Get the Facts Newsletter, August 2005
I hope this newsletter finds all of you enjoying the slower pace of summer and the abundant sunshine we miss so much when the rain returns. For many of us, August is the time to catch up on all that reading we've been meaning to get to. But with so much information bombarding us every day, it can sometimes seem impossible to tackle an actual book.
As you can probably imagine, I have so much reading material -- books, letters, reports, bills, newspapers, etc. -- that I could do nothing but read all day and still not get through all of it. But it's important to me to stay well informed on the issues and the news so that I can do the best possible job of serving you. So I've developed a few survival techniques:
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Read just the introduction and the first chapter of a book. You'll be amazed how much you can get out of a book just by reading those.
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Skim the index for topics that interest you most. Then go straight to the pages or chapters that cover them.
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Add a few international news sources to your daily diet. Just by skimming the headlines, you'll quickly see how much you've been missing. For a list of news sites I rely on most, see the "Web Sites I Like" section below.
I hope you find these tips helpful -- and this newsletter as well. As always, I'm eager to hear your feedback, so please
send me e-mail.
Enjoy the rest of your summer and your reading list!
Sincerely,
NEWS ITEMS OF NOTE
-- Iraq War: Now, It's Unwinnable
-- Iraq's Economy Tanking As War Drags On
-- Roadless Warriors vs. Bush
-- Vanity Fair Exposes the Perils of Military Recruiting
WEB SITES I LIKE
-- The Guardian Unlimited
-- The Independent
-- The Daily Star of Lebanon
-- Haaretz
BOOKS I'M READING
-- The Anatomy of Fascism
-- Essentials for a Decent Working Society
TAKE ACTION:
-- Join the American Values Team
-- Make a Donation
FEEDBACK
Your feedback on the issues -- and this newsletter -- is very important to me. Send your thoughts to: emailsignup@mcdermottforcongress.com
Patrick Cockburn of the British daily The Independent wrote a compelling argument explaining why we'll never win the war in Iraq. His firsthand accounts of suicide bombings in Iraq vividly demonstrate just how out of control things really are. And, he reports, some in the Iraqi government agree: "The current motto of both [the British and American] governments is to 'stay the course in Iraq.' This may be useful propaganda at home, but Iraqi government officials counter that London and Washington have no 'course' in Iraq, only a policy of endless zigzags."
-- Read the article
IRAQ'S ECONOMY TANKING AS WAR DRAGS ON
I learned something slightly surprising the other day when I was browsing through Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper online: Iraq is actually pumping less oil now than it did before the war. By no means am I suggesting that Iraq should return to a dictatorship to improve its economy. However, I do see this drop in production -- and in Iraq's gross domestic product in general -- as another sign of how poorly planned and executed our invasion has been.
In his Daily Star editorial, posted June 28, 2005, Khatoun Haidar writes, "If 'Project Iraq' was judged by the same rules governing the U.S. private sector and the markets, then in the face of such a failure the whole board of directors would have been sacked. Unfortunately this administration is not subject to the checks and balances of competitiveness…"
Now, what exactly is it that we've actually accomplished with this war?
-- Read the article
ROADLESS WARRIORS VS. BUSH
You may recall that at the end of his second term, President Bill Clinton passed a rule to protect 58.5 million acres of undisturbed national forest land from being cut through with roads. Then, George W. Bush overturned the rule almost as soon as he took office. But the fight isn't over yet. A group of dedicated environmentalists is keeping hope alive through repeated appeals at state-court level.
Unfortunately, the latest winner in this legal chess match was Bush, according to a recent story on MSNBC.com: "A federal judge in Wyoming struck down the Clinton administration’s [forest road] ban in 2003, ruling in a lawsuit filed by the state of Wyoming that the executive branch had overstepped its authority in effectively creating wilderness areas on U.S. Forest Service land."
-- Read the MSNBC article
-- Read about the environmentalists' past and future appeals
VANITY FAIR EXPOSES THE PERILS OF MILITARY RECRUITING
In my newsletter, I usually only provide news content that you can access for free on the Web. But I'm going to break my own rule this time because it's important. The September 2005/Jennifer Aniston issue of Vanity Fair magazine that's on newsstands now has a truly excellent, and chilling, investigative piece called "The Recruiters' War." This story is further evidence to me that the military draft IS going to make a comeback if we don't withdraw from Iraq soon.
The story is not available online, unless you pay for a subscription. So to read the full article, I'm afraid you'll have to buy the magazine. Here is a brief description of the article from Vanity Fair's Web site: "It's a different kind of hell for military recruiters 'trolling' strip malls and high schools in an increasingly desperate effort to fill their quotas. With army and Marine sources, [reporter] Michael Bronner lays bare a system of manipulation, fraud, and, in one case, fatal pressure."
-- In this month's Vanity Fair
Here are just a couple of the Web sites I rely on to get the facts.
-- The Guardian Unlimited: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/
-- The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/
-- The Daily Star of Lebanon: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/home2.asp
-- Haaretz (from Israel): http://www.haaretzdaily.com/
The Anatomy of Fascism
By Robert O. Paxton (Vintage; 2004)
Historian Robert Paxton explores the meaning of fascism through the prism of specific historical events -- and the possibility of whether fascism is merely a relic of its time or a dormant movement that could reemerge and thrive in the 21st century.
-- Get more details
I'll Be Short: Essentials for a Decent Working Society
By Robert Reich (Beacon Press; 2003)
Bill Clinton's secretary of labor offers a funny and candid look at how the ties that bind us economically are inextricably linked to the health of our economy -- meaning, the wider the income gap grows, the worse off the nation will be. Reich's argument shows that solutions such improving access to education for all and allowing workers to share in their employer's success really work.
-- Get more details
-- Join the American Values Team
-- Make a donation
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Revision date: October 3, 2005
