From AlterNet
By Geov Parrish

For over 40 years, MIT professor Noam Chomsky has been one of the world’s leading intellectual critics of U.S. foreign policy. Today, with America’s latest imperial adventure in trouble both politically and militarily, Chomsky — who turned 77 last month — vows not to slow down “as long as I’m ambulatory.” I spoke with him by phone, on Dec. 9 and again on Dec. 20, from his office in Cambridge.

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they’re getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can’t do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, “How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.” And, yeah, they’re basically correct.

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From The Guardian UK
By Frederic J. Frommer

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in an anti-abortion group’s First Amendment challenge to advertising limits in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Wisconsin Right to Life was barred in 2004 from broadcasting ads that mentioned Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat facing re-election who co-authored the law with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. A provision of the law banned the use of corporate or union money for ads identifying federal candidates two months before a general election.

In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the law, 5-4, but Wisconsin Right to Life argues that its ads should have been allowed anyway because they constituted lobbying, not electioneering. The commercials urged people to call Feingold and Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., asking them to oppose filibustering President Bush’s judicial selections.

Ironically, the court takes up the case while the Senate is debating Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, whom Democrats won’t rule out filibustering. But his nomination appears headed for approval.

Read more Free Speech

From The LA Times
By Riaz Khan

Al-Qaida’s second-in-command was the target of a U.S. airstrike near the Afghan border but he was not at the site of the attack, two senior Pakistani officials said Saturday. At least 17 people were killed.

Citing unnamed American intelligence officials, U.S. networks reported that a CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft carried out the missile strike in the Bajur tribal region of northwestern Pakistan.

The two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that the CIA had acted on incorrect information, and Ayman al-Zawahri was not in the village of Damadola when it came under attack. Al-Zawahri is ranked No. 2 in the al-Qaida terror network, second only to Osama bin Laden.

“Their information was wrong, and our investigations conclude that they acted on a false information,” said a senior intelligence official. His account was confirmed by a senior government official, who said al-Zawahri “was not there.”

Pakistan’s government was expected to formally issue its reaction later Saturday.

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From The Boston Globe
Editorial

Samuel Alito tells a moving and very American personal story about the path his immigrant father took to raise a son who would one day be poised to sit on the US Supreme Court. But Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy, his written record of court decisions, and his unconvincing, sometimes evasive, answers in his nomination hearings far outweigh the personal appeal. He should not be sent to the Supreme Court, where he could reverse the progress this nation has made toward lifting precisely the kinds of barriers his father struggled to overcome.

In four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Alito appeared contained and well informed. But Americans who were concerned about his views on presidential power, privacy, and minority rights heard little to have those fears allayed.

Alito declared his overarching constitutional philosophy of originalism: a strict adherence to the actual written text. In deciding court opinions, he said, ”We should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption.” Given that, at the time of its adoption, women could not vote and slaves were considered three-fifths of a person, such a philosophy is outdated, to say the least.

On the right to a legal abortion, Alito said he would keep an open mind and repeatedly talked about respect for precedent. But Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, perhaps not overly helpful, got Alito to agree that if the court ”makes a mistake” and reaches a ruling that is ”repugnant,” precedent need not have much weight at all.

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From The Washington Post
By Colby I. King

On the eve of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it seems fitting to ask what the Nobel Prize winner would think of America and race in the 21st century. Of course, the answer is unknowable. But it’s not beyond reason to speculate how King might react to a few noteworthy events in contemporary America.

Four topics come to mind: Georgia’s highest court, the U.S. Supreme Court, a fallen councilman and a suburban county coming to grips with itself.

� King’s home state of Georgia. In his book “Vernon Can Read!”, high-powered Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan tells the story of his first real case after graduation from Howard University law school in 1960. Jordan and his boss, Atlanta lawyer Donald Hollowell, were trying to get a stay of execution for Nathaniel Johnson, a young black man sentenced to death for raping a white woman. The case had been badly handled by a white attorney, and the version of the rape story received by Jordan and Hollowell convinced them that Johnson, who had been arrested in the middle of the night without a warrant and who had no real chance of getting a fair trial, was being railroaded to the death chamber.

Working frantically to get a stay, the two lawyers ended up in the chambers of W.H. Duckworth, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, to make their case.

“In the middle of this literally deadly serious matter,” Jordan wrote, “Duckworth asked me, ‘Son, where do you play basketball?’ ”

Read more

From The NY Times
By Maureen Dowd

The day we mourned a man whose life was devoted to clarity, this city was hidden in fog. You couldn’t see the Potomac, even on its bank.

There were many things to love about David Rosenbaum. He had a grin that always improved the weather. He was uncommonly generous to reporters he worked with and competed against. He was an exemplary husband, father, brother, uncle and grandfather.

But the truly astonishing thing about David, the Times reporter who was killed in a random robbery a week ago, was his unglamorous, unsanctimonious, unvain sort of goodness. He had a black-and-white sense of honor that was oddly old-fashioned in a capital slimed by lies, bribery, greed, corruption and ends-justify-the-means malarkey.

The skells, as Detective Sipowicz would say, saw David walking in his neighborhood after dinner and whacked him in the head with a pipe. One low-life bought laundry detergent, gas and tires with David’s credit card while he lay dying. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Guardian UK
By Robert Tait and Richard Norton-Taylor

Iran yesterday upped the ante in the dispute over its nuclear programme by threatening to block inspections of its facilities if it is referred to the UN security council.

As Britain raised the possibility of economic sanctions, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said the Islamic regime would retaliate by ending voluntary snap checks by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog. Responding to Thursday’s decision by the EU trio of Britain, France and Germany to abandon two-and-a-half years of talks with Iran, Mr Mottaki said: “In case of referral of the nuclear dossier to the UN security council, the EU members will lose their present chances, given that once such a measure is taken, the government will have to stop all its voluntary cooperation with the UN watchdog.”

But in an apparent effort to avoid a UN referral, Mr Mottaki called for further talks that would “clarify ambiguities or worries” held by the west, which suspects the Iranian nuclear programme is intended to produce atomic weapons, and not just electricity, as the regime claims. “They can choose to continue talks, hear Iran’s clear explanations and come up with a solution that would be satisfactory to both sides,” he said.

But in Washington President George Bush indicated that the time for talking had passed. A nuclear Iran, he said, would be a threat to global security, adding that it was “logical that a country which has rejected diplomatic entreaties be sent to the United Nations security council”.

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From The Nation
By John Nichols

It sounds as if Al Gore is about to deliver what could be not just one of the more significant speeches of his political career but an essential challenge to the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.

In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a “Constitutional crisis” by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.

Aides who are familiar with the preparations for the address say that Gore will frame his remarks in Constitutional language. The Democrat who beat Bush by more than 500,000 votes in the 2000 presidential election has agreed to deliver his remarks in a symbolically powerful location: the historic Constitution Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution. But this will not be the sort of cautious, bureacratic speech for which Gore was frequently criticized during his years in the Senate and the White House.

Indeed, his aides and allies are framing it as a “call to arms” in defense of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law in a time of executive excess.

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From Editor and Publisher
By E&P Staff

NEW YORK Another columnist has been dropped by his distributor over revelations about previously undisclosed payments.

Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento — a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute — for not disclosing he had taken payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant Monsanto. The payments were revealed by BusinessWeek Online, which also broke a similar story revealing columnist Doug Bandow receiving payments. Copley News Service subsequently dropped Bandow.

In a statement released Friday, SHNS Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento “did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto.” Copeland added: “Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers.”

SHNS sent out an advisory to subscribers last night that read: “The Jan. 5 column by Michael Fumento about new biotechnology products from Monsanto should have included more information. We believe the column should have disclosed a $60,000 grant from Monsanto that Fumento received in 1999 for a book about biotechnology. Fumento’s column will no longer be distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, but is available from Michael Fumento at fumento(at)pobox.com or www.fumento.com.”

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From AlterNet
By Mark Ames

Vladimir Putin’s moves to tighten controls over foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has recently been portrayed in the West as yet another example of Russia’s savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While only a drunken apologist could deny Putin’s authoritarianism, the real question is whether or not the crackdown on NGOs is a symptom of classic tyrant-paranoia, or if it has a valid basis.

If the Putin regime is being paranoid, then the case of blue-chip NGO Freedom House — an American NGO whose name seems to pop up more than any other in this part of the world, particularly when it comes to the push for democracy — provides a clear example of Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “even a paranoid has some real enemies.”

Freedom House was founded innocuously enough in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president and one of the great modern champions of human rights, and Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in 1940, uniting the mainstream American political spectrum to ensure that it would not be accused of being ideological. It was founded, according to its website, out of concern “with the mounting threats to peace and democracy [and has been] a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorships of the far left and the far right.”

Read more Freedom