NY Times: Profound effect on U.S. economy seen in a war on Iraq -- "An American attack on Iraq could profoundly affect the American economy, because the United States would have to pay most of the cost and bear the brunt of any oil price shock or other market disruptions, government officials, diplomats and economists say." (Free registration required)

Washington Post: Some top military brass favor status quo in Iraq -- Containment has worked well for eleven years, they argue, as well as asserting there is no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11 or al-Qaeda. Richard Perle, head of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, noted that "ultimately, U.S. policy on Iraq will be set by civilians, and that it will be based on a different set of assumptions than those of the uniformed armed services. 'Whether he is contained or not, that's a political question,' Perle said. What to do about Iraq essentially boils down to how much risk the U.S. government is willing to take, he said, and 'that's a political judgment that these guys aren't competent to make.'" (I wonder why Perle's nickname is "The Prince of Darkness?")

Will Pitt: Bush's messy war is courting total disaster -- "In all likelihood, the answer [of why we will invade Iraq] lies within the geometry of the voting booth and the American marketplace. The Congressional midterm elections will be taking place in 99 days. Instability in the stock market, combined with reports of massive corporate fraud and mounting evidence that Bush and Cheney behaved like Lay and Fastow, augmented by a war on terror that does not seem to be getting anything done, has stripped the GOP of anything to run on in their respective races. By most reports, Republicans are facing an electoral wipeout to rival the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. A splendid little war, combined with the inevitable demands for patriotism, would serve to create Bush coattails where none currently exist."

Carla Binion: Where did America go wrong? -- "The National Security Act of 1947, and the creation of the CIA as a result of that act, radically changed the direction of this country. This act helped create a secret government within our legitimate government. In many ways, the beginnings of the CIA and other secretive agencies marked the end of the America created by the framers of our Constitution."

David S. Broder: Deadly Politics -- "Every administration makes certain compromises -- in policy and appointments -- to satisfy important political constituencies. But most administrations draw the line at compromises that cost lives. The Bush administration now has crossed that line -- not accidentally but deliberately."

John Judis & Ruy Teixeira: The coming Democratic dominance -- An interesting, long look at the two major parties and the nature of demographic change in the U.S. in recent years, and that change's impact on the make-up of the parties. Assuming we survive the current mess we're in, this offers a ray of hope.

R. C. Longworth: A fraying alliance: Allies are worlds apart in war on terrorism -- "Conversations across Europe reveal two conflicting attitudes. Almost no European leader thinks Hussein has ties to Al Qaeda or any direct relationship to the war on terrorism. All believe that any attack on Iraq is likely to destabilize the Middle East and cause more harm than good. But all are alarmed by Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction. And most believe that if any U.S. attack has a chance to succeed, it is going to need the military and diplomatic support of a broad coalition."

Protesting Bush in Greensboro -- "As many times as they contradicted themselves and changed their directives, it became clear to us that they really were not prepared to argue with us. Armed to the teeth as they were, they were better prepared to shoot us. We, on the other hand, were only armed with the truth, our persistence and our insistence on being treated with respect and having our rights acknowledged." [ncindymedia via BartCop]

Palm Beach Post: FBI: Just 200 hard-core Al-Qaeda -- "Senior FBI officials believe there are now no more than 200 hard- core Al-Qaeda members worldwid. . . . 'Everyone tries to tie everything into 9-11 and Al-Qaeda,' said one of the two FBI officials interviewed Friday on condition of anonymity. 'There was a recent report suggesting that Al-Qaeda is about 5,000 strong. It is nowhere near 5,000 strong.'" Would someone please pass this information along to Attorney General Ashcroft? Thanks.

Mark Shields: Republicans desperately seeking leadership and ideas -- "For Republicans facing November voters, the bad news is that they and their party are widely judged to be the lapdogs of Big Business and more dedicated to protecting corporate interests than in fighting for 'ordinary Americans.'"

Daniel Kutzman: Learning to love Big Brother - George W. Bush channels George Orwell -- "As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is '1984,' the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism -- not a how-to manual." [SF Chronicle, via Cursor]

Eric Margolis: Bush is becoming downright dangerous -- "Of all the bad ideas that have been pouring from the Bush administration - the faux war on terrorism, the Palestine mess, invading Iraq, curtailment of civil liberties, unilateralism, growing deficits, farm subsidies, steel tariffs - among the very worst is the dangerous proposal that U.S. military forces be given domestic police powers." [Toronto Sun]

Robyn Blumner: President doesn't have absolute military authority over Americans -- "While the president has broad power to conduct war, he does not have the absolute and unreviewable authority to hold any suspected American for as long as this indefinite 'war' on terror continues. . . . [However,] Mark Corallo, spokesman for the Justice Department, says the president as commander in chief can designate anyone an enemy combatant -- American or not, here or abroad.'(In this war on terrorism) America is the battlefield,' he says, and no congressional statute can override the president's constitutional military authority." [St. Petersburg Times]

Reuters: N.Y. man sues, blaming fast food for ill health -- "Barber, who has had two heart attacks, told MSNBC he did not realize fried food was bad for him until three years ago and that he had been eating fast food for decades because it was convenient." This is unbelievable. Hello? Did his doctor ever perhaps mention the importance of what kinds of food we eat?

