A Controversial and/or Informative Site [Archive] - Page 11

Saundra Hummer

March 4th, 2006, 06:21 PM

America the Pitiful

By Charles Sullivan

03/04/06 "ICH" -- -- Calling our form of government a democratic republic does not make it so. We are what we do. By now it should be abundantly clear that most Americans are incapable of recognizing real democracy—because they have never been subjected to one. Perhaps no culture on earth is more materialistic or delusional than ours’. Compared to much of the world, America’s behavior is tragically pathological. We react to planetary warming by driving metal gas guzzling monstrosities, rather than enacting conservation measures. Americans have the habit of doing the opposite of what we should. Our so called leaders think our sensibilities are too delicate to expose us to truth—so reality is omitted from our diet as if it were a plague. Rather than receiving nourishing truth, we are given the opiates of propaganda that affirm and reinforce our odd self destructive behavior. We are held captive by the lies that are deftly woven from the threads of capitalism, and persuaded to act against our own interest, as well as the public good.

Propaganda is like a powerful and paralyzing drug that induces the most bizarre social behavior. In the mind it acts like an opiate that provokes psychotic episodes of self harming conduct. We are a nation addicted to oil and violence; a people grateful for our chains of ignorance and servitude to the gods of consumerism and unrestrained capitalism—the very gods that are our undoing. The drip bags of propaganda are permanently attached to our veins to assure that we never awaken from our news-induced coma. Mind control is more subtle than the open use of coercive force in shaping human behaviors. No one is more effectively enslaved than those who think they are free. Witness the glee with which so many naïve and witless conservatives cheer on the neocon cabal in the mistaken belief that their policies do them good. The paradigms of our time, which drive our behaviors, have been deftly marketed to us without our knowledge—subliminal advertising’s finest frenzy. So effective are these media campaigns that few of us even bother to question their authenticity. The result is a virtually comatose culture of consumption and waste that is incapable of defending itself from the predation of wealth and power. Propaganda marginalizes and renders us useless as citizens, by affecting our ability for self examining critical thought. We can no longer add two plus two and get four.

In this land of uncommon grace that is blessed with fabulous wealth, mantras are repeated over and over, without regard to validity, until they become ingrained in the public conscience and assume the authority of truth. They become our cultural paradigms, the bedrock of society, whose moral authority is rarely revisited. Centuries of self deception have led us unerringly to the present moment. Everything that contradicts our version of reality is expunged from the public record. Americans do not like to confront unpleasant realities. Let us not hear about the abuse of captives of war. Rather than take action to correct the gross injustices we routinely heap upon the world, as demanded by conscience, we simply deny their existence. We turn our backs on any reality that assaults our conscience and suppress the evidence. We go on as if there were no consequences. Cause and effect is not something we wish to ponder, so we sweep it under the carpet.

In a world where other cultures respect human rights and cherish some notion of justice, America’s sociopathic behavior is seen as the belligerent obscenity that it is. Our actions on the world stage are justified by fallacy and drip with a hubris that has no basis in truth.

There can be no justice without truth; no peace without justice. If we truly reap what we sow, we are in for some hard times in the years ahead. When our government behaves irresponsibly and with violence toward the world, it is incumbent upon the people to restrain it, to remake that government in the image of the people, rather than the elite. But this is only possible with an aroused and wakeful electorate. Revolution requires an informed and militant citizenry. Awakening is the first step in the long and difficult journey to self liberation. The people will not rise until they awake. If they are to awaken, we must get them off the opiates that make them comatose. We must get them off the commercial news.

Progressives and conservatives alike recognize that we have an obscene and belligerent presidency that is buoyed by a frightened and timorous congress. They see that the institutions of government are not servants of the people—they are the servants of their corporate pay masters. Depravity and concentrated wealth hold sway in the halls of government. The White House is a brothel teeming with corporate lobbyists, whose fornications are conducted beyond the pale of public view. Congress is as awash in corporate money as maggots on a corpse. The Bush cabal has to go. However, we must also recognize that the cancer extends well beyond Bush. We must recognize that the system itself is the malignancy. Effective and conscientious citizenship demands more from us than paying taxes and exercising our right to vote. It demands that we act for the common good with conscience and tenacity of purpose. Let us finish the revolution that was begun here in the 1700s.

Real democracy cannot be served by paying homage to freedom through garish displays of trinkets—flags and plastic yellow ribbons. These symbols are shallow, superfluous, and disingenuous. Anyone can administer them. To do so requires neither courage nor effort—real patriotism requires an abundance of both. Unlike real patriotism, the symbols of patriotism do not require thought or understanding—they are a conditioned response to the choreographed propaganda that oozes from our televisions and radios, the words that drip from the nation’s daily newspapers. Real patriots do not encourage the champions of Manifest Destiny in their grim work of conquest and empire—they actively oppose them and resist. Those who uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights when the government does not are the real patriots. They are America’s dissenters and protesters. They do not require flags and ribbons to demonstrate their patriotism. Their every gesture, their very lives, is an expression of the patriotism that might have made America a different place than it is now—if only there were more of them.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net.

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comments (14) | Trackback (0)

Translate this page
GO ON SITE TO DO THIS
FIND LINKS ON-SITE.
~ ~ ~
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12179.htm
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Saundra Hummer

March 4th, 2006, 06:36 PM

.
Video: See You in *ucking Hell Dog

This video should only be watch by a mature audience.

Click Play To View
You may need to update / download Free Real Player to view this video. Click on this link to download. http://snipurl.com/a75b

Posted 03/03/06
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12170.htm
. . . . . .

Blair: 'God will be my judge on Iraq'
By Andy McSmith

03/04/06 "The Independent" -- -- Tony Blair has proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally George Bush.

Contradicting warnings from advisers not to mix politics and religion, the Prime Minister said that his interest in politics sprang from his Christianity and its "values and philosophy" had guided him in public life.

Explaining how he managed to live with the decision to go to war in Iraq, Mr Blair replied: "If you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people. If you believe in God,it's made by God as well." His remarks, made in an interview to be shown on ITV's Parkinson show tonight, invite comparison with President Bush, a born-again Christian, who has made a virtue of bringing religion into politics. But they also carry the risk of inflaming opinion in the Arab world, where the term "crusader" is commonly used to condemn Christian leaders who meddle in the Middle East.

It is also exactly the sort of comment he has been repeatedly urged not to make for domestic purposes, because of the risk that a sceptical British public will react badly to politicians who appear to be "preaching". Mr Blair was instructed by his former director of communications, Alastair Campbell: "We don't do God."

As well as invoking God as the final judge of the Iraq war, Mr Blair also explained how his religious and political beliefs came to him simultaneously. "There were people at university who got me into politics. I kind of got into religion, politics, at the same time, in a way. And until the age of about 20 I really wasn't very interested in politics at all," he told Michael Parkinson. "That's how I got interested in it."

He refused to accept a description of himself as a "Christian socialist" - but only because the phrase contained the "s" word. "It's a long time since anyone used the word socialist about me," he said.

He agreed that his politics could be described as Christian "in terms of the values and the philosophy". He also confirmed that religion illuminates his politics. "If you have a religious belief, it does - but it's probably best not to take it too far," he said

Roger Bacon, who has been trying unsuccessfully to meet Tony Blair since his son, Major Matthew Bacon, 34, was killed in Iraq, said last night: "This would explain why he won't see the parents. How can he speak to us when God told him to send the troops out to Iraq so our sons could be killed?"

And Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, said she was "quite disgusted" at the comments made by the Prime Minister. The Military Families Against the War campaigner said: "How can he say he is a Christian? A Christian would never put people out there to be killed.

"A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments. It's a joke."

During his eight-year premiership, the only decisions that have caused Mr Blair sleepless nights have been those that involved taking the UK to war, he said. But he added: "The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, according to your conscience. And, for the rest of it, you leave it to the judgement that history will make."

Mr Blair refused to say whether he had prayed for guidance on whether to send British troops into Iraq - which has cost the lives of 103 British troops, 2,300 US soldiers, and up to 30,000 Iraqis, with many thousands maimed or injured, in a conflict which has claimed more lives since the fall of Baghdad than the war itself.

There have been persistent reports that Mr Blair joined the President in prayer for God's guidance at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2002, at the summit at which many people believe a secret decision was reached to invade Iraq.

The claim was made in a book by the Christian author Stephen Mansfield, who said he had heard it from White House officials. It was later backed up by a writer on Time magazine, David Aikman.

Mr Bush once told Palestinian leaders: "God would tell me, 'George, go end the tyranny in Iraq' and I did."

Mr Blair's Cabinet includes several deeply committed Christians, such as Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, who is a Roman Catholic, and the Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong - but they rarely break the injunction not to mix religion and politics publicly.

. . .

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comments (2) | Trackback (0)

Translate this page

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12172.htm
.

Saundra Hummer

March 4th, 2006, 06:53 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wasn’t Jesus A Liberal?

Part One - Part Two Here
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10580.htm

By
Gary Vance

10/19/04 -- --- Liberalism has been under assault for years now. The battering of this grand political philosophy has altered the contemporary definition of liberal to the point that Conservatives use it as a profane word. They use it to paint a political opponent as anti-God and anti-American. It has gotten to the point that moderate and liberal Christians are afraid to be open about their political leanings. Sadly, it even affects their conscience and choices as they enter the voting booth. This is particularly troubling to me as a Christian evangelical minister who loves America.
Liberalism as defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for tolerance and freedom for the individual from arbitrary authority in all spheres of life…”

I am not sure why anyone would feel threatened by Liberalism as defined by the dictionary. They are apparently unaware or simply refuse to acknowledge the long history of liberals who have labored for the betterment of society and the furthering of God’s Kingdom.

The labor movement of the early twentieth century was aided significantly when major Christian denominations got behind it. No average American would have a fair wage today if it weren’t for liberal Christians and labor activists. Liberal Christians and civil rights activists fought and still fight against conservative America for racial equality. Child labor laws were enacted because liberals fought for them. Medicare and Social Security exist today because of Liberalism. “Bleeding heart liberals” have long advocated for the homeless, the hungry, the less fortunate, and the disenfranchised. The women of America owe liberals a big thank you for their almost equal rights. “Tree hugging liberals” fight for clean air and water standards instead of favoring industrial polluters and short term profiteering that destroy God’s green earth.

Liberals believe in affordable health care for all U.S. citizens. They also believe in higher taxes for the rich and lower taxes for the middle class and the poor. Liberals love their spouses and children. Liberals faithfully attend their churches to worship God. Liberals love America and hate terrorism and have proved it by fighting in every war for this country. Liberals come in all shapes, sizes, and color. They are found in the ranks of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, agnostics, and atheists.

Conservative Republican policies generally favor the wealthy and ignore the needs of the poor. Their policies are so often greed-driven, with no concern for the environmental or societal consequences for their exploitive actions. Jesus plainly taught that the love of money is the root of all evil. So, Christians can go after the various “fruit” of sin in our society, but they won’t see the real change for the better until the axe is laid to the root. Christians should oppose greed-driven policies as a primary point of political concern.

I am sick of reading letters to the editor and editorials that paint Democrats and liberals as anti-God and anti-American and that portray conservative Republicans as the only true Christian patriots. We know that many Democrats are pro-choice and many support gay issues and this troubles most evangelicals. Democrats also support causes that should be of Christian concern that go untouched by Republicans. I have listed some in the above paragraphs. True prophetic vision sees that there is great need for repentance on the left and the right. The effects of powerful lobbyists, special interest groups, greed and corruption abound on both sides of the aisles of Congress. God sees it all and so should Christians. Christian voters need to see that God’s heart breaks over more than just a few political and moral issues. It is time to take off our blinders and mourn for the sorry state of affairs that is American politics.

Jesus was the ultimate liberal progressive revolutionary of all history. The conservative religious and social structure that He defied hated and crucified Him. They examined His life and did not like what they saw. He aligned Himself with the poor and the oppressed. He challenged the religious orthodoxy of His day. He advocated pacifism and loving our enemies. He liberated women and minorities from oppression. He healed on the Sabbath and forgave adulterers and prostitutes. He associated with drunks and other social outcasts. He rebuked the religious right of His day because they embraced the letter of the law instead of the Spirit. He loved sinners and called them to Himself. Jesus was the original Liberal. He was a progressive, and He was judged and hated for it. It was the self-righteous religionists that He rebuked and He called them hypocrites.

The primary issues of Christian Liberalism were birthed when Jesus spoke the profoundly prophetic words found in Matthew 25: 31-46. These scriptures reveal God’s heart for the poor, the sick and other neglected people through out history. Christians should read this text and judge for themselves which of the two groups mentioned there more accurately reflect the political parties of today. His Liberalism lives on today and the issues have not changed much.

I am glad that conservative Republican candidates advocate for the family and a few Christian issues, but we must quit pretending that they are the only ones that Christians should consider voting for. People should not call themselves pro-life if they are only anti-abortion and yet feel no twinge of conscience over the unfair application of capital punishment or wars fought for dubious motives. A true pro-life position cares just as passionately for the born as the un-born and views war as a last resort when all other options are exhausted.

Christians should look for candidates that will work for issues that are of importance to Christ and that can be tackled legislatively. Sadly, most of those causes have historically been opposed, ignored, and minimized by conservative Republican policy makers. They seem to dangle the moral issues carrot around election time. Then, even with a Republican controlled White House and Congress, prove themselves powerless to do anything about those issues when they convene to legislate. Issues such as eliminating poverty and homelessness in America, true equal rights for all citizens, environmental protection, a fair minimum wage, affordable health care, and lowering our infant mortality rate all go unattended. That’s just to name a few.

I have some questions for the Christian Right. Why have you not held our current elected majority officials accountable for their failure to address the full spectrum of Christian issues? Why would you vote for them again?

It is time for Christians of conscience to stand up to religious and political hypocrisy. Christians should proudly proclaim progressive values today and should advocate for the Christian Liberalism that is our heritage and our legacy.

Gary Vance (gvance1@gmail.com) lives in Loretto, Tennessee.

Wasn't Jesus a Liberal?

Part Two -
By
Gary Vance

10/10/05 -- -- I wrote an essay in October 2004 entitled "Wasn't Jesus a Liberal?" in an attempt to refute the denigration of liberalism by the Republican dominated Religious Right that increasingly claims only conservatives have the moral high ground and the endorsement of Jesus. Published on several sites on the internet, the essay encouraged a startling number of replies from readers thanking me for expressing thoughts and values that they also held. Many told of how they felt oppressed and ostracized within their communities of faith for sharing these views. What I learned is that their churches have disenfranchised vast multitudes of Christians who now don't know where to turn.

I was saddened by the responses from the Religious Right. Their commentary, revealing a great degree of ignorance and apathy concerning the full spectrum of Biblically-based Christian ideals that might be tackled in the political arena, were bitter and vitriolic diatribes that questioned my credibility as a minister and my standing in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was and is beyond any simplistic pigeonhole definition of the term liberal. The classic nobility of Christian liberalism originated with Christ. His teaching was absolute and was not tainted by shifting cultural mores like we find in todays definition of liberal. In a benign Webster's Dictionary definition of liberal, a particular line that alluded to a belief in the basic goodness of man offended my evangelical critics. Their criticism indicated that as a minister I should know what the Bible teaches concerning the hopeless depravity of man apart from God's salvation.

I chose the Webster definition in an attempt to bring into focus the more classical understanding of the term rather than the distorted, contemporary, partisan-driven connontation. The Bible teaches that God created humans in His likeness and that there remains in everyone something that He loves and is redeemable. (John 3:16) I think it is interesting that Christians who oppose the content of my essay seize on that one phrase of definition and overlook other aspects that relate to being progressive and tolerant.

The critics of the essay are offended by the idea that liberal Democrats might have a superior ideology. Especially when it comes to some social issues that have spiritual and moral implications. Basic classes in American civics teach that there are some fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican Party is driven by an ideological value that is primarily designed to help the wealthy to stay that way. The Democratic ideology is one that advocates for the worker and the lower echelon citizenry and their concerns. The connecting point and economic expression of these two opposing value systems is capitalism.

That gets us into murky waters when we start trying to sort through the details to discover the real differences between them. Therefore, it is important to revisit the foundational precepts of the two when faced with the daunting task of becoming informed voters of conscience. To do so serves as a clear reminder that the Democratic philosophy has a much nobler inherent character to which Christians should freely gravitate.

The types of decisions and policies that were enacted under previous administrations can be faulted in retrospect for failures on both sides. Corruption and compromise abounds in both political camps. It is hard for the average voter to sort through the many complexities of candidate records and positions. Sometimes it is even harder to finally make a choice that feels like anything other than picking the lesser of two evils.

Sadly, good Christians have been herded into the Republican camp by preachers, false prophets, and political hucksters who utilize a few hot button issues to capture their allegiance. These propagandists vilify and demonize liberal Democratic politicians because of positions taken on some of the most personal and private issues. Time has proven that neither party has much control over such matters in the legislative realm.

Now they find themselves blindly stuck in a quagmire. They have given their coveted blessing to a political party that exploits their vote. Endorsing tax cuts for the rich while championing a costly and unnecessary war compromises them. Current policies of the Republican Party are pushing citizens into poverty faster than in any other time in modern history. We are losing good jobs with benefits and there will be no minimum wage increase. The costs of energy and health care are ever escalating while social relief programs are drying up due to lack of funding. These are some of the consequences of just a few years of Republican dominance. The rich are getting richer while…well you know the rest of the cliché.

Christians played a pivotal role in the last election and gave Bush another term based on the hope that he might appoint some conservative judges to the high courts. It is interesting that people like Dr. James Dobson shriek about judicial activism and how wrong it is for liberal judges to legislate from the bench. Has anyone noticed that our current congress and president have not offered any significant legislation to bring the kinds of social correction that Dobson desires? They are essentially pinning all their hopes on judicial activism on the right. This kind of hypocrisy is not lost on the non-Christian onlookers.

I recall that all presidents in my lifetime have acknowledged some type of Christian faith. The current president is the first to politicize his claimed faith to such a great extent. He has essentially become the poster boy for the Religious Right.

Their belief is that he prays and in turn hears from God for important decisions. The policies that he has pursued do not in any way indicate that God has been leading him. They do however show a great consistency in support of the foundational ideology of the Republican Party. Every move is for the benefit of the rich at all costs. The whole planet and all of heaven looks on and sees this perverted expression of Christianity and are repulsed by it.

This mentality is far removed from the heart of God that is revealed in scripture. They embrace the little baby Jesus at Christmas and the dying and resurrected Christ at Easter, but give little thought to the life and teachings of Jesus in between. The primary quote of Jesus used by the Republicans has to do with the poor always being with us. They quote that verse in an attempt to deflect any call for helping the poor while overlooking the hundreds of verses that advocate for them.

The liberal Jesus challenged the rich to be generous with the poor. The liberal Jesus would much rather have the Beatitudes considered and embraced than public displays of the Ten Commandments. The liberal Jesus would not be arguing for the inclusion of God in the pledge of allegiance because He would find the whole concept of the pledge to be a shallow form of idolatry. The liberal Jesus is just as concerned for the welfare of the born as the unborn. The liberal Jesus said to render unto Caesar that which was Caesars when questioned about taxation.

Cutting taxes on the rich is the trademark of the Republican philosophy. Their whiny voices proclaim taxation to be the bane of democracy. Actually, our founding fathers opposed taxation without representation. The interests of the wealthy are by far the best represented in government while making up only two percent of the total population. They complain that they are unfairly penalized for working hard. They believe it is socialistic encroachment to take a portion of their earnings to fund programs for the poor and needy of our country. They never mention that they are still rich after taxes.

Republicans will never embrace the liberal positions that Christ advocated because there is seldom any way to make a profit from them. Only after a devastating hurricane does this president begin to address the issue of poverty. He does so with vague rhetorical generalities, but no real thought or planning is being brought forth because the problem is systemic. Solutions would require the abandonment of much of what is Republican.

Cronyism continues to be the modus operandi for this administration. No bid contracts for clean up and rebuilding a ruined Gulf Coast are already being reported. Money that was being spent a few years ago to improve the levees around New Orleans was diverted to rebuild the bombed out infrastructure in Iraq. Those levees broke in exactly the places where the work stopped. Now we hear grandiose plans spewing forth from Washington about rebuilding a glorious New Orleans and looking forward to basking on the porch of a new house for Trent Lott. The plan to pay for this will involve cutting funding for social programs that help the poor and elderly.

The fact that Christian leaders are not calling the policies of this government into righteous accountability is what troubles me the most. They went out on the limb with their endorsements and yet they still give this inept and misguided president carte blanche. Where is the voice of the true prophet? Why do they still blindly support him and his policies of greed and war?

They have become like all the other lobbyists that love their place dining at the table of political power. Never mind if their emperor has no clothes and little integrity. Never mind if his philosophies and policies are tight fisted toward the poor and generous to the rich. Never mind the vindictive actions taken against anyone that questions policy or dares to dissent. Never mind the radical departures from treaties and long held moral positions that ensure decent treatment for prisoners taken in war. The list is longer than I can bear to write.

It grieves me that there appears to be no turning in the deceived evangelical Christian leadership or their millions of followers. It leaves me wondering where I fit into this Christian expression in which I have so much vested interest. It has been suggested that I spend too much time and thought on matters that I can't really do anything about. At times I feel that way. Then a flicker of hope rises in my soul as I consider that ultimately Truth triumphs over lies and Justice triumphs over evil. This will happen with or without the endorsement and participation of the Religious Right.

I have to wonder. Does anyone in that vast multitude of Christians hear the voice of Jesus calling unto them to repent and turn away from the wicked pursuits of the greedy? Will any prophets arise to identify the sins of the king, the nation, and the Church?

Jesus prophesied that in the days prior to his return that deception would abound and the love of many of His followers would wax cold. There would be a great falling away. I am afraid this is the case. I conclude with one final question. Will the Church continue to be the lap dog of one political party or will it assume the position of becoming the watchdog of both? How this question is answered will greatly impact the future of America.

Gary Vance (gvance1@gmail.com) was licensed to preach as a Southern Baptist in 1976. Most of his years as a Christian have been spent in the ranks of the evangelical, fundamental, and charismatic church expressions. He currently pastors a small church in Tennessee.

. . . . .

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
.

Saundra Hummer

March 4th, 2006, 08:27 PM

FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH
New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death
Robert Collier,
Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, September 25, 2005

The battle between a grieving family and the U.S. military justice system is on display in thousands of pages of documents strewn across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in suburban San Jose.

As she pores through testimony from three previous Army investigations into the killing of her son, former football star Pat Tillman, by his fellow Army Rangers last year in Afghanistan, she hopes that a new inquiry launched in August by the Pentagon’s inspector general finally will answer the family’s questions:

Were witnesses allowed to change their testimony on key details, as alleged by one investigator? Why did internal documents on the case, such as the initial casualty report, include false information? When did top Pentagon officials know that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire, and why did they delay for five weeks before informing his family?

“There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman said. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army in March are heavily censored, with nearly every page containing blacked-out sections; most names have been deleted. (Names for this story were provided by sources close to the investigation.) At least one volume was withheld altogether from the family, and even an Army press release given to the media has deletions. On her copies, Mary Tillman has added competing marks and scrawls — countless color-coded tabs and angry notes such as “Contradiction!” “Wrong!” and “????”

A Chronicle review of more than 2,000 pages of testimony, as well as interviews with Pat Tillman’s family members and soldiers who served with him, found contradictions, inaccuracies and what appears to be the military’s attempt at self-protection.

For example, the documents contain testimony of the first investigating officer alleging that Army officials allowed witnesses to change key details in their sworn statements so his finding that certain soldiers committed “gross negligence” could be softened.

Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.

Unlike Cindy Sheehan — who has protested against President Bush because of the death of her son Casey in combat in Baghdad — Mary Tillman, 49, who teaches in a San Jose public junior high school, and her ex-husband, Patrick Tillman, 50, a San Jose lawyer, have avoided association with the anti-war movement. Their main public allies are Sen. John McCain, RAriz., and Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, who have lobbied on their behalf. Yet the case has high stakes because of Pat Tillman’s status as an all-American hero.

A football star at Leland High School in San Jose and at Arizona State University, Tillman was chosen Pac-10 defensive player of the year in 1997 and selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL draft the following spring.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Arizona State and graduated summa cum laude in 3 1/2 years with a 3.84 grade point average. Ever the student, Tillman not only memorized the playbook by the time he reported for the Cardinals’ rookie camp but pointed out errors in it. He then worked on a master’s degree in history while playing professional football.

His 224 tackles in a single season (2000) are a team record, and because of team loyalty he rejected a five year, $9 million offer from the St. Louis Rams for a one-year, $512,000 contract to stay with Arizona the next year.

Moved in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tillman decided to give up his career, saying he wanted to fight al Qaeda and help find Osama bin Laden. He spurned the Cardinals’ offer of a three year, $3.6 million contract extension and joined the Army in June 2002 along with his brother Kevin, who was playing minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization.

Pat Tillman’s enlistment grabbed the attention of the nation — and the highest levels of the Bush administration. A personal letter from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, thanking him for serving his country, now resides in a storage box, put away by Pat’s widow, Marie.

Instead of going to Afghanistan, as the brothers expected, their Ranger battalion was sent to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Tillmans saw combat several times on their way to Baghdad. In early 2004, they finally were assigned to Afghanistan.

Although the Rangers are an elite combat group, the investigative documents reveal that the conduct of the Tillmans’ detachment — A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — appeared to be anything but expert as it advanced through a remote canyon in eastern Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, on a mission to search for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in a village called Manah.

According to the files, when one of the humvees became disabled, thus stalling the mission, commanding officers split Tillman’s platoon in two so one half could move on and the other could arrange transport for the disabled vehicle. Platoon leader Lt. David Uthlaut protested the move as dangerous, but he was overruled. The first group was ordered out in the late afternoon, with Pat Tillman in the forward unit. Kevin’s unit followed 15 to 20 minutes later, hauling the humvee on an Afghan-owned flatbed truck. Both groups temporarily lost radio and visual contact with each other in the deep canyon, and the second group came under attack from suspected Taliban fighters on the surrounding ridges.

Pat Tillman, according to testimony, climbed a hill with another soldier and an Afghan militiaman, intending to attack the enemy. He offered to remove his 28-pound body armor so he could move more quickly, but was ordered not to. Meanwhile, the lead vehicle in the platoon’s second group arrived near Tillman’s position about 65 meters away and mistook the group as enemy. The Afghan stood and fired above the second group at the suspected enemy on the opposite ridge. Although the driver of the second group’s lead vehicle, according to his testimony, recognized Tillman’s group as “friendlies” and tried to signal others in his vehicle not to shoot, they directed fire toward the Afghan and began shooting wildly, without first identifying their target, and also shot at a village on the ridgeline.

The Afghan was killed. According to testimony, Tillman, who along with others on the hill waved his arms and yelled “cease fire,” set off a smoke grenade to identify his group as fellow soldiers. There was a momentary lull in the firing, and he and the soldier next to him, thinking themselves safe, relaxed, stood up and started talking. But the shooting resumed. Tillman was hit in the wrist with shrapnel and in his body armor with numerous bullets.

The soldier next to him testified: “I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat f—ing Tillman, dammit.” He said this over and over until he stopped,” having been hit by three bullets in the forehead, killing him.

The soldier continued, “I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was … I saw his head was gone.” Two other Rangers elsewhere on the mountainside were injured by shrapnel.

Kevin was unaware that his brother had been killed until nearly an hour later when he asked if anyone had seen Pat and a fellow soldier told him.

Tillman’s death came at a sensitive time for the Bush administration — just a week before the Army’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq became public and sparked a huge scandal. The Pentagon immediately announced that Tillman had died heroically in combat with the enemy, and President Bush hailed him as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.”

His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.

Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.

According to testimony, the first investigation was initiated less than 24 hours after Tillman’s death by an officer in the same Ranger battalion. His report, delivered May 4, 2004, determined that soldiers involved in the incident had committed “gross negligence” and should be appropriately disciplined. The officer became a key witness in the subsequent investigation. For reasons that are not clear, the officer’s investigation was taken over by a higher ranking commander. That officer’s findings, delivered the next month, called for less severe discipline.

The parents, protesting that many questions were left unanswered, found a sympathetic ear in McCain, who Mary Tillman later said was greatly admired by her son. Tillman was well known in Arizona because of his success there as a college and pro football player. McCain began to press the Pentagon on the family’s behalf, and a third probe finally was authorized. Its report was delivered in January.

The military is saying little publicly about the Tillman case. Most Army personnel who were involved in the Tillman incident or the investigations declined to comment publicly when contacted by The Chronicle. The inspector general’s press office also declined to comment, saying only that the new probe is openended.

Over the coming weeks, Pentagon investigators are scheduled to carry out new interviews with many of the soldiers, officers and others involved in the incident. As they carry out their reassessment, potentially controversial points include:

-- Conflicting testimony. In his Nov. 14, 2004, interrogation, the first investigator expressed frustration with “watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought … was a lesser of a punishment than what they should’ve received. And I will tell you, over a period of time … the stories have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals.”

The investigator testified that after he submitted his report on May 3, higher-ranking officers permitted soldiers to change key details of their testimony in order to prevent any individual from being singled out for punishment.

“They had the entire chain of command (inaudible) that were involved, the [deleted], all sticking up for [deleted] … And the reason the [deleted] called me in … because the [deleted] … changed their story in how things occurred and the timing and the distance in an attempt to stick up for their counterpart, implied, insinuated that the report wasn’t as accurate as I submitted it …” the first investigator testified.

In another section of his testimony, he said witnesses changed details regarding “the distance, the time, the location and the positioning” in Tillman’s killing.

Another disputed detail was whether the soldiers were firing while speeding down the canyon or whether they stopped, got out and continued shooting. In testimony in the third investigation, the soldiers said they did not stop. However, the medical examiner’s report said Tillman was killed by three bullets closely spaced in his forehead — a pattern that would have been unlikely if the shooter were moving fast. Spc. Russell Baer, a soldier pinned down by gunfire on the hillside near Tillman, said in an interview with The Chronicle that at least two soldiers had gotten out of the humvee to fire uphill. One other soldier confirmed this account to a Tillman family member.

One soldier dismissed by the Rangers for his actions in the incident submitted a statement in the third investigation that suggests the probe was incomplete: “The investigation does not truly set to rest the events of the evening of 22 April 2004. There is critical information not included or misinterpreted in it that could shed some light on who is really at fault for this,” he wrote.

-- Commanders’ accountability. According to the documents and interviews, Capt. William Saunders, to whom platoon leader Uthlaut had protested splitting his troops, was allowed to change his testimony over a crucial detail — whether he had reported Uthlaut’s dissent to a higher ranking commander. In initial questioning, Saunders said he had done so, but when that apparently was contradicted by that commander’s testimony, Saunders was threatened with perjury charges. He was given immunity and allowed to change his prior testimony.

The regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, was promoted to colonel two months after the incident, and Saunders, who a source said received a reprimand, later was given authority to determine the punishment of those below him. He gave administrative reprimands to six soldiers, including Uthlaut, who had been seriously wounded in the face by shrapnel in the incident. Uthlaut — who was first captain of his senior class at West Point, the academy’s highest honor — was dismissed from the Rangers and re-entered the regular Army.

“It seems grossly inappropriate that Saunders would determine punishment for the others when he shares responsibility for the debacle,” Mary Tillman said.

Baer told The Chronicle that commanding officers were to blame for the friendly fire because they split the platoon and ordered it to leave a secure location in favor of a region known as a Taliban stronghold.

“It was dumb to send us out during daylight,” said Baer, who was honorably discharged from the Rangers earlier this year and lives in the East Bay.

“It’s a well-known military doctrine that privates first learn going through basic training — if you are in enemy territory and you are stopped for a prolonged period of time, the best thing to do is to wait until nightfall. Why they thought that moving us out in broad daylight from our position, dragging a busted humvee slowly through a known hotspot after we had been stranded there all day was a good idea will forever elude me. Who made that decision? Bailey? Saunders? That’s what I want to know.”

-- Inaccurate information. While the military code gives clear guidance for informing family members upon a soldier’s death when cases are suspected of being a result of friendly fire, that procedure was not followed in the Tillman case. After Tillman’s death, the Army gave conflicting and incorrect descriptions of the events.

On April 22, the family was told that Tillman was hit with enemy fire getting out of a vehicle and died an hour later at a field hospital.

Although there was ample testimony that Tillman died immediately, an Army report — dated April 22, 2004, from the field hospital in Salerno, Afghanistan, where his body was taken — suggested otherwise. While it stated that he had no blood pressure or pulse “on arrival,” it stated that cardio pulmonary resuscitation had been conducted and that he was transferred to the intensive care unit for further CPR.

On April 23, all top Ranger commanders were told of the suspected fratricide. That same day, an Army press release said he was killed “when his patrol vehicle came under attack.”

On April 29, four days before Tillman’s memorial, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, and other top commanders were told of the fratricide. It is not known if Abizaid reported the news to Washington. Mary Tillman believes that with her son’s high profile, and the fact that Rumsfeld sent him a personal letter, the word quickly reached the defense secretary. “If Pat was on Rumsfeld’s radar, it’s pretty likely that he would have been informed right away after he was killed,” she said. White House, Pentagon and Army spokesmen all said they had no information on when Bush or Rumsfeld were informed.

On April 30, the Army awarded Tillman a Silver Star medal for bravery, saying that “through the firing Tillman’s voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground.”

On May 2, the acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee was told of the fratricide.

On May 7, the Army’s official casualty report stated incorrectly that Tillman was killed by “enemy forces” and “died in a medical treatment facility.”

On May 28, the Army finally admitted to Tillman’s family that he had been killed by friendly fire.

“The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said the father, Patrick Tillman. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels. This is not something that (lower-ranking) people in the field do,” he said.

The files show that many of the soldiers questioned in the inquiry said it was common knowledge that the incident involved friendly fire.

A soldier who on April 23 burned Tillman’s bullet riddled body armor — which would have been evidence in a friendly-fire investigation — testified that he did so because there was no doubt it was friendly fire that killed Tillman. Two days later, Tillman’s uniform and vest also were burned because they were soaked in blood and considered a biohazard. Tillman’s uniform also was burned.

The officer who led the first investigation testified that when he was given responsibility for the probe the morning after Tillman’s death, he was informed that the cause was “potential fratricide.’’

After they received the friendly-fire notification May 28, the Tillmans began a public campaign seeking more information. But it was only when the Tillmans began angrily accusing the Pentagon of a coverup, in June 2005, that the Army apologized for the delay, issuing a statement blaming “procedural misjudgments and mistakes.”

-- Legal liability. In testimony on Nov. 14, the officer who conducted the first investigation said that he thought some Rangers could have been charged with “criminal intent,” and that some Rangers committed “gross negligence.” The legal difference between the two terms is roughly similar to the distinction between murder and involuntary manslaughter.

