious noises about a new Jobs Bill. ² I told you so, eh, those stupid rookie mistakes in the first stimulus are whapping us hard right freaking now, so pass another Jobs Bill for the little people and Party for Christmas. Please.

Millions upon millions of Americans could give a damn about little people voices in the internet, interest rates or bicameral legislatures, they don’t view the system as serving any of their needs so they don’t feed into it or expect anything from it. We’re missing their stories and input and glory without a Jobs Bill, the country abusing its little people with neglect as the Predator strikes drone on.

A real Jobs Bill could start to change all that, we could give young urban men who aren’t going to graduate from college a real shot at some career start by creating a municipal internet, installing sidewalk ramps, clearing forests, building and staffing libraries, and creating vivid public web sites (not all out public works have to require a hard hat). The economists love this stuff, stimulus employment works are the most efficient at quickly pumping cash into the system and creating sound economic investments.

In fact, everybody loves a Jobs Bill except those god damn Republicans. What a freaking surprise.

At this point of the political year, however, the little people have watched the House blow up the Healthcare Accomplishment of the Century by enraging half the Party base with the Stupak amendment. Way to go, you know? Will Congress truly surprise the little people and deliver a Jobs Bill that just happens to have an effect of saving their incompetent fool asses? We’ll see.

[1] The usual partisan thrust of the question has become useless, for there is no Republican alternative, their lunacy leaves nothing for a voter. For instance, the Republican solution for reducing the deficit is cutting taxes. Precisely that and nothing else, truly, that’s all they offer. It doesn’t matter if one labels Congress “Democratic,” seriously, with a Republican Party offering mental solutions like their deficit insanity Congress will forever remain Democratic. I’m not hurting Obama or the Party with the question, in other words.

[2] For those few brave hapless souls out there who insist the Party and Obama are still badasses we should always respect, well, I give you this phonetic thrust of attempted legislation: Jobs Bill. Now replace that holy resonance with this: Public Option.

How the fuck do mistakes like this happen? How does the allegedly brilliant marketing of the 2008 campaign come up with stuff like this? The base and the Party is supposed to crusade a holy war of legislation over something that could in theory be a public toilet?

[shows hands helplessly] This is how total Congressional dysfunction theses flourish. I’ll never forget the Party putting us through this for such a crashing, monstrous failure of elemental marketing in the healthcare evolution.

Hurry, hurry. There's no time for thinking; it's time to act. Washington's permanent war lobby has worked itself into a veritable lather. The proper Pentagon press leaks have been made, Op-Eds written, talk show commandos deployed.

No less influential a military mind than the Washington Post's David Broder declares that even a bad decision about Afghanistan would be better than a postponed decision. Conceding that "a flood of leaks" has shown that "the perfect course of action does not exist," Broder nevertheless counsels haste. "[T]he urgent necessity," he writes, "is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."

Read that again. Better to do something stupid, the man says, than for President Obama to ask too many tough questions.

Shorter Broder: when in doubt, panic. After all, it's only lives, our national security, and our strategic interests that are at stake.

Jonathan Allen, at Politico:

House Republicans have a new foreign policy adviser with a controversial pedigree: Oliver North.

North, an aide on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council who is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scheme to sell arms to Iran and divert the funds to Nicaraguan revolutionaries in the 1980s, was the special guest at a House Republican Conference meeting on Tuesday. North was convicted on three counts related to the Iran-Contra scandal and his efforts to cover it up, but the convictions were later overturned.

Of course, Politico neglects to mention that the conviction were overturned on a technicality, and that North's brilliant efforts in Iran-Contra included helping trade arms for hostages, giving the hostage-takers an incentive to take more hostages. Brilliant on strategy, and specifically banned by law. I'm sure North has invaluable insights... "Brilliant" being a very relative concept, to Republicans...

Make no mistake. The pressure on the president is enormous, and not just from irresponsible idiots like Broder. CBS News recently reported some of the financial stakes:

In fiscal year 2009, for example, the civilian U.S. Agency for International Development awarded $20 million in contracts for work in Afghanistan, while the U.S. Army alone awarded $2.2 billion -- $834 million of it for construction projects. In fact, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, the Pentagon has spent “roughly $2.7 billion on construction over the past three fiscal years” in that country and, “if its request is approved as part of the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill, it would spend another $1.3 billion on more than 100 projects at 40 sites across the country, according to a Senate report on the legislation.”

Follow the money. Because a lot of people have less than honest reasons to be pressuring the president. Amidst conflicting unsourced reports on his intentions, he continues to approach it cautiously. Let's hope he stands up to these pressures, and does the right thing.

NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini was so singled out for his dire predictions about the direction of the economy, during the housing bubble, that he was given the moniker "Dr. Doom." People don't like hearing what he has to say. But given the record, we all need to. For months, he has been warning about rising unemployment. As Mary pointed out, on Tuesday, Roubini's warnings now are taking on a more urgent tone.

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

And he warns that after both the 2001 and 1990-1991 recessions had ended, unemployment continued to rise for another year and a half! Which, in the present case, means rising unemployment through next summer! When we will be in the midst of an election which will largely determine the ability of President Obama to implement his agenda for the rest of his first term! Frightened yet?

He sees unemployment peaking around 11%, and remaining very high for at least two years. And that doesn't include the underemployed, as employers cut hours, which he says will equate to another 3,000,000 lost jobs. He says the recovery will be weak, and the likelihood of a double dip recession is increasing. But he does have an answer.

There's really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers.

Extending unemployment benefits is not enough. We need the government to create jobs. And quickly! And in an October interview, Roubini also warned of an impending crash in commodity prices. Which is just what we need. His overall answer?

I don’t believe in market discipline. It doesn’t work. That was the ideology of the last 10 years; self-regulation means no regulation. Market discipline doesn’t exist with irrational exuberance and reliance on internal risk management models that don’t work. Nobody listens to risk managers, because it’s risk takers that make the profits. The reliance on ratings agencies that have their own conflicts of interest, the reliance on soft-touch regulation, the focus on principles instead of rules—that particular regulatory philosophy has been a disaster, and we’ve learned it the hard way. We have to go to simpler rules, tougher rules and more binding rules. That’s the right approach.

Jobs and regulation. Which brings us to another of those very few economists who warned about the current economic crisis. Paul Krugman. That Nobel Prize guy. A couple weeks ago, he had this to say about the question of a WPA-type jobs program:

As it is, job-creation efforts are generally indirect. Tax cuts and transfers in the hope that people will spend them; aid to state governments in the hope of averting layoffs. Even infrastructure spending is routed through private contractors.

You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work. Think of it as the stimulus equivalent of getting the middlemen out of the student loan program.

The problem being politics. Which makes little sense, given that the Democratic Party now controls the politics. Or ought to, given that we have the White House and both houses of Congress.

In a column, last week, Krugman reiterated:

Just to be clear, I believe that a large enough conventional stimulus would do the trick. But since that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, we need to talk about cheaper alternatives that address the job problem directly. Should we introduce an employment tax credit, like the one proposed by the Economic Policy Institute? Should we introduce the German-style job-sharing subsidy proposed by the Center for Economic Policy Research? Both are worthy of consideration.

The point is that we need to start doing something more than, and different from, what we’re already doing. And the experience of other countries suggests that it’s time for a policy that explicitly and directly targets job creation.

Jobs. A government stimulus based on the direct or only slightly indirect creation of jobs. And regulation? Referring to a recent post by UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong, Krugman writes:

Big financial institutions are a small club, with a shared interest in sustaining the system. Ever since the days of JP Morgan it has been standard practice, in times of crisis, to get major players together in a room and get them to forgo short-term profit maximization on behalf of the industry interests. It happened in the Panic of 1907; it happened in the Latin American debt crisis of the 80s; it happened in the LTCM bailout, which was financed by private firms, not the feds.

Also, individual banks are in a long-term relationship with the public and the government.

An insiders' club that is all about self-interest, and not about public interest. Which is sort of the Republican Party ethos. And suggests that the government ought to be forcing a public interest agenda, whereas it recently hasn't been. It's been catering to the banks.

Krugman agrees with DeLong, that the risk of an actual depression is rising.

Why? Because bank-friendly policies have squandered public trust in all government action: try talking to the general public about stimulus, and it’s all confounded in their minds with the deeply unpopular bailouts.

By itself, the AIG story would be damaging enough. But it’s part of a pattern — and that pattern has ended up undermining the economy’s prospects, big time.