NY Times: House votes for independent inquiry on intelligence agencies' actions on Sept.11 -- "Twenty-five Republicans broke party lines and voted with 193 Democrats and 1 independent in favor of the bill to set up the 10-member panel. There were 188 votes against. The measure, sponsored by Representative Tim Roemer, Democrat of Indiana, has been favored by families of the Sept. 11 victims. The families have been lobbying Congress for an independent inquiry." (Free registration required)

Death of privacy

Village Voice: Your grocery list could spark a terror probe -- "The saga began with a misguided fit of patriotism mere weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, when a corporate employee handed over the records ó almost literally, the grocery lists ó to federal investigators from three agencies that had never even requested them." [Via Cursor]

Counterpunch: Ashcroft's war on bookstores -- "A week after the Naval Institute Press shipped three copies of Tom Clancy's cold war thriller, The Hunt for Red October, the FBI showed up. The FBI, which apparently got the information from the publisher, 'wanted to know where the books were and who purchased them,' says Johnson. She says she told the two men that she couldn't remember to whom she sold two of the copies, but acknowledged she sent one copy to her cousin, who had served aboard a nuclear submarine, 'and had all kinds of clearances.' Johnson says she wasn't pleased about the interrogation -- 'and my cousin certainly wasn't happy about anyone checking on what he was reading.'"

Dave Winer: Hollywood wants the right to hack your computer -- "Two years ago I never imagined that the US Congress would consider making it legal for Hollywood to spread viruses that hack our computers; that give us a disease to protect a right that's not clear that they have. But that's exactly what is happening in Washington, now, in 2002."

Add to these the FBI demanding patrons' records of public libraries.

Cosmic pinball? -- "It will take weeks or even months before astronomers will be able to confirm their suspicion that asteroid 2002 NT7 will pass very close to but not hit the Earth early in 2019." [BBC]

NY Times: Ashcroft's terrorism politics dismay some conservatives -- "Many religious conservatives who were most instrumental in pressing President Bush to appoint John Ashcroft as attorney general now say they have become deeply troubled by his actions as the leading public figure in the law enforcement drive against terrorism." Be careful what you wish for...

AP: U.S. trying to block U.N. vote on anti-torture plan -- "Concerned about the possibility of independent visits to U.S. civilian and military prisons, the United States sought Wednesday to block a vote on a U.N. plan meant to enforce a convention on torture. The United States wants negotiations on the plan reopened, a move human rights groups say could kill the proposal, which they believe is essential to ending torture around the world." Do we have something to hide, or what?

Reuters: Former Adelphia execs arrested for fraud

R.I.P., Rumpole

James Carroll: Questions on Bush's War on Iraq -- "The obvious difference between Iraq and the United States is that this nation is a democracy. That means that we US citizens are responsible for the behavior of George W. Bush in ways that the people of Iraq are not responsible for Saddam Hussein. There is good reason to believe that Bush, in his highly personal, irrational, and thoroughly Manichaean campaign against Hussein, has set the very world on a course toward disaster. No one can change that course but us."

Robert Scheer -- "That's what all this talk of Al Qaeda sleeper cells, homeland security and knocking off Saddam Hussein is about: a backdrop for the theater of war, a necessary distraction to a set of domestic policies that has failed miserably. The massive tax cut brought us nothing but soaring national debt, Alan Greenspan has been revealed as an impotent Wizard of Oz and the Republican magic bullet of monetarism has proved a bust."

A weekend poll suggests that less than half of American voters would vote to re-elect Bush.

Israel has managed to kill a senior Hamas leader; unfortunately, in doing so, the missile took out an entire apartment building, killing children.

USA Today: Despair grows as markets plunge. Naturally, the administration is making a valiant effort to blame the latest free-fall on Clinton's zipper.

Interesting thread over at kuro5hin on whether Americans might be able to seek political asylum.

James Raskin: "We need a national movement for constitutional literacy, and not just so Americans will be prepared to absorb the shock of judicial decisions that enforce the Establishment Clause. We need constitutional literacy as a basic tool of intellectual self-defense. America's 'conservatives' are prepared to push constitutional amendments to deal with a host of symbolic, cultural and even supernatural problems: flag desecration, prayer in the schools, display of the Ten Commandments, even the words 'under God' in the Pledge. Meantime, the Court has denied the existence of basic democratic rights that we all thought were part of the constitutional fabric, such as the right to vote and the right to education. A movement for constitutional literacy would set the table for the meaningful constitutional reforms that we need."

BBC: No home for digital pictures? -- "The problem is there will be no way to look at them. That's because technology evolves so fast that any storage medium in use today is bound to become obsolete sooner or later. Finding the right equipment to retrieve digital images stored decades previously on obsolete media will become almost impossible."

As expected, Worldcom filed bankruptcy late yesterday.

Reuters: Giving U.S. military more power at home debated -- The big bugaboo, of course, is the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the military from engaging in police activity. Those already stewing about our "shadow government" will not take well to this.

Wow! Ogden Nash gets his own postage stamp! Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker... and more rib ticklers.

Be nice to the meter reader

Peter Sussman: -- "Over the past year, administration officials have assured us that the suspension of civil rights they initiated in the panic following the Sept. 11 attacks was not intended for law-abiding folks like you and me -- only for those malignant characters, mostly foreign, suspected of "terrorism." But that begs the crucial question: Suspected by whom? Now we have an answer: your neighborhood informer -- a bus driver, say, or the meter reader."

Paul Roberts comments about 'TIPS' -- "Why are 12 million Americans, in addition to thousands of government police agents with unprecedented eavesdropping powers, needed to ferret out the suspected 5,000 terrorists in the United States?"

Brian Doherty: An American Stasi

OK, summer vacation is over. ;-)

Actually it hasn't been a real vacation, more like a working vacation, plus a lot of reading.

A very belated "Get well" to Dave!