THE CALAMITY HOWLER #150 Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 13:07:25 -0500 (CDT) THE CALAMITY HOWLER May 11, 2007 Issue #150 Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage in the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas Times one finds the way Populists not only accepted the label `calamity howler but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue to howl until their objectives had been attained. --- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack EDITOR\PUBLISHER: A.V Krebs E-MAIL: avkrebs@comcast.net TO RECEIVE: Send name and address to avkrebs@comcast.net OVERVIEW: * U.S. INFRASTRUCTURE FOUND TO BE IN DISREPAIR By Thaddeus Herrick * THE COST OF WAR, UNNOTICED By Lori Montgomery * INCOME GAP IS WIDENING, DATA SHOWS By David Cay Johnston * DISTRACT AND DISENFRANCHISE By Paul Krugman * FEMA IS FAULTED IN KATRINA CONTRACTS By Associated Press * POPE SAYS RICH NATIONS "PLUNDERED" THIRD WORLD By Philip Pullella * REPUBLICANS MAKING SPECTACLES OF THEMSELVES By Margaret Carlson * KEITH OLBERMANN GETS FIRST MOLLY IVINS AWARD FROM AAN By Joe Strupp U.S. INFRASTRUCTURE FOUND TO BE IN DISREPAIR By Thaddeus Herrick Wall Street Journal May 9, 2007 Airports, roads, rail, bridges and other transit infrastructure are deteriorating across the U.S. because of insufficient investment, according to a report. Chicago needs $6 billion to bring its subways into good repair, says the report to be released today by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young LLP. Rehabilitation or replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge north of New York City could cost as much as $14.5 billion. And in Atlanta, current rush-hour trips by car could take 75% longer by 2030. The report, entitled "Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective," says the failure to address what the co-authors call an emerging crisis in mobility will undermine the ability of the U.S. to compete internationally. "At some point, the system is going to grind to a halt," says Dale Ann Reiss, global director of real estate at the New York-based Ernst & Young accounting firm and vice chairman of the Urban Land Institute, a land-use think tank in Washington. More foreboding, the report warns that further inaction will lead to disasters on the magnitude of the levee failures in Hurricane Katrina. The report underscores the broader disrepair of transit, power and water systems in the U.S. In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers graded as "poor" the condition of the nation's transit infrastructure as well as power grids, dams and systems for drinking water and wastewater. The U.S. faces a $1.6 trillion deficit in needed infrastructure spending through 2010 for repairs and maintenance, today's report says. A lack of political will because of fear of raising taxes is mainly responsible for the shortfall, the report says. It predicts an array of higher taxes but also says help is needed from the private sector and public-private partnerships, which it predicts will help fund, construct, operate and manage transit projects. Investment funds sponsored by global investment banks, private-equity firms and institutional money managers are becoming a rapidly expanding source of capital for everything from toll roads to bridges to tunnels, especially in Europe and the United Kingdom, the report says. "We have a lot to learn from other parts of the world," says Ms. Reiss, who is to present the study at an Urban Land Institute meeting in Chicago. The U.S. encourages automobile dependency, according to the report, while a number of other countries are pursuing transportation alternatives. The report says there were more than 750 cars per 1,000 people in the U.S. as of 2000, while the number was just over 500 cars per 1,000 in the U.K. No amount of investment will be adequate if driving continues to be the only practical transportation option in the U.S., the report says. Meanwhile, Japan has 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) of high-speed rail and is building 300 additional kilometers by 2020, the study says. China is building more than 2,500 kilometers. The U.S. has only 300 kilometers of high-speed rail and none under construction. The cost for the U.S. to catch up: at least $250 billion over the next 20 years. The study urges leaders and planners to reconsider the way U.S. cities are built, with hub-and-spoke systems to better handle mass transit. It also suggests infill housing and mixed-use development to reduce dependence on cars, especially in Sun Belt cities such as Houston, where the average commuter already drives 39 miles a day. Some states are taking action. California, for example, passed a $37 billion state public-works bond measure last year, earmarking $20 billion for transport, $10 billion for school construction, $4 billion for levees and $3 billion for affordable housing built near mass transit. As a result, though, about 6% of the state's general-fund tax revenues will be needed to pay debt service, a relatively high level. Not surprisingly, the greatest action is occurring in emerging economies. Annually, China spends 9% of its gross domestic product on infrastructure, while India spends 3.5%, the report says. While the U.S. doesn't face such massive infrastructure buildup, it still needs to spend more on maintenance. It spends just .93% of its GDP, or $112.9 billion, according to the study. THE COST OF WAR, UNNOTICED By Lori Montgomery Washington Post May 8, 2007 The global war on terror, as President Bush calls the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and related military operations, is about to become the second-most-expensive conflict in U.S. history, after World War II. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress has approved more than $609 billion for the wars, a figure likely to stand as lawmakers rework their latest spending bill in response to a Bush veto. Requests for $145 billion more await congressional action and would raise the cost in inflation-adjusted dollars beyond the cost of the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But the United States is vastly richer than it was in those days, and the nation's wealth now dwarfs the price of war, economists said. Last year, spending in Iraq amounted to less than one percent of the total economy --- about as much as Americans spent shopping online and less than half what they spent at Wal-Mart. Total defense spending is four percent of gross domestic product, the figure that measures the nation's economic output. In contrast, defense spending ate up 14% of GDP at the height of the Korean War and nine percent during the Vietnam War. And this time, the war bill is going directly on the nation's credit card. Unlike his predecessors, Bush is financing a major conflict without raising taxes or making significant cuts in domestic programs. Instead, he has cut taxes and run up the national debt. The result, economists said, is a war that has barely dented the average American's pocketbook and caused few reverberations in the broader economy. "This war is easier to manage because it's a very small portion of GDP compared to the past," said Robert D. Hormats, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and a former Reagan administration official who recently published a history of war financing. "Even the borrowing of money is relatively small compared to past wars, so the impact on the economy is relatively minor." Like all debts, however, the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually come due. While it is unlikely to cause economic upheaval, such as the devastating inflation that followed the Vietnam War, economists foresee substantial increases in government spending to rebuild the nation's exhausted armed forces, care for its disabled veterans and cover rising interest payments. Administration officials say those payments will be easier to afford because Bush's tax cuts strengthened the economy and boosted tax collections. But even many conservative economists are skeptical. Some worry that the bill for Iraq will come just as the baby-boom generation starts retiring, further straining a budget that will require deep cuts, higher taxes or bigger deficits. "When you borrow to pay for the war, you feel it less," said Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist who is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "But if you do borrow, it may be future needs you're sacrificing. There's always a sacrifice." Borrowing is common in wartime. According to Hormats, virtually every U.S. war has required some debt. The title of his book, "The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars," comes from a 1790 report by the nation's first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton wrote that the heavy debt that helped finance the Revolutionary War was "the price of liberty" and insisted that the new nation scrupulously repay it to preserve its ability to borrow in the future. Hamilton won that argument, and the government's commitment to repaying its debts has become a bedrock American principle. At the same time, most wartime presidents have tried to cover at least part of the cost of their conflicts by means other than debt, Hormats writes, often pushing radical changes in fiscal policy aimed at restraining deficits and inflation. To help pay for World War II, by far the nation's most expensive, Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the number of taxpayers from four million to 42 million, tripled tax collections as a percentage of GDP and slashed spending on his treasured New Deal programs. As the military budget devoured more than a third of the economy, Roosevelt also called for mass sacrifice, rationing food and gasoline, capping prices and wages and exhorting Americans to spend any money they could spare on war bonds and stamps. Heavy government spending on the Korean War set off a bout of inflation that neared eight percent in 1951. To pay for the war, President Harry S. Truman raised the top tax rates to 91% for individuals and an all-time high of 70% for corporations, while imposing wage and price controls. Lyndon B. Johnson, who tried to protect a 1964 tax cut and his Great Society programs while escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam, eventually signed both a tax increase and spending cuts in 1968 --- too late to avoid touching off more than a decade of inflation. Bush, in contrast, has allowed domestic spending to rise and cut taxes repeatedly since taking office, adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt. He signed a huge stimulus package two months after marching on Baghdad in March 2003. A few months later, he signed legislation to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest expansion of the federal health program for the elderly since its creation in 1965. That combination is unprecedented, Hormats and others said. "This may be the first war in history --- in the history of the world --- in which there was a tax cut rather than a tax hike," said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton University economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Clinton administration. Administration officials say the 21st-century economy is different from that of the 1960s, when the U.S. government had no easy access to cheap capital. To the extent that fighting in Iraq has contributed to higher oil prices, it has added to inflationary pressures, economists said. But they added that military spending alone has not done so. And the low cost of borrowing today makes a rising debt worth the investment "in the safety and security of Americans," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. Though the administration has not cut domestic spending, it has managed to hold the budget for discretionary programs relatively flat in recent years, Fratto said. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, a tax increase to pay for the ensuing war could have devastated the economy, he said. "Could it have been paid for by tax increases? I suppose it could have been," Fratto said. "But at what cost to the economy?" Grover Norquist, a Bush adviser and anti-tax lobbyist, argued that the tax cuts have helped create millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in new wealth, which will ultimately make the debt easier to pay off. "If you're going to finance a war, it's better to finance it through growth and higher revenue" than through raising taxes, Norquist said. "Would you be better off spending less money? Yes. But my argument is that economic growth that creates jobs is a fine policy whether we're at daggers drawn or at peace with the world." Norquist was among the few analysts willing to offer a spirited defense of the administration. Many conservatives said they are troubled by Bush's inability to restrain non-military spending. "In their defense, I think they would say they wanted to do that, but were basically unable to because Congress wouldn't comply," said Kevin A. Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hormats called Bush's war financing "shortsighted," not only because of the potential fiscal consequences but also because it bypassed an opportunity to engage the support of the public, which has grown increasingly skeptical of the war. "They tried to do this on the cheap and without a candid conversation with the American people about the cost," Hormats said. "But the irony is the great wartime leaders have seen it in the opposite way," theorizing that a call to sacrifice would "tie people to the war effort." Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton and who was among the winners of the 2001 Nobel prize for economics, said Bush has undertaken a "deceptive policy of saying you can have both guns and butter" --- a strategy similar to Johnson's in the early years of Vietnam. In December, Stiglitz co-authored a study that predicts the Iraq conflict alone will eventually cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion, counting military rebuilding and health care for wounded veterans. "It's actually turning out to be a very expensive war," Stiglitz said. But "it has been designed to be a war the American people don't feel." INCOME GAP IS WIDENING, DATA SHOWS By David Cay Johnston New York Times March 29, 2007 Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top one percent of Americans --- those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 --- receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The top ten percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression. While total reported income in the United States increased almost nine percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90% dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent. The gains went largely to the top one percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14%. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980. Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who analyzed the Internal Revenue Service data with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, said such growing disparities were significant in terms of social and political stability. If the economy is growing but only a few are enjoying the benefits, it goes to our sense of fairness, Professor Saez said. It can have important political consequences. Last year, according to data from other sources, incomes for average Americans increased for the first time in several years. But because those at the top rely heavily on the stock market and business profits for their income, both of which were strong last year, it is likely that the disparities in 2005 are the same or larger now, Professor Saez said. He noted that the analysis was based on preliminary data and that the highest-income Americans were more likely than others to file their returns late, so his data might understate the growth in inequality. The disparities may be even greater for another reason. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that it is able to accurately tax 99% of wage income but that it captures only about 70% of business and investment income, most of which flows to upper-income individuals, because not everybody accurately reports such figures. The Bush administration argued that its tax policies, despite cuts that benefited those at the top more than others, had not added to the widening gap but made the tax code more progressive, not less. Brookly McLaughlin, the chief Treasury Department spokeswoman, said that this year the share of income taxes paid by lower-income taxpayers will be lower than it would have been without the tax relief, while the share of income taxes for higher-income taxpayers will be higher. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., she noted, has acknowledged that income disparities have increased, but, along with a solid consensus of experts, attributed that shift largely to the rapid pace of technological change has been a major driver in the decades-long widening of the income gap in the United States." Others argued that public policies had played a role in the shift. Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor, said that the data understates the widening disparity between the top one percent and the rest of the country. He said that in addition to rising incomes and reduced taxes, the equation should take into account cuts in fringe benefits to workers and in government services that middle-class and poor Americans rely on more than the affluent. These include health care, child care and education spending. The nation faces some very tough choices in coming years, he said. That such a large share of the income gains are going to the very top, at a minimum, raises serious questions about continuing to provide tax cuts averaging over $150,000 a year to people making more than a million dollars a year, while saying we do not have enough money to provide health insurance to 47 million Americans and cutting education benefits. A major issue likely to be debated in Congress in the year ahead is whether reversing the Bush tax cuts would slow investment and, if so, how much that would cost the economy. Mr. Greensteins organization will release a report today showing that for Americans in the middle, the share of income taken by federal taxes has been essentially unchanged across four decades. By comparison, it has fallen by half for those at the very top of the income ladder. Because the incomes of those at the top have grown so much more than those below them, their share of total income tax revenue has risen despite the reduced rates. The analysis by the two professors showed that the top ten percent of Americans collected 48.5 percent of all reported income in 2005. That is an increase of more than two percentage points over the previous year and up from roughly 33% in the late 1970s. The peak for this group was 49.3 percent in 1928. The top one percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top one percent reported 23.9 percent of all income. The top tenth of a percent and top one-hundredth of a percent recorded even bigger gains in 2005 over the previous year. Their incomes soared by about a fifth in one year, largely because of the rising stock market and increased business profits. The top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million, up $908,000, while the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up nearly $4.4 million in one year. DISTRACT AND DISENFRANCHISE By Paul Krugman New York Times April 2, 2007 I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now, finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising income inequality. Let me explain. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were being taxed to provide social programs for other people. Since then, however, we have once again become a deeply unequal society. Median income has risen only 17% since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape. And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that todays rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages arent going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59% of workers believe that its harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind. But todays Republicans cant respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists wont let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization. The Republican Partys adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It cant offer domestic policies that respond to the publics real needs. So how can it win elections? The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement. The terrorist attacks on September 11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasnt the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention? But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the voting booth. Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida felon purge, which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about. Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud --- a phrase that has become almost synonymous with voting while black. Former staff members of the Justice Departments civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgias voter ID law to Tom DeLays Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters. The good news is that all the G.O.P.s abuses of power werent enough to win the 2006 elections. And 2008 may be even harder for the Republicans, because the Democrats --- who spent most of the Clinton years trying to reassure rich people and corporations that they werent really populists --- seem to be realizing that times have changed. A week before the Republican candidates trooped to Palm Beach to declare their allegiance to tax cuts, the Democrats met to declare their commitment to universal health care. And its hard to see what the G.O.P. can offer in response. FEMA IS FAULTED IN KATRINA CONTRACTS By Associated Press April 23, 2007 The Federal Emergency Management Agency exposed taxpayers to significant waste, and possibly violated federal law, by awarding $3.6 billion worth of Hurricane Katrina contracts to companies with poor credit histories and bad paperwork, investigators say. The new report by the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, set to be released this week, examines the propriety of 36 trailer contracts designated for small and local businesses in the stricken Gulf Coast region following the 2005 storm. It found a haphazard competitive bidding process in which the winning contract prices were both unreasonably low and high. Moreover, FEMA didn't take adequate legal steps to ensure that companies were small and locally operated. FEMA, in the report, disagreed that the wide price variations put taxpayers at risk. The agency contended that it was comfortable with bidders' financial viability based in part on past performance. POPE SAYS RICH NATIONS "PLUNDERED" THIRD WORLD By Philip Pullella Reuters April 4, 2007 VATICAN CITY --- Rich countries bent on power and profit have mercilessly "plundered and sacked" Africa and other poor regions and exported to them the "cynicism of a world without God," Pope Benedict writes in his first book. The Pope also condemns drug trafficking and sexual tourism, saying they are signs of a world brimming with "people who are empty" yet living among abundant material goods. One section of the book was printed in Wednesday's Corriere Della Sera daily before publication later this month by Italian publisher Rizzoli, which owns the newspaper. A Rizzoli spokeswoman confirmed the authenticity of the excerpts. In the 400-page book, called "Jesus of Nazareth," the Pope offers a modern application of Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man who had been robbed by thieves when others, including a priest, had not. "The current relevance of the parable is obvious," the Pope writes. "If we apply it to the dimensions of globalised society today, we see how the populations of Africa have been plundered and sacked and this concerns us intimately," the Pope says in his book, which comes out on April 16, his 80th birthday. He drew a link between the lifestyle of people in the developed world and the dire conditions of people in Africa. "We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked," he writes. The German Pope, who has condemned the effects of colonialism before, said rich countries had also hurt poor countries spiritually by belittling or trying to wipe out their own cultural and spiritual traditions. "Instead of giving them God, the God close to us in Christ, and welcoming in their traditions all that is precious and great ... we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, where only power and profit count...," he writes. The Pope says his comments were valid for other regions apart from Africa. In what could be seen as a strong self-criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, whose missionary activities often went hand-in-glove with colonialism, the Pope writes: "We destroyed (their) moral criteria to the point that corruption and a lust for power devoid of scruples have become obvious." REPUBLICANS MAKING SPECTACLES OF THEMSELVES By Margaret Carlson May 7, 2007 At Jack Valenti's funeral in Washington, I was reminded of the old observation that the powerful always expect to be the center of attention, including "the bride at the wedding, the corpse at the funeral." Sen. Pete Domenici arrived 20 minutes late, well after the side doors to St. Matthew's Cathedral had closed, and at the exact moment the cortege reached the top of the steps and paused before proceeding down the center aisle. Like most senators, Domenici isn't used to waiting even for the deceased. He turned sideways to gauge whether he could squeeze past the remains of Valenti, a former Hollywood lobbyist. If it weren't for pallbearers twice his size, he might have. In a church packed with the likes of Steven Spielberg and Michael Douglas, Domenici marched toward the altar, presuming someone would make room for him. Someone did. The incident is a reminder of how people in Washington comport themselves as if the rules don't apply to them. That mind-set has Domenici in hot water trying to explain away a call to David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in his home state of New Mexico. When Iglesias told Domenici he wouldn't be indicting a Democrat in time to help Republicans in the 2006 elections, he said Domenici angrily hung up. Iglesias was fired shortly thereafter in a purge of eight that's become the subject of a congressional inquiry. Domenici has hired a lawyer. Bad behavior is usual. What's unusual is how many people have been caught at it lately, from clients of an escort service to the president of the World Bank. Deborah Jeane Palfrey, indicted for running a prostitution ring, says she was providing good company, not illegal sex, for $300 an hour. To pressure her rich and powerful customers to testify on her behalf, she has turned her records over to ABC television's "20/20" program. She has nailed one high-ranking Bush administration official, Randall Tobias, who resigned as deputy secretary of state after ABC News called him. The married Tobias, 65, the former head of Eli Lilly & Co., told ABC he just called "gals to come over to the condo to give me a massage," thereby not violating the abstinence-only philosophy he had pushed as part of his job. Then there's World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. He acts as if it's all in a mogul's day to secure a pay raise for his girlfriend that was twice as large as allowed by bank rules in her move to the State Department. She now earns slightly more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Although Wolfowitz got the hearing he said was his due, it only made things worse. He had claimed the support of the bank's ethics committee, but its former chairman, Ad Melkert, had a different story. He said he told Wolfowitz his girlfriend needed to be moved to a job beyond his supervision. But he said he didn't know about, let alone approve, his negotiating her pay package. Former general counsel Roberto Danino went further, saying Wolfowitz withheld information about the "extraordinary salary increase" and that he may have tried to "deceive the board." This was in keeping with his record at the Pentagon. As deputy secretary of defense, he boxed out anyone who didn't cooperate in his effort to prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Wolfowitz in his victimhood is like George Tenet, who's flogging a book, for which he got a $4 million advance, like a crybaby. How unfair, he wails, that he should be blamed for the Iraq war just because he provided the basis for waging it. What a spectacle: Tenet defending his cowardice and careerism while brave soldiers continue to die in a war for which he made the contrived "slam dunk" case. You had an inexperienced president and an obsessed vice president in thrall to a clique of ideologues wanting support for their suspect claims, and a CIA director who wanted to be part of the Oval Office club. Tenet claims he wrote his book and accepted the Medal of Freedom for the hardworking folks at the CIA. But some of the hardest-working folks aren't having it. In an open letter to the man they call "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," six former officials say Tenet had "solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD." They concluded, "You have no appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated." Washington officials, with their rarefied sense of entitlement, feel victimized the minute they're called to account. Tenet's book is number six on the Amazon.com Web site. Domenici is still a senator. Wolfowitz remains head of the World Bank. And there's no injustice in anything done to them, but rather to the country they swore to honor and defend. MARGARET CARLSON is a columnist for Bloomberg News KEITH OLBERMANN GETS FIRST MOLLY IVINS AWARD FROM AAN By Joe Strupp Editor&Publisher May 9, 2007 MSNBC's Keith Olbermann will receive the first Molly Ivins Award from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies later today, according to AAN officials. "I'm utterly honored," Olbermann said in a statement, "largely because I'd still like to be Molly Ivins when I grow up." The organization, which represents 125 alternative publications, created the award to "honor those who practice the same bold, fearless journalism for which Ivins was renowned during her years as co-editor of AAN member The Texas Observer and as a syndicated columnist." "Describing her own style of writing, Molly Ivins once wrote, 'Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.' That's the sort of journalism we recognize today, that which holds those in power accountable in the court of public opinion," said AAN President and Memphis Flyer Publisher Kenneth Neill. "Keith Olbermann speaks truth to power with wit and style, just as Molly did." Olbermann will receive the honor during a lunchtime event at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York, where the annual Newspaper Association of America convention is being held this week. Olbermann, a former ESPN broadcaster, hosts the nightly "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," which has gained ratings strength in the past two years. Ivins, the longtime columnist, died January 31 at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer. AAN officials stated in a release that Olbermann's show "is notable for its literate writing, fast-paced delivery, historical and pop-culture references and the host's signature wit, all of which make 'Countdown' one of the most vital and colorful newscasts on the air." AAN plans to donate $2,000 in Olbermann's name to the Molly Ivins Fund for Investigative Reporting at the Texas Observer, stating "Ivins remained a passionate supporter of the non-profit bi-weekly newsmagazine until her passing." These newletters are produced by the Calamity Howler. If you do not wish to receive this e-mail, simply click on the link to :(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu)unsubscribe:(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu).