Speaking at Friday prayers, Sheikh Sattar Battat, an aide to al-Sadr, said he was “surprised” that al-Sistani had failed to condemn the violence.

“We are surprised by the silence in Najaf where the highest Shiite religious authority is based,” he said, referring to al-Sistani.

For 50 days Sadr City is being bombed … Children, women and old people are being killed by all kinds of US weapons, and Najaf remains silent.”

Battat said the al-Sadr movement has not seen any “reaction or fatwa [religious decree] from Najaf” criticising the government assault on Shia fighters in Sadr City.

“For us this means that Najaf accepts the massacre in Sadr City,” he said.

Much of Muqtada al-Sadr’s legitimacy is based on the legacy of his father, Grand Ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr, who built his movement in the 1990s among Iraq’s poorest Shia, and was assassinated by Saddam’s regime in 1999.

One of the central elements of the elder Sadr’s program (and now of Muqtada’s) was a distinction between the “silent clerics” (represented by Sistani and the Najaf establishment) — bookish sorts who stay remote from the lives of their people — and the “speaking clerics” who take part in the suffering and struggle of the Shia, as Sadeq did. And here the “silent clerics” once again stayed silent while Shia were crushed in Sadr City, of all places, while medical care, food, and shelter are being doled out in Muqtada’s name. It doesn’t require any math to see that Sadr benefits politically from this.

Cannon argues that, contrary to Elizabeth Edwards’ claim that McCain’s embrace of the private market wouldn’t secure coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, “the individual market covers lots of people with high-cost medical conditions — so long as they purchased the insurance when they were healthy.” Not only that, but “those high-cost patients do not pay premiums that correspond to their health risk, and their coverage does not disappear when they change jobs.”

But Cannon, in his enthusiasm to defend McCain, overlooks some important facts:

McCain’s Plan Would Weaken The Ability Of Sick People To Keep Their Private Insurance: The main reason (not mentioned by Cannon) that some people who develop health problems can renew their health insurance without seeing higher premiums is federal regulation through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). States have improved on these regulations, offering more protections to sick consumers of private health insurance, but John McCain, in his push for an unregulated national market, would undermine these additional protections.

McCain’s Plan For The Uninsurable Is Woefully Inadequate: While only 5% of non-elderly Americans participate in the individual insurance market, 56 million chronically ill people are currently covered by employer-based health insurance plans, which can absorb the cost of these high-risk individuals because their pools are diversified. McCain would eliminate the tax incentive to keep these plans active, and nudge many of these folks into the private market where insurers would be reluctant to cover them. McCain’s answer? Dubious “high-risk” pools. Cato’s answer? Thoroughly debunked “Health Savings Accounts.”

There Are Better Alternatives That McCain Opposes: Cannon argues that McCain’s plan “provide more secure coverage of high-cost conditions than the current job-based system does” — but the way to provide the best security is a method which McCain adamantly opposes: offer a competing non-discriminatory, flexible alternative to employee based coverage by letting any American join a system like the one members of Congress use to get their insurance.

As the Des Moines register editorial board opined, McCain’s “dangerous experiment…should scare the heck out of the millions of Americans who rely on employer-based coverage.”

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Poor wrote that Gore said in an interview on National Public Radio, “The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.” (Listen here.)

In fact, the audio clip has been doctored and the conclusion that “Al Gore Calls Myanmar Cyclone a ‘Consequence’ of Global Warming” is false:

Gore Says Myanmar Cyclone Not A Consequence Of Global Warming. The BMI headline ignores that Gore says in the interview that “any individual storm can’t be linked singularly to global warming – we’ve always had hurricanes.”

Gore Properly Described Relationship Between Storms And Global Warming. In the interview, Gore discussed Nargis and the devastating storms that struck China in 2006 (Typhoon Saomai) and Bangladesh in 2007 (Cyclone Sidr). He goes on to say that “the emerging consensus” among climate scientists is that the “the trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming, and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple of hundred feet of the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful.”

Story Presents False Clip Of Interview. The audio clip included with the online story includes two segments that have been spliced together, out of order, to mislead the listener as to Gore’s actual meaning. The actual transcript (see below) makes it clear Gore was saying that the “consequences” of global warming we’re seeing was the melting of the polar ice cap, which is unequivocally due to anthropogenic climate change.

Business & Media Institute Is Part Of Right-Wing Message Machine. BMI is a right-wing “free-enterprise” front group that is part of Brent Bozell’s conservative media machine, the Media Research Center. Poor describes himself on his Facebook page as a “professional jerk” with “very conservative” political views.

The actual transcript reveals that Gore was speaking in response to a question about conservative pastor John Hagee’s claim in a 2006 interview with Terry Gross that “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Poor’s story is being amplified and further distorted by the right-wing media machine. This morning, the Fox News “Fox and Friends” team covered the devastation of Nargis by attacking Gore’s “ill-advised” comments, claiming he is “in hot water again with climatologists.” Steve Doocy hosted Dr. William Gray, who has claimed that manmade global warming is “a big scam.” Here are Doocy’s two questions to Dr. Gray:

Al Gore says that the cyclone that’s killed a lot of people linked to global warming. Is that accurate?

When Al Gore says the big cyclone has killed all those people because of global warming, that’s, according to you, just wrong.

Watch it:

The people truly guilty of “using tragedy to advance an agenda” are Pastor Hagee, Jeff Poor, Matt Drudge, Steve Doocy, and their conservative ilk.

Digg It!

UPDATE: HT Dr. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground Wunder Blog: Sea surface temperatures were over a full degree Celsius above average in the region where Nargis intensified before landfall, as can be seen from this May 1 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite map:

UPDATE II: Glenn Beck pushed the false story on his CNN show on May 7, and Media Matters exposes that Brett Baier claimed on the May 8 edition of Fox News Special Report: “Former Vice President Al Gore says global warming is to blame for the cyclone in Myanmar.”

Actual Transcript of Al Gore’s Interview with Terry Gross: (more…)

John McCain wants English to be the national language, but apparently not until after November.

Not only is he cutting ads in Spanish, he clearly hopes those ads don’t reach too many bilingual Latinos. Otherwise, they might notice he is trying to have it both ways on immigration policy again.

In the English narration of his latest Spanish-language ad, McCain touts “pro-innovation immigration policies” — something far less objectionable to Tancredo-Sensenbrenner conservatives than his pre-flip flop immigration position.

The Spanish text that appears simultaneous to that declaration trumpets “Immigration Policy Innovation” (or under the most generous possible translation, “Innovation in Immigration Policy,”) something that reads a lot like he is still supporting the comprehensive immigration reform he has since turned his back on and which enjoys overwhelming support among Latinos (and the population writ large). Watch the ad:

Either McCain needs Spanish lessons or he needs to stop trying to have it both ways on immigration. You must be either for or against practical, effective immigration reform. You can’t rely on the myth that Spanish-speaking Hispanics don’t understand English to attempt to pull the wool over their eyes while trying not to offend your most extreme base.

The answer: pressure from their commanding officers to pump up a statistic straight out of America’s last long war against an intractable insurgency.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to [the Iraqi farmer, Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi]’s death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam’s counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war.[…]

The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion’s snipers.

I think we’ve seen this “dead bodies=success” mentality bleed out into pro-war blogs as well, where the numbers of insurgent dead are credulously relayed and uncritically reported as progress, irrespective of the collateral damage incurred in those deaths and of the galvanizing effects that this has on support for insurgency. (Of course, if you’re someone who believes that trying not to create more insurgents is irrelevant to the task of counterinsurgency, then no big deal. I suppose one could always apply the Bush Doctrine on the ground in Iraq, and justify the murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi on the theory that he might, one day, have joined the insurgency. But then you’d have to kill his son, and then all his friends, too. Nice war we’ve got going here, huh?)

The murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, and the atmosphere in which it occurred, is reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib abuses. In both cases, a high-pressure environment, hazy rules of engagement, and pressure from above to produce usable intelligence/dead “insurgents” led to atrocity. In both cases, the lowest men down were punished for carrying out the directives of their commanders (and Commander-in-Chief), while those commanders were left untouched.

As the article demonstrates, it is a mistake to regard this killing as an isolated incident. I think it would also be a mistake to see this any of this solely as a failure of command. Rather, the lesson to be drawn here is that we should, if at all possible in the future, avoid invading and occupying foreign countries, and thereby creating situations where tragedies like this one are predictable and inevitable. One of the best ways to support our troops is to ensure that they not be misused as instruments of bad policy.

Armed gunmen from the Shi’a Lebanese Hezbollah movement have seized control of the streets in the Lebanese capital city today, surrounding the homes and offices of Sunni and Druze leaders in Western Beirut. This week’s clashes represented the worst violence since Lebanon’s civil war and demonstrated how far the situation has deteriorated in the three years since the Cedar Revolution brought much hope for change in this divided country.

Coming in advance of President Bush’s trip to the Middle East next week, the instability in Lebanon is a reminder of the dangers that can emerge from neglect and inattention and an approach to the Middle East too heavily focused on Iraq. Less than a year after the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, another Middle Eastern civil war in bubbling over – this time with a group that some have called the “A team” of global terrorists which has used violence to seize control of the capital city – hardly the result President Bush was hoping for when he prematurely declared that freedom was on the march in Lebanon and elsewhere in 2005. Ironically, the global trends in freedom have stalled and retrenched on President Bush’s watch, according to Freedom House.

How did the situation in Lebanon deteriorate so rapidly? The immediate cause: the Lebanese government confronted Hezbollah, a group that receives backing from Syria and Iran, by declaring the group’s private communications network illegal and replacing the airport security chief because of his alleged ties to militant groups. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed that this amounted to a “declaration of war,” and his movement’s fighters took the fight to the streets against Lebanese government security forces.

But there were numerous and early warning signs that Lebanon was a tinderbox. A year and a half ago, Jordan’s King Abdullah came to Washington and warned of the possibility of three civil wars – between Iraqis, Palestinians, and Lebanese. In the afterglow of the Cedar Revolution, long-standing Lebanese internal divisions endured, and assassinations and political murders, including the November 2006 killing of Christian political leader Pierre Gemayal, continued. In the past year, a deadlock over power-sharing between Lebanese political factions has left the country without a new president.

As the Center’s Middle East Bulletin has highlighted on numerous occasions, the internal divisions in Lebanon has created a dangerous vacuum. Addressing it requires a comprehensive approach with engagement by the United States, countries in the region, and other global powers. Last March’s poorly-attended Arab League summit in Damascus did not result in any concrete plan for addressing the deadlock; no way forward was developed to help Lebanese factions bridge internal divides.

The violence in Lebanon demonstrates more than ever the need for sustained and continued U.S. engagement to stabilize the Middle East. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton outlined a strategy for a comprehensive regional diplomacy aimed at managing and resolving conflicts in the Middle East - pragmatically recognizing that the challenges in Iraq could not be dealt with in isolation of what happens in places like Lebanon.

In the past two weeks, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) has been circulating draft climate legislation in line with President Bush’s Rose Garden global warming speech, which called for industry tax credits and for U.S. global warming emissions to continue growing until 2025. To do so would be sheer lunacy. But Voinovich embraced the plan and translated Bush’s goals into the Incentives-Based Alternative Climate Policy Act. Voinovich’s bill was crafted by a who’s who of industry front groups, including the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, the National Manufacturers Association, the Edison Electric Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council.

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Steve Cochran summarized the Voinovich proposal as “bankrupt,” saying:

It’s a detailed prescription for doing nothing. If you think climate change is a hoax, this is your bill.

Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder agreed, saying the Voinovich bill is “repugnant and immoral.” He warned:

Any senator who votes for such sham legislation will answer for it at the ballot box.

But as Darren Samuelsohn reports in E&E News, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) is placing himself in the Voinovich camp. Samuelson writes:

In contrast, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) maintained that he is a long way from backing the Lieberman-Warner bill. Instead, he is taking a close look at an alternative climate bill circulated from Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) that opens with tax incentives for new energy technologies but falls back on cap and trade if the other ideas have not worked by 2030.

“It’s a more realistic approach to what technology is going to be required,” Nelson said. “Just legislating it, doesn’t get you there.”

Joe Romm at Climate Progress responds to Sen. Nelson: “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!“

The North Carolina Attorney General’s office decided yesterday that undocumented immigrant students cannot attend public colleges in their state. This decision to cut off opportunity for one group of North Carolina residents affects even those children who have gone to North Carolina public schools since kindergarten, and cannot remember ever living anywhere other than North Carolina.

This finding appears to have been unnecessary and could have been decided differently, as a prior Attorney General had found that these same students could attend. It turns out that there are only a handful of undocumented students attending North Carolina community and four year public colleges, and all of these are paying full tuition, effectively subsidizing other North Carolina residents who pay the lower in-state tuition.

The state estimates that of approximately 471,000 students in its public colleges, only 367 (or less than one tenth of one percent) are undocumented immigrants. So it is not clear what problem opponents of these students were trying to solve. However, removing even the hope of attending college for undocumented students currently in elementary or high school in North Carolina seems particularly unfair. Most of these kids arrived in the United States with their parents as young children and had no choice in the matter. Nor would most have any idea how to get around in their parents’ home countries.

Ensuring that undocumented immigrant children cannot get a higher education is a mistake. The United States needs all of the well educated workers we can get. Since these young people have no connection to any country outside the United States, they will remain in North Carolina, without a college education. Thus, they will be less likely to hold a job that lifts them out of poverty and when they start their families, their children will be less likely to escape poverty or to do well in school.

It is precisely because these children have worked hard while playing by the rules, and because education ends the cycle of poverty, that progressives support the Dream Act, which would provide in-state tuition and a path to citizenship for children who have grown up here, played by the rules, and want to go to college. And decisions like today’s by the North Carolina Attorney General are why our country needs to pass a national comprehensive immigration law that creates a path to citizenship for those 12 million undocumented immigrants already here, while ending the state by state approach that continues to fail to solve a problem which should be handled by the Congress and President.

When asked at a recent press conference what the United States can do to help make food more affordable around the world, President Bush replied:

One thing I think that would be — I know would be very creative policy is if we — is if we would buy food from local farmers as a way to help deal with scarcity, but also as a way to put in place an infrastructure so that nations can be self-sustaining and self-supporting. It’s a proposal I put forth that Congress hasn’t responded to yet, and I sincerely hope they do.

President Bush is suggesting that we put international food-aid money into local economies rather than the current policy of food aid, which must be purchased in the US and transported on US-flagged ships. This change would support local production and distribution abroad, rather than exporting US products that lower prices and hurt agriculture-based economies in other countries. Bush introduced this position in his State of the Union address, in which he asked Congress “to provide food assistance by purchasing crops directly from farmers in the developing world, so we can build up local agriculture and help break the cycle of famine.”

President Bush should support policies that encourage local and regional purchasing within our own borders as well.

Legislators can do something right now. Since the Farm Bill is still in flux, it is important to show your support for geographic preference language that will allow School Nutrition Programs to prefer locally grown foods during purchasing process.

The 2002 Farm Bill included language that encourages schools to purchase food from local producers. However, in a letter to school food service directors in 2007, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) states that “interpretation is incorrect and FNS disagrees with it as a result.” USDA’s misinterpretation necessitates a strong, clear statement from Congress that schools are allowed to use a geographic preference in their bid. The tentative agreement reached on the Farm Bill includes such language, although now President Bush is threatening a veto.

Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202.224.3121 and let your legislators know that they should keep language in the Farm Bill that allows schools flexibility to purchase from local farmers.

Hagee denounced Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for pressing a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. He called it “a cheap political ploy” aimed at “making Condoleezza Rice a vice presidential candidate and building a midnight legacy for George Bush.”[…]

Hagee also attacked “the liberal media for trying to produce a millstone around John McCain’s neck.”

Speaking to the 2007 AIPAC conference, Hagee compared supporters of a two-state solution in the Middle East to Nazis. Hagee also echoed right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu, telling the audience that “Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.”

Hagee’s opposition to a two-state solution, the eventual establishment of which remains the stated policy of the United States, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, puts Hagee far out of the American mainstream. Hagee’s view is grounded in an extremist interpretation of scripture known as premillenial dispensationalism, which holds that we are currently living in the end times, and that the return of the Jewish people to the entire land of Israel (or at least the land of Israel as it was drawn by Sykes and Picot) is a necessary precondition for the second coming of Jesus Christ. In Hagee’s view, establishing a homeland for the Palestinians ruins this plan.

Given how deeply the media have interrogated the views of Barack Obama’s former pastor, it’s certainly appropriate to expect them to explore the bizarre apocalyptic beliefs of a cleric whose endorsement John McCain specifically sought. Where does John McCain stand on Hagee’s implication that U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine is “Nazi”-like? Maybe it’s time to throw this millstone under the bus.

Today, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) chaired a hearing of the Environment and Public Works oversight subcommittee investigating the politicization of science at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The administration witness was Dr. George Gray, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Research and Development at the EPA. Gray was appointed to the position by President Bush in 2005. Before then, Gray ran the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, an industry-funded think tank founded by John D. Graham in 1990 that fights environmental regulation. (Graham was the “nation’s regulatory gatekeeper” in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 2001 to 2006.)

At the hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) described Gray’s misuse of the English language as “Alice in Wonderland,” telling Dr. Gray, “You have tried to defend the indefensible and you have failed.” Sen. Whitehouse described the EPA’s actions as “Orwellian” and concluded the hearing with the sarcastic salute, “I have to applaud Dr. Gray for his ability to say what I found to be preposterous things with a completely straight face throughout.”

Here are excerpts from the Conservative’s Dictionary Of Scientific Language discovered by the Wonk Room to help you translate Gray’s tortured testimony:

conflict of interest, n. Conflict with an industry-friendly position. Usage: “One reviewer’s comments were excluded from the report and were not considered by EPA due to the perception of a potential conflict of interest.” — Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Department of Energy report for the EPA Integrated Risk Information System.

In 2007, Dr. Deborah Rice was the chair of an expert peer review panel charged with setting safe exposure levels for deca-BDE, a toxic fire retardant that contaminates human blood and breast milk. The American Chemistry Council (ACC), acting on behalf of the Brominated Flame Retardant Industry Partnership, wrote to Gray to ask that he personally intervene in the process. ACC alleged that the panel is not an “independent, third-party review” because Dr. Rice is a “fervent advocate of banning deca-BDE.” Rice was removed from the panel and her comments stripped.

deliberative, adj. Secret. Usage: “The discussions we have with the rest of the federal agencies are kept deliberative.” — Dr. Gray, in testimony.

This is a reference to the “deliberative process privilege,” which protects internal and interagency communications from judicially compelled disclosure. The Bush administration has claimed that the deliberative process privilege also prevents agencies from voluntarily disclosing such information, and allows them to defy Congressional subpoenas.

science-policy continuum, n. The blurring of all distinctions between scientific and political decision-making. Usage: “EPA views the relationship between science, science policy, and regulation as a continuum.” — Dr. Gray, in testimony.

The laws that govern the Environmental Protection Agency clearly state that only scientific and health considerations may guide its actions. By refusing to accept the distinctions between different stages of the regulatory process, the Bush administration is attempting to provide a legal justification for OMB interference with any and all EPA science.

sound science, n. 1. Political corruption. 2. Scientific research that does not expose industry to potential regulation or litigation. 3. An excuse for delay in regulating industry. Usage: “I have always believed that one of the primary responsibilities of this committee is to ensure that regulatory decisions are based on sound science.” — Sen. Inhofe

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (now Center) (TASSC) was founded in 1993 by Philip Morris to discredit research demonstrating the dangers of secondhand smoke. The Chronicle for Higher Education described President Bush’s appeal to “sound science” as “a pretext for delaying or junking scientific findings that do not support his policy priorities.”

transparency, n. The pretense that political interference that is kept secret does not exist. Usage: “Transparency is key to the way we do our assessments.” –transparent, adj. Hiding corruption. Usage: “At the end of the process we are very transparent.” –Dr. Gray, in testimony

The EPA decision-making processes involve both secret steps (see “deliberative”) and public steps. At the end of the process all the public steps are disclosed.

uncertainty, n. 1. Scientific conclusions that expose industry to potential regulation or litigation. 2. An excuse for ignoring such science to make an industry-friendly decision. 3. An excuse for delay in regulating industry. Usage: “In so doing, the Administrator sought to balance concern about the potential for health effects and their severity with the increasing uncertainty associated with our understanding of the likelihood of such effects at lower O₃ exposure levels.” –EPA Administrator Johnson’s justification for setting an ozone standard of 0.075 ppm, outside the range of 0.060 to 0.070 recommended by the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.

Johnson used the word “uncertainty” over 150 times in his ozone standard ruling. However, as Dr. George Thurston testified, “In the face of uncertainty, the Clean Air Act stipulates that the Administrator must choose a more stringent standard, to ensure a margin of safety.” He also explained that the Administrator was confusing “uncertainty in the size of the pollution health effects” with doubt about the existence of any effect. “There is no doubt that there are adverse health effects occuring below 0.075 ppm.”

The package has two primary components:

1. The Neighborhood Stabilization Act, a measure designed to provide funds for the purchase and rehabilitation of foreclosed properties so they can be restored and used as affordable housing

2. The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act, legislation to expand access to federally insured mortgages to help troubled homeowners refinance their loans, primarily through an expansion of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance program.

Below, The Wonk Room debunks Bush’s arguments for vetoing the bill: (more…)

Jack Kemp – once Bob Dole’s running mate and now a top economic advisor to John McCain – defends McCain for supporting the capital gains tax cuts he originally opposed. Kemp repeats the discredited claim that lower capital gains rates produce more revenue. (There’s more on this here, here, and here). And then he says:

It is an absolute, empirically proven fact of tax policy that nearly one-half of all capital gains redound to the benefit of folks earning less than $50,000 a year.

It’s not quite clear what Kemp means by “redound to the benefit,” but if means they get the money then he’s wrong – very wrong. Households earning less than $50,000 a year collected a mere 2.5 percent of capital gains in 2005, according to the Tax Policy Center. Families earning more than $1 million a year collected 59 percent of capital gains. Moreover, most middle-class families with capital gains hold their investments in retirement accounts shielded against capital gains taxes.

U.S. forces battle almost daily with Shiite militiamen in Sadr City, including Sadr loyalists, but commanders are careful to avoid blaming the Mahdi Army for the violence. […]

The military still insists that Sadr’s Mahdi Army is not its main problem, saying it is “special groups” that have broken away from Sadr’s control. Those groups are trained and armed by Iran and not bound by Sadr’s directives.

However, military officials acknowledge that mainstream Mahdi Army elements took part in the initial fighting that erupted March 25 against an offensive launched by U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces.

Abu Muqawama’s Dr. iRack notes rightly that “the notion of ’special groups’– JAM factions that supposedly have close ties to Iran’s Quds force –is, in many respects, a useful fiction,” as it allows U.S. forces to move against elements of Sadr’s militia without appearing to directly challenge Sadr’s wider political movement, which is the largest in Iraq. But, as iRack notes, the U.S. military has “made a habit of describing all JAMsters who violate the ‘freeze’ on armed activities declared by Moqtada al-Sadr last August as ’special groups.’ ”

[This] creates a false impression that the majority of JAMsters fighting U.S. forces take their orders directly from the mullahs in Iran (much as the use of the label “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as a catch all term for a disparate and very loosely aligned collection Sunni insurgent groups creates the false impression that most Sunni insurgents take their orders from Bin Laden or the foreign leadership of AQI).

The Bush administration has consistently tried to blame outside actors for violence in Iraq in order to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that the U.S. occupation is opposed by a substantial majority of the population who the U.S. is ostensibly there to support. In seeking to defend a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, the administration and its supporters have drawn a deeply distorted picture of the political struggles currently taking place within various Iraqi communities.

In this podcast, New York Times reporters Alissa Rubin and Stephen Farrell discuss the situation on the ground in Sadr City. Farrell characterizes the current fighting as part of an intra-Shia struggle between “the haves and have nots, the establishment and outsiders.”

You have the people who rule the street and the people who run the government. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Iraqis who would wholeheartedly side with the idea that somehow the official democratic clean honest wonderful government is bringing law and order to an undisciplined rabble. I think most people, certainly most Sunnis that you talk to, would see this as a fight between a militia [ISCI/Badr] which happens to have turned itself into the government army and a militia [Sadr’s Mahdi Army] which hasn’t. The insiders and the outsiders.

Since very early in the occupation of Iraq, the United States has been willing to work with ISCI because it was willing to work with the U.S. That is, they recognized, for the moment, the authority of the U.S. occupation. The Sadrists did not, which resulted in the U.S.’s freezing them out of a political process which the Sadrists in any case viewed as illegitimate. This allowed ISCI to establish itself within the Iraqi government to a far greater extent than its relatively small political base could reasonably justify, and to incorporate large numbers of its (Iranian trained and supported) militia into the security services.

To put it simply, the U.S. is opposing Sadr because he opposes the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. is supporting ISCI because ISCI supports the occupation. As Brian Katulis and I noted in an op-ed several weeks ago, the irony of this strategy is that it has allied the United States with Iran’s primary proxy in the Iraqi government, against what is arguably the most potent nationalist political force in the country.

Today, Al Kamen reports that the hearing has been postponed because Johnson refused to appear:

EPA officials say Johnson had a “recurrence of ongoing back issues stemming from a car accident years ago.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is conducting a hearing right now into the politicization of EPA scientific decisions (live webcast). Administrator Johnson declined the invitation to appear.

The Wonk Room wishes Administrator Johnson well and hopes that his recurring back pain subsides. Once he recovers, he should be ready to testify on these and other ongoing scandals involving his agency:

EPA SCANDAL	CURRENT STATUS
The denial of the California waiver petition.	January 8: California and 15 other states sue to overturn denial. April 9: Waxman issues latest subpoena for documents involving White House. April 22: NHTSA issues fuel-economy standards that it claims preempts state global warming standards; states warn of lawsuit.
Failure to obey Supreme Court mandate to make a global warming pollution endangerment finding.	March 27: EPA announces it will ask for a new round of comments. April 2: Officials of 18 states sue to require the EPA to act within 60 days April 2: EPA documents are subpoenaed by House Global Warming Committee; the documents have not been turned over. April 18: Court orders EPA to file its response to the state suit by May 8.
White House interference in ozone standards.	April 16: Waxman subpoenas White House documents. May 8: Date of scheduled Oversight Committee hearing with Administrator Johnson; postponed when Johnson refuses to appear.
Mary Gade firing.	May 1: EPA Region V Administrator Mary Gade resigns, saying “There’s no question this is about Dow.” Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Dingell (D-MI) announce intent to investigate. May 7: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington file two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the EPA regarding Gade’s resignation.
Politicization of the EPA.	April 23: Union of Concerned Scientists issues survey of 1600 staff scientists describing mass politicization and political interference. April 29: Sen. Boxer (D-CA) releases Goverment Accountability Office report detailing politicization of toxic regulation. May 7: Senate Environment and Public Works Oversight Subcommittee holds hearing into politicization of EPA.

UPDATE: Council on Foreign Relations fellow and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson argues today in the Washington Post:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a “war on science.”

UPDATE II: The Sacramento Bee reports that the EPA will probably not regulate toxic rocket fuel contamination of water:

In a Senate hearing Tuesday, EPA assistant water chief Benjamin Grumbles did not dispute studies showing that perchlorate increases risks of brain damage in fetuses and infants and thyroid disorders in adults.

But, Grumbles said, there’s a “distinct possibility” the environmental agency won’t take action because they don’t know whether regulation would meaningfully reduce those risks.

Yesterday, Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett of the Environmental Protection Agency announced his departure from the EPA. Like John Yoo, the 31-year-old Jason Burnett is the author and advocate of a series of legal arguments that subvert the very purpose of his agency.

Burnett’s shameful record includes:

– Promoting arsenic in drinking water. Working with American Enterprise Institute scholar Robert Hahn in 2000 and 2001, Burnett wrote a series of papers arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency should let economic costs trump scientific recommendations when setting regulatory health standards. Burnett argued that an arsenic standard proposed in the waning days of the Clinton Administration “cannot be justified on economic grounds.” The Bush administration eventually adopted the Clinton standard after outcry followed its original announcement to abandon it.

– The “Queen of Hearts” mercury regulations. Working in the EPA Office of Air and Radiation from 2004 to 2006, Burnett authored the industry-friendly mercury regulations that were rejected by a federal appeals court in 2008. In its decision, the court said the EPA’s “explanation deploys the logic of the Queen of Hearts, substituting EPA’s desires for the plain text” of the Clean Air Act.

– Overruling soot health standards at behest of industry. Fine particle matter — soot — kills more people than any other form of air pollution. On July 12, 2006, Johnson, Burnett, and two other EPA officials met with 15 top industry lobbyists. Two months later, Administrator Johnson issued a standard forty percent above the recommendation of staff scientists, the independent Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council, and the American Medical Association, leaving 77 million Americans at medical risk.

– Climate contempt. Following the Supreme Court mandate to take action on global warming pollution, Jason Burnett “worked on EPA’s controversial decision to deny a California petition seeking to regulate cars and trucks for climate change.” S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, described the decision as “legally and technically unjustified and indefensible.”

Darren Samuelson, who broke the story of Burnett’s resignation on E&E News (sub. req’d), interviewed Burnett on how he perceives his global warming legacy:

“I have confidence future administrations will be able to make more informed decisions” based on the work EPA is currently doing on the issue, he said.

Now John McCain has made it very clear that he plans to balance the federal budget by the end of his second term.

Criticism has been broad, coming from Paul Krugman, the Wall Street Journal, the American Prospect and Robert Bixby, director of the non-partisan Concord Coalition.

To balance the budget, McCain would need to cut federal programs down to a level they haven’t seen since 1976–decreasing spending by programs like the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture and Department of Labor over 40% if you hold constant defense spending, which the senator has agreed not to cut. No president would propose and no Congress would pass such draconian cuts.

So how will McCain balance the budget? James Pethokoukis of U.S. News thinks he has the answer: massive cuts in Social Security benefits. The cuts Pethokoukis outlines would not only eliminate the Social Security shortfall but also generate $2.9 trillion to help pay for McCain’s tax cuts. He points to McCain aides’ suggestions that he might raise the retirement age and cut the growth in benefits over time.

Implementing those two solutions would actually result in more money going into Social Security than is needed to fund scheduled benefits. There would be money left over to help reduce taxes or increase spending on education or energy or whatever […] Now if you did a combination of price indexing starting in 2015 and extended the retirement age to 70 by 2050, that $5 trillion deficit turns into a $2.87 trillion surplus.

If Pethokoukis is right, McCain is attempting to do something that no president has ever done before: using payroll tax revenue to fund other functions of government. The result would be huge cuts in the program that lifts 13 million seniors out of poverty and a shift of the tax burden from progressive corporate taxes onto regressive wage taxes.

The gaping whole in McCain’s budget plans has left us all to speculate. But it cannot be a good sign for the McCain campaign when even McCain sympathizers think they detect a plan for massive cuts in arguably the most popular government program in history.

Like Alex, Kevin couldn’t find the numbers behind Big Oil’s subsidies:

If I spent several months on this topic instead of half an hour, maybe I could figure this all out, but surely someone else has already done this?

Alex and Kevin, the Think Progress Wonk Room rides to your rescue.

In its report “Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy Markets 2007,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that FY 2007 subsidies for the oil and natural gas industry totalled $2.1 billion. Center for American Progress Action Fund fellows Sam Davis and Daniel Weiss identify the worst of these tax loopholes and lost royalties that involve Big Oil:

The bipartisan Energy Advancement and Investment Act of 2007 had several provisions to close tax loopholes and recover royalties from big oil companies. These provisions would raise $25.9 billion over 10 years by:

• Modifying Section 199 to exclude gross receipts from the sale of oil and gas from the domestic production deduction. Raises $9.4 billion.
• Modifying Section 907 to eliminate the distinction between foreign oil and gas extraction income and foreign oil related income. This would combine foreign upstream and downstream income into a single oil basket for foreign oil and gas extraction income purposes. Raises $3.2 billion.
• Extending the oil spill liability trust fund tax through 2017, and increase it from 5 to 10 cents per barrel. Raises $2.7 billion.
• Recovering forgone royalties by establishment of an excise tax on removal price of taxable oil or gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Raises $10.6 billion.

A significant bipartisan majority of the Senate voted for these provisions as an amendment to the Senate energy bill on June 21, 2007, but it fell two votes short of the super majority of 60 votes needed to end debate and pass the amendment.

Eliminating the entire “massive corporate welfare infrastructure” for Big Oil is a much weightier task, of course, entering into the realm of overall corporate tax policy. The Wonk Room has done extensive analysis of Sen John McCain’s (R-AZ) corporate tax proposals and how they would benefit Big Oil.

As economist Reuven S. Avi-Yonah writes in a Wonk Room report, Sen. McCain’s “economic stimulus plan” involves a $1.7 trillion increase in corporate welfare by cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent and by allowing first-year expensing of equipment purchases — a potent new form of tax sheltering.

Domestic Policy Advisor James Kvaal has written in the Wonk Room that the cut in the corporate tax rate alone would deliver about $3.8 billion in tax cuts a year to the five largest American oil companies:

This past Sunday afternoon, the government of Sudan bombed the village of Shegag Karo in North Darfur. One of the bombs fell on an elementary school, killing 6 children. Another bomb destroyed the town’s market, killing 6 civilians and wounding many more. On Monday morning, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum issued a press statement. Did they condemn the attack as a brazen violation of international humanitarian law and a United Nations Security Council ban on offensive military flights over Darfur? No. In fact, the release commemorated the two-year anniversary of the Darfur Peace Agreement, a moribund and counterproductive deal which the Bush administration still counts as a diplomatic success.

That the administration is clinging to the Darfur Peace Agreement is not surprising; despite all of its lofty rhetoric and hand-wringing over the genocide in Darfur, the administration’s policy decisions have made little difference on the ground in Sudan. For the administration, the peace deal is something tangible. For the people of Darfur, the administration’s blind faith in the Darfur Peace Agreement is cruelly ironic. Civilians, like those in Shegag Karo, are subject to aerial bombardments and ground assaults by Sudanese soldiers and government-backed militias. Absent logistical support from the United States and other military powers, the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur is still too small and too feeble to offer any real protection. Worse, the Bush administration’s one real diplomatic achievement in Sudan, the landmark peace agreement that ended Sudan’s North/South civil war, is on the verge of collapse due to the Sudanese government’s refusal to implement key provisions. (more…)

In his speech today on the federal judiciary, Sen. John McCain promised to nominate more Supreme Court justices like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But as George Will has pointed out, Roberts and Alito “consider his signature achievement” – campaign finance reform – “constitutionally dubious.”

In the past, McCain has suggested in private that Alito was too conservative, at least according to John Fund and Robert Novak. But today he said:

I have my own standards of judicial ability, experience, philosophy, and temperament. And Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito meet those standards in every respect. They would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me.

Last year, Roberts and Alito helped strike down a key portion of the McCain-Feingold law in a 5-4 decision, F.E.C. v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. The right-to-life group ran ads calling on Wisconsin’s two senators, by name, to stop filibustering judges – ads prohibited by McCain-Feingold shortly before elections to prevent thinly veiled attack ads.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the ads were constitutionally protected as free speech. As Justice Stephen Breyer told the Wisconsin Right to Life lawyers, “If we agree with you in this case, goodbye McCain-Feingold.”

In another part of today’s speech, McCain criticized “judicial activism,” where judges “shut down debates by order of the court” rather than undertaking the “inconvenience” of the democratic process. But one of the “abuses by the courts” he cites is actually the opposite of judicial activism.

In Kelo v. City of New London, a city bought homeowners’ property through eminent domain and then resold it to a private developer. The Court’s majority declined to “second-guess” city’s determination that the plan was needed for its redevelopment and therefore was a valid public purpose. It was the conservative minority which wanted to overrule the city and impose its own policy preferences.