http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64628-2004Jan30.html?nav=hptoc_p
White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission
Panel May Subpoena Its Summaries of Bush Briefings
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A02
The White House, already embroiled in a public fight over the deadline for an independent commission's investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is refusing to give the panel notes on presidential briefing papers taken by some of its own members, officials said this week.
The standoff has prompted the 10-member commission to consider issuing subpoenas for the notes and has further soured relations between the Bush administration and the bipartisan panel, according to sources familiar with the issue. Lack of access to the materials would mean that the information they contain could not be included in a final report about the attacks, several officials said.
"We're having discussions on this almost hourly or at least daily," said the commission's vice chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "We retain all of our rights to gain the access we need. . . . This is a priority item for us to resolve, and we are working to resolve it."
The disagreement is the latest obstacle to face the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete its work by a May 27 deadline after months of fighting over access to government documents. The commission has asked that the deadline be pushed back at least two months, but the White House and leading congressional Republicans oppose that idea.
Such a postponement would mean releasing the potentially damaging commission report on July 26, in the middle of the presidential campaign. Legislation to be introduced next week in the Senate would extend the commission's deadline until next January, avoiding the election altogether.
The latest dispute stems from an agreement reached in November that allowed a four-member team from the commission to examine highly classified documents known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB), including a controversial August 2001 memo that discusses the possibility of airline hijackings by al Qaeda terrorists. The deal allowed the team -- made up of three commission members and Executive Director Philip D. Zelikow -- to take notes on the materials that would be passed along to the rest of the commission, but only after the White House gave its approval.
The team completed its work several weeks ago but has been unable to reach an agreement with the White House on how to share its summaries with the seven commission members who were not privy to the material, officials said.
The standoff has prompted commission members to discuss using subpoenas to obtain either the summaries or the entire catalogue of President's Daily Briefs, several sources said.
Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Indiana congressman, said that "the convoluted and tortuous process set up by the White House has bottlenecked. If it's not resolved within the next few days, I believe we have to pursue other options."
Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, who served on the four-person review team, declined to comment on the details of the impasse but said negotiations are continuing.
"All I can say is that we have followed the procedure that we contemplated and we are discussing with the White House whether that can be made to work for us," Gorelick said. "We are trying to ensure that we get the information we need, while at the same time respecting the needs and desires of the White House. . . . We have not been able yet to transmit [PDB summaries] to the whole commission."
White House officials declined to comment on the details of the negotiations, or to say why administration lawyers have objected to releasing the review team's notes.
"The administration has worked closely with the commission, providing unprecedented access to information and documents," said White House spokeswoman Erin Healy. "We continue to have discussions on a number of issues as the process moves forward, and we will continue to do so in a spirit of cooperation."
But Kristen Breitweiser, widow of World Trade Center victim Ronald Breitweiser and a member of a group of victims' families who monitor the commission's work, called the White House position "unacceptable." She said the panel should subpoena the documents it needs.
"The White House needs to stop being all talk and no action," Breitweiser said. "They say they're cooperating. It's time to show that."
After months of delays last fall, the commission issued subpoenas for documents from the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration and the city of New York, eventually working out agreements in all three cases. The panel also threatened to subpoena the White House over the PDB issue, but settled on the compromise because officials said they did not want to get bogged down in a court battle.
The White House indicated at the time that it would consider asserting that the PDB documents were covered by executive privilege and not subject to review by outside parties.
Friday, January 30, 2004
Krischer: Limbaugh probe hurt by state
By John Pacenti, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 30, 2004
WEST PALM BEACH -- State Attorney Barry Krischer on Thursday accused Attorney General Charlie Crist's office of trying to impede the Rush Limbaugh prescription fraud investigation for political reasons.
Krischer expected Crist's office to file the state's response to Limbaugh's appeal of a decision to unseal the commentator's medical records in the prescription fraud case. Crist's office pulled out of the appeal one hour before a Jan. 12 deadline imposed by the appeals court, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for Krischer's office.
"We obviously think that was to put us into a position so we could not respond," Edmondson said. A prosecutor from Krischer's office was able to file the brief in time.
Joanne Carrin, spokeswoman for Crist, said the attorney general's office is not involved in the Limbaugh case. "We don't know what he is talking about," Carrin said. "It sounds ridiculous."
The accusation came a day after Crist's office criticized Krischer for mischaracterizing advice it gave prosecutors last week regarding the release of plea negotiations in the Limbaugh case.
Edmondson called the letter from Assistant Attorney General Patricia Gleason "political."
Krischer is a Democrat, Crist a Republican and Limbaugh a conservative icon for his radio shows.
Carrin couldn't say for sure if the attorney general's office pulled out of writing the brief an hour before deadline, but she said the office never represents state attorneys in civil appellate matters. Limbaugh has yet to be charged criminally, and the motion to keep his medical records sealed was filed in civil court.
"It's not the type of appeal we would be involved in," Carrin said. "Regardless, if we offered any assistance or not, they filed a response. We did not impede anything."
Assistant State Attorney James Martz ended up writing the appellate brief so the office could make the deadline.
The investigation, meanwhile, remains static as the 4th District Court of Appeal wrestles with whether to give prosecutors access to Limbaugh's medical records.
Limbaugh, 53, came to prosecutors' attention when his former maid told them she had provided thousands of illegal pain pills to him. He is now under investigation for "doctor shopping" after records from a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion revealed he received more than 2,000 pain pills over five months.
Doctor shopping, a rarely charged felony punishable by up to five years in prison, is when a patient dupes two or more physicians into prescribing overlapping medications.
Limbaugh told listeners in October he was addicted to painkillers and entered a five-week drug rehabilitation program. His attorney has said the prescriptions were for intense back and ear pain.
Much of the news in the case surrounds Krischer's office's release last week of letters from mid-December discussing plea negotiations in the case. In the letters, Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, offered to settle the case if his client could enter a pretrial intervention program, which would entail a not-guilty plea. Krischer's office said Limbaugh could receive probation but only if he pleaded guilty to doctor shopping, an offer Limbaugh rejected.
Black has said releasing the letters was illegal and unethical and is evidence of a media smear campaign against Limbaugh.
"It appears as if Mr. Krischer is trying to shift the focus from his own actions," Black said Thursday.
In releasing the letters, Krischer's office provided a memo in which Assistant State Attorney Ken Selvig detailed how Gleason, a public records expert at the attorney general's office, informed him there was no exemption for plea negotiations under public records law. Krischer also called the Florida Bar, which Selvig said informed the office it would be unethical to not release the letters.
Wednesday, Crist's office and the Bar said Krischer's office misrepresented their advice.
Black on Thursday again called for the "appropriate authorities" to investigate Krischer for planting false stories in the press.
"The fact is, Mr. Krischer tried to mislead the public regarding the advice his office received from the Florida Bar and the attorney general's office, both of which have made it clear that he misrepresented what they said," Black said.
john_pacenti@pbpost.com
By John Pacenti, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 30, 2004
WEST PALM BEACH -- State Attorney Barry Krischer on Thursday accused Attorney General Charlie Crist's office of trying to impede the Rush Limbaugh prescription fraud investigation for political reasons.
Krischer expected Crist's office to file the state's response to Limbaugh's appeal of a decision to unseal the commentator's medical records in the prescription fraud case. Crist's office pulled out of the appeal one hour before a Jan. 12 deadline imposed by the appeals court, said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for Krischer's office.
"We obviously think that was to put us into a position so we could not respond," Edmondson said. A prosecutor from Krischer's office was able to file the brief in time.
Joanne Carrin, spokeswoman for Crist, said the attorney general's office is not involved in the Limbaugh case. "We don't know what he is talking about," Carrin said. "It sounds ridiculous."
The accusation came a day after Crist's office criticized Krischer for mischaracterizing advice it gave prosecutors last week regarding the release of plea negotiations in the Limbaugh case.
Edmondson called the letter from Assistant Attorney General Patricia Gleason "political."
Krischer is a Democrat, Crist a Republican and Limbaugh a conservative icon for his radio shows.
Carrin couldn't say for sure if the attorney general's office pulled out of writing the brief an hour before deadline, but she said the office never represents state attorneys in civil appellate matters. Limbaugh has yet to be charged criminally, and the motion to keep his medical records sealed was filed in civil court.
"It's not the type of appeal we would be involved in," Carrin said. "Regardless, if we offered any assistance or not, they filed a response. We did not impede anything."
Assistant State Attorney James Martz ended up writing the appellate brief so the office could make the deadline.
The investigation, meanwhile, remains static as the 4th District Court of Appeal wrestles with whether to give prosecutors access to Limbaugh's medical records.
Limbaugh, 53, came to prosecutors' attention when his former maid told them she had provided thousands of illegal pain pills to him. He is now under investigation for "doctor shopping" after records from a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion revealed he received more than 2,000 pain pills over five months.
Doctor shopping, a rarely charged felony punishable by up to five years in prison, is when a patient dupes two or more physicians into prescribing overlapping medications.
Limbaugh told listeners in October he was addicted to painkillers and entered a five-week drug rehabilitation program. His attorney has said the prescriptions were for intense back and ear pain.
Much of the news in the case surrounds Krischer's office's release last week of letters from mid-December discussing plea negotiations in the case. In the letters, Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, offered to settle the case if his client could enter a pretrial intervention program, which would entail a not-guilty plea. Krischer's office said Limbaugh could receive probation but only if he pleaded guilty to doctor shopping, an offer Limbaugh rejected.
Black has said releasing the letters was illegal and unethical and is evidence of a media smear campaign against Limbaugh.
"It appears as if Mr. Krischer is trying to shift the focus from his own actions," Black said Thursday.
In releasing the letters, Krischer's office provided a memo in which Assistant State Attorney Ken Selvig detailed how Gleason, a public records expert at the attorney general's office, informed him there was no exemption for plea negotiations under public records law. Krischer also called the Florida Bar, which Selvig said informed the office it would be unethical to not release the letters.
Wednesday, Crist's office and the Bar said Krischer's office misrepresented their advice.
Black on Thursday again called for the "appropriate authorities" to investigate Krischer for planting false stories in the press.
"The fact is, Mr. Krischer tried to mislead the public regarding the advice his office received from the Florida Bar and the attorney general's office, both of which have made it clear that he misrepresented what they said," Black said.
john_pacenti@pbpost.com
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Editorials Question Bush's Role in 'Cooking' Up a War
By Greg Mitchell
Published: January 28, 2004 Updated at 10:45 AM EST
NEW YORKIn the wake of the latest revelations from weapons inspector David Kay, many of the largest U.S. newspapers are belatedly pressing the Bush administration for an explanation of how it could have gotten the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so wrong in the march to war last year. A growing number are raising the possibility that Bush and his team may have "cooked" the intelligence to support their case for war.
An E&P survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday, and his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq, and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war.
Nearly all of those papers blamed intelligence failures for the miscalculation and called for a full probe. But eight of the 13 -- most of which supported the war -- also raised the issue of White House deceit and its possibly blind pursuit of intelligence that fit its plan for war.
Among them was The Dallas Morning News (Click for QuikCap), in Bush's home state, which had supported the war, but now declared: "We feel deceived -- by the CIA, which overestimated the threat, and by the White House, which probably stretched the bad estimates to build a case for war." If Bush had found other strategic or humanitarian reasons for the war, "he should have argued the case on that basis," the editorial said.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Click for QuikCap) also stated that while intelligence was faulty, "the evidence also seems overwhelming that the Bush administration pushed existing evidence well beyond its breaking point, exaggerating threats and claiming specific knowledge of Iraqi WMD where in reality no such knowledge existed." The paper also came down hard on the administration for linking Saddam Hussein directly to al Qaeda -- which was in opposition to intelligence reports.
The Los Angeles Times refused to place the blame mainly on the intelligence agencies, observing that "the administration was not a passive consumer of intelligence. The CIA's own Iraq analysts contended last June that the administration pressured them to create worst-case scenarios." While backing a full CIA probe, the L.A. Times added, "Any investigation ... will also have to take in to account the administration's agenda." Indeed, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to make "bogus claims" about WMDs in Iraq over the weekend despite Kay's findings, the editorial noted.
The Detroit Free Press asked, "Was the administration misled, or did it twist what it was told to justify taking down Hussein? A full accounting is due."