And DeLong, himself? After more than two years of saying there was no chance of another Great Depression, he's changed his mind.

In my estimation the chances of another big downward shock to the U.S. economy--a shock that would carry us from the 1/3-of-a-Great-Depression we have now to 2/3 or more--are about 5%. And it now looks very much as if if such a shock hits the U.S. government will be unable to do a d----- thing about it.

We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by a lot more deficit spending--unemployment, after all, goes down whenever anybody spends more (even though sometimes falling unemployment comes at too-high a price in rising inflation), and the government's money is as good as anybody else's. But the centrist Democratic legislative caucus has now dug in its heels behind the position that we cannot undertake more deficit spending right now because we have a dire structural health-care financing proble afrer 2030. The Republican legislative causes has now dug in its heels behind the position that the fact that unemployment is 10% shows not that policy earlier this year was too cautious but rather that it was ineffective. And the Obama administration has not been able or has not tried to move either of those groups out of their current entrenchments.

Jobs, again. Jobs, jobs, jobs. And what we don't need is to be listening to inflation hawks or deficit hawks. As any credible historian of the Great Depression will tell you. Think 1937.

For an overall perspective, on the political dynamics, Joan Walsh just warned:

So while I'm not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I'm particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven't done enough to change that. Palin can't change any of that, but Obama can. There's still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.

It's time for the Democrats to be Democrats.

Part of it I blame on what Bush left behind. Just like he left Texas in a mess, Bush left this country in shambles, and had already started on a course of indebtedness and Wall Street bailouts that poisoned the well for the next president’s agenda.

However, it’s also too easy to blame the problems facing Democrats right now on their leadership and the Republicans. A healthy dose of looking in the mirror would help the White House right about now, not that they ever will. Barack Obama owns the paltry and misguided stimulus package, and the fact that we will not get another shot at one before 2010. Barack Obama owns the lack of financial reform to date, and the fact that his own administration is conspiring to work against real reform and continues to this day to be more interested in helping out Goldman Sachs than they are in holding Wall Street accountable. And Barack Obama owns the blown health care debate and legislative approach, which has evolved to a point where a necessary debate about the morality of letting big insurance companies destroy the lives of everyday Americans has been diverted into a debate about abortion, which should have been foreseen months ago as a red state poison pill.

With this background, an incremental approach on health care reform that focused initially on market reforms and strong cost controls made more sense, as even conservative Republicans in the House support these measures now. And it pays to remember that at a critical time in 1994, the Clintons had the chance to get a compromise as a down payment on health care reform from Tim Penny and other moderates, but passed and never got another chance. We are now at a similar point where a flawed industry-friendly bill that does nothing to deal with the broken reimbursement incentives for costly care has been married with an individual mandate, a ban on abortion, and lack of real choice of health plan options, the worst of all worlds.

Yet there is no White House or DNC action plan ready to activate which would punish wayward DINOs like Bart Stupak for taking industry cash and turning this debate into an evisceration of Roe v. Wade. There could have been a ready-made political strategy here for local protests to spring up in Stupak’s district and all other DINO’s, complaining about why he and others get quality and affordable health care from the government, yet oppose it for everyone else. There could have been a debate about why the Bart Stupak’s of the world care more about leveraging the uninsured middle class for an abortion debate and taking industry money all the while. Unfortunately, the White House’s takeover of the DNC, and neutering of the vast OFA apparatus so as to not hold Democrats accountable makes this impossible. It also misses the point: if the White House really wanted health care to be the signature issue in 2009, which I think was a tragic mistake given the weakened economy and need to focus on reform, accountability, and recovery first, then why didn’t Pelosi and Emanuel see this coming? Why didn’t Obama set the narrative himself before the August recess and define the debate, putting the arguments of his opponents in context well before the tea bagging stupidity that allowed the Stupak’s of the world to throw 11th-hour grenades?

My cat, in sizing up birds and squirrels each morning, is more adept at strategy and long-range thinking than Rahm Emanuel.

Mr. President, a little less focus on your golf game and overseas travels, and a little more laser-like focus on the economy, strategy, and hard-reality politics would have done you and your party well. As it is, your party will now lose seats in 2010, while you will likely be re-elected because of the GOP’s self-destruction. But things could have been much different and better for Main Street, if only you were smarter and more savvy, and if you had listened to different people. The GOP is about to take the populism that Obama left by the roadside, and turn it against the Democrats.