The Tillmans demand that all avenues of inquiry remain open.

“I want to know what kind of criminal intent there was,” Mary Tillman said. “There’s so much in the reports that is (deleted) that it’s hard to tell what we’re not seeing.”

In Congress, pressure is building for a full public disclosure of what happened. “I am committed to continuing my work with the Tillman family to ensure that their concerns are being addressed,” said Rep. Honda. He added that he expects the investigation to do the following: “1) provide all factual evidence about the events of April 22, 2004; 2) identify the command decisions that contributed to Pat Tillman’s death; 3) explain why the Army took so long to reveal fratricide as the cause of Pat Tillman’s death; and 4) offer all necessary recommendations for improved procedures relating to such incidents.”

Patrick Tillman drily called the new Army probe “the latest, greatest investigation.” He added, “In Washington, I don’t think any of them want it investigated. They (politicians and Army officials) just don’t want to see it ended with them, landing on their desk so they get blamed for the cover-up.” The January 2005 investigation concluded that there was no coverup.

Throughout the controversy, the Tillman family has been reluctant to cause a media stir. Mary noted that Pat shunned publicity, refusing all public comment when he enlisted and asking the Army to reject all media requests for interviews while he was in service. Pat’s widow, Marie, and his brother Kevin have not become publicly involved in the case, and they declined to comment for this article.

Yet other Tillman family members are less reluctant to show Tillman’s unique character, which was more complex than the public image of a gung-ho patriotic warrior. He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”

Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”

Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.

Baer said Tillman was popular among his fellow soldiers and had no enemies. “The guys who killed Pat were his biggest fans,” he said. “They were really wrecked afterward.” He called Tillman “this amazing positive force who really brought our whole platoon together.

He had this great energy. Everybody loved him.” His former comrades and family recall Tillman as a born leader yet remarkably humble. White, the Navy SEAL, recalls one day when “some 19-year-old Ranger came and ordered him to cut an acre of grass.

And Pat just did it, he cut that grass, he didn’t complain. He could have taken millions of dollars playing football, but instead he was just taking orders like that.”

Mary Tillman says that’s how Pat would have wanted to be remembered, as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. But she also believes “Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”

For the moment, all that is left are the memories and the thick binders spread across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in San Jose. As she waits for the Pentagon investigators to finish their new probe, she wonders whether they will ask the hard questions. Like other family members, “I just want accountability,” she said. “I want answers.”

. . .

‘IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE’
That’s the lament of Mary Tillman, above, a teacher of special education in a San Jose public school. She has long pressed the Army to reopen its investigation into the friendly-fire killing of her son, Pat Tillman, in a canyon in Afghanistan on April 22, . The persistence of Mary Tillman and her former husband, Patrick Tillman, was rewarded when the Pentagon’s inspector general opened a new inquiry in August, the fourth such probe. Mary Tillman says she hopes questions created by discrepancies in past testimony will finally be answered.

. . .

STORY CHANGES OVER TIME
An officer in Pat Tillman's Ranger battalion who directed the first investigation into the soldier's death served as a witness on Nov. 14, 2004, in the third investigation, which was led by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones. The first investigator complained that the officers in charge of the second invest-

igation had allowed Rangers involved in the shooting to change their testimony.

. . . . .
THREAT OF PERJURY CHARGES
An excerpt from a March 3, 2005, memorandum by

Brig. Gen. Gary Jones describes how Capt. William Saunders, the commander of Pat Tillman's Ranger company, was threatened with perjury charges. Jones' memo said Saunders made false claims that he had informed his superiors that platoon commander Lt. David Uthlaut had protested orders given to him leading up to the incident. Despite this threat, Saunders was allowed to change his testimony and was granted immunity.

E-mail Robert Collier at: rcollier@sfchronicle.com.

Page A - 1
. . .
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL

Saundra Hummer

March 4th, 2006, 11:37 PM

. . . . . . .
Propaganda: America's Psychological Warriors
Published on Sunday, February 19, 2006
by the Seattle Times
by Floyd J. McKay

Aficionados of the movie "Casablanca" will recall the roguishly corrupt police inspector Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains, who upon "discovering" that gambling was taking place at Rick's club, proclaimed that he was "shocked, shocked."

You had to think of that when the White House announced that it, too, was "shocked" that a Pentagon contractor was bribing Iraqi journalists and posting propaganda in Iraqi newspapers without identifying the source.

The people "shocked, just shocked" were the same people who paid at least two American journalists to write pro-administration columns and produced for compliant local television stations so-called "news reports" that were nothing more than propaganda.

Nor, for that matter, should Congress or the nation's media be "shocked" by the employment of propaganda techniques that are at least as old as World War I, and have been employed by this and other governments since the advent of modern mass media.

This foolishness is small peanuts compared with torture of prisoners or unauthorized eavesdropping, abuses of power that this nation should really worry about.

The major problem with our clumsy propaganda efforts in Iraq is that they are not working, even in a part of the world where journalists are accustomed to being bullied or bought by those in authority.

In this climate, one can hardly blame American military commanders for trying to play by the same rules. Winning hearts and minds works better with a compliant press. But, to a remarkable degree, propaganda methods that have worked in the past have failed in Iraq. Ironically, the Bush administration has been more successful with propaganda aimed at the American people than against Arabs.

Propaganda on a massive, organized scale dates to World War I, and the lessons learned in the often-crude application of WWI propaganda are ingrained in the spin doctors of the electronic world.

At its root, propaganda plays on emotions, often defying reason and facts in order to reach into the psyche of the audience. Propaganda is a mind game — the skillful propagandist plays with your deepest emotions, exploiting your greatest fears and prejudices.

Propaganda researchers Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson define modern propaganda as "mass 'suggestion' or 'influence' through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual. Propaganda involves the dexterous use of images, slogans and symbols that play on our prejudices and emotions; it is the communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to 'voluntarily' accept this position as if it were his or her own."

Fear is the best weapon of the propagandist. Fear of another 9/11 attack is stated or embedded into nearly every message produced by the White House. Labeling is another weapon of choice for the propagandist. In World War I, Germans were Huns, Krauts and Boche. World War II produced Japs and Nips, and Vietnam brought us Gooks. Today's label, "terrorist," is seldom missing from White House speeches.

In World War I, German Americans were demonized and in World War II, Japanese Americans were placed in concentration camps. Islamic Americans often feel they are now in the propaganda bull's-eye.

Wartime propaganda inevitably plays on powerful symbols and images. The flag is unfurled, battlefield heroism extolled, and critics reviled as people who hate their country and its troops. Religion is frequently called upon — amazingly, God is always on our side.

Successful propaganda uses elementary tools such as labeling and fear-mongering and repeats a simple message over and over, until it is drilled into the heads of the audience. Once embedded, it often remains long after evidence has discredited it — witness the fact that millions of Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were connected, and an Iraqi was among the 9/11 terrorists.

Wartime propaganda is necessary to keep the home front involved and also to assure young men and women that killing is all right in a proper cause. We teach our children "Thou shalt not kill," but soldiers are trained to kill. Even professional soldiers must be helped to overcome their reluctance to kill. Propaganda reassures them and their families.

Is this wrong? Can propaganda ever be right or is it always a psychological force of evil? Call someone a propagandist, and images of Hitler and Goebbels appear. Yet, during World War II, which nearly every American supported, we used propaganda heavily at home and abroad and it helped the survival of freedom.

Today's conflicts are not always as clear-cut as Western democracy vs. Nazi genocide and Japanese militarism. A war on terror (a sure-fire label) is launched against an amorphous enemy of shadowy characters without a nation or an army. This war will never end (pity the president who announces victory the day before a bomb goes off). A nation constantly on edge will continue to believe much of what it is told, until and unless wolf is cried too many times, or the bearer of the warnings is found to be telling lies or half-truths — which are the marks of much propaganda.

Psychologists Pratkanis and Aronson suggest four stratagem of successful propaganda: 1) pre-persuasion, establishing a climate in which the message will be believed; 2) source credibility, a likable or authoritative communicator; 3) a message focused on simple, achievable goals; and 4) arousing emotions and providing a targeted response.

These stratagem worked for the Bush administration in America through the 2004 election, but the president's credibility is declining as Iraq drags on through its third year.

In Iraq, however, the four stratagems never worked.

Shortly after 9/11 but well before we invaded Iraq, the administration embarked on a "brand America" campaign in the Middle East. Leading advertising agencies were consulted and Charlotte Beers, a legendary Madison Avenue ad executive, was named undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Beers was only the latest propagandist attempting to penetrate the region. Our efforts date to at least the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, at the height of the Cold War, and they include secret funding of Arabic-language publications and bribery of journalists, basic tactics employed today in Iraq by a new generation of psychological warriors.

Beers relied on her experience in corporate public relations, in which a "brand identity" is selected and relentlessly pursued with attractive, simplistic messages that do not invite feedback. Americans are accustomed to this tactic. It works in the corporate world and all too often in politics.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, a massive campaign to sell America was launched, particularly targeting young Arabs. Feel-good images of Arab Americans and the widespread use of American pop music and MTV-style videos were broadcast while we were preparing to invade an Arab country.

But polling in the region showed U.S. standing at all-time lows. A frustrated Beers told Congress, "We only have one choice in the world of the Middle East and Southeast. We have to buy the media itself." We tried that, too, and polls showed no U.S. gains.

American propagandists were encouraged by some success in Afghanistan, where the lack of any real indigenous media gave the U.S. an open playing field, which it filled with American-subsidized media. The U.S. role was not disclosed. "We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity," the Army's top psychological operations officer told The New York Times. In Afghanistan, the lack of competition helps American-subsidized media sell the U.S.'s messages.

But Afghanistan is not an Arab state. In mid-December, the State Department ceased publication of the Arabic-language youth magazine "Hi," which had, like subsidized television, radio and newspapers, failed to attract a large Arab audience.

The unlucky Beers has been replaced by Karen Hughes, one of the president's closest confidantes. The Pentagon continues to spend millions on old, failed techniques. In the more-competitive media environment of post-Saddam Iraq, the U.S. has been unable to penetrate with a pro-democracy, good-news message. The Pentagon — after awarding tens of millions of dollars for a private contractor, Lincoln Group, to place pro-American propaganda — has now launched two investigations of the contractor.

Former Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Mahir last April described "a broader picture that makes it clear that the problem that the United States faces in the Arab and Muslim world cannot be tackled by exercises in public relations. It can only be addressed by a genuine change in policies and stands... ."

American propaganda in Iraq and the Middle East fails all of the four stratagem, most particularly that of credibility. We profess human rights but torture Islamic prisoners or imprison them for years in secret locations without charge. We talk democracy but support authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our thirst for oil raises suspicions of motive, as does our construction of huge military bases in Iraq. Most of all, Arabs see the U.S. as staunchly supportive of Israel's four-decade occupation of the West Bank Palestinian territories.

Even the most skillful propagandists in the world are working against what the Israelis call "facts on the ground." Our actions negate our words and feed the propaganda machines of those who would do us harm. In the Middle East it is they and not we who have credibility.

###

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0219-24.htm

. . .

I finally have most of the errors fixed on my posts. My computer was showing things very small here on AAJ and one other site, so I enlarged them. After few weeks, they showed up the normal size and my posts were humongous, and so I've been editing them, so forgive the little things out to the side, the font editing wraps. I will fix those if and when I can, but I'm almost through downsizing most of them, inch tall letters are way to big.
. . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 02:46 PM

David Sirota

03.04.2006

Tom Friedman Becomes America's Chief Revisionist Historian (57 comments )
READ MORE: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Iraq, New York Times, George W. Bush
Last week, I noted how so-called "liberal" pundits like Tom Friedman are desperately trying to distort the Dubai ports scandal so as to perpetuate the free trade orthodoxy they have spent so many years pushing. This week, we see the same dishonest behavior from Friedman when it comes to Iraq.In a column this week about the war, Friedman concludes by saying:

"A majority of Americans, in a gut way, always understood the value of trying to produce a democratizing government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. That is why there has been no big antiwar movement. Americans should, and will, stick with Iraq if they sense that Iraqis are on a pathway to building a decent, stable government. But Americans will not, and should not, baby-sit an Iraqi civil war. The minute they sense that's what's happening, you will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war."
There are so many lies and deliberate distortions in this paragraph it makes one's head spin.

First, Friedman's claim that the public has always supported the war because we "always understood the value" of pushing democracy in the Mideast. This is revisionist history at its worst, whereby Friedman, who loudly pushed the war and is now clearly embarrassed about that advocacy, is trying to paint a wholly fabricated picture of what happened in the lead up to the invasion. The war was sold by the Bush administration and pundits like Friedman as necessary to defuse an "imminent threat" of attack by Iraq. To this day, the public knows the "democracy" rationale is a lie. A Zogby poll released last week found that just 24% of Americans believe that "establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. That's not a majority, even by Friedman's dishonest standards.

Second, Friedman's claim that there is "no big antiwar movement" is just straight up lying. There's no way to couch it in any other term. Millions of people protested the invasion in towns throughout America and the world, and millions continue to vehemently oppose the neoconservative foreign policy that the Bush administration and Friedman espouse. Friedman doesn't want to acknowledge this reality because he is desperate to portray himself and his extremism as somehow mainstream when it is anything but.

Finally, and perhaps most dishonest of all, is Friedman's claim that if a civil war erupts in Iraq we "will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war" (emphasis added). What the hell is this guy talking about? What planet is he living on? Has he even bothered to actually look at the facts? I mean, really - we will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war? Last I checked, nearly every major poll from 2004 until the present has shown that public support for the Iraq War has evaporated. It seems the majority of people who continue to cheer on the war are ideologues like Friedman, who are scrambling to protect their own reputations and credibility after shamelessly pressing the country into Iraq in the first place. The fact that Friedman is still claiming that the public supports the war shows that he is either very comfortable lying in the pages of the New York Times, wholly divorced from reality - or both.

Now, you might say, so what? So what if a pundit like Tom Friedman is lying? He's just a columnist, right? Wrong. Friedman is not any old pundit - he is an agenda-setter. He is someone the insulated political class in Washington - especially Democrats - bows down to, regardless of how self-serving, inane or dishonest his pronouncements are. You can bet that the political chattering class in Washington read this column of his, and nodded its head in agreement - regardless of the fact that it has no relations to actual facts. When you understand this, you understand how dangerous Friedman and the pundit class really is - and you suddenly realize why the opposition party still has no real position on Iraq, and why our government's policies are so totally misguided and out of step with mainstream public opinion.

. . . . .

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/tom-friedman-becomes-amer_b_16762.html

. . .

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 03:15 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Dark Portrait of a 'Painter of Light'
Christian-themed artist Thomas Kinkade is accused of ruthless tactics and seamy personal conduct. He disputes the allegations.
By Kim Christensen, Times Staff Writer
March 5, 2006 Thomas Kinkade is famous for his luminous landscapes and street scenes, those dreamy, deliberately inspirational images he says have brought "God's light" into people's lives, even as they have made him one of America's most collected artists.

A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.
"When I got saved, God became my art agent," he said in a 2004 video biography, genteel in tone and rich in the themes of faith and family values that have helped win him legions of fans, albeit few among art critics.

But some former Kinkade employees, gallery operators and others contend that the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side.

In litigation and interviews with the Los Angeles Times, some former gallery owners depict Kinkade, 48, as a ruthless businessman who drove them to financial ruin at the same time he was fattening his business associates' bank accounts and feathering his nest with tens of millions of dollars.

Kinkade — whose solely owned Thomas Kinkade Co. is based in Morgan Hill, Calif. — denies these allegations.

Last month, however, a three-member panel of the American Arbitration Assn. ordered his company to pay $860,000 for defrauding the former owners of two failed Virginia galleries. That decision marks the first major legal setback for Kinkade, who won three previous arbitration claims. Five more are pending.

It's not just Kinkade's business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he's built his empire.

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.

Kinkade declined The Times' request for an interview but responded to written questions. He labeled those accounts of his personal behavior as "ridiculous" and "crazy allegations."

The artist and his lawyer, Dana Levitt, contend that Sheppard, a key witness in the arbitration cases against Kinkade and his company, is a disgruntled ex-employee, noting that he lost a wrongful termination claim against the artist's charitable foundations in 2004. They also deny the ex-dealers' allegations, which they say are driven by "lawyers playing the litigation lottery" and are "uncoupled from reality."

Kinkade, a self-described product of a broken home and a hardscrabble childhood, once worked as a film animator and hawked his paintings at supermarket parking lots in his hometown of Placerville, Calif. His climb to fame began two decades ago, when he and his wife spent their life savings to start making his prints.

Since then, Kinkade has spun a hugely lucrative career from his distinctly romantic, idealized images of street scenes, lighthouses, country cottages and landscapes. It is a world without sharp edges, all warm and fuzzily aglow with setting suns and streetlights and luminescent windows.

Critics have described Kinkade's works — with titles such as "Sunset on Lamplight Lane" and "The Garden of Prayer" — as little more than mass-produced kitsch. But that has not deterred the multitudes who pay from a few hundred dollars for paper prints to $10,000 or more for canvas editions he has signed and retouched.

"It's mainstream art, not art you have to look at to try to understand, or have an art degree to know whether it's good or not," said Mike Koligman, a longtime fan who with his wife owns Kinkade galleries in San Diego and Utah.

Karen de la Carriere feels the same way. Framed Kinkades fill her living room walls and have transformed a long hallway into a veritable gantlet of glowing lithographs. Kinkade's art is both a personal passion and a business for the Los Angeles resident, who deals in the resale market for Kinkades, selling more than $25,000 of his works each month on eBay and her website.

"This is God-given talent," she said of a favored print, "Sierra Evening Majesty," with its snowy peaks, red-gold skies and smoke wisping from a cabin chimney. "He is a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci or Monet. There is no one in our generation who can paint like that."

Nor many who make the money he does.

From 1997 through May 2005, Kinkade reaped more than $50 million in royalties from his prints and licensed product lines, according to testimony in the recently decided arbitration case. His images adorn air fresheners, night lights, teddy bears, toys, tote bags, pillows, umbrellas and La-Z-Boy loungers, which one retailer's ad describes as "something not merely to be acquired, but collected — like fine art itself."

As he built his brand, Kinkade also came to embody its underlying themes of faith, family and life's blessings. He speaks lovingly of his childhood sweetheart, Nanette — whom he married in 1982 — and their four daughters, calling his family "my proudest achievement in life."

Often, he embeds their initials or images in his paintings. Sometimes he joins them there.

"There's Thom on his Harley," a saleswoman at one of the original Kinkade galleries, on Monterey's Cannery Row, said as she showed a visitor a print of "San Francisco, Lombard Street." Hanging nearby was "New York, Fifth Avenue," with Thom and one of his daughters in a '57 Chevy convertible.

Such whimsy illustrates the lighter side of the Kinkade his supporters say is genial and genuine, a "regular guy" with small-town roots. He also has raised millions for charities, including the Salvation Army and Make-A-Wish Foundation.

But a far more selfish portrait of the artist emerges from legal action brought by former gallery owners against Kinkade, Media Arts Group Inc. — the public company he has since taken private — and some who helped build it into a $250-million-a-year retail juggernaut before its sales flagged and its stock tanked.

Ex-dealers allege that the artist used his faith — and manipulated theirs — to induce them to invest in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, independently owned stores licensed to deal exclusively in his work. They also contend he sought to devalue the company before buying it back two years ago for $32.7 million, renaming it Thomas Kinkade Co.

Company executives and lawyers contend that a steep drop in the number of Signature galleries, which have dwindled to fewer than half of the 350 that once existed, is a result of a broad decline in the limited-edition art business, hastened by the dot-com crash, a shrinking economy and the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Many dealers had the ability to weather the effects of the recession; some dealers did not," said Chief Executive Dan Byrne.

But such arguments failed to persuade the arbitration panel, which on Feb. 23 ruled in favor of the former Virginia gallery owners, Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello.

The panel found that the company and one of its executives, Richard F. Barnett, defrauded the couple by failing to disclose pertinent information that would have dissuaded them from investing $122,000 to open the first of their two galleries in 1999.

The interim award of $860,000, based on a decision that Kinkade's lawyer said he would seek to void, could quadruple when interest, legal fees and other costs are added, said the former dealers' Michigan lawyer, Norman Yatooma, whose firm is also handling the five pending arbitration claims.

Kinkade himself has been dismissed from the Hazlewood-Spinello claim, so obligation for payment of the award would fall to his solely owned company, and to Barnett, said Yatooma's associate, Joseph Ejbeh.

Though the panel did not single out the artist in its fraud finding, it wrote that he and other Media Arts Group executives had created "a certain religious environment designed to instill a special relationship of trust" with the couple, who have since divorced. The company, communicating through Kinkade and the others, often used terms such as "partner," "trust," "Christian" and "God" to convey a sense of "higher calling," the panel wrote.

Although Kinkade has said he does not market specifically to Christians, his limited-edition canvas prints bear the familiar Christian fish symbol and are inscribed with a biblical reference, "John 3:16." He also is fond of quoting Matthew 5:16 — "Let your light shine before men" — at times sounding more evangelist than artist.

"I love to talk about my faith," he said in a deposition. "I try to embrace people with love, unconditional love, like Christ did."

Former dealer Jim Cote said he was hard-pressed to feel the love. He has filed an arbitration claim, alleging among other things that he was a victim of Media Arts Group's pressure to saturate the market.

"In the beginning it was fine," said Cote, of Birmingham, Mich., who opened his first Signature gallery in 1996. "Sales were great because Thom at that point was very popular and there were limited outlets to buy his art."

But as time went on, Cote alleges, Media Arts Group pushed him to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own outlets in his territory. Cote eventually had three stores, all of which failed.

"This is not bread and milk," he said. "You can't have galleries on every corner."

Cote said his net worth of more than $3 million had been erased. Gone are his marriage, his house and most of his possessions. He doesn't blame his divorce entirely on his galleries' failure, he said, but "it certainly didn't help."

He shut his last store in December and has filed for bankruptcy protection.

"At this point, I've got a dog and an apartment, and that's it," Cote said. "This is not where I thought I'd be at 56."

Kinkade's lawyers deny Cote's allegations.

As Hazlewood, Spinello, Cote and other Signature gallery owners were faltering, the company's stock plummeted from a high of nearly $25 a share to less than $3. Former dealers allege that Kinkade allowed them to sink in order to drive down the stock price, so he could buy back the company at a bargain basement price — a charge the artist and his lawyer said was absurd.

"There was no conspiracy to shoot ourselves in the foot," Kinkade testified in the arbitration case that was just decided. "Nobody wanted to hurt the dealers."

Kinkade, who co-founded the company as Lightpost Publishing in 1989 and took it public in 1994, bought it back in 2004 for $4 a share. Investors who had put their faith and their fortunes in the Painter of Light — a moniker he trademarked — were left holding a mostly empty bag.

"I took a bloodbath, an absolute bloodbath," said De la Carriere, the Los Angeles art dealer, who said she invested her inheritance in Media Arts Group stock at more than $20 a share.

But even as the company ran aground, Kinkade and others in top positions prospered, according to testimony.

From 1997 through May 2005, Kinkade earned $53 million for his work, the company's assistant controller testified. That figure includes $11.8 million from top-of-the-line "studio proofs," small-edition canvas prints that Kinkade personally retouched, or "highlighted"— with as much as 65% of the profit going to him.

Kinkade wasn't the only one who got rich.

Barnett, then head of retail sales and now an executive vice president, also made millions as the Signature galleries were failing. Unbeknownst to the dealers, he reaped commissions on all art sold to them at wholesale, averaging more than $2 million a year for 1999, 2000 and 2001, according to testimony.

The arbitration panel found that the company and Barnett, who ran a training program for prospective gallery owners known as Thomas Kinkade University, "painted an unrealistic and misleading picture of the prospects for success" and never warned potential investors of the inherent risks.

"We were told success story after success story, and of course the 'Thom story' and his Christian views and the way he runs his life," Spinello told the arbitration panel in late 2004.

Just as it has revealed the inner workings of Kinkade's business, the dealer litigation also has delved into his personal conduct, which witnesses testified was often at odds with the God-fearing image he projected.

In testimony and interviews with The Times, Sheppard and other former employees said they often went with Kinkade to strip clubs and bars, where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control.

John Dandois, Media Arts Group's senior director of retail operations from 1995 to 1999, testified in a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.

"Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn't tell where the boundary was," he said. "And then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff."

Dandois, who left the company to become chief executive of a group of galleries owned by Kinkade's brother, Patrick, recounted that about six years ago the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas that people seated nearby moved away from him.

"I think it was Roy or Siegfried or whatever had a codpiece in his leotards," Dandois testified. "And so when the show started, Thom just started yelling, 'Codpiece, codpiece,' and had to be quieted by his mother and Nanette."

At other times, Kinkade could be downright nasty, Dandois testified, recalling an incident in which Dandois' wife tried to help the allegedly inebriated artist to his feet in a bar.

"He had been falling down, and he fell off the stool, and he was laying on the ground and just looked up at her and flipped her the bird and told her, you know, just to 'F you' several times," Dandois testified.

In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s for the artist's appearance on the "Hour of Power" television show at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. On the eve of the broadcast, Sheppard said, he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking. As they walked to their rooms, according to Sheppard and another person who was there, Kinkade veered toward a nearby figure of a Disney character.

"Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to 'mark his territory,' " Sheppard told The Times.

In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he "grew up in the country" where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said it might have happened.

"There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don't recall it," he said.

Kinkade's memory also was fuzzy when he was asked during the arbitration proceedings about a signing party in Indiana that went awry in August 2002.

Held at a South Bend hotel, the party began sedately enough as Kinkade met with a group of Signature gallery owners to sign stacks of prints. Some who were there say it was a goodwill gesture by the artist to smooth relations with dealers, who could sell the signed pieces at a premium.

After the larger group dispersed, Kinkade and others moved to a smaller room for a private signing with Michigan gallery owner Cote and some of his employees. Champagne was served, then hard liquor. By various accounts, most of the partyers overindulged, including Kinkade and Cote.

At one point, according to testimony and interviews with Cote and three others who were there, Kinkade polled the men in the room about their preferences in women's anatomies.

"He was having a conversation with the men in the room about whether they like breasts or butts," said Lori Kopec, Cote's director of gallery operations, who also testified about the party. "There were only two women in the room, and I was very uncomfortable at that point."

It was during that bawdy discussion, according to arbitration records, that Kinkade turned his attention to the other woman.

"He approached [her] and he palmed her breasts and he said, 'These are great tits!' " Ernie Dodson, another Cote employee, told The Times, adding that he drank no alcohol that night. "I was just standing in the corner in amazement. It was like, holy cow!"

The woman whom Kinkade allegedly fondled confirmed to The Times that he touched her breasts without her consent. She spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she was embarrassed and concerned for her family's privacy.

Cote and Kopec said they also saw the alleged groping.

"She let out a yelp and backed away," Kopec said. "That's when I knew he had actually touched her."

Kinkade testified in a deposition that excessive drinking and "some normal rowdy talk" had taken place, but when confronted with the groping allegation, he denied touching the woman.

"But you've got to remember," he said, "I'm the idol to these women who are there. They sell my work every day, you know. They're enamored with any attention I would give them. I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night."

In response to The Times' written questions, Kinkade did not address any specific incident.

"It does disappoint me when people I have tried to help and befriend make crazy allegations about me," he said. "I am a big fan of imagination, but the specific allegations you have described to me are ridiculous and I feel like the victim of a legal stalker."

He described himself as "an average, hard-working guy who just happens to be a famous artist" and said he didn't take himself too seriously.

In the recent arbitration case, he also testified that he had never claimed to be perfect.

"Book of Ecclesiastes says enjoy yourself, have a glass of wine, for this is God's will for you," he said. "It's never consistent with God's will that we behave in a sinful way; however, God also loves us and accepts us and understands that at times we have our failings."
. . . . .
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

Artist at work
(Karen de la Carriere)
March 5, 2006
click to enlarge

Claimant
(Jeffrey Sauger / For The Times)
March 5, 2006
click to enlarge (go on-site for links) Just click the links below to go there.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-kinkade5mar05,0,3770067.story?page=2&track=tothtml[/INDENT][/I][/SIZE]

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 03:23 PM

Murtha: The ‘Only People Who Want Us in Iraq’ are Iran, al Qaeda, and China Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) today on CBS’s Face the Nation:
Let me tell you, the only people who want us in Iraq is Iran and al-Qaeda. I’ve talked to a top-level commander the other day, it was about two weeks ago, and he said China wants us there also. Why? Because we’re depleting our resources — our troop resources and our fiscal resources.

Murtha’s concerns are grounded in fact. The war in Iraq has allowed a historic expansion of Iranian influence westward, created a new haven and terrorist training ground for al Qaeda, and strained our military into a “‘thin green line‘ that could snap unless relief comes soon.”

UPDATE: Crooks & Liars has the video.http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/05.html#a7402

Full transcript below:

MURTHA: The public is way ahead of what’s going on in Washington. They no longer believe it. The troops themselves, 70 percent of the troops said we want to come home within a year. The only solution to this is to redeploy. Let me tell you, the only people who want us in Iraq is Iran and al-Qaeda. I’ve talked to a top-level commander the other day, it was about two weeks ago, and he said China wants us there also. Why? Because we’re depleting our resources, our troop resources and our fiscal resources.

SCHIEFFER: Now, Congressman, when you say al-Qaeda wants us there, why would al-Qaeda want us there?

MURTHA: Because we’re depleting our resources. A very small proportion of what’s going on in Iraq — they’ve diverted their attention away from the war on terrorism. The war on terrorism is worldwide. In Iraq, it’s a civil war. We have diverted ourselves away from that war on terrorism. Filed under: Iraq
Posted by Nico at 12:16 pm

Permalink | Comment (83)

83 Comments » Go on-site to read comments by views and to see the video.

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 04:09 PM

~ . ~ . ~
Europe's Muslims divided in wake of cartoon furor

World > Europe
from the
March 06, 2006 edition

PHOTO: GO ON-SITE TO VIEW:CONTROVERSIAL: Danish MP Naser Khader (c.), who exhorts fellow Muslims to embrace democratic values, is seen as a sell-out by many immigrants.
KELD NAVNTOFT/REUTERS

By James Brandon | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

LONDON – As protests against the Danish cartoons fade, Europe's moderate Muslims are facing difficult choices about their faith, identity, and values.
"The middle ground in Muslim communities is between a rock and a hard place," says Omar Shah, an Afghan-Danish commentator on Muslim affairs. "The moderate majority is having to decide where they stand." During a month of flag-burning protests in Europe against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the voices of Islamic radicals were the loudest. As the flames die down,however,it is increasingly clear that the cartoon affair has reignited difficult debates within Europe's 20-million-strong Muslim community. Though radical organizations have gained strength, new "progressive" Muslim groups are beginning to challenge traditional ideas.

In Denmark, where the cartoons were first published, Muslims who want to live in a pluralistic, secular, and tolerant Danish society have formed a new group to publicize their ideals.

"We want to use this group to tell ordinary Danes that we are also Danes first and foremost, " says Fathi El-Abed, a spokesman for the group, Democratic Muslims. " We want to [tell them], 'We are democratic just like you - the only thing different is that we come from a Muslim background.' "

"I have been in Denmark for 17 years but I was not part of the integration debate because I just thought that everything would work out," says Mr. El-Abed, who is of Palestinian origin. "But since this crisis came, I decided that I can no longer allow others to speak on my behalf ... many others are in the same position."

The new group's leader, Naser Khader, a Syrian-born Social Democrat MP and self-described "cultural Muslim," is already a well-known figure in Danish politics. His fame stems partly from his "Ten Commandments of Democracy," which include a strict separation of religion and politics, unreserved support for freedom of expression, and a rejection of violence.

"Danes see him as a role model - as the ideal Muslim - but many immigrants see him as a sell-out," says Mr. Shah. "A lot of them see [him] as someone attacking Islam. And some of them really despise him actually."

In Britain, meanwhile, the new Progressive British Muslims group defended newspapers' right to publish drawings of the prophet. "Although it is forbidden for Muslims to pictorially display the Prophet Mohammed, it should be remembered that living in a pluralistic and secular society Muslims cannot expect those who do not follow Islam to respect its boundaries," said their spokesman, Dr. Shaaz Mahboob, in a statement.

As moderate Muslim groups have begun to organize more aggressively, so, too, have radical groups.After months of keeping a low profile following the London bombings, Britain's most prominent radical group - Al-Gharabaa - reemerged to protest outside the Danish embassy, demanding the murder of the cartoonists.

"This rally was a way for them to reassert themselves within the Muslim community," says Abdulrahman Malik, contributing editor of the Muslim news magazine Q News. "They are trying to regain the ground they had lost."

The group used the publicity to attack multiculturalism and integration, and to reach out to Muslims disillusioned with life in the West.

Anjem Choudhary, the group's spokesman, also attacked mainstream groups like the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), who try to work with the British government to promote their agendas.

"The MCB and the MAB don't represent anyone apart from themselves," said Mr. Choudhary. "They are the lackeys of Blair's government. If the MCB held a demonstration how many people would come? Nobody."

Across London, Choudhary's group has since become more visible. One Saturday last month in East London, three members of Al-Ghurabaa were openly recruiting new members on a busy shopping street.

"We say to the West you are not allowed to dictate to us what we say," explains a young man, Ali, as his colleagues hand out brochures on Islam to non-Muslims. For Muslims, he had pamphlets such as "Joining the Police: contribution or apostasy?"

"Whatever our religion allows us to say we'll say it," Ali adds, as his colleague quietly hides a stack of leaflets reading, "Kill those who insult the Prophet." The three volunteers estimate they've handed out more than 500 leaflets that morning, with many people stopping to talk to them.

In an effort to compete with groups like Al-Ghurabaa, mainstream groups in Britain have become more radical.

"If you insist on stepping on us, it's not peace you get. Let it be understood - don't mess with the prophet," the MAB's Dr. Azzam Tamimi thundered during a rally in London's Trafalgar Square last month.

Such inflammatory talk might be expected to lead many Muslims toward the progressive organizations. But even non-practicing Muslims are often wary of groups led by people like Khader, who criticize not just extremists but traditional Islamic practices, says Shah.