Newsday of Melville, N.Y., said the latest revelation "raises troubling questions about the Bush administration's use of ambiguous or flawed intelligence findings to buttress its case" for the war. The Oregonian of Portland stated that, "it's fair to wonder ... whether the White House processed the intelligence information professionally."
The Boston Globe editorial said, in part: "President Bush should acknowledge two harsh truths: that the intelligence was completely wrong and that administration hawks tried to politicize intelligence."
Oddly, while fully condemning the intelligence scandal, two of the most liberal papers -- The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle -- did not strongly raise the specter of White House deceit. The Times hinted at this, however, by suggesting that Cheney's continuing false arguments revealed the "rigid thinking" based on "preconceived notions" that "helped propel us into an invasion."
The Philadelphia Inquirer simply declared that Kay's conclusion "destroys the remaining credibility of this administration's argument for an immediate, pre-emptive war."
Only two the 13 papers that ran editorials expressed little concern that the Kay findings undercut their support for the war: The New York Post and New York Daily News. The Post warned readers not to "be taken in by all the hot air following David Kay's statements."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P. Research assistance by Sonya Moore.
By Greg Mitchell
Published: January 28, 2004 Updated at 10:45 AM EST
NEW YORKIn the wake of the latest revelations from weapons inspector David Kay, many of the largest U.S. newspapers are belatedly pressing the Bush administration for an explanation of how it could have gotten the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so wrong in the march to war last year. A growing number are raising the possibility that Bush and his team may have "cooked" the intelligence to support their case for war.
An E&P survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday, and his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq, and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war.
Nearly all of those papers blamed intelligence failures for the miscalculation and called for a full probe. But eight of the 13 -- most of which supported the war -- also raised the issue of White House deceit and its possibly blind pursuit of intelligence that fit its plan for war.
Among them was The Dallas Morning News (Click for QuikCap), in Bush's home state, which had supported the war, but now declared: "We feel deceived -- by the CIA, which overestimated the threat, and by the White House, which probably stretched the bad estimates to build a case for war." If Bush had found other strategic or humanitarian reasons for the war, "he should have argued the case on that basis," the editorial said.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Click for QuikCap) also stated that while intelligence was faulty, "the evidence also seems overwhelming that the Bush administration pushed existing evidence well beyond its breaking point, exaggerating threats and claiming specific knowledge of Iraqi WMD where in reality no such knowledge existed." The paper also came down hard on the administration for linking Saddam Hussein directly to al Qaeda -- which was in opposition to intelligence reports.
The Los Angeles Times refused to place the blame mainly on the intelligence agencies, observing that "the administration was not a passive consumer of intelligence. The CIA's own Iraq analysts contended last June that the administration pressured them to create worst-case scenarios." While backing a full CIA probe, the L.A. Times added, "Any investigation ... will also have to take in to account the administration's agenda." Indeed, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to make "bogus claims" about WMDs in Iraq over the weekend despite Kay's findings, the editorial noted.
The Detroit Free Press asked, "Was the administration misled, or did it twist what it was told to justify taking down Hussein? A full accounting is due."
Newsday of Melville, N.Y., said the latest revelation "raises troubling questions about the Bush administration's use of ambiguous or flawed intelligence findings to buttress its case" for the war. The Oregonian of Portland stated that, "it's fair to wonder ... whether the White House processed the intelligence information professionally."
The Boston Globe editorial said, in part: "President Bush should acknowledge two harsh truths: that the intelligence was completely wrong and that administration hawks tried to politicize intelligence."
Oddly, while fully condemning the intelligence scandal, two of the most liberal papers -- The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle -- did not strongly raise the specter of White House deceit. The Times hinted at this, however, by suggesting that Cheney's continuing false arguments revealed the "rigid thinking" based on "preconceived notions" that "helped propel us into an invasion."
The Philadelphia Inquirer simply declared that Kay's conclusion "destroys the remaining credibility of this administration's argument for an immediate, pre-emptive war."
Only two the 13 papers that ran editorials expressed little concern that the Kay findings undercut their support for the war: The New York Post and New York Daily News. The Post warned readers not to "be taken in by all the hot air following David Kay's statements."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P. Research assistance by Sonya Moore.
Bush Backs Away From His Claims About Iraq Arms
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: January 28, 2004
ASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly.
"I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," he said at an appearance with the visiting president of Poland.
Mr. Bush praised Dr. Kay's work and came to the defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose reporting on Iraq's weapons programs Dr. Kay sharply criticized in interviews over the weekend. "These are unbelievably hard-working, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America," Mr. Bush said of the intelligence community.
Yet at the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials said it was obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They said they doubted that Mr. Bush would have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue.
Democrats demanded that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate — the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies — could have been so flawed. The White House expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel.
"I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said on Tuesday, before meeting with Mr. Bush with a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Mr. Daschle noted that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Officials knowledgeable about the exchange said Mr. Bush interrupted Mr. Daschle and argued that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. The president also said he had not given up the search for the weapons.
Dr. Kay resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group. In an interview with Reuters last week, he said one reason he stepped down was that his team had been diverted to some degree to help battle the insurgency.
In private, some administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Kay's conclusion that the intelligence was deeply flawed was becoming an unwelcome political problem that the White House would have to confront, either now or when the presidential campaign heats up.
Two administration officials reported that a debate has erupted within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate.
"We spent the summer with the White House and the agency spitting at each other," said one official, recalling the arguments over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's inaccurate accusation in the State of the Union address last year that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material in Africa. "We can't afford another of those."
Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that senior members of the administration continue to exaggerate evidence about unconventional weapons.
"Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the "overwhelming question" surrounding the intelligence issue remained "was this a predetermined war or not?"
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: January 28, 2004
ASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly.
"I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," he said at an appearance with the visiting president of Poland.
Mr. Bush praised Dr. Kay's work and came to the defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose reporting on Iraq's weapons programs Dr. Kay sharply criticized in interviews over the weekend. "These are unbelievably hard-working, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America," Mr. Bush said of the intelligence community.
Yet at the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials said it was obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They said they doubted that Mr. Bush would have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue.
Democrats demanded that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate — the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies — could have been so flawed. The White House expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel.
"I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said on Tuesday, before meeting with Mr. Bush with a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Mr. Daschle noted that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Officials knowledgeable about the exchange said Mr. Bush interrupted Mr. Daschle and argued that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. The president also said he had not given up the search for the weapons.
Dr. Kay resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group. In an interview with Reuters last week, he said one reason he stepped down was that his team had been diverted to some degree to help battle the insurgency.
In private, some administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Kay's conclusion that the intelligence was deeply flawed was becoming an unwelcome political problem that the White House would have to confront, either now or when the presidential campaign heats up.
Two administration officials reported that a debate has erupted within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate.
"We spent the summer with the White House and the agency spitting at each other," said one official, recalling the arguments over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's inaccurate accusation in the State of the Union address last year that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material in Africa. "We can't afford another of those."
Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that senior members of the administration continue to exaggerate evidence about unconventional weapons.
"Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the "overwhelming question" surrounding the intelligence issue remained "was this a predetermined war or not?"
Monday, January 26, 2004
Bush's Betrayal
by P.M. Carpenter
TV-mag journalist Diane Sawyer recently asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered, "So what's the difference?"
Those were astonishing words, even for famously indifferent George W. Bush. Impossible to know is if he let them escape out of peerless arrogance or mere ignorance; yet, using his own standard of critical analysis, what difference does it make? The frightening reality is this: Either a want in character or deficiency of intellect has produced a president capable of dragging the nation to unparalleled heights of international loathing, all the while he without a clue or a care.
The world simply doesn't trust us any longer -- a reversal of goodwill in lightening time -- yet Mr. Bush pretends it's only because of some silly difference of opinion over some petty difference about what was real and what was not.
Perhaps if the president engaged the world by at least reading newspapers he could grasp the unpleasant diplomatic consequences of crying wolf. According to a front-page report in the Washington Post last week, no less than foreign policy analysts who then sat in the president's pro-invasion corner are now in anguish over sinking, or rather sunken, U.S. credibility abroad.
Defense Advisory Board member and war hawk Kenneth Adelman, for example, complained "the foreign policy blow-back" from the administration's rhetorical hyperbole "is pretty serious." He noted the damage done to exercising future, legitimate actions against imminent threats to national security. In effect, the Bush doctrine had one shot at proving itself justifiable, but the postwar absence of damning evidence has only served to shoot down our credibility instead. (For those egg-on-the-face conservatives who now advance the curious defense that the always-wrong Clinton administration also believed in damning evidence, try to remember this much: It didn't slap on six-shooters and go blasting its way into Baghdad, only later to say, "Oops.")
Richard Haass -- Council on Foreign Relations president, former assistant to State Secretary Colin Powell and good Republican -- joined Adelman's critical ranks. Not only have U.S. allegations about North Korea's nuclear capability been thrown into question as a result of the Iraqi WMD fiasco, similar and quite valid allegations against other hostile nations, said Haass, could be dismissed by the international community as so much swashbuckling. The giant gap between Bush's imaginary rhetoric and proven reality has made it "more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," Haass concluded.
One can try piercing that argument from many angles, but it would seem impenetrable. Only the most diehard apologist or hyper-hormonal cowboy would argue the administration's overblown warnings about Iraq have not altered and, in fact, further limited U.S. options against real foreign dangers. And therein lies, it seems to me, the irony behind the president's schoolyard taunt that political opponents would seek an international "permission slip" before acting again. Ironic, because that is the one course of action that Mr. Bush, more than anyone else, has helped to establish as the only course.
In the hope of building any kind of real coalition against a real threat, future presidents will likely feel constrained to present piles upon piles of evidence that would make the stuff against O.J. Simpson look shaky. America's depleted credibility will demand inordinate efforts to meet almost impossible thresholds of intelligence findings. Such a prerequisite to unified international action, which Bush has imposed through unprecedented recklessness, could someday prove to retard a well-advised U.S. response in accord with legitimate international law.
In these most perilous of times -- when we most need friends to help combat vicious global threats without first feeling compelled to vet our every word -- the president has complicated America's security. And that, Mr. Bush, is "the difference."
pmcarpenter@buzzflash.com
by P.M. Carpenter
TV-mag journalist Diane Sawyer recently asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered, "So what's the difference?"
Those were astonishing words, even for famously indifferent George W. Bush. Impossible to know is if he let them escape out of peerless arrogance or mere ignorance; yet, using his own standard of critical analysis, what difference does it make? The frightening reality is this: Either a want in character or deficiency of intellect has produced a president capable of dragging the nation to unparalleled heights of international loathing, all the while he without a clue or a care.
The world simply doesn't trust us any longer -- a reversal of goodwill in lightening time -- yet Mr. Bush pretends it's only because of some silly difference of opinion over some petty difference about what was real and what was not.
Perhaps if the president engaged the world by at least reading newspapers he could grasp the unpleasant diplomatic consequences of crying wolf. According to a front-page report in the Washington Post last week, no less than foreign policy analysts who then sat in the president's pro-invasion corner are now in anguish over sinking, or rather sunken, U.S. credibility abroad.
Defense Advisory Board member and war hawk Kenneth Adelman, for example, complained "the foreign policy blow-back" from the administration's rhetorical hyperbole "is pretty serious." He noted the damage done to exercising future, legitimate actions against imminent threats to national security. In effect, the Bush doctrine had one shot at proving itself justifiable, but the postwar absence of damning evidence has only served to shoot down our credibility instead. (For those egg-on-the-face conservatives who now advance the curious defense that the always-wrong Clinton administration also believed in damning evidence, try to remember this much: It didn't slap on six-shooters and go blasting its way into Baghdad, only later to say, "Oops.")
Richard Haass -- Council on Foreign Relations president, former assistant to State Secretary Colin Powell and good Republican -- joined Adelman's critical ranks. Not only have U.S. allegations about North Korea's nuclear capability been thrown into question as a result of the Iraqi WMD fiasco, similar and quite valid allegations against other hostile nations, said Haass, could be dismissed by the international community as so much swashbuckling. The giant gap between Bush's imaginary rhetoric and proven reality has made it "more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," Haass concluded.
One can try piercing that argument from many angles, but it would seem impenetrable. Only the most diehard apologist or hyper-hormonal cowboy would argue the administration's overblown warnings about Iraq have not altered and, in fact, further limited U.S. options against real foreign dangers. And therein lies, it seems to me, the irony behind the president's schoolyard taunt that political opponents would seek an international "permission slip" before acting again. Ironic, because that is the one course of action that Mr. Bush, more than anyone else, has helped to establish as the only course.
In the hope of building any kind of real coalition against a real threat, future presidents will likely feel constrained to present piles upon piles of evidence that would make the stuff against O.J. Simpson look shaky. America's depleted credibility will demand inordinate efforts to meet almost impossible thresholds of intelligence findings. Such a prerequisite to unified international action, which Bush has imposed through unprecedented recklessness, could someday prove to retard a well-advised U.S. response in accord with legitimate international law.
In these most perilous of times -- when we most need friends to help combat vicious global threats without first feeling compelled to vet our every word -- the president has complicated America's security. And that, Mr. Bush, is "the difference."
pmcarpenter@buzzflash.com
Sunday, January 25, 2004
http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/2/hendra-t.html
We See That Now
A heartfelt -- no -- abject -- no -- craven apology to the right from the left for our campaign of hate, anger and malice against God's own president.
Tony Hendra
We confess. It's all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation's most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to drag him down to our own filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level.
There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and our vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything thrown at him because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House by underhanded means should be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of a free press. And yes, it's true, just as your more sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary Clinton does owe her success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it's not true that ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development was the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other truths, Robert Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for hate-mongers and bigots! Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his Republican creator. We see that now.
George W. Bush cannot be, as we've screamed till we're blue in the face, the cretinous finger puppet of an incalculably cynical and malevolent cabal and a ruthless neo-Confederate, bent on creating a plutocratic ruling class at home and a rapacious corporate imperium abroad. He's one or the other. We cannot have it both ways. We see that now.
Similarly, we can hardly denigrate Rupert Murdoch and his "gutter press" while at the same time carping that without him the right would be a marginalized mob of obscurantist paranoids kept on life support by retrograde trust-fund nut jobs. Mr. Murdoch is a great populist. Lowest-common-denominator programming is an honorable tradition in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Taking such programming to China, where he is equally solicitous of a proto superpower whose interests are frequently inimical to ours, does not mean that Mr. Murdoch is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or that NewsCorp's money is somehow "tainted." It's despicable of us to suggest that all those hardworking journalists -- from Bill O'Reilly to William Kristol -- who take his supposedly dirty money are likewise tainted! We see that now.
What demon put into our so-called minds the idea that the ghastly tragedy of that bright morning in September 2001 might have been prevented because the Bush administration had received warnings for a month that some sort of attack might be coming? And that the president and his advisers had ignored that intelligence and then made use of the tragedy to seize the draconian emergency powers they craved and get the economy back onto a perpetual-war footing? How could we even entertain such thoughts? What venom flowed through our hate-infarcted hearts?
We're sorry for our endless ranting about oil being the lifeblood of the Bush family circle, and The Carlyle Group existing as nothing more than a gigantic corporate kickback to its members for faithful service while in office, and the Bush team comprising the selfsame men who supported Saddam Hussein to the hilt while he was committing most of his genocidal atrocities and therefore making them his guilty accomplices. These are vicious, hateful untruths. We see that now.
The First Amendment does not give us the right to screech that young Americans are dying in Iraq so that George W. Bush can get himself legitimately elected president. It's a bald-faced lie that his bald-faced lies about weapons of mass destruction cost them their lives. Our brave men and women in uniform know when they enlist that there is always the chance they may have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. Their motives are never -- as we so squalidly claimed in the wake of the Jessica Lynch affair -- to get a higher education because the military is now the sole conduit to it for the two-thirds of Americans who can't afford it. What a despicably mercenary motive to impute to our heroes! And in any case, why isn't the re-election of an epochal president a lofty patriotic aim, worth the sacrifice -- as our great defense secretary has implied -- of a few lives? Why would this aim fill us with rage and hate, instead of quiet pride?
We were wrong to call George W. Bush's huge tax cuts legalized looting, wrong about the replacement of a $5 trillion surplus with a $3 trillion deficit. No, that is not $8 trillion down the drain in three short years. We arrived at that ridiculous conclusion by juggling the figures. If you're as egregiously partisan as we, you can make figures prove anything. We see that now.
We apologize from the bottom of our hearts for our unfounded suspicions about the plane crash that killed Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and his family. Only a wild-eyed conspiracy nut would link it to the crash had killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan. Nostra culpa! Grief unhinged our better judgment. Hey, Democrats die in planes around election time. That's life. We better get used to it.
What drives us to ask -- so shrilly, so annoyingly -- why Ken Lay still isn't in prison? Are we really certain that he deprived hundreds of thousands of people of their savings? That he helped hatch a plot to bring down the Democrats in California by destabilizing that state's power supply? So what if that's now happened? Has Mr. Lay done anything that is technically wrong?
Realizing now the awesome power of prayer, we'll stop praying every moment of every day that Tom DeLay gets snatched up in the rapture. We realize, too, that the sign in his office -- "This Could Be The Day" (i.e., Judgment Day) -- does not utterly disqualify Mr. DeLay from assessing the best long-term interests of the nation. We believe, with him, that the poor are entirely to blame for their own poverty, and that if -- sorry, when -- our savior returns, he will indeed own a concealed-carry permit. We know now that Mr. DeLay is not precisely the kind of religious lunatic the Founders had in mind when separating church and state; that he and his co-religionists are in no way brutish, heathen, hate-driven humbugs whose fundamentalism makes Osama bin Laden look like the archbishop of Canterbury. We hope and pray that Mr. DeLay will guide the destiny of America till the trump of doom. Even if it is next Tuesday.
Looking back on the decade-plus of our boundless ill will and partisan fury, we've come to understand something absolutely vital about that glorious year 1989, the year you won the Cold War: The reason the Cold War had to be won was that it made the world a two-party system. One of them had to go. It's the same in our great nation. What's the point of having two (or even one and a half) parties when it leads to nothing but unending conflict, frustration, stagnation and despair? For America to bring the message to the world that ours is the best and only way, we must have unanimity. One party indivisible under God.
Yet ever since 1989, we've been fighting a new Cold War -- in Congress, in the culture, in the media, in the nation's schools and courts and bedrooms.
It's time for us to ... surrender. We're tearing down the Berlin Wall of rage and malice we've erected between you and us. We do this before it is too late, before you reach the point where you will be forced -- however reluctantly -- to investigate us, confiscate our property, search our houses, seize our personal records, detain us sine die, suspend habeas corpus, take reprisals against our loved ones, hold show trials, send us to re-education camps -- whatever you in your impeccable judgment deem necessary to preserve the homeland from, well, the likes of us.
But -- a huge "but," we know -- if in your great hearts you can find the room to forgive us, if even the meanest of positions can be found for us in the new dispensation, let us serve you. We'll do anything you want, no matter how menial: deleting hard drives, wiretapping journalists, delivering bags of cash to senators, transporting assets to the Caymans, firing pregnant Mexicans, evicting the disabled, laying bets for virtuous windbags, beating up young gay men, escorting Muslims to the border, performing sexual favors for The Heritage Foundation -- whatever you need we'll do it, and for free.
Some of us even have advanced skills to put at your disposal. We could help discredit Europe's socialistic health and welfare systems and nonprofit public utilities so The Carlyle Group can privatize them. We could produce inspiring movies about the great Americans who are ushering in the thousand years of prosperity that are just around the corner. We could create upbeat news stories for the Ministry of Truth you plan for George W. Bush's second term.
We come to you not just as sinners but as supplicants, begging not just forgiveness but inclusion. There's a reason God named the right the right: Because it's right. You have a monopoly on the truth, and you always have and you always will.
We see that now. We really do.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
We See That Now
A heartfelt -- no -- abject -- no -- craven apology to the right from the left for our campaign of hate, anger and malice against God's own president.
Tony Hendra
We confess. It's all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation's most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to drag him down to our own filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level.
There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and our vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything thrown at him because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House by underhanded means should be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of a free press. And yes, it's true, just as your more sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary Clinton does owe her success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it's not true that ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development was the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other truths, Robert Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for hate-mongers and bigots! Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his Republican creator. We see that now.
George W. Bush cannot be, as we've screamed till we're blue in the face, the cretinous finger puppet of an incalculably cynical and malevolent cabal and a ruthless neo-Confederate, bent on creating a plutocratic ruling class at home and a rapacious corporate imperium abroad. He's one or the other. We cannot have it both ways. We see that now.
Similarly, we can hardly denigrate Rupert Murdoch and his "gutter press" while at the same time carping that without him the right would be a marginalized mob of obscurantist paranoids kept on life support by retrograde trust-fund nut jobs. Mr. Murdoch is a great populist. Lowest-common-denominator programming is an honorable tradition in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Taking such programming to China, where he is equally solicitous of a proto superpower whose interests are frequently inimical to ours, does not mean that Mr. Murdoch is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or that NewsCorp's money is somehow "tainted." It's despicable of us to suggest that all those hardworking journalists -- from Bill O'Reilly to William Kristol -- who take his supposedly dirty money are likewise tainted! We see that now.
What demon put into our so-called minds the idea that the ghastly tragedy of that bright morning in September 2001 might have been prevented because the Bush administration had received warnings for a month that some sort of attack might be coming? And that the president and his advisers had ignored that intelligence and then made use of the tragedy to seize the draconian emergency powers they craved and get the economy back onto a perpetual-war footing? How could we even entertain such thoughts? What venom flowed through our hate-infarcted hearts?
We're sorry for our endless ranting about oil being the lifeblood of the Bush family circle, and The Carlyle Group existing as nothing more than a gigantic corporate kickback to its members for faithful service while in office, and the Bush team comprising the selfsame men who supported Saddam Hussein to the hilt while he was committing most of his genocidal atrocities and therefore making them his guilty accomplices. These are vicious, hateful untruths. We see that now.
The First Amendment does not give us the right to screech that young Americans are dying in Iraq so that George W. Bush can get himself legitimately elected president. It's a bald-faced lie that his bald-faced lies about weapons of mass destruction cost them their lives. Our brave men and women in uniform know when they enlist that there is always the chance they may have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. Their motives are never -- as we so squalidly claimed in the wake of the Jessica Lynch affair -- to get a higher education because the military is now the sole conduit to it for the two-thirds of Americans who can't afford it. What a despicably mercenary motive to impute to our heroes! And in any case, why isn't the re-election of an epochal president a lofty patriotic aim, worth the sacrifice -- as our great defense secretary has implied -- of a few lives? Why would this aim fill us with rage and hate, instead of quiet pride?
We were wrong to call George W. Bush's huge tax cuts legalized looting, wrong about the replacement of a $5 trillion surplus with a $3 trillion deficit. No, that is not $8 trillion down the drain in three short years. We arrived at that ridiculous conclusion by juggling the figures. If you're as egregiously partisan as we, you can make figures prove anything. We see that now.
We apologize from the bottom of our hearts for our unfounded suspicions about the plane crash that killed Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and his family. Only a wild-eyed conspiracy nut would link it to the crash had killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan. Nostra culpa! Grief unhinged our better judgment. Hey, Democrats die in planes around election time. That's life. We better get used to it.
What drives us to ask -- so shrilly, so annoyingly -- why Ken Lay still isn't in prison? Are we really certain that he deprived hundreds of thousands of people of their savings? That he helped hatch a plot to bring down the Democrats in California by destabilizing that state's power supply? So what if that's now happened? Has Mr. Lay done anything that is technically wrong?
Realizing now the awesome power of prayer, we'll stop praying every moment of every day that Tom DeLay gets snatched up in the rapture. We realize, too, that the sign in his office -- "This Could Be The Day" (i.e., Judgment Day) -- does not utterly disqualify Mr. DeLay from assessing the best long-term interests of the nation. We believe, with him, that the poor are entirely to blame for their own poverty, and that if -- sorry, when -- our savior returns, he will indeed own a concealed-carry permit. We know now that Mr. DeLay is not precisely the kind of religious lunatic the Founders had in mind when separating church and state; that he and his co-religionists are in no way brutish, heathen, hate-driven humbugs whose fundamentalism makes Osama bin Laden look like the archbishop of Canterbury. We hope and pray that Mr. DeLay will guide the destiny of America till the trump of doom. Even if it is next Tuesday.
Looking back on the decade-plus of our boundless ill will and partisan fury, we've come to understand something absolutely vital about that glorious year 1989, the year you won the Cold War: The reason the Cold War had to be won was that it made the world a two-party system. One of them had to go. It's the same in our great nation. What's the point of having two (or even one and a half) parties when it leads to nothing but unending conflict, frustration, stagnation and despair? For America to bring the message to the world that ours is the best and only way, we must have unanimity. One party indivisible under God.
Yet ever since 1989, we've been fighting a new Cold War -- in Congress, in the culture, in the media, in the nation's schools and courts and bedrooms.
It's time for us to ... surrender. We're tearing down the Berlin Wall of rage and malice we've erected between you and us. We do this before it is too late, before you reach the point where you will be forced -- however reluctantly -- to investigate us, confiscate our property, search our houses, seize our personal records, detain us sine die, suspend habeas corpus, take reprisals against our loved ones, hold show trials, send us to re-education camps -- whatever you in your impeccable judgment deem necessary to preserve the homeland from, well, the likes of us.
But -- a huge "but," we know -- if in your great hearts you can find the room to forgive us, if even the meanest of positions can be found for us in the new dispensation, let us serve you. We'll do anything you want, no matter how menial: deleting hard drives, wiretapping journalists, delivering bags of cash to senators, transporting assets to the Caymans, firing pregnant Mexicans, evicting the disabled, laying bets for virtuous windbags, beating up young gay men, escorting Muslims to the border, performing sexual favors for The Heritage Foundation -- whatever you need we'll do it, and for free.
Some of us even have advanced skills to put at your disposal. We could help discredit Europe's socialistic health and welfare systems and nonprofit public utilities so The Carlyle Group can privatize them. We could produce inspiring movies about the great Americans who are ushering in the thousand years of prosperity that are just around the corner. We could create upbeat news stories for the Ministry of Truth you plan for George W. Bush's second term.
We come to you not just as sinners but as supplicants, begging not just forgiveness but inclusion. There's a reason God named the right the right: Because it's right. You have a monopoly on the truth, and you always have and you always will.
We see that now. We really do.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Saturday, January 24, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=S1AKQC3ZI24JKCRBAEKSFFA?type=topNews&storyID=4197408
Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq
Fri January 23, 2004 02:20 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.
Kay said he believes most of what is going to be found in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been found and that the hunt will become more difficult once America turns over governing the country to the Iraqis.
The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No actual banned arms have been found.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq
Fri January 23, 2004 02:20 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.
Kay said he believes most of what is going to be found in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been found and that the hunt will become more difficult once America turns over governing the country to the Iraqis.
The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No actual banned arms have been found.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
OKAY >>> back to this Iraq thingie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1130138,00.html
Of course the White House fears free elections in Iraq
Only an appointocracy can be trusted to accept US troops and corporations
Naomi Klein
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian
"The people of Iraq are free," declared President Bush in his state of the union address on Tuesday. The previous day, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to Baghdad's streets, shouting: "Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection."
According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House's version of freedom and the one being demanded on the street. Asked whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was heading towards a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for direct elections, Bremer said he had no "fundamental disagreement with him".
It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. "I don't want to go into the technical details of refinements. There are - if you talk to experts in these matters - all kinds of ways to organise partial elections and caucuses. And I'm not an election expert, so I don't want to go into the details. But we've always said we're willing to consider refinements."
I'm not an election expert either, but I'm pretty sure there are differences here that cannot be refined. Al-Sistani's supporters want all Iraqis to have a vote and the people they elect to write the laws of the country - your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.
Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organising committees. These will then choose delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These will then select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers, who will form the new government. This, Bush said in the state of the union address, constitutes "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty".
Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and Bush to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by an appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees.
The White House insists its aversion to elections is purely practical; there just isn't time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The favourite explanation is that Bush needs a "braggable" on the campaign trail: when his Democratic rival raises the spectre of Vietnam, Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we're on our way out.
Except that the US has no intention of actually getting out of Iraq: it wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oilfields. It was with this goal in mind that, on September 19, Bremer pushed through a package of economic reforms that the Economist described as a "capitalist dream".
But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Bremer's reforms, arguing that under the international agreements that govern occupying powers - the Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1949 - the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq's economic assets, not its auctioneer. Radical changes - such as Bremer's order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100% foreign ownership - violate these agreements and so could be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.
This prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out. Bremer has responded by quietly cancelling his plan to privatise Iraq's 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can legally sell off Iraq's assets.
But will it? Given the widespread perception that the US is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well decide to expel US troops immediately and to reverse Bremer's privatisation project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect - far more than the absence of a census - explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.
Under the current American plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold on to power from June 30 until general elections are held "no later" than December 31 2005. That's 18 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite US troops to stay indefinitely and turn Bremer's capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this "self-rule". It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.
That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge stillborn, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multi-year contracts controlling key resources, and an economic programme that has left 60-70% of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?
On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these forces by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amara earlier this month, killing six.
Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalising on the rage, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle; after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and now occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Bremer's shock therapy appears to have jolted hundred of thousands into action.
This courage deserves our support. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai last weekend, the author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to "become the global resistance to the occupation". She suggested choosing "two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq" and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.
In his state of the union address, Bush said: "I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." He is being proven right in Iraq every day - and the rising voices are chanting: "No, no USA. Yes, yes elections."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1130138,00.html
Of course the White House fears free elections in Iraq
Only an appointocracy can be trusted to accept US troops and corporations
Naomi Klein
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian
"The people of Iraq are free," declared President Bush in his state of the union address on Tuesday. The previous day, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to Baghdad's streets, shouting: "Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection."
According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House's version of freedom and the one being demanded on the street. Asked whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was heading towards a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for direct elections, Bremer said he had no "fundamental disagreement with him".
It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. "I don't want to go into the technical details of refinements. There are - if you talk to experts in these matters - all kinds of ways to organise partial elections and caucuses. And I'm not an election expert, so I don't want to go into the details. But we've always said we're willing to consider refinements."
I'm not an election expert either, but I'm pretty sure there are differences here that cannot be refined. Al-Sistani's supporters want all Iraqis to have a vote and the people they elect to write the laws of the country - your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.
Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organising committees. These will then choose delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These will then select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers, who will form the new government. This, Bush said in the state of the union address, constitutes "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty".
Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and Bush to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by an appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees.
The White House insists its aversion to elections is purely practical; there just isn't time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The favourite explanation is that Bush needs a "braggable" on the campaign trail: when his Democratic rival raises the spectre of Vietnam, Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we're on our way out.
Except that the US has no intention of actually getting out of Iraq: it wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oilfields. It was with this goal in mind that, on September 19, Bremer pushed through a package of economic reforms that the Economist described as a "capitalist dream".
But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Bremer's reforms, arguing that under the international agreements that govern occupying powers - the Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1949 - the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq's economic assets, not its auctioneer. Radical changes - such as Bremer's order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100% foreign ownership - violate these agreements and so could be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.
This prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out. Bremer has responded by quietly cancelling his plan to privatise Iraq's 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can legally sell off Iraq's assets.
But will it? Given the widespread perception that the US is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well decide to expel US troops immediately and to reverse Bremer's privatisation project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect - far more than the absence of a census - explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.
Under the current American plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold on to power from June 30 until general elections are held "no later" than December 31 2005. That's 18 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite US troops to stay indefinitely and turn Bremer's capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this "self-rule". It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.
That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge stillborn, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multi-year contracts controlling key resources, and an economic programme that has left 60-70% of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?
On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these forces by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amara earlier this month, killing six.
Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalising on the rage, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle; after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and now occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Bremer's shock therapy appears to have jolted hundred of thousands into action.
This courage deserves our support. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai last weekend, the author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to "become the global resistance to the occupation". She suggested choosing "two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq" and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.
In his state of the union address, Bush said: "I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." He is being proven right in Iraq every day - and the rising voices are chanting: "No, no USA. Yes, yes elections."
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Infiltration of files seen as extensive
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.
Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.
Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.
Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.
Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.
"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."
As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.
Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.
The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.
Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.
"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."
But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.
And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."
After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.
Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.
Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.
Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.
The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.
Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.
Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.
Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.
Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.
"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."
As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.
Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.
The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.
Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.
"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."
But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.
And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."
After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.
Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.
Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.
Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.
The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
January 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/opinion/20KRUG.html
Going for Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN
ccording to advance reports, George Bush will use tonight's State of the Union speech to portray himself as a visionary leader who stands above the political fray. But that act is losing its effectiveness. Mr. Bush's relentless partisanship has depleted much of the immense good will he enjoyed after 9/11. He is still adored by his base, but he is deeply distrusted by much of the nation.
Mr. Bush may not understand this; indeed, he still seems to think that he's another Lincoln or F.D.R. "No president has done more for human rights than I have," he told Ken Auletta.
But his political handlers seem to have decided on a go-for-broke strategy: confuse the middle one last time, energize the base and grab enough power that the consequences don't matter.
What do I mean by confusing the middle? The striking thing about the "visionary" proposals floated in advance of the State of the Union is their transparent cynicism and lack of realism. Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too. And the ever-deferential media have managed to keep a straight face.
But that's just the most dramatic example of an array of policy proposals that don't withstand even minimal scrutiny. Mr. Bush has already pushed through an expensive new Medicare benefit — without any visible source of financing. Reports say that tonight he'll propose additional, and even more expensive, new initiatives, like partial Social Security privatization — which all by itself would require at least $1 trillion in extra funds over the next decade. Where is all this money going to come from?
Judging from the latest CBS/New York Times Poll, these promises of something for nothing aren't likely to convince many people. It's not just that the bounce from Saddam's capture has already gone away. Unfavorable views of Mr. Bush as a person have reached record levels for his presidency. It seems fair to say that many Americans, like most of the rest of the world, simply don't trust him anymore.
But some Americans will respond to upbeat messages, no matter how unrealistic. And that may be enough for Mr. Bush, because while he poses as someone above the fray, he is continuing to solidify his base.
The most sinister example was the recess appointment of Charles Pickering Sr., with his segregationist past and questionable record on voting rights, to the federal appeals court — the day after Martin Luther King's actual birthday. Was this careless timing? Don't be silly: it was a deliberate, if subtle, gesture of sympathy with a part of the Republican coalition that never gets mentioned in public.
A less objectionable but equally calculated gesture will be Mr. Bush's demand that his tax cuts be made permanent. Realistically, this can't make any difference to the economy now, and it makes no sense, given the array of new spending plans he will simultaneously unveil. But it's a signal to the base that any seeming moderation needn't be taken seriously, and that the administration's hard-right turn will continue.
Meanwhile, the lying has already begun, with the Republican National Committee's willful misrepresentation of Wesley Clark's prewar statements. (Why are news organizations letting them get away with this?)
The question we should ask is, Where is all this leading?
Some cynical pundits think that Mr. Bush's advisers plan to leave the hard work of dealing with the mess he's made to future presidents. But I don't think that's right. I can't see how the budget can continue along its current path through a second Bush term — financial markets won't stand for it.
And what about the growing military crisis? The mess in Iraq has placed our volunteer military, a magnificent but fragile institution, under immense strain. National Guard and Reserve members find themselves effectively drafted as full-time soldiers. More than 40,000 soldiers whose enlistment terms have expired have been kept from leaving under "stop loss" orders. This can't go on for four more years.
Karl Rove and other insiders must know all this. So they must figure that once they have won the election, they will have such a complete lock on power that they can break many of their promises with impunity.
What will they do with that lock on power? Their election strategy — confuse the middle, but feed the base — suggests the answer.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
OP-ED COLUMNIST http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/opinion/20KRUG.html
Going for Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN
ccording to advance reports, George Bush will use tonight's State of the Union speech to portray himself as a visionary leader who stands above the political fray. But that act is losing its effectiveness. Mr. Bush's relentless partisanship has depleted much of the immense good will he enjoyed after 9/11. He is still adored by his base, but he is deeply distrusted by much of the nation.
Mr. Bush may not understand this; indeed, he still seems to think that he's another Lincoln or F.D.R. "No president has done more for human rights than I have," he told Ken Auletta.
But his political handlers seem to have decided on a go-for-broke strategy: confuse the middle one last time, energize the base and grab enough power that the consequences don't matter.
What do I mean by confusing the middle? The striking thing about the "visionary" proposals floated in advance of the State of the Union is their transparent cynicism and lack of realism. Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too. And the ever-deferential media have managed to keep a straight face.
But that's just the most dramatic example of an array of policy proposals that don't withstand even minimal scrutiny. Mr. Bush has already pushed through an expensive new Medicare benefit — without any visible source of financing. Reports say that tonight he'll propose additional, and even more expensive, new initiatives, like partial Social Security privatization — which all by itself would require at least $1 trillion in extra funds over the next decade. Where is all this money going to come from?
Judging from the latest CBS/New York Times Poll, these promises of something for nothing aren't likely to convince many people. It's not just that the bounce from Saddam's capture has already gone away. Unfavorable views of Mr. Bush as a person have reached record levels for his presidency. It seems fair to say that many Americans, like most of the rest of the world, simply don't trust him anymore.
But some Americans will respond to upbeat messages, no matter how unrealistic. And that may be enough for Mr. Bush, because while he poses as someone above the fray, he is continuing to solidify his base.
The most sinister example was the recess appointment of Charles Pickering Sr., with his segregationist past and questionable record on voting rights, to the federal appeals court — the day after Martin Luther King's actual birthday. Was this careless timing? Don't be silly: it was a deliberate, if subtle, gesture of sympathy with a part of the Republican coalition that never gets mentioned in public.
A less objectionable but equally calculated gesture will be Mr. Bush's demand that his tax cuts be made permanent. Realistically, this can't make any difference to the economy now, and it makes no sense, given the array of new spending plans he will simultaneously unveil. But it's a signal to the base that any seeming moderation needn't be taken seriously, and that the administration's hard-right turn will continue.
Meanwhile, the lying has already begun, with the Republican National Committee's willful misrepresentation of Wesley Clark's prewar statements. (Why are news organizations letting them get away with this?)
The question we should ask is, Where is all this leading?
Some cynical pundits think that Mr. Bush's advisers plan to leave the hard work of dealing with the mess he's made to future presidents. But I don't think that's right. I can't see how the budget can continue along its current path through a second Bush term — financial markets won't stand for it.
And what about the growing military crisis? The mess in Iraq has placed our volunteer military, a magnificent but fragile institution, under immense strain. National Guard and Reserve members find themselves effectively drafted as full-time soldiers. More than 40,000 soldiers whose enlistment terms have expired have been kept from leaving under "stop loss" orders. This can't go on for four more years.
Karl Rove and other insiders must know all this. So they must figure that once they have won the election, they will have such a complete lock on power that they can break many of their promises with impunity.
What will they do with that lock on power? Their election strategy — confuse the middle, but feed the base — suggests the answer.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Released: January 20, 2004
As Democrats Vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, President Bush Looks Vulnerable in Both His Re-Elect and Face-Off with Generic Democrat; Bush’s Job Performance 49% Positive, 50% Negative; Democrats Lead Over Republicans in Congressional Generic, New Zogby International Poll Reveals:
President George W. Bush’s job performance has dropped since mid- December, while his vulnerability increases when matched against an unnamed Democrat or when respondents are asked if he should be re-elected.
The most recent Zogby America poll of 1000 likely voters chosen at random was conducted January 15-18, 2004 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population.Margins are higher in sub-groups. MORE
As Democrats Vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, President Bush Looks Vulnerable in Both His Re-Elect and Face-Off with Generic Democrat; Bush’s Job Performance 49% Positive, 50% Negative; Democrats Lead Over Republicans in Congressional Generic, New Zogby International Poll Reveals:
President George W. Bush’s job performance has dropped since mid- December, while his vulnerability increases when matched against an unnamed Democrat or when respondents are asked if he should be re-elected.
The most recent Zogby America poll of 1000 likely voters chosen at random was conducted January 15-18, 2004 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population.Margins are higher in sub-groups. MORE
Monday, January 19, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28025-2004Jan18.html?referrer=emailarticle
9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline
Hearings Being Scaled Back to Finish Work by May; Top Officials Expected to Testify
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A09
President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.
A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said.
With time running short, the 10-member bipartisan panel has already decided to scale back the number and scope of hearings that it will hold for the public, commission members and staffers said. The commission is rushing to finish interviews with as many as 200 remaining witnesses and to finish examining about 2 million pages of documents related to the attacks.
Public hearings in coming months will include testimony from key Cabinet members in the Bush and Clinton administrations. The likely roster will include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, CIA Director George J. Tenet, former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, former defense secretary William S. Cohen, and the current and former directors of the FBI, two officials said. The next hearing, scheduled over two days beginning Jan. 26, will focus on border and aviation security issues.
Commission representatives are also negotiating to secure private testimony from President Bush, former president Bill Clinton, Vice President Cheney and former vice president Al Gore. None of the four would be likely to be asked to testify publicly, several sources said.
The statute that created the panel in late 2002 requires commission members to complete a report for the president and Congress by May 27, with another 60 days available after that to issue supplemental documents or tie up loose ends, officials said. The commission has been beleaguered by organizational problems and fights with the Bush administration and New York over access to documents.
"We need at least a few more months to complete our work," said commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who has pushed for more time. "We have a breathtaking task ahead of us, and we need enough time to make sure our work is credible and thorough."
But the White House and Hastert's office made clear during discussions over the past two weeks that they would strongly oppose any extension of the deadline, which would require congressional approval, officials said. One source described the issue Friday as "dead in the water."
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said, "The administration has given them an unprecedented amount of cooperation . . . and we expect they will be able to meet that deadline."
John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said there is little support for a delay in the Republican-controlled Congress. "I can't imagine a situation where they get an extension," Feehery said. "I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for considering that."
As recently as December, the commission's two leaders -- former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean (R) and former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- said the panel would have enough time to complete its work. But commission members decided during a closed meeting earlier this month that they should explore the idea of a delay with the White House and Capitol Hill.
The commission's handling of the deadline has angered a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, who argue that the panel has not been aggressive enough in demanding more time and in seeking key documents and testimony from the Bush administration.
Several relatives have also strongly criticized the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, because of his ties to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials.
Zelikow has recused himself from issues connected to his role as an administration adviser in the early weeks of Bush's term, but he was also interviewed several months ago as a witness by the commission, officials said. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat who served in the Clinton Justice Department, has also been interviewed as a witness, officials said.
Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center, said the interviews underscore a conflict-of-interest problem at the commission and cast serious doubts on the panel's credibility.
"We've had it," said Breitweiser, who met with several commission leaders last week. "It is such a slap in the face of the families of victims. They are dishonoring the dead with their irresponsible behavior." Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Zelikow and Gorelick were among more than 800 witnesses who have been interviewed so far and said their experiences in national security are relevant to the panel's investigation. "Whether these people were involved in this commission or not, they may have well made this list because of the perspective they would have had about the work of the government during the time in question," he said.
9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline
Hearings Being Scaled Back to Finish Work by May; Top Officials Expected to Testify
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A09
President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.
A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said.
With time running short, the 10-member bipartisan panel has already decided to scale back the number and scope of hearings that it will hold for the public, commission members and staffers said. The commission is rushing to finish interviews with as many as 200 remaining witnesses and to finish examining about 2 million pages of documents related to the attacks.
Public hearings in coming months will include testimony from key Cabinet members in the Bush and Clinton administrations. The likely roster will include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, CIA Director George J. Tenet, former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, former defense secretary William S. Cohen, and the current and former directors of the FBI, two officials said. The next hearing, scheduled over two days beginning Jan. 26, will focus on border and aviation security issues.
Commission representatives are also negotiating to secure private testimony from President Bush, former president Bill Clinton, Vice President Cheney and former vice president Al Gore. None of the four would be likely to be asked to testify publicly, several sources said.
The statute that created the panel in late 2002 requires commission members to complete a report for the president and Congress by May 27, with another 60 days available after that to issue supplemental documents or tie up loose ends, officials said. The commission has been beleaguered by organizational problems and fights with the Bush administration and New York over access to documents.
"We need at least a few more months to complete our work," said commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who has pushed for more time. "We have a breathtaking task ahead of us, and we need enough time to make sure our work is credible and thorough."
But the White House and Hastert's office made clear during discussions over the past two weeks that they would strongly oppose any extension of the deadline, which would require congressional approval, officials said. One source described the issue Friday as "dead in the water."
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said, "The administration has given them an unprecedented amount of cooperation . . . and we expect they will be able to meet that deadline."
John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said there is little support for a delay in the Republican-controlled Congress. "I can't imagine a situation where they get an extension," Feehery said. "I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for considering that."
As recently as December, the commission's two leaders -- former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean (R) and former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- said the panel would have enough time to complete its work. But commission members decided during a closed meeting earlier this month that they should explore the idea of a delay with the White House and Capitol Hill.
The commission's handling of the deadline has angered a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, who argue that the panel has not been aggressive enough in demanding more time and in seeking key documents and testimony from the Bush administration.
Several relatives have also strongly criticized the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, because of his ties to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials.
Zelikow has recused himself from issues connected to his role as an administration adviser in the early weeks of Bush's term, but he was also interviewed several months ago as a witness by the commission, officials said. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat who served in the Clinton Justice Department, has also been interviewed as a witness, officials said.
Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center, said the interviews underscore a conflict-of-interest problem at the commission and cast serious doubts on the panel's credibility.
"We've had it," said Breitweiser, who met with several commission leaders last week. "It is such a slap in the face of the families of victims. They are dishonoring the dead with their irresponsible behavior." Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Zelikow and Gorelick were among more than 800 witnesses who have been interviewed so far and said their experiences in national security are relevant to the panel's investigation. "Whether these people were involved in this commission or not, they may have well made this list because of the perspective they would have had about the work of the government during the time in question," he said.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
January 18, 2004
Fixing Democracy
http://www.nytimes.com
he morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.
This is no way to run a democracy.
Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people's votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform. Among the key issues:
Voting Technology An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.
They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.
To address these concerns, electronic voting machines should produce a paper trail — hard-copy receipts that voters can check to ensure that their vote was accurately reported, and that can later be used in a recount. California recently took the lead on this issue, mandating paper trails from its machines by July 2006. A bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt would do the same nationally. Congress should make every effort to put paper trails in place by this fall.
Compounding the technology issues are the political entanglements of voting machine companies. Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Inc., has raised large sums for President Bush, and pledged in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004. Diebold is hardly alone among major voting machine manufacturers in contributing to elected officials, who represent virtually their only market. But the public has a right to expect that voting machine companies that run elections will not also seek to influence them.
Internet voting will be allowed in the Michigan caucuses next month and, for the first time, in the general election in a Pentagon-operated pilot program for overseas voters. Internet voting raises all of the security concerns of electronic voting and more. Given that major corporations regularly find their Web sites and databases hacked, and "Trojan horses" can take over home computers, it's questionable whether any Internet voting can be made completely secure. The Pentagon's program was adopted with disturbingly little publicity or debate. The public is entitled to know more about how it will work, and how it will be protected.
Voter Participation Our ideal of government with the consent of the governed presumes universal participation in elections, or something close to it. But even in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, a mere 51 percent of voters went to the polls, down from 63 percent in 1960, and far less than in most mature democracies.
We no longer have poll taxes, but there are still significant obstacles to voting. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris, then the secretary of state, hired a private company to purge the voting rolls of felons, but ended up purging many nonfelons as well. There will be more voting roll purges this year, and little scrutiny is being given to how secretaries of state, many of whom are highly political, are conducting them. And the Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle, includes new requirements for voter identification that could be used in some states to turn away voters.
More broadly, we need a national commitment to increasing registration and turnout. Seven states allow some form of election-day registration, which appears to raise turnout. Voting by mail, making Election Day a holiday, and similar reforms can also help. And there is a movement to roll back laws denying the vote to nearly five million people with felony convictions, 36 percent of them black males.
Competitive Elections The founders intended the House of Representatives to be the branch most responsive to the passions of the people. But with the rise of partisan gerrymandering, redistricting to favor the party in control of the process, competitive House elections are becoming virtually obsolete. Only four challengers defeated incumbents in the 2002 general elections, a record low, and in the nation's 435 Congressional districts, there may be no more than 30 this year where the outcome is truly in doubt.
Pennsylvania is a classic case. After the 2000 census, Republicans, who controlled the state legislature, used powerful computers to draw bizarrely shaped districts — which were given names like "upside-down Chinese dragon" — that maximized Republican voting strength. They paired Democratic incumbents in a single district, so they would have to run against each other, and fashioned new districts where Republicans would have an easy ride. As a result, a state with nearly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans has a Congressional delegation with 12 Republicans and just 7 Democrats.
Partisan gerrymandering takes control of Congress away from the voters, and puts it in the hands of legislative redistricters. It can also profoundly distort the political direction of the country. In four states that are almost precisely evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — Republican legislators drew district lines so that 51 of the 77 seats are Republican, a nearly two-to-one edge.
Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potential landmark case challenging Pennsylvania's lines. The court could, and should, use it to establish constitutional limits on redistricting for partisan advantage. Another solution states can adopt on their own — although parties in control of state government will have little incentive to — is appointing nonpartisan commissions to draw district lines that will produce competitive races.
Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power." His faith in democracy was well placed, but for elective government to play this critical role, the elections must be inclusive and fair, and they must use machinery that works.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Fixing Democracy
http://www.nytimes.com
he morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.
This is no way to run a democracy.
Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people's votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform. Among the key issues:
Voting Technology An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.
They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.
To address these concerns, electronic voting machines should produce a paper trail — hard-copy receipts that voters can check to ensure that their vote was accurately reported, and that can later be used in a recount. California recently took the lead on this issue, mandating paper trails from its machines by July 2006. A bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt would do the same nationally. Congress should make every effort to put paper trails in place by this fall.
Compounding the technology issues are the political entanglements of voting machine companies. Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Inc., has raised large sums for President Bush, and pledged in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004. Diebold is hardly alone among major voting machine manufacturers in contributing to elected officials, who represent virtually their only market. But the public has a right to expect that voting machine companies that run elections will not also seek to influence them.
Internet voting will be allowed in the Michigan caucuses next month and, for the first time, in the general election in a Pentagon-operated pilot program for overseas voters. Internet voting raises all of the security concerns of electronic voting and more. Given that major corporations regularly find their Web sites and databases hacked, and "Trojan horses" can take over home computers, it's questionable whether any Internet voting can be made completely secure. The Pentagon's program was adopted with disturbingly little publicity or debate. The public is entitled to know more about how it will work, and how it will be protected.
Voter Participation Our ideal of government with the consent of the governed presumes universal participation in elections, or something close to it. But even in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, a mere 51 percent of voters went to the polls, down from 63 percent in 1960, and far less than in most mature democracies.
We no longer have poll taxes, but there are still significant obstacles to voting. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris, then the secretary of state, hired a private company to purge the voting rolls of felons, but ended up purging many nonfelons as well. There will be more voting roll purges this year, and little scrutiny is being given to how secretaries of state, many of whom are highly political, are conducting them. And the Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle, includes new requirements for voter identification that could be used in some states to turn away voters.
More broadly, we need a national commitment to increasing registration and turnout. Seven states allow some form of election-day registration, which appears to raise turnout. Voting by mail, making Election Day a holiday, and similar reforms can also help. And there is a movement to roll back laws denying the vote to nearly five million people with felony convictions, 36 percent of them black males.
Competitive Elections The founders intended the House of Representatives to be the branch most responsive to the passions of the people. But with the rise of partisan gerrymandering, redistricting to favor the party in control of the process, competitive House elections are becoming virtually obsolete. Only four challengers defeated incumbents in the 2002 general elections, a record low, and in the nation's 435 Congressional districts, there may be no more than 30 this year where the outcome is truly in doubt.
Pennsylvania is a classic case. After the 2000 census, Republicans, who controlled the state legislature, used powerful computers to draw bizarrely shaped districts — which were given names like "upside-down Chinese dragon" — that maximized Republican voting strength. They paired Democratic incumbents in a single district, so they would have to run against each other, and fashioned new districts where Republicans would have an easy ride. As a result, a state with nearly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans has a Congressional delegation with 12 Republicans and just 7 Democrats.
Partisan gerrymandering takes control of Congress away from the voters, and puts it in the hands of legislative redistricters. It can also profoundly distort the political direction of the country. In four states that are almost precisely evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — Republican legislators drew district lines so that 51 of the 77 seats are Republican, a nearly two-to-one edge.
Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potential landmark case challenging Pennsylvania's lines. The court could, and should, use it to establish constitutional limits on redistricting for partisan advantage. Another solution states can adopt on their own — although parties in control of state government will have little incentive to — is appointing nonpartisan commissions to draw district lines that will produce competitive races.
Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power." His faith in democracy was well placed, but for elective government to play this critical role, the elections must be inclusive and fair, and they must use machinery that works.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Nietzche
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Bush Going to Mars Because Cheney- Halliburton Get the Military Contacts!!!!
Red Planet Profits
David Sirota, Christy Harvey and Judd Legum are with the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute.
New polls show that at a time of record deficits, the public is against spending billions on a Mars mission while cutting domestic priorities. Nonetheless, there is one company that has supported a Mars mission for years: Halliburton. The company, which was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney and is a major financial backer of the Administration, has long supported funding a Mars plan because it is good for its drilling technology business (it was also Cheney who spearheaded the Mars plan inside the White House).
In fact, Kiplinger's reported back in 2001, "several companies and university labs will stand to benefit from new projects" in a Mars mission—including Halliburton. And the payoff could be big: Citizens Against Government Waste notes that, despite the White House's initial lowballing, legitimate "cost estimates for the new program range from $550 billion to $1 trillion."
Four years ago, writing in the Oil & Gas Journal, Halliburton scientist Steve Streich pointed out why a Mars program would be so lucrative for Halliburton. He says a "Mars exploration program presents an unprecedented opportunity" for the industry and that it "warrants the support of both government and industry leaders." He says "one area of great importance is finding out of what the inside of Mars consists. That's where the petroleum industry comes in." Specifically, benefits for "the oil and gas industry may lie in technology that NASA will use for drilling into the surface of Mars." He says there is "great potential for a happy synergy between space researchers" on a Mars project and "the oil and gas industry."
The same Oil and Gas Journal issue reported that Halliburton is already involved in a preliminary consortium of industry and academia "organized to support the development of new technology required for the Mars mission." Petroleum News confirmed that "NASA has been working with Halliburton and others to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars."
President Bush seemed to innocently pitch the Mars mission as an opportunity to develop new space technologies. He said, "Along this journey we'll make many technological breakthroughs. We don't know yet what those breakthroughs will be, but we can be certain they'll come, and that our efforts will be repaid many times over." But for what will those technological advances be used? According to Halliburton, more oil drilling on Earth. As Streich wrote, "Drilling technology for Mars research will be useful for the oil and gas industries." He says "the oil industry is in need of a revolutionary drilling technique that allows quicker and more economical access to oil reserves." A Mars mission "presents an unprecedented opportunity" to develop that drilling technique and "improve our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth."
On top of the Halliburton factor, USA Today reports that Cheney "persuaded Bush that there could be military benefits, such as space-based defense systems." This motivation was echoed by Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) who said last week on "Scarborough Country" that: "Somebody is going to dominate space. When they do, just like when the British dominated the naval part of our globe, established their empire, just like the United States has dominated the air superiority, ultimately, whoever is able to dominate space will be able to control the destiny of the entire Earth."
Ed. Note: This originally appeared in the Center for American Progress' Daily Progress.
Published: Jan 15 2004
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution
Red Planet Profits
David Sirota, Christy Harvey and Judd Legum are with the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute.
New polls show that at a time of record deficits, the public is against spending billions on a Mars mission while cutting domestic priorities. Nonetheless, there is one company that has supported a Mars mission for years: Halliburton. The company, which was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney and is a major financial backer of the Administration, has long supported funding a Mars plan because it is good for its drilling technology business (it was also Cheney who spearheaded the Mars plan inside the White House).
In fact, Kiplinger's reported back in 2001, "several companies and university labs will stand to benefit from new projects" in a Mars mission—including Halliburton. And the payoff could be big: Citizens Against Government Waste notes that, despite the White House's initial lowballing, legitimate "cost estimates for the new program range from $550 billion to $1 trillion."
Four years ago, writing in the Oil & Gas Journal, Halliburton scientist Steve Streich pointed out why a Mars program would be so lucrative for Halliburton. He says a "Mars exploration program presents an unprecedented opportunity" for the industry and that it "warrants the support of both government and industry leaders." He says "one area of great importance is finding out of what the inside of Mars consists. That's where the petroleum industry comes in." Specifically, benefits for "the oil and gas industry may lie in technology that NASA will use for drilling into the surface of Mars." He says there is "great potential for a happy synergy between space researchers" on a Mars project and "the oil and gas industry."
The same Oil and Gas Journal issue reported that Halliburton is already involved in a preliminary consortium of industry and academia "organized to support the development of new technology required for the Mars mission." Petroleum News confirmed that "NASA has been working with Halliburton and others to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars."
President Bush seemed to innocently pitch the Mars mission as an opportunity to develop new space technologies. He said, "Along this journey we'll make many technological breakthroughs. We don't know yet what those breakthroughs will be, but we can be certain they'll come, and that our efforts will be repaid many times over." But for what will those technological advances be used? According to Halliburton, more oil drilling on Earth. As Streich wrote, "Drilling technology for Mars research will be useful for the oil and gas industries." He says "the oil industry is in need of a revolutionary drilling technique that allows quicker and more economical access to oil reserves." A Mars mission "presents an unprecedented opportunity" to develop that drilling technique and "improve our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth."
On top of the Halliburton factor, USA Today reports that Cheney "persuaded Bush that there could be military benefits, such as space-based defense systems." This motivation was echoed by Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) who said last week on "Scarborough Country" that: "Somebody is going to dominate space. When they do, just like when the British dominated the naval part of our globe, established their empire, just like the United States has dominated the air superiority, ultimately, whoever is able to dominate space will be able to control the destiny of the entire Earth."
Ed. Note: This originally appeared in the Center for American Progress' Daily Progress.
Published: Jan 15 2004
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. -- Revolution
Friday, January 16, 2004
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040116/D80459AO2.html
Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court
Jan 16, 4:16 PM (ET)
By TERENCE HUNT
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush bypassed Congress and installed Charles Pickering on the federal appeals court Friday in an election-year slap at Democrats who had blocked the nomination for more than two years.
Bush installed Pickering by a recess appointment, which avoids the confirmation process. Such appointments are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.
Pickering, a federal trial judge whom Bush nominated for a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, has been waiting for a confirmation vote in the Senate.
"I'm grateful to the president for his continued confidence and support," Pickering told The Associated Press from his home in Mississippi. "I look forward to serving on the 5th Circuit."
Democrats have accused Pickering of supporting segregation as a young man, and promoting anti-abortion and anti-voting rights views as a state lawmaker.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the recess appointment "a finger in the eye to all those seeking fairness and bipartisanship in the judicial nominations process."
Another Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said, "It is quite unfortunate that the president has chosen to seat Judge Pickering only days before the nation celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
Thompson said that while on the federal bench in Mississippi, Pickering had sought to "limit minority voting strength and to stifle the rights of women - counter to everything Dr. King and the civil rights movement were all about."
The 5th Circuit handles appeals from Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, and the federal judges on that circuit have been trailblazers on desegregation and voting rights in the past.
Pushing for Pickering's confirmation last year, Bush said, "He is a good, fair-minded man, and the treatment he has received by a handful of senators is a disgrace. He has wide bipartisan support from those who know him best."
Democrats have used the threat of a filibuster to block four U.S. Appeals Court nominees this congressional term: Pickering, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Texas judge Priscilla Owen and Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada. Others, including California judges Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown, are expected to be blocked by Democrats as well.
Frustrated at the delays, Estrada withdrew his nomination in September.
Pickering's nomination had sparked one of the most contentious battles between Republicans and Democrats over the federal courts.
He was the first of Bush's nominees to be blocked by Democrats, while they controlled the Senate in 2001, and his chances of getting through the Senate waned with the resignation of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., over racially insensitive statements about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Pickering, however, refused to step aside and continued to try to build up support in the South. He strongly denied allegations of racial insensitivity.
"For 25 years I have strongly advocated that African-Americans and whites should sit down and talk in a positive and constructive manner to try to promote better understanding. This I've done," Pickering said after a meeting with the Mississippi Black Caucus last year.
Republicans concentrated on other nominees like Estrada and Owen, but always promised to get back to Pickering.
During Pickering's nomination hearing, Republicans accused Democrats of being religiously biased against Bush's anti-abortion nominees, a theme they continued with Estrada and other Bush anti-abortion nominees.
---
Associated Press writer Jesse Holland contributed to this report.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
-- Revolution Books, New York, New York
Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court
Jan 16, 4:16 PM (ET)
By TERENCE HUNT
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush bypassed Congress and installed Charles Pickering on the federal appeals court Friday in an election-year slap at Democrats who had blocked the nomination for more than two years.
Bush installed Pickering by a recess appointment, which avoids the confirmation process. Such appointments are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.
Pickering, a federal trial judge whom Bush nominated for a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, has been waiting for a confirmation vote in the Senate.
"I'm grateful to the president for his continued confidence and support," Pickering told The Associated Press from his home in Mississippi. "I look forward to serving on the 5th Circuit."
Democrats have accused Pickering of supporting segregation as a young man, and promoting anti-abortion and anti-voting rights views as a state lawmaker.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the recess appointment "a finger in the eye to all those seeking fairness and bipartisanship in the judicial nominations process."
Another Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said, "It is quite unfortunate that the president has chosen to seat Judge Pickering only days before the nation celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
Thompson said that while on the federal bench in Mississippi, Pickering had sought to "limit minority voting strength and to stifle the rights of women - counter to everything Dr. King and the civil rights movement were all about."
The 5th Circuit handles appeals from Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, and the federal judges on that circuit have been trailblazers on desegregation and voting rights in the past.
Pushing for Pickering's confirmation last year, Bush said, "He is a good, fair-minded man, and the treatment he has received by a handful of senators is a disgrace. He has wide bipartisan support from those who know him best."
Democrats have used the threat of a filibuster to block four U.S. Appeals Court nominees this congressional term: Pickering, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Texas judge Priscilla Owen and Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada. Others, including California judges Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown, are expected to be blocked by Democrats as well.
Frustrated at the delays, Estrada withdrew his nomination in September.
Pickering's nomination had sparked one of the most contentious battles between Republicans and Democrats over the federal courts.
He was the first of Bush's nominees to be blocked by Democrats, while they controlled the Senate in 2001, and his chances of getting through the Senate waned with the resignation of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., over racially insensitive statements about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Pickering, however, refused to step aside and continued to try to build up support in the South. He strongly denied allegations of racial insensitivity.
"For 25 years I have strongly advocated that African-Americans and whites should sit down and talk in a positive and constructive manner to try to promote better understanding. This I've done," Pickering said after a meeting with the Mississippi Black Caucus last year.
Republicans concentrated on other nominees like Estrada and Owen, but always promised to get back to Pickering.
During Pickering's nomination hearing, Republicans accused Democrats of being religiously biased against Bush's anti-abortion nominees, a theme they continued with Estrada and other Bush anti-abortion nominees.
---
Associated Press writer Jesse Holland contributed to this report.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
-- Revolution Books, New York, New York
"Paranoid Shift" -- don't miss this very important commentary.....
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/011004Hasty/011004hasty.html
Sample quote:
"Why is it so hard to believe serious people who have repeatedly warned us that powerful ruling elites are out to dominate "the masses?" Did we think Dwight Eisenhower was exaggerating when he warned of the extreme "danger" to democracy of "the military industrial complex?" Was Barry Goldwater just being a quaint old-fashioned John Bircher when he said that the Trilateral Commission was "David Rockefeller's latest scheme to take over the world, by taking over the government of the United States?" Were Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt or Joseph Kennedy just being class traitors when they talked about a small group of wealthy elites who operate as a hidden government behind the government? Especially after he died so mysteriously, why shouldn't we believe the late CIA Director William Colby, who bragged about how the CIA "owns everyone of any major significance in the major media?"
And don't miss:
2004 -- The Year of the Law and of Living Dangerously
Seemingly Unsolvable Legal Traps Face an Administration Running Out of Wiggle Room
Something “Big” Will Prevent Saddam from Coming to Trial
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/123103_danger.html
by
Michael C. Ruppert
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
-- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/011004Hasty/011004hasty.html
Sample quote:
"Why is it so hard to believe serious people who have repeatedly warned us that powerful ruling elites are out to dominate "the masses?" Did we think Dwight Eisenhower was exaggerating when he warned of the extreme "danger" to democracy of "the military industrial complex?" Was Barry Goldwater just being a quaint old-fashioned John Bircher when he said that the Trilateral Commission was "David Rockefeller's latest scheme to take over the world, by taking over the government of the United States?" Were Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt or Joseph Kennedy just being class traitors when they talked about a small group of wealthy elites who operate as a hidden government behind the government? Especially after he died so mysteriously, why shouldn't we believe the late CIA Director William Colby, who bragged about how the CIA "owns everyone of any major significance in the major media?"
And don't miss:
2004 -- The Year of the Law and of Living Dangerously
Seemingly Unsolvable Legal Traps Face an Administration Running Out of Wiggle Room
Something “Big” Will Prevent Saddam from Coming to Trial
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/123103_danger.html
by
Michael C. Ruppert
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
-- Revolution Books, New York, New York.
Who Gets It?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 16, 2004
arlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."
In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.
Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.
But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.
The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.
What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness — shared, we now know, by General Clark — to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" — as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents — a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.)
But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.
One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration — a much larger group than you might think — are afraid to give money to Democrats.
Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.
Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.
So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.
That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 16, 2004
arlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."
In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.
Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.
But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.
The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.
What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness — shared, we now know, by General Clark — to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" — as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents — a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.)
But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.
One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration — a much larger group than you might think — are afraid to give money to Democrats.
Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.
Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.
So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.
That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/01/ana04001.html
Here Is The Bush Cartel Recipe For Foreign Policy, As BuzzFlash Found It In A Neo-Con Cookbook
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
Here is the "Bush Cartel Recipe for Foreign Policy," as BuzzFlash found it in a Neo-Con cookbook:
Take one part ignorance and mix it with two cups of hubris. Toss into a blender and mix slowly, as you add three cups of oil and one cup of blood. Add a pinch of vengeance (for Saddam Hussein allegedly trying to kill Poppy Bush) and drop in chopped up jello molds of France and Germany.
Remove from blender into mixing bowl larded with lies and stir at a rapid frenzy. Add a generous teaspoon of opiate for the masses. Place in rectangular tray.
Cook for 30 minutes and then decorate with red, white and blue frosting to simulate the American flag. Use little banners placed around the cake to represent multi-billion dollar sweetheart contracts given to campaign contributors -- and paid for by the American taxpayer.
Add candles made from filaments of Saddam's beard, and prepare to celebrate your triumphant foreign policy dessert, as Laura Bush flings open the White House windows and yells out: "Let Them Eat Cake!"
BuzzFlash.com
Here Is The Bush Cartel Recipe For Foreign Policy, As BuzzFlash Found It In A Neo-Con Cookbook
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
Here is the "Bush Cartel Recipe for Foreign Policy," as BuzzFlash found it in a Neo-Con cookbook:
Take one part ignorance and mix it with two cups of hubris. Toss into a blender and mix slowly, as you add three cups of oil and one cup of blood. Add a pinch of vengeance (for Saddam Hussein allegedly trying to kill Poppy Bush) and drop in chopped up jello molds of France and Germany.
Remove from blender into mixing bowl larded with lies and stir at a rapid frenzy. Add a generous teaspoon of opiate for the masses. Place in rectangular tray.
Cook for 30 minutes and then decorate with red, white and blue frosting to simulate the American flag. Use little banners placed around the cake to represent multi-billion dollar sweetheart contracts given to campaign contributors -- and paid for by the American taxpayer.
Add candles made from filaments of Saddam's beard, and prepare to celebrate your triumphant foreign policy dessert, as Laura Bush flings open the White House windows and yells out: "Let Them Eat Cake!"
BuzzFlash.com
Thursday, January 15, 2004
from http://www.robertscheer.com
----------------------------------
SCHWARZENEGGER JUST ACTS LIKE HE CARES FOR THE POOR
Scripted campaign over, Arnold now aims to balance budget on backs of
those who can least afford it
January 15 -- We should have known from his movie roles that
California's new governor would be nothing more than a blowhard bully boy.
Lacking the guts to take on the entrenched special interests, as he promised
when he played the heavily scripted role of outsider candidate, he now
proposes to do what all cowardly politicians do: balance the budget on
the backs of the poor.
A Los Angeles Times headline Saturday said it all: "Budget Ax Will Fall
Heavily on the Poor, Ill." The story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
budget plan explained how it "promises higher costs and hurdles for
thousands of Californians, from some children with cancer who will no longer
get state help paying for chemotherapy to high school graduates who
will be shunted to community colleges instead of universities."
Those kinds of cuts, including reneging on an already approved
cost-of-living increase for mothers and children on welfare, are not only
hardhearted, but they won't save enough to dent the state's $14 billion
revenue shortfall for the 2004-05 budget. They are window dressing to give
the governor the cover of making what he termed "painful" spending cuts
while selling his $15 billion bond initiative -- which is a way of
raising taxes without appearing to do so. Another scam involves the $1.3
billion in property tax revenue Schwarzenegger proposes to steal from
cash-strapped local governments and school districts -- you know, the
people who bring you police, firefighters, street repairs, schools, parks
and all that other frivolous stuff.
"It's perplexing to me that the governor would say that public safety
is the top priority of the state of California and do something like
this that really jeopardizes our ability to provide public safety to our
citizens," said Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who had praised the
governor's promise of a few weeks ago to restore funding to cities and
counties. That was before looking at these budget numbers.
Unchallenged are such questionable expenditures as the continued
irresponsible expansion of our prison system far beyond our needs; under the
governor's proposal, the youth and adult corrections budget would
increase by 8 percent, causing no pain for the powerful prison guards lobby,
which will now switch its allegiance to Schwarzenegger.
"The aged, the blind, the disabled and poor women with children are
paying for a big chunk of the loss of revenue from the vehicle tax," state
Senate Leader John Burton told me Monday. "Them and college students
and people needing medical assistance. The reality is the only way to
balance this budget without exploiting these groups is to raise taxes on
the wealthy, and the governor doesn't want to do that."
Put another way, if you have a few Schwarzenegger-branded Hummers in
your garage, you've just received a tidy windfall at the expense of those
who can least afford it -- such as mothers trying to work their way off
welfare through the CalWORKS program. A mother in Los Angeles raising
two kids would see her transitional family aid drop from $704 a month to
$669, according to the Los Angeles Times. That wouldn't even support
the governor's stogie habit, even if he cut back to two decent cigars a
day.
What hypocrisy for mega-millionaire Schwarzenegger to refer to
"painful" budget cuts. His kids, after all, are not enrolled in the Healthy
Families program, which encourages working poor parents to get needed
dental and vision care for their children, nor another initiative that
helps working families meet the extraordinary expenses associated with
treating severe medical problems like cerebral palsy and cancer -- both of
which would be curtailed in the governor's budget. His kids will never
have to drop out of community college because of the fee hikes he's
imposed or suffer from the deep cuts in Medi-Cal funding for the health
needs of the poor.
No, the pain that Schwarzenegger claims to feel is the fake suffering
of actors in movies -- blood and bruises that can be wiped away when the
filming stops. Perhaps that is why he evidenced so much wisecracking
good humor at his press conference announcing the budget cuts, which are
not likely to hurt anyone in his circle.
"It has been terrific," he told the more than 100 reporters, domestic
and foreign, who yuk it up at his cornball jokes. "I have enjoyed every
single day of this job."
Well, good for him. Perhaps he could stop grinning long enough to
imagine how much fun it would be to support his family for a month on $669
or be unable to pay his children's medical bills.
copyright 2004 Robert Scheer
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If America is safer since the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, why did Bush raise the threat level to orange over the holidays? It seems threats come from Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, NOT Hussein's baathist insurgents. Doh!! -- Claudia Dikinis 12/29/03
----------------------------------
SCHWARZENEGGER JUST ACTS LIKE HE CARES FOR THE POOR
Scripted campaign over, Arnold now aims to balance budget on backs of
those who can least afford it
January 15 -- We should have known from his movie roles that
California's new governor would be nothing more than a blowhard bully boy.
Lacking the guts to take on the entrenched special interests, as he promised
when he played the heavily scripted role of outsider candidate, he now
proposes to do what all cowardly politicians do: balance the budget on
the backs of the poor.
A Los Angeles Times headline Saturday said it all: "Budget Ax Will Fall
Heavily on the Poor, Ill." The story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
budget plan explained how it "promises higher costs and hurdles for
thousands of Californians, from some children with cancer who will no longer
get state help paying for chemotherapy to high school graduates who
will be shunted to community colleges instead of universities."
Those kinds of cuts, including reneging on an already approved
cost-of-living increase for mothers and children on welfare, are not only
hardhearted, but they won't save enough to dent the state's $14 billion
revenue shortfall for the 2004-05 budget. They are window dressing to give
the governor the cover of making what he termed "painful" spending cuts
while selling his $15 billion bond initiative -- which is a way of
raising taxes without appearing to do so. Another scam involves the $1.3
billion in property tax revenue Schwarzenegger proposes to steal from
cash-strapped local governments and school districts -- you know, the
people who bring you police, firefighters, street repairs, schools, parks
and all that other frivolous stuff.
"It's perplexing to me that the governor would say that public safety
is the top priority of the state of California and do something like
this that really jeopardizes our ability to provide public safety to our
citizens," said Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who had praised the
governor's promise of a few weeks ago to restore funding to cities and
counties. That was before looking at these budget numbers.
Unchallenged are such questionable expenditures as the continued
irresponsible expansion of our prison system far beyond our needs; under the
governor's proposal, the youth and adult corrections budget would
increase by 8 percent, causing no pain for the powerful prison guards lobby,
which will now switch its allegiance to Schwarzenegger.
"The aged, the blind, the disabled and poor women with children are
paying for a big chunk of the loss of revenue from the vehicle tax," state
Senate Leader John Burton told me Monday. "Them and college students
and people needing medical assistance. The reality is the only way to
balance this budget without exploiting these groups is to raise taxes on
the wealthy, and the governor doesn't want to do that."
Put another way, if you have a few Schwarzenegger-branded Hummers in
your garage, you've just received a tidy windfall at the expense of those
who can least afford it -- such as mothers trying to work their way off
welfare through the CalWORKS program. A mother in Los Angeles raising
two kids would see her transitional family aid drop from $704 a month to
$669, according to the Los Angeles Times. That wouldn't even support
the governor's stogie habit, even if he cut back to two decent cigars a
day.
What hypocrisy for mega-millionaire Schwarzenegger to refer to
"painful" budget cuts. His kids, after all, are not enrolled in the Healthy
Families program, which encourages working poor parents to get needed
dental and vision care for their children, nor another initiative that
helps working families meet the extraordinary expenses associated with
treating severe medical problems like cerebral palsy and cancer -- both of
which would be curtailed in the governor's budget. His kids will never
have to drop out of community college because of the fee hikes he's
imposed or suffer from the deep cuts in Medi-Cal funding for the health
needs of the poor.
No, the pain that Schwarzenegger claims to feel is the fake suffering
of actors in movies -- blood and bruises that can be wiped away when the
filming stops. Perhaps that is why he evidenced so much wisecracking
good humor at his press conference announcing the budget cuts, which are
not likely to hurt anyone in his circle.
"It has been terrific," he told the more than 100 reporters, domestic
and foreign, who yuk it up at his cornball jokes. "I have enjoyed every
single day of this job."
Well, good for him. Perhaps he could stop grinning long enough to
imagine how much fun it would be to support his family for a month on $669
or be unable to pay his children's medical bills.
copyright 2004 Robert Scheer
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If America is safer since the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, why did Bush raise the threat level to orange over the holidays? It seems threats come from Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, NOT Hussein's baathist insurgents. Doh!! -- Claudia Dikinis 12/29/03
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1120510,00.html
Giant space shield plan to save planet
Mark Townsend
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer
Humanity could not exist without it - yet in an extraordinary plan that
underlines the catastrophic implications of climate change, scientists
now want to curb the Sun's life-giving influence to save mankind from
its biggest threat: global warming.
Key talks involving the Government's most senior climate experts have
produced proposals to site a massive shield on the edge of space that
would deflect the Sun's rays and stabilise the climate.
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of metallic 'scatterers' would be
ejected into the upper atmosphere under the plans. In addition, billions
of tiny barrage balloons could serve as a secondary barrier to block
rays from the Earth's nearest star.
On land, giant reservoirs holding saline water could be built to offset
the rise in sea levels caused by the melting of the polar ice-caps. The
oceans, too, would be modified to cope with the planet's increasingly
warmer weather. Massive floating cloud-making machines would be dotted
across their surface while, below, large plantations of algae would be
grown to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The theories were discussed by Britain's most eminent climatologists at
a meeting in Cambridge last week to analyse the latest theories to
tackle the problem of the planet heating up. They included the
Government's chief scientist, Sir David King, who warned last week that
climate change was the most severe problem facing civilisation.
Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the
German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate
scientists at the Tyndall Centre, said: 'These are exotic ideas and we
probably will have to come up with the right mixture. But the problem
has not gone away, so we think this analysis is just in time.
'The present climate policy does not seem to be working. We are not
saying we have the magic bullet, but this is a desperate situation and
people should start thinking about the unconventional. Preventative
plans on a larger scale are needed.'
Environmentalists maintain that the solutions are so radical they serve
only to underscore how unprepared governments are to deal with the
threat. Last week researchers predicted that a quarter of land animals
and plants will die out because of global warming over the next 50 years.
Scientists, however, argue that until the United States and Russia
ratify international agreements to limit the emission of greenhouse
gases they will have little choice but to explore new methods to save
the planet.
Extreme technological fixes include deploying tens of billions of
wafer-thin metal plates less than a centimetre wide into the Earth's low
orbit via space rockets. These would be specially built to allow
space-bound rays to pass while at the same time absorbing a significant
amount of solar energy before bouncing it back into space. They would be
designed to stay in place for a century.
Similar solutions include the release of massive nets of ultra-fine
metal mesh into the upper atmosphere by aircraft to prevent the Sun's
rays from reaching Earth. Alternatively, millions of metallic-coated
super-pressure balloons - similar in design to a children's party
version, although a fraction of the size - would be filled with helium
and released until they reach the stratosphere 35,000ft above the Earth.
Trapped in parcels of air, they would stay up for about five years
before falling to earth and being replaced.
All the methods are designed to block about 1 per cent of the Sun's
rays, enough to protect at least one million square kilometres of the
Earth and significantly cool the planet.
Inspiration came from studying the effects of volcanic eruptions in
Indonesia in 1814. During these explosions, enough material was spewed
into the upper atmosphere to cause temperatures to fall by up to 30 per
cent for almost three years, roughly the amount some predict that they
will rise to by the end of this century.
Academics from California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who
told government scientists about the billion-pound scheme, claim it will
increase crop yields, because plants would be less damaged by the Sun's
harmful rays. The scheme would create more spectacular sunrises and
sunsets, deeper blue skies and would reduce the cancer risk for
sunbathers and children.
Pumping nutrients into the world's oceans remains another weapon under
consideration. This would encourage the growth of vast underwater algae
blooms to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Scientists believe
'large-scale ocean fertilisation' could act as a substitute for the
world's disappearing forests, which act as a huge natural sponge for
soaking up carbon dioxide from the air.
Massive floating cloud-making machines could also become a feature of
the oceans. These solar-powered contraptions would spray seawater
droplets of a precise size into the sky to help encourage the formation
of low-level clouds.
Other ideas being looked at include the burial of carbon dioxide
emissions underground. Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Roger
Higman said: 'Climate change is the biggest environmental threat the
world faces. It is important for scientists to explore imaginative ways
to tackle its impacts, but technical fixes must not be used as an excuse
for failing to reduce the growing levels of greenhouse gases.'
This week the Government will announce how it proposes to implement the
most significant piece of climate change legislation since the Kyoto
protocol, Europe's greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If America is safer since the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, why did Bush raise the threat level to orange over the holidays? It seems threats come from Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, NOT Hussein's baathist insurgents. Doh!! -- Claudia Dikinis 12/29/03
Giant space shield plan to save planet
Mark Townsend
Sunday January 11, 2004
The Observer
Humanity could not exist without it - yet in an extraordinary plan that
underlines the catastrophic implications of climate change, scientists
now want to curb the Sun's life-giving influence to save mankind from
its biggest threat: global warming.
Key talks involving the Government's most senior climate experts have
produced proposals to site a massive shield on the edge of space that
would deflect the Sun's rays and stabilise the climate.
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of metallic 'scatterers' would be
ejected into the upper atmosphere under the plans. In addition, billions
of tiny barrage balloons could serve as a secondary barrier to block
rays from the Earth's nearest star.
On land, giant reservoirs holding saline water could be built to offset
the rise in sea levels caused by the melting of the polar ice-caps. The
oceans, too, would be modified to cope with the planet's increasingly
warmer weather. Massive floating cloud-making machines would be dotted
across their surface while, below, large plantations of algae would be
grown to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The theories were discussed by Britain's most eminent climatologists at
a meeting in Cambridge last week to analyse the latest theories to
tackle the problem of the planet heating up. They included the
Government's chief scientist, Sir David King, who warned last week that
climate change was the most severe problem facing civilisation.
Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the
German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate
scientists at the Tyndall Centre, said: 'These are exotic ideas and we
probably will have to come up with the right mixture. But the problem
has not gone away, so we think this analysis is just in time.
'The present climate policy does not seem to be working. We are not
saying we have the magic bullet, but this is a desperate situation and
people should start thinking about the unconventional. Preventative
plans on a larger scale are needed.'
Environmentalists maintain that the solutions are so radical they serve
only to underscore how unprepared governments are to deal with the
threat. Last week researchers predicted that a quarter of land animals
and plants will die out because of global warming over the next 50 years.
Scientists, however, argue that until the United States and Russia
ratify international agreements to limit the emission of greenhouse
gases they will have little choice but to explore new methods to save
the planet.
Extreme technological fixes include deploying tens of billions of
wafer-thin metal plates less than a centimetre wide into the Earth's low
orbit via space rockets. These would be specially built to allow
space-bound rays to pass while at the same time absorbing a significant
amount of solar energy before bouncing it back into space. They would be
designed to stay in place for a century.
Similar solutions include the release of massive nets of ultra-fine
metal mesh into the upper atmosphere by aircraft to prevent the Sun's
rays from reaching Earth. Alternatively, millions of metallic-coated
super-pressure balloons - similar in design to a children's party
version, although a fraction of the size - would be filled with helium
and released until they reach the stratosphere 35,000ft above the Earth.
Trapped in parcels of air, they would stay up for about five years
before falling to earth and being replaced.
All the methods are designed to block about 1 per cent of the Sun's
rays, enough to protect at least one million square kilometres of the
Earth and significantly cool the planet.
Inspiration came from studying the effects of volcanic eruptions in
Indonesia in 1814. During these explosions, enough material was spewed
into the upper atmosphere to cause temperatures to fall by up to 30 per
cent for almost three years, roughly the amount some predict that they
will rise to by the end of this century.
Academics from California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who
told government scientists about the billion-pound scheme, claim it will
increase crop yields, because plants would be less damaged by the Sun's
harmful rays. The scheme would create more spectacular sunrises and
sunsets, deeper blue skies and would reduce the cancer risk for
sunbathers and children.
Pumping nutrients into the world's oceans remains another weapon under
consideration. This would encourage the growth of vast underwater algae
blooms to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Scientists believe
'large-scale ocean fertilisation' could act as a substitute for the
world's disappearing forests, which act as a huge natural sponge for
soaking up carbon dioxide from the air.
Massive floating cloud-making machines could also become a feature of
the oceans. These solar-powered contraptions would spray seawater
droplets of a precise size into the sky to help encourage the formation
of low-level clouds.
Other ideas being looked at include the burial of carbon dioxide
emissions underground. Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Roger
Higman said: 'Climate change is the biggest environmental threat the
world faces. It is important for scientists to explore imaginative ways
to tackle its impacts, but technical fixes must not be used as an excuse
for failing to reduce the growing levels of greenhouse gases.'
This week the Government will announce how it proposes to implement the
most significant piece of climate change legislation since the Kyoto
protocol, Europe's greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme.
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If America is safer since the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, why did Bush raise the threat level to orange over the holidays? It seems threats come from Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, NOT Hussein's baathist insurgents. Doh!! -- Claudia Dikinis 12/29/03
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