So while I'm not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I'm particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven't done enough to change that. Palin can't change any of that, but Obama can. There's still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking.

And they thought they could cut a deal with Big Pharma, because the drug companies wanted to be part of the solution in this new kind of politics, which is why the administration agreed to oppose serious price controls.

Here's their "thank you" card:

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

But what about that agreement with Rahm Emanuel, supported by Max Baucus and the boys about giving back some of those profits in exchange for no government price controls?

But this year’s price increases would effectively cancel out the savings from at least the first year of the Senate Finance agreement. And some critics say the surge in drug prices could change the dynamics of the entire 10-year deal.

“It makes it much easier for the drug companies to pony up the $80 billion because they’ll be making more money,” said Steven D. Findlay, senior health care analyst with the advocacy group Consumers Union.

Note that Big Pharma did the same thing right after Medicare Part D, once they got the government to pay for drugs without price controls. But that was under a free market presidency, so it was expected that the pigs would be at the trough with full government support.

I've reached the point where I have no confidence in this team domestically. They have no use for principles or base convictions, and their policies aren't rooted in anything except deal-making. The health care reform bill does little if anything to deal effectively with costs, but it does manage to hand millions of middle class American taxpayers into the arms of the same bad actors who got us into this mess. Yet the House and Senate progressives are told that they have to support this historic opportunity, when in truth what they're being told is that they have to support this president even when he is a fool supporting bad policy.

I'll pass. This was an opportunity lost, but lost by the White House and its naivete about basic politics, and why policy matters. The next time the GOP rants about government involvement in health care, Democrats should point back to Big Pharma and these outrageous cost increases, and the constant GOP opposition to re-importation from Canada and allowing the government to negotiate for best prices, or any other active involvement on behalf of protecting the taxpayers. But for this White House to seize the high ground again, they would have to demonize and call out those who have bled this country dry, and that would be an old kind of politics that this team doesn't have the guts for.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

One of the other things I'd worry about is from the NPR story:

"Why is America's economy so good?" he says. "The first is education. The world's best universities are in America."

The second advantage, Yi says: The U.S. has the best high-tech talent in the world.

Finally, Yi concludes, "you have a good political system: democracy" — one that Yi says allows the U.S. to solve problems quickly.

One could only wish that was true. But with our fiscal policies and priorities throwing out education with the bathwater, the exporting of high-tech jobs overseas and the watching sausage get made for "solving problems quickly" to provide healthcare for all, one has to wonder.

Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems - are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

For those who don't remember, the first battle of Fallujah began in April, 2004, after the much-publicized brutal massacre, dismemberment, and public display of the bodies of four Blackwater mercenaries. As explained by Washington Post Pentagon and military correspondent Thomas Ricks, in Fiasco:

Despite misgivings from some military commanders, including top Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the Bush White House wanted a quick response.

(Iraq occupation czar Paul) Bremer talked to Sanchez about launching a vigorous attack, and soon the Marines got a call from Sanchez's headquarters. "Go in and clobber people" was the way one officer remembered it.

Ill-planned and with ill intent, the U.S. military's response was brutal. The American corporate media didn't cover it with quite the same obsession they had brought to the initial massacre. In an article excoriating coverage by the New York Times, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explained:

The head of Fallujah's hospital, Dr. Rafie al-Issawi, has consistently maintained that more than 600 people were killed in the initial U.S. siege of Fallujah in April 2004, a figure that rose to more than 800 as the siege was lifted and people pinned down by the fighting were able to register their families' deaths (Knight-Ridder, 5/9/04). More than 300 of the dead, according to al-Issawi, were women and children. The Iraqi Health Ministry in Baghdad, part of the U.S.-installed government, gave a lower figure of about 271 killed, with 52 of the dead being women and children. On October 26, the independent British-based group Iraq Body Count reported that the civilian death toll in Fallujah in April was about 600, based on their extensive evaluation of the numbers reported by local hospital officials and the Health Ministry, as well as mainstream media accounts.

Other journalistic investigations depict the reality of widespread civilian death in Fallujah: An Associated Press tally of the dead in Iraq (4/30/04) discovered that in Fallujah "two football fields were turned into cemeteries, with hundreds of freshly dug graves, marked with wooden planks scrawled with names -- some with names of women, some marked specifically as children. At one of the fields, an AP reporter was told by volunteer gravediggers on April 11 that more than 300 people had been buried there." A Reuters report (4/13/04) quoted researchers from Human Rights Watch calling for an investigation based on reports they received from residents fleeing the violence in Fallujah.

Even the lower estimates provided by the Health Ministry debunk the Times' repeated assertion that reports of "large civilian casualties" are "unconfirmed"-- unless the paper wants to maintain that 52 women and children killed in an attempt to "liberate" their city are inconsequential. But the Times should know from its own reporting that the higher casualty figures are much more realistic.

By the end of a very bloody month, which culminated in aerial bombardments and hundreds of civilian dead, Bush again was dishonestly declaring victory. The U.S. forces ended up negotiating a withdrawal, while turning the city over to supposedly friendly Iraqi forces. In fact, the withdrawal represented a retreat.

As described by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, in Imperial Life in the Emerald City:

The Iraq force, called the Fallujah Brigade, would turn out to be a disaster.

As were all things Bush Administration being, including very specifically, and in contrast to the usual and typically dishonest stereotype of Republican administrations, all strategic military planning.

Eventually, the eight hundred AK-47 assault rifles, twenty-seven pickup trucks, and fifty radios the marines had given the brigade wound up in the hands of insurgents.

Within months, the U.S. was again sporadically bombing the civilian city. By the end of the year, a second massive assault was launched by U.S. forces. Unembedded American reporter Dahr Jamail managed to get into the besieged city, and described civilians cut down by sniper fire, bullet-riddled ambulances, overwhelmed hospitals, and a makeshift cemetery built in a public soccer field.

In Beyond The Green Zone, Jamail wrote:

Media repression during the second siege of Fallujah was intense. The “100 Orders” penned by former US administrator Bremer included Order 65, passed on 20 March 2004, which established an Iraqi communications and media commission. This commission had powers to control the media because it had complete control over licensing and regulating telecommunications, broadcasting, information services, and media establishments. On 28 June, when the US handed over power to a “sovereign” Iraqi interim government, Bremer simply passed on his authority to Iyad Allawi, who had long-standing ties with the British intelligence service MI6 and the CIA. The media commission sent out an order just after the assault on Fallujah commenced ordering news organisations to “stick to the government line on the US-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action”. The warning was circulated on Allawi’s letterhead. The letter also asked the media in Iraq to “set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear”.

On the ground, aside from the notorious bombing and then banning of al-Jazeera, other instances of media repression were numerous. A journalist for the al-Arabiya network, who attempted to get inside Fallujah, was detained by the military, as was a French freelance photographer named Corentin Fleury, who was staying at my hotel. Fleury, a soft-spoken, wiry man, was detained by the US military along with his interpreter, 28-year-old Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, when they were leaving Fallujah just before the siege of the city began. They had worked in the city for nine days leading up to the siege, and were held for five days in a military detention facility outside the city.

“They were very nervous and they asked us what we had seen, and looked through all my photos, asking me questions about them,” he said as we talked in my room one night. He told me he had photographed homes destroyed by US war planes. Despite appeals by the French government to the US military to free his translator and return Fleury’s confiscated camera equipment and his photos, there had been no luck in attaining either. (When I had last seen Fleury in February 2005, Hadad was still being held by the US military.)

The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah. As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz, from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet. Her mother told us, “They attacked our home, and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.”

Significantly, given this weekend's news, Jamail also wrote, in September 2004:

The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.

”Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. ”They used everything — tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”...

”They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,” Abu Sabah, another Fallujah refugee from the Julan area told IPS. ”Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.”

He said pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects. ”People suffered so much from these,” he said.

In the new report, The Guardian asked a local doctor to monitor birth defects over a three week period. In just that three weeks, at Fallujah General Hospital, alone, 37 babies were born with birth defects, many of them involving neural tubes. Overall, doctors say they used to get a couple babies with birth defects every couple weeks or so, but now get a couple a day!

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Certainly, there is enough evidence to warrant a full investigation. What happened, who authorized it, and if chemical and radiological weapons were used, did that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity?