At In These Times, David Moberg writes from Fort Wayne, Indiana:

^{Winning the White Working Class}

Tom Lewandowski, a former General Electric factory worker, heads the central labor union council in this northeastern Indiana city of a quarter million people. Once an industrial powerhouse, Fort Wayne is still a manufacturing center despite decades of plant closings that have often been due to jobs being moved overseas.

Although socialists were powerful in local politics here before World War I, the town is now a Republican stronghold — even among many blue-collar workers — in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964. Fort Wayne, says Lewandowski, his wide grin flashing, is "a red stain on the red state."

As a labor leader, Lewandowski remained neutral in the Indiana primary, which Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) narrowly won, but he personally supported Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (after his first choice, John Edwards, dropped out of the race). Obama’s "organizer mindset" appealed to Lewandowski, who has been building a working-class community affiliate of the labor movement. Obama’s March 18 Philadelphia speech on race in America further impressed him.

Now Lewandowski wants Obama to take another big step, one that could strengthen Obama’s appeal among white working-class voters who have gravitated more toward Clinton, as they did again in Indiana and North Carolina.

"Like what he did with his Philadelphia speech on race, he needs a speech on class," Lewandowski says. "But, of course, we don’t have class in America."

Obama would do well to take Lewandowski’s advice.

Estimated number of Iraqis still in exile outside their country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: 2.5 million.

Number of Iraqi refugees admitted into the United States since March 2003: 5675

Number of Iraqi refugees admitted into Sweden in the same period: 90,000.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Some days you gotta almost feel sorry for John McCain. He’s trying so hard to paint himself green. Which doesn’t do him any good among the environmental dunderheads in his own party. And doesn’t convince all that many of the rest of us that he has a clue, as Joseph Romm affirmed in detail in a thoroughgoing smackdown over at Climate Progress.

Not only would McCain’s prescriptions seriously fail to address global warming, but he also has a voting record, the ungreen nature of which is available for all to see. When he deigns to show up for eco-related votes (which, as the League for Conservation Voters noted, he didn’t do at all during the group’s last measuring period), he gives the finger to environmentally far-sighted legislation about three-fourths of the time.

His appearance in Portland, Oregon, Monday gave some of the megamedia a chance to half-swoon over the Senator’s proposals in the global warming department. While Time was mildly critical, it gave him credit because he "really wants to fix the problem," citing his break from GOP orthodoxy on global warming in 2000 and a couple of pieces of failed legislation.

Well, sure, McCain isn’t the worst Republican in this matter. And there are some pretty dumb Democrats, too. But McCain’s latest foray seems all part of the scheme. As Jon Perr of BlueOregon pointed out after the speech, citing a comment by South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham, McCain’s stance is "to use the environment as a cudgel to beat back those claiming McCain represented a third Bush term."

The Vestas Wind Energy Training Facility in Portland chosen by McCain’s campaign team may have seemed like a brilliant move. But it actually provided a perfect backdrop for what has been wrong with U.S. energy policy since Ronald Reagan stepped into office and immediately started dissing advocates of renewable power and conservation. Vestas is Denmark’s leading wind-turbine manufacturer. Make that the world’s leader, with 23% share of the entire market. It’s a key reason Denmark already generates 20% of its total electrical output from wind power and has plans for lots more.

In March, Vestas opened its first U.S. factory in Windsor, Colorado. As the company announced to shareholders in its first quarter report issued May 8, it plans to expand the work force there to 400 because it has ...

...resolved to build the world’s largest tower factory in Colorado. The decision was made in spite of the uncertainty surrounding the extension of the PTC [production tax credit] scheme. However, with 25 states in the USA already having adopted targets for renewable energy's proportion of the local energy mix, Vestas is ... confident that the USA will henceforth pursue a more long-term energy policy instead of the prevailing highly short-term approach to wind power. Wind power calls for a detailed siting legislation and should form a natural part of the much required renewal of the US power grid. The tower facility investment, which underlines Vestas’ belief in a robust US growth market, is expected, along with national legislative measures, soon to convince more European sub-suppliers to come to the USA where they can join forces with Vestas to support the wind power investments made by North American customers.

That could have been a U.S.-owned factory in Windsor, and it could have been built 10 or 15 or 20 years ago if the conventional wisdom of politicians (including some on the Democratic side of the aisle) hadn’t been that renewable energy was a big joke, or, at best, an idea not worth fighting for. From fiscal 1982 through fiscal 2006, the federal renewables research and development budget, adjusted for inflation, was less than Jimmy Carter’s final budget. Three times less than Carter's during Mister Bush’s first term. Bill Clinton made a stab at increasing the renewables budget, but the great futurist Newt Gingrich blocked his efforts.

Consequently, although wind turbines are being installed in the United States at a rapid pace, benefiting from far-sighted state governments, most of them aren’t U.S. made. Why? Because politicians like Senator John McCain relentlessly and myopically voted against budgets and policies that would have encouraged the creation of a sustainable, job-rich renewables industry the way Denmark did starting three decades ago. These politicians surrendered a U.S. lead in technology and gave away U.S. jobs. We all get to pay the price today. The Danes, on the other hand, have so much wind-generated electricity that they are having to find new uses for it. The Danish utility Dong Energy "plans to build a nationwide system to charge electric cars with the surplus wind power."