"All these groups who call themselves progressive are just marginal at the moment," concludes Malik. "But they are a voice that needs to be heard ... only time will tell if they turn out to be significant."
. . . . .
Related Stories
Opinion: Behind the cartoon war: radical clerics competing for followers 02/23/06
Opinion: Why American newspapers should publish the cartoons 02/23/06
Muslim Americans split on cartoons 02/09/06

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0306/p04s01-woeu.html . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 06:00 PM

A Must Read
. . . . . . . . . . . .
If It Can Happen To Journalists,
What Will Our Fate Be For Voicing Our Concerns,
Our Dissent?
SRH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gergen: Bush worst than Nixon on Secrecy

David Gergen appeared on "Reliable Sources," this morning and said this administration is trying to put journalists in jail. Lock em' all up. More intimidation and attack the messenger tactics that the apologists are so fond of to defend the White House. Except of course-when the leak is really helpful... Video-WMP Video-QT (hat tip David Edwards)
(Thanks to Reliable Sources for the transcript)

KURTZ: ... and that is the story on the front page of this morning's "Washington Post" about White House effort to stem leaks. And it talks about the administration, the Bush administration, having launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. These involve federal employees being questioned on "The New York Times" story about the national security wiretaps, on the "Washington Post" story about secret CIA prisons, Valerie Plame, all of that.

Do you -- you have been on both sides of this fence. Do you see this as an administration that really is going after journalists, or just legitimately trying to stem the flow of classified information leaking out to the press?

GERGEN: I am glad you brought that up. This administration has engaged in secrecy at a level we have not seen in over 30 years. Unfortunately, I have to bring up the name of Richard Nixon, because we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon. And now what they're doing -- and they're using the war on terror to justify -- is they're starting to target journalists who try to pierce the veil of secrecy and find things and put them in the newspapers.

Now, in the past what the government has always done is go after the people who leak, the inside people. That's the way they try to stop leaks. This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said -- and Porter Goss said this to Congress -- that we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things to...bring them up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't -- in effect, if they don't reveal their sources.

TMV:

"The goal in all instances was to plug leaks. But in retrospect most of the time these leaks were published in the press it turned out that government did indeed have things to hide — and the information that had been hid under classification had been information that was embarrassing to the government, showing either miscalculations or that the public had been mislead...read on

ReddHedd:

"Given the stories on the White House efforts to go after leakers who make them look bad or expose illegal activites on the part of the President -- but selectively fail to really take their own selective leaking seriously (hello -- Dick Cheney can declassify whatever the hell he feels like, even though that's not what the law says?) -- I'd say that's certainly a topic worth some serious public discussion....read on

FROM A BLOG: MORE ON MURTHA AND GERGEN
Crooks and Liars has some video clips up from today's Sunday morning gabfests. All I can say is "ouch."

First, there is this clip from Rep. John Murtha's appearance on Face the Nation:The public is way ahead of what’s going on in Washington. They no longer believe it. The troops themselves, 70 percent of the troops said we want to come home within a year. The only solution to this is to redeploy. Let me tell you, the only people who want us in Iraq is Iran and al-Qaeda. I've talked to a top-level commander the other day, it was about two weeks ago, and he said China wants us there also. Why? Because we’re depleting our resources, our troop resources and our fiscal resources.
Murtha comes across as not only very credible, but also as caring about the lives of our troops, the consequences of the horrible choices made by the Bush Administration, and as having some serious sources at high levels in the military who are having the same concerns. Perhaps because all of that is true -- you can really feel the anger on behalf of the nation and its men and women in uniform coming off Murtha in waves, can't you? Boo yah.

Crooks and Liars also has a clip from David Gergen's appearance on Reliable Sources this morning, and it is really a doozy. (Thanks to Nate for the heads up on this -- I e-mailed John Amato to see if he could pull the clip, and he was already working on it. I swear, how did we survive before C&L?) Anyway, Gergen said the following:
This administration has engaged in secrecy at a level we have not seen in over 30 years. Unfortunately, I have to bring up the name of Richard Nixon, because we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon. And now what they're doing -- and they're using the war on terror to justify -- is they're starting to target journalists who try to pierce the veil of secrecy and find things and put them in the newspapers.

Now, in the past what the government has always done is go after the people who leak, the inside people. That's the way they try to stop leaks. This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said -- and Porter Goss said this to Congress -- that we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things to...bring them up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't -- in effect, if they don't reveal their sources.
Given the stories on the White House efforts to go after leakers who make them look bad or expose illegal activites on the part of the President -- but selectively fail to really take their own selective leaking seriously (hello -- Dick Cheney can declassify whatever the hell he feels like, even though that's not what the law says?) -- I'd say that's certainly a topic worth some serious public discussion.

See more at the WaPo and the NYTimes. Glenn also discusses this issue on his blog this morning, and it is worth a read as well.

Can someone explain to me how the Bush Administration expects anyone to take them seriously on this matter when Karl Rove still works in the West Wing with his security clearance intact after admitting to discussing Valerie Plame Wilson with two reporters?

When you use the laws to punish your critics -- even to the point of abusing this to try to silence whistleblowers -- yet you fail to punish your allies for illegal behavior that violates national security regulations...well, you don't really expect to have any credibility at all, do you? And to threaten journalists with jail for printing true information on how the Bush Administration may be breaking the law -- well, all I can say is that Stalin would be awfully proud, wouldn't he?

It's getting ugly in Washington for George Bush. And its about damn time -- if ever a President earned scorn and disgust, it is this one.

(As a kid, I loved Wile E. Coyote and his Acme gadgets of doom. His repeated failures were funny in Saturday morning cartoons -- but the repeated failures and poor choices of the Bush Administration aren't so funny. Thought everyone could use a laugh this morning. Chuck Jones was a genius, pure and simple.)

posted by ReddHedd @ 10:35 AM

SECOND
- THERE IS THIS -
WOW ! ! !
BILL KRYSTAL OF ALL PEOPLE
WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE ?
HERE'S THE CLINCHER
IT WAS ALL ON FOX

THINK PROGRESS made a great catch from this morning's Fox News Sunday, and I wanted to take a moment this morning to talk about the potential implications of Bill Kristol's pronouncement of the Bush Administration as incompetent.

Here's Kristol's quote:
I think it’s become in people’s minds an emblem of the administration that just isn’t as serious about the competent execution of the functions of government as it should be. And even — I’m struck talking to conservatives and Republicans — they agree with the president on basic political philosophy, the they agree with his basic policy agenda, but they are worried that they just don’t seem to be able to execute as well as they should be. (emphasis mine)
That Kristol was saying this on Fox this morning is telling of a couple of things: the Republican party establishment is now worried that President Bush has become a drag on the entire party, and that he poses a serious problem for them in the upcoming mid-term elections in the Fall; and that someone has sanctioned Kristol talking about this on air on Fox.

Which leads me to a whole host of questions:

-- Is this evidence that Dick Cheney is not going quietly into the night but, instead, is using Kristol as pushback by proxy against Rove's attempt to throw him under the bus as an Administration sacrifice to the possibility of better poll numbers via a new VP nomination? As close as Kristol has been with Cheney's neocon cabal, it's certainly possible. But Cheney's power is at a low ebb at the moment, and I have to wonder if Kristol -- who has been opportunist in the past -- would stick his neck out for Cheney against Rove, without some reasonable expectation that Cheney had an ace up his sleeve. (Or that, perhaps, Rove might be looking more closely at an indictment than we've publicly heard. Or something to that effect.)

-- Is this some Rovian machination to distance the President from Congress and the Republican party while his popularity is so far down, in an effort to salvage every vote they can for the mid-terms to try to maintain the Republican strangle-hold on Congress? And, if so, wonder what the President thinks of Turdblossom having a surrogate call him incompetent on Faux News as a political ploy? Ego versus tactics -- wonder which one wins out in Bush's mind?

-- Is this Kristol expressing fears of members of Congress and the Republican party, rather than having anything to do with the Administration? Are members of Congress and old guard Republicans -- including the money that backs the party's machine -- ready to throw Bushie under the bus? In other words, has he gone from lame duck status straight to political road kill?

-- Is Kristol just not getting the Administration love any longer, and he's decided to take it out on them by smacking them around while the President is out of town? I mean, really, everyone else is smacking him around these days, why shouldn't Kristol get in a swipe to build up his "honest broker" credentials (**cough**)...after all, there's another election coming up and Kristol needs to keep that pundit gig.

-- Is this another salvo of the Team McCain in 2008 campaign?

Judd makes a great point in his post:
Kristol is right, and it’s a dynamic that makes policy debates almost irrelevant. Even if the administration were to stumble onto a policy that would improve things, it’s highly unlikely the people in charge would be able to execute the policy effectively.
Maybe the Katrina video is resonating in the internal Republican polling numbers more than we thought. In any case, whatever the answers to these questions, it's stacking up to be an interesting week.. . . . .
posted by ReddHedd @ 8:35 AM

http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006_03_05_firedoglake_archive.html#11415839213736 9177

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 06:18 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

Eugene Debs : 16 June 1918: The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison:
~

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 06:25 PM

.
World in peril, Chomsky tells overflow crowd

By
Brian Liberatore
Press & Sun-Bulletin 03/05/06 "Press & Sun-Bulletin " -- --There are dire consequences to the current direction of the U.S. foreign policy, said Noam Chomsky in a speech Saturday at Binghamton University. Among those consequences, he said, is a nuclear Armageddon.
"Under the current U.S. policies, a nuclear exchange is inevitable," the 77-year-old MIT professor said in his presentation, "Imminent Crises: Paths Toward Solutions." He spoke to an over-capacity crowd in BU's Osterhout Concert Theater.

Chomsky cited nuclear proliferation and environmental collapse as the two greatest crises that "literally threaten survival."

Since the 1960s Chomsky, a widely acclaimed professor of linguistics, has crusaded against political contradiction, nuclear proliferation and Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Regarded by many as the greatest intellectual alive today and dismissed by others as a radical, Chomsky has voiced harsh criticism against the foreign policy of the United States since World War II.

About 1,500 people crammed into the main theater, while a television broadcast the speech to a room of about 500 next door. Ushers were forced to turn hundreds of people away as the building filled beyond its capacity.

Asked whether he had anticipated the number of people, the building's operations director, Darryl Wood, responded, "Not this many, no."

Inside the theater, Chomsky delivered an account of the world's ills. He addressed the history of the Iraq conflict, the unrest it has fostered, and Iran's intentions for nuclear armament - a path, he said, that is directly tied to U.S. aggression in the Middle East. Chomsky outlined a course of action. "All of this is under our control if we're not willing to observe passively and obediently," he said. "Take democracy seriously."

Peter Klotz drove two hours from Siena College in Loudonville to see the professor. "He knows what he's talking about," Klotz said. "His ideas are certainly not new, but he presents things in a very concise manner."

John Hamilton, who drove from Ithaca to see Chomsky, stood up to ask a question during the question-and-answer period following Chomsky's speech. "My question is, what do you find hopeful?" Hamilton said.

"I think one should be very optimistic for the reasons I just mentioned," Chomsky said. "The large majority of the population already agrees with the things activists are committed to. All we have to do is organize people who are convinced."
. . .
© 2006 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comments (7) | Trackback (0)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12208.htm

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 06:59 PM

03.05.2006
Russert Watch: Smokin' The Good Stuff (16 comments )
READ MORE: Iraq, Tim Russert, Dick Cheney, 2006, Washington Post, Hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security, George W. Bush
The disconnect between reality and the dialog on this morning's Meet the Press was so acute I thought the dog had chewed the remote once again and tuned me in to Mystery Science Theater 3000. LOTS OF LINKS ON-SITE, WITH MUCH MORE TO THE BLOGS, ETC.
First up was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace who seems to be the only man in America who thinks things are going, and I quote, "very, very well" in Iraq.

He believes the only problem is the bad rap being given to to the war by a media obsessed with dwelling on the negative:
"I don'’t think we'’re getting the goodness out to the American people the way we should. Somehow we need to find a way to have balance in the amount of reporting that we're able to get out."
Pace then takes a detour into Bizarroworld and declares that the militias "are not a long term problem," poo-poohs the notion of escalating violence and impending civil war and takes heart in the active participation of the Iraqi people in fighting the insurgency:
MR. RUSSERT: General, many observers -- objective observers say that you cannot have an insurgency this robust without being enabled by the population. Now, Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic, who'a supporter of the war, said that he wrote on a story of a young man that called emergency line 130 to report insurgents shooting mortars; no one answered the line. And then he said you don'’t do it again because if you call that emergency line, insurgents get a hold of your phone number and come kill you.

GEN. PACE: Think about the two things that you said. One -- one was that they'’re being supportive, and another is fear. I believe it's the fear factor, not the support factor. The tip line last March was getting about 400 tips per month. Now it'’s upwards of 4,000 tips per month that are coming in from Iraqi citizens telling their government and telling us where -- —where problems are.

So the ten-fold increase in tips about insurgent violence is, you see, something to be encouraged by. It's not the result of an increase in the violence per se, it's because the Iraqi people have just become a lot more enthusiastic about helping out.

While others were happy to dunk their fingers in the purple ink, General Pace seems to have immersed his entire head. He's now Lizzie Grubman with oak-leaf clusters.

Next up, Russert had Jack Kemp and John Edwards who safely avoided almost every substantive development in the issues they were invited on to discuss. Father Tim broke out one of his patent-pending "gotcha, Democrat" moments on John Edwards because he -- like the majority of Americans -- has had a change of heart over his early support for the war. Edwards appeared quite surprised that this should be a cause for so much Timmeh triumphalism.

No doubt it secured Russert's invitation to this week's Cheney chili cook-out.

Then began the contortionist twists around the subject of the Dubai Ports World deal. Jack Kemp gave off merging into the wallpaper to announce that despite the fact that overwhelming numbers of Americans oppose the deal, their concern is undue because many US ports were already being operated by companies with ties to Communist China.

One wonders how he imagines the GOP base and the Reagan Republicans will find this comforting.

John Edwards then opined that the solution is to award the contracts to American companies and everyone spent a great deal of time talking about what boon companions we have in the United Arab Emirates. The successful avoidance of any discussion about the legitimate fears harbored by most Americans with regard to the deal was quite a feat.

Those fears were well articulated by Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Weisman, writing in the Washington Post:

Joseph King, who headed the customs agency's anti-terrorism efforts under the Treasury Department and the new Department of Homeland Security, said national security fears are well grounded.

He said a company the size of Dubai Ports World would be able to get hundreds of visas to relocate managers and other employees to the United States. Using appeals to Muslim solidarity or threats of violence, al-Qaeda operatives could force low-level managers to provide some of those visas to al-Qaeda sympathizers, said King, who for years tracked similar efforts by organized crime to infiltrate ports in New York and New Jersey. Those sympathizers could obtain legitimate driver's licenses, work permits and mortgages that could then be used by terrorist operatives.

Dubai Ports World could also offer a simple conduit for wire transfers to terrorist operatives in the Middle East. Large wire transfers from individuals would quickly attract federal scrutiny, but such transfers, buried in the dozens of wire transfers a day from Dubai Ports World's operations in the United States to the Middle East would go undetected, King said.

It's no surprise Kemp didn't bring this up -- the GOP, having pushed every button they could find to convince the country that Arabs=terrorists are now having a hard time splitting hairs between "good Arabs" and "bad Arabs." And Tim -- well he's got a fever for Lynne's chili, he's not going to risk it.

But what does Edwards have to lose? Is he afraid that the "racist" grenade will be lobbed at him by people who've never given a happy hootie about civil rights as anything other than something to crush in the consolidation of their base? I'm guessing not, because the conversation then segues into Hurricane Katrina and Edwards appears to be openly courting the Lestor Maddox brigade in some new reverse Southern Strategy. Queried by Russert about the racial divide and Hurricane Katrina, and whether this has hurt the Administration in the eyes of African Americans, Edwards says:

And then, finally, and this is a critical component, responsibility matters. You know we, the American people, our country, we expect people that we're helping to help themselves. And where we -- we have to address things like teenage pregnancy. One -- —one of the things I find when I sit at these tables with families who live in poverty is the mother of four or five children has kids who are having kids. We have to do something about that.
There's really nothing quite like a panel full of white male millionaires scolding poor African American women about their reproductive irresponsibility, particularly in a conversation about the victims of Hurricane Katrina and in a week where South Dakota has passed a bill guaranteeing every rapist the right to have his fetus carried to term because women just really need to learn to keep their legs together.

Who knew the bigot vote was even in play?

That Edwards would not bring up the single biggest event of the week with regard to Katrina -- the tapes which show George Bush deliberately misled people about what he knew before, during and after the hurricane hit -- was quite the gift to the Administration. No doubt Lynne is penciling his name onto the invitation list as we speak. He can bring the potato salad.

As for me I'll just give the remote to the dog and hope that I eventually stumble on more substantive news, maybe Rita Cosby grilling Tito Jackson.

Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Jane Hamsher
Related News Stories
Bush: I Didn't Realize Katrina Victims Were Suffering Until I Saw Them Screaming On TV...
White House Releases Katrina Failures Report... Bush Not "Satisfied With Federal Response"...
Lead GOP Opponent To White House Ports Deal Punished... No Plane For Official Iraq Trip...
Related Blog Posts
Bob Burnett: George Bush - Orphaned by Failure
Bob Cesca: And You Call Yourself A Homeland Security Advisor?
Eric Alterman: The Second Time as Farce
Posted Comments :
Good blog Jane, .... MTP was actually kind of mashed potatoes today. Bland! But isn't it weird how proud those "Generals" like Pace are of all that Boy Scout crap they pin to their jackets and collars and shoulders? Ribbons and badges and insignia's and medals, literally, by the hundreds on that buffoon's coat. Can you imagine how much time he spends every day polishing and placing that flea market costume jewelery on his chest? Maybe if he would spend half the time reading the damn newspaper or watching BBC.

Kemp is the worst of the has been's -no comment.

Edwards is still mouthing the: "we can do better, ya'll - I'm preaching to the choir", batter mouth biscuit pablum that he ran during the '04 campaign. Another total loser,.... A waste of TV time. Thank goodness for Lifecycle's and Treadmills.
Posted by: dynapro on March 05, 2006 at 06:53pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Fitz!
Posted by: ccmask on March 05, 2006 at 06:58pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

You go Jane!

Well, you can't really be surprised that this week was, well, like last week can you? Tim controls every aspect of the show and he has a lot of people to pander to if he expects to be invited to all the best DC Salons.

Unfortunately, John Edwards' responses are a good example of the psychic fugue that seems to have gripped the dems. Here you have a week of revelations that make the White House look as incompetent as they are, including a video showing the President having a Nixon moment and lying knowing that the tape is rolling.

But what does Edwards do? Lecture poor people on their lack of propriety when it comes to their reproduction habits. That was certainly helpful for the dems. As you noted, the bigot vote isn't really in play- the GOP has that one locked up.

And the whole "gotcha" moment with Tim and Edwards shows just how clueless Tim is- many, many people supported the war initially believing the administration lies that saddam had links to Al Queda and Saddam was an imminent threat but now that those lies have been exposed a majority of Americans have CHANGED THEIR MINDS. So I am not sure why Tim thought Edwards changing his was such a victory, but as you said Jane, he probably was thinking of the chili.

-Stacy
http://www.cafepolitico.us/blog1
Posted by: stacyb on March 05, 2006 at 07:05pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

No comments yet. Is anyone watching Timmy? Maybe the bullshit is too obvious. I hope you're getting hardship duty pay for this, Jane. Disappointed in your account on John Edwards. I thought he had honesty, and there is so much to be honest about these days. Sigh.
Posted by: Danny on March 05, 2006 at 07:07pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

If the U S government is going to allocate a lot of money somewhere I had as lief it go to American teenage mothers than to Arab bombers. Silly me. Or maybe we could send the Army to patrol these girls so they don't have sex. Oh, wait a minute. Aren't these the same occupational cohort that left so many Eurasian children in Viet Nam? Maybe we could castrate some males as an example? Oh my, what a quandry for these poor, overtaxed white males...
Posted by: logos on March 05, 2006 at 07:10pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Jane! The bigot vote is totally in play, since the bigots are runnin' from W because he sold our ports to Browns. Bigots make few distinctions between The Darker Ones, and so their votes are absolutely in play. Those pickup-truck-drivin', confederate-flag-lovin', used-to-be-Democrats are lookin' for a new lever to pull.
Posted by: TeddySanFran on March 05, 2006 at 07:15pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

I listened to Pace refer to the "ideology of terrorism" and wondered exactly what he was up to. I understand that the right wing word-smithing attempts to characterize the opponent in demeaning and apoplectic terms. The battle of the words as it were with the Sovits for example. When we of the USA held the Boston Tea Party were we operating in the ideology of terrorism? I find this manufactured phraseology part of the devious, calculating, and manipulating campaign of propaganda to the American people and I, for one, do not like it.
When the U.S. Military tortures people are we operating in the ideology of terrorism? When we murder people in the dark of night, by assassin or F-15 bombs are we too operating under the ideology of terrorism? Can we then be any better than them?
Posted by: Henry on March 05, 2006 at 07:16pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

TITO Jackson? sounds kinda communistical to me! is Rita going comsymp on us? have the Reds of Aruba brainwashed her?
Posted by: wilson46201 on March 05, 2006 at 07:18pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

What I watched was a general of the US, with no real information on whats going on in Iraq, telling bullshit on the Russert republican happy hour, then he has on two has beens, that gives Timmy his gotcha quotes, never some of the smirky idiots sayings that will be in GWBush's library under lock and key.
Posted by: Honza on March 05, 2006 at 07:26pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

I thought Russert's Katrina question that he posed to Kemp was a bit odd: http://miblogweighsaton.blogspot.com/2006/03/tim-russert-idiot.html
Posted by: Nordy on March 05, 2006 at 07:31pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

I actually felt sorry for Pace. He basically has the alternatives of going out and saying this kind of nonsense or resigning from his job. I am sure that in many ways he would prefer to talk about real subjects in a truthful manner, but those discussions are not for public consumption. He gave a long-winded answer about troop levels with stories about how he had been with the generals and Sec. Rumsfeld during discussions of troop levels. He did not say whether the troop levels requested by the generals had been approved by the secretary. Tim did not catch the distinction, of course. Then there was the very sad canard about how the real problem is that the good news is not getting out of Iraq. I almost cried. Pace said "here in the states you see video of the same bomb going off for weeks." Just a few minutes earlier I had seen the "In Memoriam" segment of "This Week" where the names of about 20 soldiers were posted, most of them 20-25 years old. These were not the same names that had been posted before, these were new names of young Americans whose parents will never see them again and whose feet will never again touch American soil. Like I said, I feel sorry for Pete Pace, but I would like him to go to the homes of the families whose children died in the desert last week, and see if they think that the real problem is that the good news isn't being told.

Don't Bogart that Joint, my friend!
peace,
jim
Posted by: JimPreston on March 05, 2006 at 07:34pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Well Jane, It's like my old Uncle Estaban Rosanna Danna always said. If it smells like crap, and looks like crap, and tastes like crap. It's probably network news.

I work with the kids at church. This morning I met two beautiful children. They were visitors and they looked really uncomfortable. Especially the little girl. She was just five with big green eyes. I always goof around with new kids and ask all kinds of silly questions like, How long have your dogs been married?, or, Thick or thin crust? I asked them where they went to school and they told me that they were living at Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia. They were gonna' be there for another year and half and that they liked living on base. Then I asked which one of their parents was in the military, their mommy or their their daddy? The little girl looked to her big brother to answer and he struggled to find the right words and the kids looked at each other just for an instant and I could almost hear the silent words that passed between them. The little girl turned to me and said, "Our daddy died."

This war is evil.
Posted by: Squid25 on March 05, 2006 at 07:40pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Jane--

Thanks, as always, for acid-etching the essentials and sparing us all a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

John Edwards, it appears, has finally defined himself: he's an estimable teeth-capping surrounded by poll-driven talking points.

Good ballast, in retrospect, for the vigorous blow-dry encased in undiagrammable sentences, John Kerry.

With the prospect of Hillary Clinton--to borrow an apt phrase from David Mamet, "a cunt wrapped around ambition"--one is tempted to vote Socialist Workers Party in the next election.

Except they're Trotskyists, and the Trots are all Neo-Cons now.

Downer comment, sorry. Happy ending? Perhaps someone will provide one.
Posted by: barkingdog on March 05, 2006 at 07:50pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Why is Timmy always grinning? Is it the opposite of the lean and hungry look? Sounds like Edwards sold out. Must be running again.
Posted by: daphney on March 05, 2006 at 07:59pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

My favorite bit was when Russert mentioned Wm. F. Buckley's recent opinion piece saying that we have lost the war.

Pace then suggested that Buckley should walk around the streets of Iraq and find out how great things really are.

Russert then asked Pace if he believed that Buckley could safely walk the streets in Iraq.

Pace sheepishly admitted that it is way too unsafe.

What a wad.

http://politicalskullduggery.blogspot.com/
Posted by: hlrandomfactor on March 05, 2006 at 08:02pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Great post, Jane. You never miss. You saved the rest of us from watching that tripe today.
Posted by: magnacarta on March 05, 2006 at 08:05pm
Is this comment abusive? spam? [flag it]

Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Jane Hamsher
Cenk Uygur: The Liberation of Meaninglessness
David Sirota: Tom Friedman Becomes America's Chief Revisionist Historian
Harry Shearer: Overtopping vs. Breaching

March 5, 2006
DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005
Home The News The Blog Contagious Festival Features Politics Aside Eat The Press Russert Watch Hot Topics Contact Us Jane Hamsher

Login to Huffington Post | Make Huff Post your Home Page | RSS/XML | Sitemap | Advertising | Jobs

Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com, LLC | User Agreement | Privacy | Comment Policy | Powered by MovableTypehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/russert-watch-smokin-t_b_16809.html

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 07:07 PM

< < <> > > >

Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan goes the proverb. Judging from his string of failures, President Bush must be the loneliest foundling in America. The problem is that his mistakes impact all Americans. Now, the time has come to take corrective action.

The Administration blunders go on and on. The past couple of weeks saw Dick Cheney shoot a Republican donor; the disclosure that the Bush Administration approved the transfer of management of six U.S. ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates; and the revelation that Bush was briefed about the consequences of Hurricane Katrina before it hit and yet did nothing, except go on a fundraising junket.

And that string of screw-ups doesn't include Iraq.
The February 26th CBS News poll that found that only 34 percent of respondents approved of the job George Bush is doing, his lowest rating yet. Only 30 percent approved of his handling of Iraq. February 28th saw the Zogby survey of our troops in Iraq. Asked how much longer the occupation should go on, "29% of the respondents... said the U.S. should leave Iraq 'immediately,' while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay 'as long as they are needed.'" In other words, 72 per cent said we should leave within a year.

And, both these polls were conducted before the bombing of the al-Askari shrine, which set off new fighting between Shiite and Sunni Iraqis. Violence that appears to indicate the beleaguered nation has fallen into all out civil war. A development that would accentuate the poll results; turn Americans even more against the occupation and the Bush presidency. As America approaches the third anniversary of the invasion -- March 19th -- it's clear that a solid majority of both civilians and the military want our troops to come home.

You'll remember that when George W. Bush was running for President he promised that if elected he would introduce "a responsibility era." He was emphatic about this, "Our nation's leaders are responsible ... to confront problems, not pass them on to others." Now we know that he didn't mean it. He has no intention of confronting problems, taking responsibility for his actions.

Five years of this President should have convinced Americans that Dubya isn't ever going to admit a mistake. He told us that we were going to stay in Iraq until we win and, by gum, he intends that do that. On February 28th, Dick Cheney reiterated, "This nation has made a decision... We will stand by our friends and engage our enemies with the goal of a victory. And as the president said in the State of the Union, 'We are in this fight to win, and we are winning.'"

The Bush Administration is unwilling to admit failure and, therefore, to take responsibility for corrective action. So, too, is the Republican Party. The latest Gallup Poll on political Party affiliation found that 30 percent of Americans Identified as Republicans. In the latest CBS poll 72 percent of the GOP approved of the way the President is handling his job. 65 percent of Republicans believe that "things are going well" in Iraq. These are the GOP stalwarts who believe that Dubya "is a Christian," and therefore can do no wrong. Plus those who thank the Prez every day for their lovely tax cuts.

The question is, what are the 70 percent of us, who are not Bush adherents, going to do about the mess that the Bush Administration has made? How are we going to overcome the madness of Emperor George before it is too late?

We must get Congress to act. On March 18 and 19th there will be a series of marches and rallies against the Iraqi occupation. These two days are an opportunity for every American, who actually believes in responsibility, to do something. These protests should be supported, but it's also vitally important that each of us contact our Senator or Congressperson and demand that they take action to stop the war. And, bolster real national security.

One more thing, at this point in time there are two Democrats who are way out in front of all the others in terms of building a war chest for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. They are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The weekend of March 18 and 19 provides a natural opportunity for all of us to contact them. To tell Clinton and Kerry they we expect them to speak out against the madness. That they must take a stand on principle or suffer the consequences.

The good news is that an overwhelming majority of Americans have finally come to their senses. Roughly two-thirds of us realize that George Bush is a fraud and a failure. Now we need to take corrective action. We must convince Congress to address the blunders of the Bush Administration. If they won't do it, then we need to elect new Senators and Representatives in November.

READ MORE: Iraq, Dick Cheney, 2008, CBS, Hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush
<>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/george-bush-orphaned-by_b_16684.html

Saundra Hummer

March 5th, 2006, 10:53 PM

~

AC-130 Gunships Returning to Iraq
By
CHARLES J. HANLEY,
AP Special Correspondent
Fri Mar 3, 1:21 PM ET

AN AIR BASE IN IRAQ - The U.S. Air Force has begun moving heavily armed AC-130 airplanes — the lethal "flying gunships" of the Vietnam War — to a base in Iraq as commanders search for new tools to counter the Iraqi resistance, The Associated Press has learned.

An AP reporter saw the first of the turboprop-driven aircraft after it landed at the airfield this week. Four are expected.

The Iraq-based special forces command controlling the AC-130s, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, said it would have no comment on the deployment. But the plan's general outline was confirmed by other Air Force officers, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Military officials warned that disclosing the location of the aircraft's new base would violate security provisions of rules governing media access to U.S. installations.

The four-engine gunships, whose home base is Hurlburt Field in Florida, have operated over Iraq before, flying from airfields elsewhere in the region. In November 2004, air-to-ground fire from AC-130s supported the U.S. attack that took the western city of Fallujah from insurgents. Basing the planes inside Iraq will cut hours off their transit time to reach suspected targets.

The left-side ports of the AC-130s, 98-foot-long planes that can slowly circle over a target for long periods, bristle with a potent arsenal — 40 mm cannon that can fire 120 rounds per minute, and big 105 mm cannon, normally a field artillery weapon. The plane's latest version, the AC-130U, known as "Spooky," also carries Gatling gun-type 20 mm cannon.

The gunships were designed primarily for battlefield use to place saturated fire on massed troops. In Vietnam, for example, they were deployed against North Vietnamese supply convoys along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the Air Force claimed to have destroyed 10,000 trucks over several years.

The use of AC-130s in places like Fallujah, urban settings where insurgents may be among crowded populations of noncombatants, has been criticized by human rights groups.

The slow-moving AC-130s also offer an intelligence gathering advantage in the Iraq fight: sophisticated long-range video, infrared and radar sensors.

American commanders are marshaling all available tools to detect the Iraqi insurgents' stealthy operations, especially at night, when they plant roadside bombs targeting American road patrols and convoys.

The Air Force's senior tactical commander in Iraq said the AC-130 can be both a high-intensity and low-intensity weapon.

"It's got tons of guns, and it's got all kinds of stuff on it that can be applied to the problems you have," Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, who refused to discuss the current AC-130 deployment, said in an AP interview.

That "stuff" includes "the ability to take these high-tech pods and to use them to find guys planting (bombs) and to find other nefarious activity," he said.

The Predator drone — the MQ-1 unmanned aerial vehicle — has been a reconnaissance workhorse in Iraq, but Air Force officers say they don't have enough to meet demand for missions. The fiscal 2007 Defense Department budget proposed last month -the Bush administration envisions spending $1.6 billion on additional reconnaissance drones.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060303/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_us_gunships;_ylt=Am5lK7LTI7iR1IH6UK9Pbkis0NUE ;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 12:48 PM

.
World must stand up to religious censors
Opinion
By
Marci A. Hamilton
Mon Mar 6, 7:03 AM ET

It should scare those who believe in democracy that the European Union, in light of protests over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, might ask the European media to adopt a voluntary "code" that would forbid insults to religion that are similarly offensive. (Related: Focus on Faith past columns)The Organization of the Islamic Conference, an intergovernmental group of 57 states dedicated to protecting Muslim interests, is pushing hard for the idea. The OIC and the Arab League also have approached the United Nations to obtain a resolution that would protect religious entities from materials offensive to them by threatening sanctions on publishers.

Many nations in Europe already criminalize Holocaust denial and in some, "contempt of religion" is a crime. Such a media code would be the private counterpart of these laws. In addition, anti-blasphemy laws are in place in numerous countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They are often enforced under the Aegis of sharia, or Muslim law, a set of religious rules that can trump secular principles.

These limitations on free speech are not just on paper. A German court last month convicted a 61-year-old man of insulting Islam by printing the word "Koran" on toilet paper and offering it to mosques. He received a suspended sentence of a year in jail.

Roberto Calderoli, who was pressured to resign as an Italian government minister last month for wearing a T-shirt showing controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, is under investigation for "contempt of religion." He could be charged with offending the Islamic faith.

"At least nine countries have taken punitive actions against publications or their editors" for reprinting the Danish cartoons, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. "Six newspapers in three countries have been forced to close, and at least nine journalists in four countries have been arrested and face potential criminal prosecution. Governments have also issued censorship orders and sponsored protests."

Here in the States

One might have thought that the United States would pose a stark contrast, but the truth is that when it comes to religion, free press and speech principles too often take a back seat.

When the vast majority of newspapers in the USA did not publish the cartoons that are triggering dangerous riots leading to dozens of deaths in places as far-flung as Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya and Afghanistan, they obeyed a dangerous instinct in American society - mindless deference to religious sensibilities and entities, just because they are religious. Had the cartoons depicted individual politicians, or secular historical figures, is there any doubt that the U.S. media would have published them without delay?

U.S. newspaper editors, with a few exceptions such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, have blinked because the cause of this violence is religious offense. The cartoons, though, are an integral part of a story of extreme violence that targets American values. Readers cannot begin to make sense of the riots with their senseless destruction and deaths without seeing the cartoons.

This is paternalism based on an entrenched Pollyanna attitude. It is assumed that religious entities need - and deserve - special cushioning to protect them from accountability.

Yet that is the kind of misguided thinking that made it possible for this society to ignore the suffering of thousands upon thousands of children who have been abused by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church (and other religious institutions). It took many years before newspapers covered the issue or prosecutors took action because in too many cases, they were protecting the church from embarrassment and discomfort. The inevitable result was exponentially more crime and more suffering. Failing to hold religious entities accountable for their actions is, in a word, indefensible.

Islamists are using the publication of sophomoric cartoons in Denmark to justify widespread violence and demands for special treatment in the future. It is a brash grab for power that should be stunning. But too much of the free world is acting as though publishing the cartoons is worse than the violence because the rioting is being carried out by religious entities who have been offended. Other religious groups are all too willing to support the rioters' reasoning. While the Vatican decried the violence, it agreed with the rioters that the freedom of speech "cannot imply a right to offend the religious sentiments of believers." Here is the reasoning that opened the door to worldwide abuse by the clergy within the Catholic Church.

Accountability

If the free world's response is that it will promise never to offend Islamists in the future, it is failing to hold them accountable for their actions. That is the road to anarchy, and it is dumbfounding in the context of a war that is being instigated by a sect of Islamists. This latter statement is a fact, by the way, not a slander.

Many forget that when this country was first being settled and for many years thereafter, there were laws against blasphemy. In other words, colonial America started with a principle that the religious powers-that-be could not be criticized in public. Anti-sedition laws later banned certain criticism of the government. The First Amendment put into motion an opposing force. It assures a right to believe whatever one chooses and to say whatever one thinks. The blasphemy and sedition laws could not stand in the face of this fundamental principle. Nor can a "media code." No splitting the difference; it's an either/or issue.

The free world must choose. It can hold groups - including religious ones - accountable for their actions regardless of cause. Or it can protect them from discomfort caused by a lively and sometimes unruly public debate, and thereby excuse their crimes. With all due respect, the answer is obvious.

Marci A. Hamilton is a constitutional law scholar and author ofGod vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law.

http://news/yahoo.com/

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 01:01 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
If he gets this we're in deeper do-do.
SRH ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Bush to Ask Congress for Line-Item Veto Power
Reuters
Sunday 05 March 2006
Washington - President George W. Bush will soon make a formal request to Congress for a line-item veto - authority that would give him power to cancel specific spending items in budget bills, an administration official said on Sunday.

Many presidents have sought such authority on the argument it would help cut down on wasteful spending in the budget. In a rare yielding of some of its powers of the purse strings, Congress passed legislation granting a line-item veto to President Bill Clinton The Supreme Court struck down the law in 1998, ruling by a vote of 6-3 that Congress did not have the authority under the Constitution to give the president that power.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not wish to be seen as pre-empting the president's announcement, said that Bush would transmit to Congress a proposal with language aimed at withstanding a Supreme Court challenge.

Bush plans to announce his intention to draw up a proposal on the line-item veto on Monday morning during a ceremony to swear in the new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Edward Lazear, the official said.

Bush, who has never vetoed a spending bill, has been criticized by many conservatives for the surge in federal expenditures on his watch. Republicans worry the record deficits could hurt them in this year's midterm elections in which Democrats are seeking to regain control of one or both houses of Congress.

The Bush administration has forecast a fiscal 2007 budget deficit of $439 billion, an all-time high.

The lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff and the conviction of former California Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham on bribery charges have put a spotlight on budget earmarks - targeted spending items often added to unrelated spending bills.

Bush called in his State of the Union address for a line-item veto but did not offer specifics. He has also said he wants to see Congress put limits on earmarks.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030606P.shtml.

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 01:22 PM

TRUTHOUT EDITORIAL

Twilight's Last Gleaming
By John Cory
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 05 March 2006

Who are these people? These people who line their pockets with the lives of our loved ones? These gray men who lurk in shadows and kill the sunshine of democracy? These people who wear morality like a cheap suit pilfered from the collection plate of decency? Who are these people who have turned America into their own personal ATM machine? These are the people of the lie - Republicans.

Who are these people? These people who sit in spineless silence unable to speak in defense of America? These people who mime the words of our founders, afraid to act with independence? Who utter the words "We concede," instead of "We the People?" These are the people who lie down - Democrats
Newspapers no longer serve the public, only their corporate masters. They have wedged themselves firmly between the cheeks of power, a tissue to sanitize the bullshit. The media has finally achieved the ultimate self-delusion; broadcasting sitcom politics, and talking points of the throne, it has become the court jester with tinkling bells and curly pointed shoes: useless, untrustworthy, and fused in falsehoods and facades.

This is twilight's last gleaming. Attention must be paid. Democracy is dying.

Bush and Company wants us to be afraid. Republicans sell us fear as they sell out America.

Democrats wait in the wings, picking up their pieces of silver to keep mum. Both political parties capitalize on all the fear.

Democrats think we will become so fearful of Republicans that we will have no other choice but to elect them. That is their incentive. Low profile, quiet acquiescence, and they think their silence will be rewarded.

This is not the time for silence. According to recent polls from Zogby, Fox News, Gallup and CNN, 72% of our troops believe the war in Iraq is a failure and we should withdraw. 64% of the public disapproves of Bush's handling of Iraq. 69% of Americans are against the Dubai Port deal. 52% do not find Bush "honest and trustworthy."

And yet Democrats can find no voice, no fight, no issue to unify them to protect "we the people." Major print and media outlets can find no reason to investigate Republican scandals, bribery and lies, no reason to question an administration that started a war with a lie and failed its own citizens when Katrina hit, by lying about what they did or did not know. Katrina, like 9/11, left the boy king wide-eyed and unprepared. Leader of the free world? Most Americans think not.

When it comes time for voting, here is what I will remember: the silence.

If there is a voice for America, let them speak now. Let them speak for the poor women who not only will find abortion illegal, but will not be allowed birth control and contraceptives. Let them speak for the old and infirm who will not be able to have healthcare and cost-effective drug prescriptions. Let them speak for true family values of providing for our veterans and protecting our troops with proper body armor and ending a false war so no more loved ones have to die for a lie.

But most of all, let them now speak up for the one precious gift that is America - Freedom. Freedom of speech - Freedom to dissent - Freedom from illegal domestic spying. Freedom, sweet freedom for which our fathers, brothers, and sisters have fought and died for over the past 230 years!

Hunter S. Thompson warned, "Big dark coming soon." Big dark is here.

Our Constitution hangs by a thread. Make no mistake, this is twilight's last gleaming. It's time to defend America, not sell it down the river of corporate greed. It is time to stand up, not slink away to fight another day, because there are no more days. The monarchs of mendacity under George Bush are dismantling democracy at every opportunity.

Democrats, you want my vote? Earn it! Get up off your ass and take a stand! Take back America. Stop whimpering. Throw out your Republican-lite Bush lickspittles and suit up for battle. We the people will support you if you speak up for the America we live in and want to preserve. You cannot claim victory simply because you kept the GOP from burying the Constitution while you let them drive it underground.
*
This is twilight's last gleaming. Who will speak up for America?

John Cory is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970.
. . . . .
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030506Z.shtml . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 02:52 PM

Another Pitstop in Kabul
Commentary: Diverting attention away from Iraq, President Bush pays a surprise visit to Afghanistan.

By Carl Robichaud
March 2, 2006
More on Afghanistan

What Liberation?
The Taliban may be gone, but women in Afghanistan are still being arrested for 'moral' crimes.
P L U S :
The Return of the Poppy Fields

Article created by the The Century Foundation.
President Bush’s first visit to Afghanistan came four years after September 11 and lasted less than five hours. The details are telling. That the president chose not to spend the night in Kabul or announce his visit—a prudent move considering reports that Taliban insurgents have portable surface-to-air missiles—tells as much about Afghanistan’s security situation as do Pentagon metrics of troops trained or insurgents killed.
That four years passed before the president visited Afghanistan suggests the extent to which the central front in the global war on terror after September 11 has been crowded to the margins. America has achieved much in Afghanistan, but much more could have been achieved if its attention had not shifted to Iraq. Starting with the transfer of special forces from operations against al Qaeda, Iraq has absorbed the lion’s share of resources. This trend is most recently manifest in the downsizing of Operation Enduring Freedom forces and the transfer of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration’s most able Afghan hand and a trusted confidant of President Karzai, to Iraq.

Some skeptics have argued that the president’s visit was an attempt to shift attention from failures in Iraq to successes in Afghanistan. Afghanistan offers a respite from the al-Askariya violence at a time when the latest polls show half of Americans disapprove of the president’s performance on the war on terror, and when Iraq appears to be tearing at the seams.

It is no surprise, then, that the president focused on the positive. “We like stories of young girls going to school for the first time so they can realize their potential,” he told reporters during his visit. “We appreciate a free press. We are enthralled when we see an entrepreneurial class grow up where people are able to work and realize their dreams.”

Anecdotes can encourage, but they are no substitute for measured progress.

Girl’s education has shown mixed progress, with enrollment rates up in regions with good security but stagnant where security is a problem. Human Rights Watch is preparing a report on the subject next month and the early returns are not encouraging: parents, when forced to decide whether to send their girls several miles in uncertain condition to schools of questionable quality, often keep them home.

On press freedom, Freedom House notes that “ Afghanistan’s media continue to operate in a fragile setting.” The government maintains “broad restrictions on content” and retains a commission that can fine or imprison journalists, as several recent high-profile trials have shown. “Journalists continue to be threatened or harassed by government ministers, the intelligence service, militias, and others in positions of power,” the report notes, “and many practice self-censorship or avoid writing about sensitive issues such as Islam, national unity, or crimes committed by specific warlords.”

In terms of entrepreneurship, business is booming in Kabul as foreign aid and spending injects capital into the local economy. Yet development has not extended to most of the country. The most viable form of entrepreneurship is still in the narcotics sector, where, in one of the world’s most lucrative agricultural extension programs, traffickers extend high-interest microcredit to impoverished farmers. (Presumably this is not what the president had in mind.)

Discussing Afghanistan as if it were nothing but a success story is disingenuous. Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and many leading Taliban and al Qaeda operatives remain at large. The Afghan government ranks among the world’s weakest and the Afghan people among its poorest. Militia commanders and narco-traffickers have entrenched their rule over large swaths of the country, with many gaining a toehold in government after September’s parliamentary elections. Even if donor support remains strong, the IMF forecasts that sustaining Afghanistan’s large professional army and its ambitious development program will require a doubling or tripling of the revenue to GDP ratio. While this sort of growth has been achieved before in some post-conflict countries, such as Rwanda and Uganda, it is a tall order in Afghanistan where revenue streams are controlled by militia commanders and tribal leaders.

These issues cannot be solved without focused international engagement backed by sufficient resources. Yet the United States continues to spend 90 percent of its Afghanistan budget on military approaches while shortchanging programs in justice, governance, and development.

At the recent donor conference, Condoleezza Rice pledged that “the United States is fully devoted to the long-term success of Afghanistan.” Let’s hope her words prove true. Afghanistan deserves more than a photo op.

To find out more, see The Century Foundation's Afghanistan Watch project (www.afghanistanwatch.org).

Carl Robichaud is a program officer at The Century Foundation and directs its Afghanistan Watch project. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/03/Another_Pitstop_in_Kabul.html

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 03:18 PM

~

Why Not a Line-Item Veto?
So President Bush wants to bring back the line-item veto (LINK, OR SEE FOLLOWING ARTICLE)as a way of reining in spending. The veto would allow him to strip away any earmark that he doesn't like from a bill without vetoing the entire bill—a power that would, theoretically, be good for cutting out "wasteful" congressional pork. President Clinton was granted similar authority by Congress in 1996, though the Supreme Court eventually struck the veto down, saying it violated the separation of powers and gave "the president the unilateral power to change the text of duly enacted statues." Presumably the Bush administration thinks their version can pass constitutional muster this time around (or that the Roberts Court will look more kindly on executive power grabs).

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it's a decent indication of how unserious the administration is about reining in spending. Frankly, the line-item veto isn't all that effective as a cost-cutting measure: In the eight months that Clinton wielded it he managed to shave off a scant $500 million off the budget. That's a pittance. Pork isn't a big part of the federal budget, and never will be. And anyway, most of the time, Congress had no problem overriding Clinton's cuts. The evidence from the states is no more persuasive: In the 43 states that allow the veto, governors rarely use it, and state legislatures usually just end up vote-trading to divert spending from one wasteful project to another.

No, the only real appeal of the veto lies in its political potential. Clinton occasionally used his power to punish uncooperative Republicans by denying them local projects, as when he struck down tax breaks for Idaho Potato Farmers, just to stick it to one of his more vocal opponents, Sen. Larry Craig. This president could do the same—he could, for instance, influence congressional races by denying Democrats the ability to win votes back home through earmarks, while allowing Republicans to pork out to their hearts content. What would stop him? The opportunities for abuses of power are limitless, and it's silly to think that this president wouldn't take advantage of them. (Brian Doherty's concerns along these lines seem pretty cogent -- and that's from a libertarian.)

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 03/06/06 at 12:01 PM

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/index.html#1109

Bush Proposes Line-Item Veto

By JOHN O'NEIL
Published: March 6, 2006

President Bush today proposed legislation to create a line-item veto, a measure he said would help restrain government spending by allowing him to strip out pork-barrel spending.

Congress passed a line-item veto in 1996, but two years later, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that it represented an unconstitutional intrusion into powers granted exclusively to the legislative branch. Mr. Bush said his new bill was drafted in a way that would avoid the court's objections.

An administration official later said that the new bill would send vetoed items back to Congress, which could then reinstate them by majority vote, rather than the traditional two-thirds margin, as the 1996 bill had required.

Mr. Bush today cast the proposal, which he has favored since his first presidential campaign in 2000, in terms of its ability to help hold down money spent by "earmarks" — spending inserted into larger bills by individual members of Congress, usually for projects that benefit their home districts. The total amount spent by earmarking has soared in recent years, leading to a new effort in the Senate to rein them in, which Mr. Bush said today he supported.

The biggest obstacle to members of Congress cutting spending is the fear that they would lose their own items, Mr. Bush said, speaking at a White House ceremony for the swearing in of Edward P. Lazear as the new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. "Everybody thinks their spending idea is a great idea," he said.

Earmarks compound the problem, he said.

"Congress can slip spending provisions into large bills where they never debated and never get discussed," said Mr. Bush. "As a result, too many bills passed by Congress include unneeded spending that reflects special interests instead of the people's interest."

He noted that 43 governors have the right to cast line-item vetoes. "Now it's time to bring this important tool of fiscal discipline to Washington, D.C.," Mr. Bush said.

The bill passed in 1996 gave the president the right to veto individual items in bills on spending or tax breaks. It had been proposed as part of the Republicans' 1994 "Contract With America," but it attracted the votes of 69 senators and more than 290 members of the House.

President Clinton used the veto to block 82 items, including money for New York City hospitals and a tax break for Idaho potato growers, from 11 laws. One batch of line-item vetoes, for 38 military construction projects, was overridden by Congress.

Then, in 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the line-item vetoes amounted to amendments to the laws the items were contained in, and thus trespassed on the power to enact legislation that the Constitution granted exclusively to Congress.

Mr. Bush said today that his new plan avoided that problem.

"Today, I'm sending Congress legislation that will meet standards and give me the authority to strip special spending and earmarks out of a bill, and then send them back to Congress for an up or down vote," he said.

Even though only a majority vote would be needed to override, members of Congress might find it more difficult to vote for questionable items once they stood by themselves instead of lying buried in the depths of larger legislation.

But it is not clear from the earlier Supreme Court decision just how much extra authority over budgeting the justices are willing to allow a president to have regardless of the threshold for an override.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in a concurring decision, had seemed to object to the broader notion of rewriting the legislative process to concentrate more power in the hands of the president. "Liberty is always at stake when one or more of the branches seek to transgress the separation of powers," he wrote.

Writing for the minority, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "there is not a nickel's worth of difference" between giving the president the authority to cancel an individual item and allowing him to spend money on a particular item at his discretion.

The more immediate hurdle Mr. Bush's proposal faces is in Congress, where the idea has not been a priority even for the many members who had previously supported it. Democrats also seem less likely to support the plan if it would mean giving more power to Mr. Bush.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, said that Mr. Reid would vote against the idea, as he had in 1996.

"Senator Reid is opposed to the line-item veto in part because it takes away powers granted to Congress, and because of the impact it could have on smaller states like Nevada," Mr. Manley said.

http://nytimes.com/2006/03/06/politics/06cnd-veto.html?hp&ex=1141707600&en=28ea09e767321bc0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/index.html#1109 . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 06:00 PM

* * * * *
The Street Samaritans

News: Post-Katrina volunteer medics on bicycles created a new model of community health care in New Orleans.
By
Tim Shorrock
Photos: Kike Arnal
March/April 2006 Issue

NEW ORLEANS - In the days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, the city’s Algiers neighborhood was one of the few that stayed dry. Although Katrina’s winds caused extensive damage to roofs and toppled trees and power lines, there was no water in the streets or in houses like there was in the rest of the city. Still, Algiers was left without electric power or running water for many days, and the invasion of the city by thousands of soldiers, federal police officers and private paramilitary personnel created an atmosphere of tension and trepidation. In Algiers, as in other neighborhoods, the National Guard imposed a mandatory dawn-to-dusk curfew. In one area, white residents frightened by rumors of car-jackings and looting camped out on their roofs and organized patrols, guns at the ready. Late one night, National Guardsmen and a SWAT team from the New Orleans Police Department raided the Algiers Fischer Housing Development in search of someone who had fired at a cell phone truck; black youths then took guns from local pawn shops and vowed to fight the troops and what they called white vigilantes. Algiers resident Ronald Ragens, 55, remembers those days as lonely and frightening. “All you was seein’ was police, military and all kinds of huge trucks running supplies here and there, and helicopters flyin’ over like it was a war zone,” he recalls. “It was rough.”