As NBBooks wondered in his Daily Kos Diary Wednesday upon the release of a new Department of Energy report, Can the U.S. achieve 20% wind energy by 2030?:

Jim Walker, Vice President of renewable energy development company enXco and President-Elect of [the American Wind Energy Association], noted that if U.S. installed capacity were the same as Germany’s per capita, the U.S. would have 43 gigawatts (GW) of wind turbine capacity installed now, instead of 17 GW. And if the U.S. had the same capacity as Germany per unit of land area, the U.S. would have 320 GW installed now. The state with largest amount installed is Texas, but it is Iowa that leads in proportion of total electricity produced by wind, with 5.5 percent. And if a transmission system would be put in place, Iowa could export four times the total electricity it needs. Montana and the Dakotas alone have enough wind energy potential to supply the entire U.S. demand for electricity.

It’s not as if wind-energy potential is fresh news. At the Solar Energy Research Institute, where I worked as an editor, maps were being drawn 30 years ago pointing out this abundant resource. If the renewables neanderthals hadn’t half-strangled SERI and the soft-path part of the energy budget, today we wouldn’t be talking about 20% wind power for 2030, we’d be talking about it for 2010.

While Time implies that McCain got religion in this matter in 2000, that's bunkum. As the Center for American Progress reported:

In 2002 and 2005, there were votes in the Senate to require utilities nationwide to generate 10 percent or 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy resources. Sen. McCain voted against renewable electricity every time.

McCain declared to the on-line environment journal Grist in October that "I’m not one who believes that we need to subsidize things." Sure enough, he opposes subsidies for solar and wind, the latter being 1% of U.S. electricity. But, with his mavericktude on full display, he has no problem with continued subsidies for the mature nuclear industry, which provides 20% of U.S. electricity.

The Senator from Arizona’s stance on renewables isn’t his only problem on the energy and global warming front. As Romm points out in Part 2 of his assessment of the Portland speech:

The entire cost containment foundation of McCain’s climate plan is quicksand.

Just like his entire campaign.

A lot of play has been given to a YouTube clip of Bill O'Reilly's long ago meltdown. You must have been living without electricity the past week if you don't know what I am talking about. If you have been powerless, you can find the original here.

Never one to miss an opportunity, the loofah man, whose ratings on Foxaganda have never been as high as they are on YouTube this week, apparently is doing a celebrity try-out (with a little help from a self-employed 25-year-old journalist, novelist, and film maker posting as levmyshkin).

As Bill-O says below in one of his rare moments of truth, "I don't know fuck."

Of course, Bill-O will have to compete with Steven Colbert.

+ + +

(UPDATE: BruinKid corrects me and notes that the real origin of this is RevoLucian. Apologies. What else can I say? I'm an old fart with technological gaps.)

Twenty-four days of silence and still counting.

On Sunday, April 20, The New York Times published David Barstow's article on the propaganda conduit the Pentagon had built for itself to television, radio and cable channels, turning retired military-cum-media-analysts "into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."

Since then, as a number of bloggers have repeatedly noted, almost zero coverage about Barstow's story has appeared on the television and radio networks and cable stations where these analysts have appeared. Not even 30 seconds in most cases.

That's high contrast with how many times the analysts themselves have appeared.

Media Matters, which has been doing an excellent job of hammering on this story, has conducted a review which found that since January 1, 2002:

...the analysts named in Barstow's article collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR in segments covering the Iraq war both before and after the invasion, as well as numerous other national security or government policy issues. ...

Media Matters used the Nexis database to tabulate appearances by [20] analysts on networks with which they were affiliated that included discussions of issues related to national security or U.S. government policy. Instances in which analysts appeared on networks other than those with which they were affiliated were not counted. (My emphasis - MB)

For instance, Thomas G. McInerney, a terrorist-promoting retired lieutenant general, appeared on Fox News 144 times. Retired Brigadier Gen. David L. Grange analyzed for CNN and CNN Headline News 921 times. Retired Major Gen. Wayne A. Downing analyzed 270 times for NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

A spreadsheet listing each of the analysts' appearances is available at the Media Matters' link above.

Someone else who has been doing a fine job of dogging the military analyst story since it broke is Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. He is one of those rummaging around in the document dump of 8000 pages and audiotapes that the Pentagon was forced to provide The New York Times.

Greenwald's latest piece, on Tuesday, asked, Was Karl Rove involved in the military analyst program?:

I have no idea whether the "Karl" with whom they had weekly briefings and were planning to brief on the military analyst Iraq trip is Karl Rove. I asked Larry Di Rita by email about this exchange and specifically whether Rove was ever briefed on the program, and he has not replied.

In the documents I reviewed, I haven't seen any other "Karl" referenced who works at the DoD. These are fairly high-ranking DoD officials and there aren't many people they're worried about having to explain themselves to (Smith's position as Assistant Defense Secretary was one requiring Senate confirmation and he reported to Rumsfeld). Given the significant possibility that this program was illegal, and given Perino's denial of the White House's knowledge of it, this question -- whether the "karl" being briefed on the program was Karl Rove -- certainly seems to be one that should be asked.

UPDATE: I think it's fair to call this "confirmation" that Rove was involved in the military analysts program. First, a March 16, 2006 email from Dallas Lawrence (6548), referencing a briefing of military analysts -- which, he wrote, was "a closed call opened only to our retired military analysts" in order "to get them on message heading into the weekend on Iraqi troop strength, advances, etc."

Some bloggers have wondered why anybody should make such a big deal of this story. After all, we've known for years that  government propagandists exaggerated, distorted and lied about the Iraq war before it started and have continued to do so as the occupation has dragged on and on. So nobody should be shocked that this Pentagon project occurred. Moreover, it is said, this is nothing new in U.S. history.

That misses the point. Yes, our government did not begin engaging in this kind of media-mediated propaganda on September 12, 2001. Starting in the 1950s, for instance, the CIA eventually put together a cohort of 400 American journalists at highly respected newspapers that it could count on to provide information about countries they visited and leaders they talked to as well as to get story angles the agency wanted published into print.

This latest domestic propaganda project is no surprise, and only a shock to the naive. But just because it's not surprising doesn't make it any less outrageous. And those who are digging out the details of what went on, how the project came about, who thought it up and carried it out, deserve our kudos for their efforts just as the media who operated as conduits for this propaganda deserve our jeers for failing to vet these experts in the first place and for keeping silent about them now.

+++

The Overnight News Digest is posted.    

Over at Echidne of the Snakes, Anthony McCarthy is helping to fill in for the moment and writes:

^{It’s Next Year That Could Get Us Killed If We’re Not Smart About It:}

Those on the blog threads who are discouraging people from vigorously opposing and voting against the Republicans, in the only way that will affect reality in January, are acting as Republican agents provocateurs. I know that they will have some idealistic sounding reason for it, they will have some line, but reality is real*, that is the real life effect of what they are saying.

There is no rational reason for someone who doesn’t want the Bush-Cheney nightmare to continue under a new name to discourage people from voting for the Democratic nominee. There is either an irrational reason for them doing it or they are actually working to continue the policies of the Bush-Cheney nightmare. The six months before November will be too busy trying to prevent disaster to try to sort out the moles from the dupes. Until after the election, I’m considering them all Republican operatives, because they’ll be doing the same thing.

* Anticipating the usual eloquent appeals for "the future", well, January 2009 is as much "the future" as their age of their glorious millennium. I am pretty sure January will come next year, I haven’t seen any evidence that their fantasy future will get here. And since time goes all in one direction and only on one road, the road to whatever future there is will have to go through next year. That’s the reality of it. People are going to have to eat next year, have health problems next year, need an environment that will grow them food and sustain their lives next year, keep from getting involved with McCain’s war on Iran next year. We need a good next year to have a future beyond it. Next year could get us all killed.

American military fatalities in Iraq since March 2003: 4076

Total coalition fatalities: 4388

Estimated (because nobody counts) Iraqi military and civilian fatalities in the same period: 200,000 to 1.4 million, depending on the source.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

At Salon.com Monday, Juan Cole writes about al-Jazeera's coverage of the U.S. elections:

^{Clinton and Obama on Al-Jazeera: The Arab network has followed the Democratic race closely. Inside its studios, I discover how Clinton's "obliterate Iran" comment played, and much more.}

Many Americans incorrectly think of Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language network as al-Qaida Central because it occasionally broadcasts excerpts from videotapes of the terror organization's leaders. Nowadays, however, viewers are far more likely to see images of the American presidential candidates on the channel's screens. As the United States, always an interested party, has become a dominant on-the-ground player in the Middle East, residents of the region increasingly feel that their own fate depends on the outcome of this election. I was in Qatar earlier this month and stopped by the office of Ahmed Sheikh, editor in chief of Al-Jazeera's Arabic service, to ask him about his network's coverage of the campaign.

Al-Jazeera's Arabic service studios in the rapidly growing metropolis of Doha have been expanded but are still relatively modest. The facilities at the new English-language Al-Jazeera International across the street are far more state-of-the-art. The correspondent who welcomed me said that when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak visited, he was taken aback by how small the studio was, remarking, "So this is the matchbox that has caused all that trouble!"

Safely delivered to Sheikh's office, I was plied with strong Arab tea. Soon our conversation turned to the U.S. presidential campaign. Why, I asked, give such distant events air time? "Because the United States is occupying Iraq and it is an ally of Israel and a power broker in the region," Sheikh replied. "The United States is the only superpower on the planet. Events in Iraq and Palestine affect this area."

He revealed that the station would be preparing 40 more stories between now and November covering the American elections. "We are interested in the Arab-American vote, but also in the black and Hispanic votes. Arab-Americans may be trending Democratic, largely because of the Iraq situation." ...

How did Sheikh view Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's remark about the United States being able to "totally obliterate" Iran? "It will not be a picnic for the U.S. to attack Iran. That would push oil to $300 a barrel, with severe consequences. And Iran would find ways of retaliating." Interestingly, he made allowances, observing, "Hillary Clinton is in an election campaign. I would give her the benefit of the doubt."

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
By Tim Shorrock
Simon & Shuster, 2008
439 pages
$17.99

If your budget is limited or your spare hours are few, sit down at Barnes & Noble and read the first chapter of Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting that far who won’t set aside the money and time to take the book home and devour the rest of it. Shorrock gives us as clear a picture of the business ties of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex as can be done by a guy without a TS/SCI, the highest security clearance.

These days, as he tells us, the majority of people who do have TS/SCIs aren’t employed by the government. They’re private contractors. And they didn’t get those clearances by talking about their work to outsiders, unless their specific task is disinformation. Despite zipped lips and unreturned phone calls, Shorrock has pried off lids and written a book as revealing in its own way as the seminal The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford’s great 1982 exposé about the National Security Agency.  

You won’t read the words "ruling class" in Spies for Hire, and I’m sympathetic, because few writers who want to be taken seriously will unhesitatingly employ those words in public discourse these days. Not so much out of fear that Patrick Buchanan will redbait them as that many post-Cold War liberals will do so. But a slice of the ruling class is who Shorrock describes throughout his book.

The most dangerous people on the planet are not the fanatics squatting in hide-outs in the mountains of Pakistan or operating sleeper cells in Amsterdam. They are instead the chieftains and sub-chieftains of an interwoven array of entrepreneurial intelligence mavens engaged in a "public-private partnership" whose power and behavior and reach are limited only by the elected officials charged with their supposed oversight. At the beck and call of this dangerous array are money, information, expertise, the latest technology, lethal force, and the ear of political leaders who actively or passively set the ethical and legal parameters, if any, in which these spies for hire operate on a daily basis. They have in their hands the most sophisticated tools for going after whomever they designate as "the bad guys" – and anybody else they wish – secretly. And much else. Most of this isn’t new. But in the old days, the early ‘90s and before, those engaged in this work were almost always government guys. Now it’s hard to tell.

At the National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency, indeed, the entire alphabet soup of 16 agencies that fall under the purview of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, government analysts often find themselves sitting next to corporate analysts working on the same project, but for two or three times the salary. At the CIA, they call them "green-badgers" to distinguish them from the government employees who wear blue badges, and they are everywhere. It’s not just people with badly needed, ultraspecialized experience that can’t be found in-house. Contractors have filled jobs as high as deputy chief of station for the CIA.

Epitomizing what’s happened is the guy at the top of the whole shebang, Mike McConnell. Appointed as director of national intelligence by President Bush in January 2007, McConnell came out of both the public and private sectors. A vice admiral in the Navy, where he served all but three of his 29 years as an intelligence officer, including a stint as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence when the general was chairman of  the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, McConnell departed for Booz Allen Hamilton in 1996. As executive vice president for 10 years there, he managed the company’s extensive contract jobs in military intelligence, which kept him in close contact with government intelligence agencies. How much Booz Allen profited from these contracts is classified information, but it was not peanuts. As Shorrock writes, those contracts meant that the company was "directly involved in the most sensitive initiatives taken by U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon during the war on terror."

If you haven’t already, now is a good time to get ready for John McCain, Eco-Ranger. Because we’re going to hear a lot from the Arizona Senator about the environment. Some of what he says is going to sound pretty good. Beware.

As Kate Sheppard at Grist wrote Friday:

John McCain gave a campaign speech in New Jersey today in which he touched on environmental issues and talked up his record in that area. "There is no doubt our environment is globally challenged," McCain said in a stop at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J. "I'm proud of my environmental record."

But as some enviros in the state were quick to point out, that record is mixed at best (take, for example, his lifetime League of Conservation Voters score of 24 percent and his 2007 score of zero). "His words say one thing, his record puts him in lockstep with the Bush administration and its dismantling of environmental programs," New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel told Newsday.

The speech [Friday] was the first of several environmental addresses planned over the next week. On Monday, McCain is slated to give a big speech at Vestas Energy, which manufactures wind turbines, in Portland, Ore.

Take notes, everybody.

You can find the DailyKos Environmentalists here.

Click for the Rescue.

Twenty days ago, David Barstow broke his story in The New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of network and cable military analysts to reinforce its talking points and present a favorable picture of happenings in Iraq. Ever since, the print and television media have delved into the scandal, prying out new details in interviews and document searches, and discussing the implications for democracy when the Department of Defense shapes the debate with the help of triple-dipping former employees who present themselves as objective observers of U.S. policy.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. In some parallel dimension.

In our dimension, what we’ve got isn’t a flurry of follow-up reports but rather one of the key elements of propaganda: killing a story by ignoring it.

The media typically employ their pervasive power to reinforce the dominant ideology through repeated exposure to every element of their biased agenda. But silence should not be underrated. It provides a marvelous tool of control when accompanied by the never-ending distractions and distortions of infotainment.

No surprise whatsoever that the network and cable stations who hired these ex-military analysts without disclosing to audiences their conflicts of interest or other biases have been – let us be generous – reluctant to acknowledge their role in passing along exaggerations and outright lies to Americans in the run-up to the war and its bloody, treasury-sucking aftermath. They have a big stake in silence.

On the other hand, it might be thought that editorialists of major print outlets which didn't pay for the free-lance "expertise" of the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda brigade would be eager to write something excoriating. Or that print reporters would be digging into the documents on the subject that the Pentagon has dumped at this Web site. Alas, such modest aggressiveness is also confined to that other dimension.

Just how silent the media have been has been examined by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (TV News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits) and the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (Media Passes on Times Pentagon Piece). In the first week after Barstow’s story appeared, Pew found two stories about it in other media, both of them on PBS. Since then, there have been a handful of others.

Only in wwwLand and among a few in Congress has the story been given any significant attention. Senator John Kerry urged a "thorough investigation" by the Government Accountability Office, as he noted here at Daily Kos in Investigate the Pentagon Pundit Program. Senator Russ Feingold also wrote the GAO. Michigan Senator Carl Levin has written to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro wrote to news executives at the broadcast and cable networks asking them to explain what criteria they use for hiring military analysts. Only ABC and CNN responded. She and 40 other congresspersons have asked the Pentagon’s Inspector General to conduct a probe. She joined with Michigan Rep. John Dingell and others requesting the Federal Communications Commission look into the matter:

"While we deem the DoD’s policy unethical and perhaps illegal, we also question whether the analysts and the networks are potentially equally culpable pursuant to the sponsorship identification requirements in the Communications Act of 1934 and the rules of the Federal Communications Commission," the letter stated.

"When seemingly objective television commentators are in fact highly motivated to promote the agenda of a government agency, a gross violation of the public trust occurs," it continued. "The American people should never be subject to a covert propaganda campaign but rather should be clearly notified of who is sponsoring what they are watching."

About all this too, megamedia silence.

It’s not as if there hasn’t been anything fresh to report. Media Matters, which has followed the story since it broke, actually spent some time perusing those documents the Pentagon posted. For those who claim there was nothing nefarious about the domestic propaganda program, that it was merely a program of courtesy briefings to ensure that the military analysts were up to speed on what was really happening with regards to Iraq, Media Matters found this audio-taped exchange of ass-kissing and subversion from an April 18, 2006, Pentagon meeting with several analysts, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and General Peter Pace, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

UNIDENTIFIED 1: I'm an old intel guy, and I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. And that is "psyops." Now, most people, when they hear that, they think, "Oh my God --

RUMSFELD: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- "they're trying to brainwash [inaudible]."

RUMSFELD: "What are you, some kind of nut? You don't believe in the Constitution?"

UNIDENTIFIED 2: Well, he is.
[laughter]

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Some have characterized [inaudible]. But I would also disagree with you, sir, respectfully. You are absolutely brilliant in front of the camera. And anybody --

RUMSFELD: It's by acting. Because I don't spend any time --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: It doesn't matter. The point is that you are. And I think most of us would agree with that. And --

RUMSFELD: But I -- but -- but --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- to take the offensive is -- because many of us go on every day. We don't agree with everything the administration does, maybe with some of your decisions and -- but we get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating, and then we take the -- and we're all thick-skinned, or we wouldn't continue to do this.

RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: But we would love -- I would personally love -- and I think I speak for most of the gentlemen here at the table -- for you to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it.
[crosstalk]

UNIDENTIFIED 1: And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy.

The Pentagon wouldn’t say who those unidentifieds were, but it gave Media Matters a list of confirmed participants at the meeting. Among them were Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, military analyst for Fox News who recently suggested using terrorism against Iran.

On Wednesday at its Web site, Media Matters asked the media: "Have you hosted on air the person who told Rumsfeld at the  meeting with military analysts: 'You are the leader. You are our guy'?

In that other dimension, they might have gotten an answer. But in that dimension, they wouldn't have had to ask the question.

+ + +

^{Glenn Greenwald has written an excellent piece based on the documents on the Pentagon Web site.}

A century and a half ago in Internet time, during the first flowering of political blogging, I found myself devouring a lot of outstanding writers and thinkers. Some have now burned out, or departed the scene for sadder reasons, but many have continued, growing in stature and skill. At the top of my list from the beginning was (and is) digby. Clever, original, provocative, refreshingly unclichéd, and progressive to the marrow, she has epitomized the benefits of this new form of media and offered a moral center. Even when I disagree with her take on some subject - not all that often - I've been able to count on her to spur me think, to look at an issue or person or political history in a new way.

Most of all, she makes me - everyone who regularly reads her, I believe - ponder the big picture. No matter which presidential candidate you support (she and I disagree on this), or what your specific point of view is on a particular imbroglio, or where you stand on any one of the panoply of issues progressives have been talking about for the past several decades, digby has a record for hitting the bullseye more often than anybody in wwwLand. She resonates.

Her Hear Ye, Hear Ye piece Wednesday morning provides a perfect example. I'm going to break the rules and quote her at length:

So I hear that Village High Commissioner Tim Russert declared that we have a Democratic nominee. The Town Crier, Drudge, immediately followed with an official announcement The real leadership of our nation --- the punditocricy -- have handed down their decision. Hallelujah! ...

Look, I have the same analysis of the outcome of the elections in Indiana and North Carolina that most people have this morning. Clinton's best argument --- which was essentially that the voters were taking a second look at Obama and showing some buyers remorse --- didn't pan out last night. And there's nothing wrong with political junkies sitting around the virtual pot-bellied stove and saying the race is "over" or exhorting her to drop out. We're citizens and, in some cases, political players. There is, however, something unbelievably distasteful about a handful of powerful, millionaire, celebrity pundits "declaring" such a thing and having the paper of record breathlessly report it as if it was decisive and meaningful.

Who the fuck anointed Tim Russert as the final arbiter of anything? His job is to analyze the political landscape not declare the decision as if he were some kind of Roman Emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. It's bad enough that these gasbags put those thumbs on the scale as hard as they do, but actually taking the initiative to say when the race is over is even worse. To coin a favorite Village phrase, "it's not their place." ...

But if it is the end, as I think many of us suspect, it's for Senator Clinton to be the one to declare it, not Tim Russert or any other fatuous overpaid Village gasbag who is no more insightful or informed than any of you.

The idea floating around, even in the blogosphere, that once Tim Russert "says it" it's true is so galling that I can hardly keep from projectile vomiting. Giving him that power will come back to bite us hard down the road. ...

I think we all see the writing on the wall. Obama has plenty of money and there is no great problem if this thing goes on for a couple of weeks. I think everyone should relax about the campaign and start regrouping around the ideas that brought us here --- one of which is the fact that the mainstream media are tools, that Drudge is a Republican pimp and that our nation is not well served by a bunch of corporate whores who all sit around sipping mojitos on Nantucket playing with our politics like they are a rousing game of cribbage.

Indeed. Political blogging has come a long way in the past half decade. Some people have gotten famous for it. Quit their day jobs. And some already-famous folks - journalists and pundits and others - have become become bloggers, at least as supplements to their regular gigs.

But this transformation and legitimization ought not to obscure progressive bloggers from our roots.

We emerged because the megamedia - the oligopress, the pundithugs, the corporatist whoredom of propaganda - were lying to us, and when they weren't lying, they were omitting the truth. Not that there weren't and aren't a few truthseekers embedded in the megamedia, folks who actually take their role as reporters and investigators seriously and behave accordingly. But, as a whole, the megamedia were and continue to be conduits for ideological reinforcement. In short, brainwashers. Doing the job prescribed to them by the powers-that-be, even if they think they are doing something else. Not every pawn realizes it is one. The writings of Antonio Gramsci are relevant in this regard, but save that for another time.

Keep what digby says in mind. Even when they agree with us, smile at us, quote us, invite us on their shows, the megamedia moguls are not our friends nor the friend of the politics we espouse. They never will be. We ignore this at our peril.

+ + +

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Poblano, who has wowed Kossacks with his detailed election analyses and in-depth background Diaries like this one at Daily Kos and at his own FiveThirtyEight.com blog, got some well-deserved attention today from the  National Journal.

As Mark Blumenthal writes:

Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data. His model predicted a 17-point victory for Barack Obama in North Carolina and a 2-point edge for Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indiana.

Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina. Looking back at Poblano's efforts in Pennsylvania, pollster Dick Bennett decried the models as "stepwise regression run amok." Slate's Mickey Kaus predicted failure for "a sophisticated model that ignores... what's been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright."

But a funny thing happened. The model got it right. ...

Moreover, the predictions were more accurate than any of the pollsters' results, as indicated by the graphic below (modified from a chart created by Brian Schaffner of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies).

Poblano is just another example - albeit an exemplary one - of how a blogger with a brain and an obsession  benefits us all. We don't know if he does this from a basement in his pajamas, but who cares? Kudos to you, sir.

The upsurge in the youth vote this primary season has been nothing short of phenomenal. This sharp rise in turnout has been widely chalked up to two factors: the war in Iraq and the presence of Barack Obama in the field of candidates.

In Iowa, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas, the youth vote tripled over 2004. In Tennessee, it quadrupled. In Louisiana and Massachusetts, it doubled. Other states also saw large increases. It appears not just possible but likely that this year will break the record for the youth vote, a record set in 1972, the first year that 18-year-olds could vote in a presidential contest. That year, 52% of eligible 18-to-24-year-olds showed up at the polls (compared with 68% of those 25 and older).

After '72, until 2004, the youth vote plunged downward except for the uptick in 1992 - which was in great part accounted for by the youthful casualness of a candidate named Bill Clinton, who was a year younger when he took the oath of office than Barack Obama will be when and if he does.

The primary turnout is a heartening prospect for Democrats and those who lean Democratic because young voters have picked Democrats over Republicans by close to a 2:1 margin overall in the primaries. And that fits into a whole range of other good news for Democrats that has been partly obscured by the acerbic nature of the Obama-Clinton battle since Super Tuesday. Among them the facts that fewer people self-identify as Republicans since 2004, and that both Obama and Clinton have (personal loans notwithstanding) raised more cash, recruited more volunteers and generated more turnout than anybody could have imagined even a year ago. This is now backed up by Senator Obama's 50-state voter registration drive.

What all this seems to presage, the youth vote certainly, but all the other positive factors as well, is the very real possibility of what Paul Rosenberg at Open Left has been harping on for some time: realignment. A shift in partisan power and political outlook and approach as striking as that of 1932, as DHinMI has written about here,  here, and here.

In short, not only would the Democrats win the White House, but they might even better their 2006 net gain in the House of Representatives with 30-40 more seats, add three or four seats to their Senate majority, and continue the gains they made in state legislatures two years ago. That wouldn't be a mere blowout. It would put the Democrats in position to shape the political landscape for the next decade or two.

Whether they would actually do so should they turn all the good news into success at the polls in November - or whether the change they would usher in could legitimately be labeled "progressive" - remains, of course, to be seen. Realignment is about a lot more than who controls Congress, indeed, about a lot more than electoral politics in general. But first things first.

 

The Burmese are used to bad news. The person who should be their prime minister, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house detention or in prison off and on for 18 years. The military junta has repeatedly proved that it has no intention of relaxing its iron-fisted rule. As Dr. Suu Kyi said in her Freedom from Fear speech in 1990:

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

The generals are corrupt, so corrupt, indeed, that they did not have a system in place to give citizens an early warning when Cyclone Nargis struck Saturday. Even now, with Burma reeling from the aftermath of one of the world's worst modern natural disasters - with perhaps more than 100,000 dead and 2 million homeless - the junta is continuing years-long behavior, approving only $5 million for aid relief to their citizens, even though the government receives $2.7 billion a year in revenue from gas exports.

"Not only are the regime blocking international aid, they are not mobilising their own resources either," according to Mark Farmaner, the director of the Burma Campaign UK. "£2.5m is pathetic given the scale of this crisis. This is less than was spent on presents for the wedding of the daughter of Than Shwe, the dictator of Burma." The Campaign says that the government spends half its budget on the military.

As widely reported, the junta has somewhat relaxed its usual tight grip on aid workers who were already in Burma when Nargis struck. The BBC says these aid workers have been allowed to travel with someone from the local Red Cross or a government official without needing to obtain additional permission, as was previously the case. But far more aid workers are needed, and the junta is barely moving to make that possible, despite the devastation.

The military is extremely wary of allowing the small number of foreigners based in Burma to move around in normal times; the prospect of having many times that number operating in the country may prove too much for the generals to swallow.

"Some are getting in, some are not - we need the floodgates to open," said Britain's Ambassador in Rangoon, Mark Canning.

"It's crucial that we get these humanitarian experts in, and that's what we're putting a lot of effort into at the moment".

The government has appointed Deputy Foreign Minister Maung Myint to oversee the issuing of visas, but it still is not clear whether he has the authority to approve them in the numbers the international agencies say they need.

Early Wednesday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner spoke in favor of the United Nations invoking the concept of the "responsibility to protect." Under this highly controversial approach, approved by the world body in 2005, the United Nations could intervene in cases where governments failed or refused to protect their own citizens, even when this would violate national sovereignty.

But John Holmes, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said "confrontation" would be unhelpful because discussions with the government were slowly moving forward.

"I'm not sure that invading Burma would be a very sensible option," he said in response to criticism that the United Nations was not doing enough.

"We are having useful and constructive discussions with the authorities of Burma," he said.

"It is moving in the right direction. We want it to move much faster clearly. But I'm not sure it would help at this moment at least to embark on what could at least be seen by some people as a confrontation."

Millions of dollars have already been pledged for relief if only it can be delivered directly to those who need it. That, it seems clear, will take some blend of cajoling of and pressure on the junta to save their own people. Time is of the essence. Obtaining clean water has been a problem for days, and lack of food is rapidly becoming a serious worry.

If the immediate roadblocks can be overcome, much suffering can be avoided, and, perhaps, the generals will see their way clear to relaxing their tough rule overall, although that is a far dicier prospect. Once the first weeks are past, it would behoove aid agencies to avoid some of the problems associated with aid to Aceh province in Sumatra after the 2004 tsunami. There, that aid, according to a survey by Oxfam, wound up in the hands of the more well-to-do, with the poor benefiting least.

Two good sites to visit for information about the situation are Democratic Voice on Burma and Campaigning for Human Rights and Democracy in Burma. The latter contains a short list of organizations accepting donations for cyclone relief.

One important effort you can make that won't require a financial commitment is to e-mail or phone your favorite media operations to urge them to pay attention to this tragedy.

+ + +

^{Avila and srkp23 have Diaries here and here on the same subject.}

 

Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith of the The Daily Telegraph write:

^{Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War.}

Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia.
From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said.

"We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them," he said.

"The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. ...

"The problem is not with Russia," he said, speaking at a friend's château outside Paris.

"Russia does not have enemies and Putin is not going to start a war against the United States or any other country for that matter.

"Yet we see the United States approving a military budget and the defence secretary pledging to strengthen conventional forces because of the possibility of a war with China or Russia.

"I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world."

While Gorbachev has criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past, he also has advised him on foreign policy for some time. Putin handed over the reins to Dmitry Medvedev Wednesday, but is expected to be an éminence grise in the new government.

Gorbachev's comments stand somewhat at odds with the Kremlin's stated position, which has softened recently and been redirected at getting security guarantees from the West.

Although the language was stronger this time, the Telegraph interview isn’t the only time the first and last president of the Soviet Union has expressed concerns about deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations. In December, the 77-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner was interviewed by Anna Badkhen of  the Ideas section of the Boston Globe

IDEAS: How do you view the latest developments of relations between Russia and the West? You said recently that you see the US plan to deploy a missile defense shield in Central Europe as targeting Russia, not Iran, as the United States claims. Do you see your achievements in ending the Cold War being depleted?

GORBACHEV: What we see is the beginning of a new arms race. The United States has a super-large military budget; its military budget is even larger than it was during the Cold War.

IDEAS: What about your comment regarding the true purpose of the proposed missile defense shield?

GORBACHEV: There is truth in this. It's too early to talk about Cold War, but I think we are seeing some frost.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

If any additional evidence were needed to prove that (sur)reality has killed satire in the past seven-and-a-half years, a Michael Howard story in Tuesday's Guardian delivers the coup de grâce.  

^{This is what U.S. military planners have in mind for the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. Artist rendering courtesy U.S. Army.}

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

A $5bn (£2.5bn) tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors. About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US state department or private foreign companies.

And, because $5 billion investments don't grow on trees, you won't be seeing anything like it in, say, New Orleans.

But they're not going to stop with soothing massages and post-prandial walks along the Tigris (where nowadays dead bodies bob to the surface with their hands tied behind their backs). Disneyfication is also on the way, as reported by the Times (of London) two weeks ago:

^{Skateboarding the perimeter}

Last week, a Los Angeles-based holding company for equity firms, C3, confirmed it was starting a $500 million project to build an amusement park on the outskirts of the Green Zone in an area encompassing the Baghdad Zoo. The first phase, a skateboard park, is scheduled to open this summer.

But any Green Zone project is literally starting from the ground up.

"There is no sewer system, no working power system. Everything here is done on generators. No road system repair work. There are no city services other than the minimal amount we provide to get by," Karnowski said.

Dr. iRack over at abu muqawam invites everyone to "nominate the carnival games and rides you'd like to see in this stunning new symbol of post-surge Iraq."

+ + +

^{See Magnifico's Diary from last night on this subject.}

Thanks to Rick Perlstein for pointing out that Mildred Loving has died at age 68.

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble -- and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

Last June, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, Mildred wrote the following:

^{Loving for All}

By Mildred Loving

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the "crime" of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," a "basic civil right."

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Condolences to her kin and friends.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

‎Does support of terrorists make one a terrorist? Presumably that depends on whether you take Mister Bush’s squint-eyed November 6, 2001, prescription – "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror" – in a blindly nationalistic fashion or in a moral one. Terrorism isn’t an ideology. It’s a technique. Much as sophists and thugs - such as the late Jeane Kirkpatrick - like to twist the definition to fit who is carrying out a policy, terrorism can't be one thing for them and something else for us.

Yet one of the most pre-eminent of the Pentagon’s chosen propaganda team of ex-military-cum-television-analysts, retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, not only supports but promotes terrorism against Iran. He's still spewing on Fox News despite having been exposed by David Barstow’s revelations three weeks ago.

This isn’t new territory for McInerney. He’s argued for attacks on Iran for as long as Bill Kristol and other neoconservatives have done. As a member of the Iran Policy Committee, McInerney has long argued that the State Department should take the Mujahideen-e Khalq off its terrorist watch list. The group originated as leftwing opposition to the Shah of Iran in 1963 and was involved in various operations, including the taking of U.S. Embassy hostages in 1979 and the bloody suppression of the Shiite revolt in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although MEK killed Americans as well as Iranians in the past, it has since adopted a public veneer of being a backer of freedom and democracy as soon as the Iranian mullahs are overturned, the idea being to install one of its founders as Iran’s president.

Although thousands of MEK fighters based in Iraq were disarmed in 2003 when the U.S. military arrived, the organization has since been implicated in attacks in Iran, including assassinations and bombings in public places. Given Mister Bush’s ordering of clandestine activities in Iran and long-standing White House support for various armed groups along Iran’s borders as – belatedly – reported in the Los Angeles Times three weeks ago, such activity can hardly be surprising to anyone who has followed U.S.-Iranian relations even cursorily.

But, just as Max Boot and Robert Kaplan and Stephen Peter Rosen and others argue quite openly for American empire, now we have a well-connected ex-general openly calling for terrorist attacks – excuse me, responses – in Iran. With a Fox News reader cheering him on.

McInerney starts one minute into the video linked here.

Question: If we do have evidence, and apparently we do, according to officials, that Iran is killing U.S. troops in Iraq or supporting that, why haven't we struck by now?

McInerney: It beats me, Greg. I don't know why we haven't. They have killed hundreds of Americans with their explosively formed projectiles [EFPs], and that's why I think we have to take action. And here's what I would suggest to you. No. 1, we take the National Council for Resistance in Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on, as well as the Mujahideen-e Khalq that are at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy. For every EFP that goes off that kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked, people don't know have to know how it was done. It's covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. And then I would start moving U.S. carrier battle groups into the region, as well as some of our stealth aircraft, just to make sure they understand, don't try to kick off a major insurrection come October and September, October to impact our elections. They are deliberately ratcheting up and we’ve got to counterattack.

As McInerney pointed out, this isn’t the first time he has made this proposal. He did it in a March 30, 2007, column, too. And while he suggests that the tactic won’t endanger civilians, this is a detestable lie. IEDs, whether equipped with EFPs or not, kill civilians in Iraq all the time. Deploying McInerney’s monstrous terrorist proposal would mean murdering Iranians - men, women, children - who happen to get "unlucky."

Tony Pugh and Kevin G. Hall at McClatchy write:

As economy worsens, coping becomes a way of life

When long-haul trucker Rusty Wade pulled his rig into a Missouri truck stop last week, he noticed something strange.

Of the 50 or so 18-wheelers parked in the lot, only five had their engines idling.

"That's only because of the high price of fuel," said Wade, an independent owner-operator from Brundidge, Ala. "A year ago there would only be about five that weren't running."

But with diesel fuel at more than $4.20 per gallon, Wade not only shuts his engine down to save money. He's also cut his average road speed from 60 to 56 mph.

Instead of hotels, he and his trucker wife, Mary, often sleep in their separate vehicles. ...

In one form or another, Americans from coast to coast are following Wade's cost-cutting ways. Whether it's fewer restaurant visits, shorter road trips or skipping a haircut here and there, more consumers are looking for ways to stretch their dollars.

And with good reason. The soaring cost of core essentials like gasoline, food and housing now account for 57 cents of each consumer dollar spent. That leaves Americans with a record-low 43 cents out of each dollar for discretionary spending, according to new figures from Wachovia Economics Group.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.