Then one morning four days into the storm, something happened that melted the fear and eased the tension. Four young people on bicycles showed up in Algiers, knocking on doors and asking if anyone needed medical attention. Asked if they were from the Red Cross or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, neither of which had yet made an appearance in Algiers, the medics said no, they were just volunteers who had come without authorization. They offered first aid, took blood pressure, tested for diabetes, and inquired about symptoms of anxiety, depression and disease. “It was just about the noblest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” recalls Malik Rahim, a lifelong Algiers resident, local housing activist and former Black Panther Party member who helped arrange space for the medical workers in a local mosque. ”It was the street medics who really stopped this city from exploding into a race war, because they were white and were serving the black community at a time when blacks were fed up. Those are the real heroes of this thing.”

As New Orleans moved from tension and fear to FEMA tents, the Common Ground Clinic took over the task of providing local health care from devastated hospitals.Rahim, a friendly, outgoing man whose graying dreadlocks and soft voice belie his radical past, is now the symbolic leader of the Common Ground Collective, an unlikely tribe of activists and health care practitioners who have descended on New Orleans to provide “solidarity, not charity” to the people of this devastated community. The “street medics” on their bikes--part of a loose national network of nurses and medical assistants who provide first aid to protesters at antiwar demonstrations—were among the first to respond. “The whole place smelled like death,” recalls Noah Morris, a wiry anti-corporate activist from St. Louis who recalls seeing four gunshot victims, their bodies crudely covered by sheets of corrugated tin. Most of his initial patients, Noah says, suffered from high blood pressure, which he treated with herbal remedies and nutritional supplements “to help get the pressure down just a little bit.” The medics were followed a few days later by a caravan of doctors, nurses and grief counselors from San Francisco. Then, as word of the clinic spread, scores of health practitioners and political activists from all over the country began making their way to New Orleans.

Common Ground has drawn an eclectic crew. Michael Kozart, the first doctor to spend substantial time at the clinic, belongs to a group called the Bay Area Radical Health Collective. He decided to come after hearing Rahim speak about Algiers on KPFA, the Pacifica affiliate in Berkeley. “I thought, how can a society as rich as ours have folks being neglected because our water and medical system and the government itself is completely inefficient?” Liz Rantz, another doctor, has spent two stints here on leave from her regular job in Missoula, Montana, where’s she’s the medical director for the state’s Department of Corrections. The California Nurses Association has sent a steady stream of RNs. Acupuncturists Without Borders has organized several teams of volunteers. Volunteers have come from Minnesota, Massachusetts, Iowa, Texas, New Mexico and Canada; during the first week, there were two French volunteers from Doctors Without Borders. From the triage station to the makeshift pharmacy, there are plenty of nose rings, dreadlocks and body jewelry on display – as well as the cleanly pressed uniforms of nurses fresh from their hospital jobs.

“I was completely unaware they were a bunch of activists,” says Lynne Crawford, a bubbly nurse from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who spends most of her time working at the mobile clinics. Crawford, who wore her blue scrubs while doing her rounds, found her way here after being laid off from her last job ; after searching for ways to volunteer, she discovered Common Ground on the Internet. Unlike many of her colleagues, who sleep on the clinic’s floor or in camping tents set up in the backyard, Crawford managed to find a room on a Coast Guard cutter docked in New Orleans. When I ran into her one afternoon, she confesses to having suffered “a very big cultural shock” in her first days at Common Ground. She pointed to some of her new friends, clustered outside on a smoke break: “Why don’t they shave their legs? I just don’t get it,” she said, laughing. “But now I love the people here. We all have a common purpose.”

For activists accustomed to being marginal, Common Ground has been a revelation too. “How many political actions do you have when all of a sudden the community kind of descends on you?” asks Scott Weinstein, a tall, bearded RN from Washington, D.C., who was one of the first arrivals and serves as a liaison with what’s left of the New Orleans medical community. He says the clinic has reshaped the way he thinks about politics. “Most people think of direct action as taking a street during a demonstration,” he says, “but big deal, so you got a street. This is not about taking the streets, it’s about taking health care.”

THE MAJID BILAL MOSQUE sits on a busy street corner three blocks down from the levee. There, just past a warehouse storing colorful floats from past Mardi Gras, you can see the city’s skyline, the Superdome and the two Carnival Cruise ships - the Sensation and the Ecstasy - that were leased by the federal government for nearly $200 million to house emergency workers. Big tugs and ocean-going tankers and container ships pass by in a steady stream. The clinic itself is surrounded by tiny, one-story houses, most of their roofs patched with blue plastic tarps. A sign on the building’s back door reads: “No Weapons Allowed. Please Respect the Mosque” – a reference to the ubiquitous guns toted by the National Guard and private security guards at every government facility in the city. When the clinic opens for business one October morning at 8:30 a.m., the waiting room immediately fills up with patients.

Andrew Summer, a laid-off shipyard worker living in nearby Gretna with his brother, is here to get his medications refilled – still, months after the storm, the most common need among Common Ground’s patients. Summer is tall, lanky, and visibly tired. He survived Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, was brought by boat to the Convention Center, and eventually flown to Houston. He can’t fill his prescriptions because Charity Hospital, the famed hospital that once served most of New Orleans’s poor, has been shut down. “It’s great how they’re handling the people here,” he says.

Taking in the scene from his stoop a few doors down is Leroy Refuge, 53, a lifetime New Orleans resident who used to drive a school bus for the local diocese. He and a companion he is caring for (“her name is Miss Dorothy L. Brown, and she’s 78 years old”) have both visited the clinic and got shots “to keep the germs and everything away.” Refuge, too, was evacuated from Algiers; he ended up at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas before being flown home three weeks later. “Now we’re back at 329 Socrates and just tryin’ to live,” he says. “My mind is still a little fuzzy, but I’m comin’ around – slowly but surely, slowly but surely.” For many of Common Ground’s patients, the clinic is a relief not just from Katrina and the healthcare vacuum that followed—suddenly there were no doctors or hospitals in New Orleans, and neither the Red Cross nor FEMA seemed able to provide any—but from a quieter, long-term emergency. According to Rahim, 85 percent of the men in Algiers are uninsured, “and for many of them, the last time they saw a doctor was in prison or in emergency at Charity.”

Common Ground has found itself serving some unexpected needs too. During its first month, its medical teams gave immunizations to hundreds of laborers employed by subcontractors for the likes of Shaw Inc. and Halliburton—companies that left their workers, many of them Latino immigrants, to figure out for themselves which shots they needed and where to get them. When Rita flooded hundreds of square miles in the bayou town around Houma, Louisiana, Common Ground fielded the only relief team to visit the area; neither the Red Cross or FEMA ever made it, according to Dr. Rantz and three other volunteers who went.

MOST OF COMMON GROUND'S medical work happens at three crude work stations in what used to be the mosque’s worship hall. Station One is a card table with makeshift shelves holding cotton swabs, rubber gloves and other equipment; a stethoscope hangs over the one corner. Station Two consists of a pair of stools standing next to a set of shelves that looks like it came from a motel room. Stacked neatly are some of the donated supplies the clinic is handing out: Tampax, witch hazel, Enfamil formula, calcium supplement. Station Three is the only “private” room in the clinic, partitioned from other stations with bedsheets. After a brief intake from a triage volunteer, patients wait their turn in the line of chairs that serves as a waiting room; when their name is called, they head for one of the stations, where a nurse practitioner takes their vitals and consults with one of the doctors about what to do.

In the adjoining room, past the busy phone and fax machine, is a crude pharmacy stocked with supplies that have been donated from organizations like Vets for Peace and Food Not Bombs. At the back is a bank of computers linked to the Internet through a sporadic wireless connection provided by FEMA from the cruise ships across the river. On one wall are lists of important projects and tasks that need volunteers, including “critical incident debriefing” and “medical legal support,” under which someone has scrawled “or covering our heinies.” One task is more general: “Infusing all we do with anti-oppression intentions.”

Although hierarchy is frowned on here, some people at Common Ground clearly play leadership roles. One of them is Moe, an RN and herbalist from Montana who has been here since early September. She is often one of the first to greet newcomers and the person to find when there’s a problem with no ready solution. Moe is short, with a moon-shaped face that seems to be framed in a perpetual smile. Like Noah, she’s part of the street medic network that descends on cities like Seattle or Washington, D.C., whenever there’s a big demonstration. She is gentle, low-key, and pragmatic. In late November, it was Moe who pushed hard to get the clinic to close every Friday so volunteers could take a break. “We couldn’t get anything done” for the stress, she tells me.

For the people working here, Common Ground is the polar opposite to the time-crunched, profit-driven, top-down environment that’s become standard in the health care industry. When the clinic crew learns that a patient is bedridden and can’t get out of the house, someone drives there to pick her up and then arranges for transportation back home. The same doctor might make a diagnosis, write a prescription and go to the back room to fill it. One day, Max Fischer, who’s in his fourth year of medical school at Columbia University, sees 10 patients in 15 hours—a fraction of the load he’d handle at a hospital or regular clinic. One is a 19-year old mother with an advanced bone infection in her leg; with Charity closed, she had no idea where to find a doctor. Max calls for an ambulance to take the woman to West Jefferson Hospital in Gretna—and rides along with her when it comes. “I see myself as a patient-advocate,” says Fischer.

Alternative styles of medicine are big at Common Ground. “In those moments, in that half an hour I’m talking to someone, it’s just love that I feel,” says Marenka Cerny, a trauma counselor and massage therapist from Oakland who has set up a table just outside the clinic. Every day I’m there she has a steady stream of customers, who approach her shyly but get up from her table looking relieved. “We’re providing human contact, the most basic thing you can do for people facing so much devastation and loss,” she says. Next to her table, Korben Perry, an acupuncturist from Philadelphia, has put out a couple of chairs and a sign. One afternoon I find him working on Willy Kerr, who says he’s been coming to the clinic ever since he got back to Algiers from Houston, where he was evacuated after the storm. He’s never seen Chinese medicine before, but Perry persuades him the needle treatment will help relieve the pain in his back and gums. “I’m trying to stop smoking,” Kerr confides. As Perry places needles in his earlobes and neck, Kerr chuckles, and then settles down for a 20-minute wait. “These people here are treating me real nice,” he says. “I’d hate to see them go.” Like many others in this neighborhood, Kerr, who worked until recently at a Murphy Oil refinery south of New Orleans, is convinced that the Ninth Ward didn’t flood by chance. “They blew them levees,” he tells me. “You make sure you write that down.”

Later that afternoon, two camouflaged US Army trucks pull up outside the mosque. As their engines idle noisily, a young lieutenant jumps out, identifies himself as Louisiana National Guard, and announces that he has several boxes of supplies for the clinic. Moe, who spends much of her time organizing donated supplies of dubious utility, smiles widely when she sees the packets of cortisone and the children’s antibiotic Zithromax. For the next 15 minutes, soldiers just back from Iraq and a couple of anarchists who’ve been protesting the war unload the truck together, swapping anecdotes about New Orleans and the French Quarter.

UNLIKE SOME OF THE volunteers, who camp out in the mosque and surrounding houses, during my stay in New Orleans I crash with other medical workers at Tent City, a FEMA campsite in Algiers. In the mess tent, you see everyone who has a piece of rebuilding and securing New Orleans: National Guard troops, their rifles leaning on the tables; exhausted workers from the water and sewer company; tough-looking New Orleans cops; and the uniformed private guards from Blackwater. It’s a disconcerting place, full of short fuses and weapons, much like anyplace else in post-Katrina New Orleans--which is part of what makes Common Ground such an oddity.

By late October, all of the city is dry and relief workers as well as residents are beginning to venture into the Ninth Ward. Common Ground has set up a distribution center in a former day car center there, handing out donations from groups as varied as Pastors for Peace, which sent several box loads of boots, and the Islamic Relief Fund, which has provided 50 large buckets of “cleaning supplies”—each one marked with the logo of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—containing masks, sponges, spray bottles, gloves and hand cleaner. Several times a week it sends a medical crew to the Disaster Recovery Center in the Lower Ninth Ward, a parking lot where FEMA has set up an information table for returning residents.

At the FEMA site, guns are everywhere; on the shoulders of the National Guard troops guarding the site and in the holsters of New Orleans cops and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from the Department of Homeland Security. FEMA has hired four Blackwater guards for its own table; they stand around wearing identical logo’ed black shirts and identical wrap-around sunglasses.

Around them, the neighborhood is utterly destroyed. Electric and telephone wires are down; vehicles lie at crazy angles, some of them stuck in fences and walls and buried in living rooms. The streets and sidewalks are caked with mud that has calcified where it flowed into open doors. There’s a silence that feels all wrong in a city neighborhood, broken only occasionally by the crunching sound of tires on the dry mud.

By contrast, Common Ground, despite its chaos and occasional dysfunction, feels almost light-hearted. By the time I visit again in December a steady stream of people from the neighborhood, (including Willy Kerr, the acupuncture patient), are signing up to volunteer. A lifelong Algiers resident, Sandra, is now working as the clinic’s cook, doling out helpings of gumbo and bread pudding. A community advisory board is being set up, and the clinic is eyeing a larger site down the street. “That clinic is gonna be a permanent clinic,” Malik Rahim tells me, “served by the people its serving right now.”

~ ~ ~

Tim Shorrock is a journalist based in Memphis, Tennessee, where he moved last year after living for 23 years in Washington D.C. He writes about U.S. foreign policy, East Asia, and corporate misuse of power for many publications at home and abroad. He is working on a book about national security.

Kike Arnal is a Venezuelan photographer and documentary filmmaker based in New York City. His photographs have been featured in the New York Times, Life, and Newsweek, among others. His video, Yanomami Malaria, produced for the Discovery Channel, covered the spread of disease among populations of indigenous people in the northern Amazon.
~
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/03/common_ground_long.html
. . .

Saundra Hummer

March 6th, 2006, 09:55 PM

The Spy Who Bills Us Commentary: Your telephone company is most likely cooperating with federal wiretapping programs. And guess what? It's illegal.
By
Patrick Radden Keefe
February 24, 2006

The Watchful & the WaryFrom FBI and CIA headquarters to small-town police departments, the government is building a massive intelligence network designed to spy on terrorists -- and on everyday Americans.
Article created by the The Century Foundation.
When your phone bill arrives this month, you might want to take a moment to think about how much you trust your telephone company. While the National Security Agency has gotten a lot of press since it was revealed in December that its analysts engaged in the warrantless surveillance of US citizens, the eavesdropping agency would not have been able to conduct the operation without the intimate—and likely illegal—cooperation of private telecommunications providers.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA adopted a bold new approach. Seeking more unfettered access to the vast communications channels that run through the country, the agency approached executives at major telecommunications companies and requested that they provide the NSA with secret backdoors into the hubs and switches through which our telephone calls and e-mails are routed. Whereas the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires spies to obtain individual warrants for each target in an investigation, the phone companies provided unfiltered access to the full current of communications—not just Al Qaeda's calls, but everyone else's as well.

One problem with this approach is that it's like drinking from a fire hose. The NSA intercepts about 650 million communications worldwide every day, and, in something of a paradox, the better the agency is at hoovering in phone calls and e-mails, the worse it is at isolating critical and timely information from the white noise. According to recent reports, few of the tips the agency generated from its wiretapping program resulted in the identification of actual terrorists or plots.

Another problem is that trolling indiscriminately through the communications stream is illegal. The mechanism for eavesdropping established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is simple: Target first, eavesdrop second. If there are grounds to suspect that a person is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power, a warrant is granted to spy on that person. With this new program, the agency has inverted the traditional steps: Eavesdrop first, then identify targets within the stream of intercepted communications.

Thus far, administration officials have successfully resisted efforts by Congress to address the probable inefficiency and definite illegality of this procedure, but in outsourcing the logistics of the operation to private telecommunications companies, they may have made a crucial error. Employees of the president might argue that ''executive privilege" frees them from responding to congressional inquiries about sensitive national security operations, but the CEOs of the telecom companies have no such easy out. Earlier this month, USA Today reported that AT&T, MCI, and Sprint are three of the companies that secretly cooperate with the NSA. Democratic Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin have written to the companies, asking about their involvement in the program, and if the Bush administration continues to resist congressional inquiries, the senators could subpoena executives of the companies and oblige them to explain their involvement.

Times of national crisis grant a certain license to the executive branch, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has argued, in effect, that as long as officials are endeavoring to keep the country safe, they need not answer questions about the particular means they employ to do so. Private companies have no such license, and AT&T, MCI, and Sprint should not be able to hide from the senators or from their own customers. If it is determined—as it probably will be—that the wiretapping program was illegal, then the telecom companies are guilty of violating federal law. In the meantime, it's clear that they have violated their own customer privacy policies. You might want to take another look at yours.
. . .
Patrick Radden Keefe is a program officer and fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.
. . .
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/02/spy_who_bills_us.html
* . * .* . *

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 01:20 AM

~

ELGIN MARBLES: A visitor to the British Museum in London looks at sculptures removed from the Greek Parthenon in the 1800s.
DENNIS OWEN/REUTERS/FILE GO ON-SITE TO VIEW PHOTO'S

Ancient art, modern crime
A respected art curator goes on trial next week for allegedly buying stolen antiquities. Hers is not the only major museum under scrutiny.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Arts & Entertainment > Art
from the November 07, 2005 edition

LOS ANGELES – Museum directors hope the artwork they display will inspire visitors - but not necessarily to ask, "Did they steal that?" Yet that is precisely the question being asked at museums from New York's Metropolitan to California's Getty and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The former antiquities curator of the world's richest museum, the Getty, goes on trial next week in Italy on charges that she helped the museum acquire stolen art.
Armed with new information from the memoirs of a controversial art dealer, Italian authorities want at least 42 items in the Getty collection returned. New York's Met may have to return a "supergem" of its collection, a 6th century BC painted vase. They want at least 22 items back from Boston's MFA, including a prized 2,500-year-old Greek vase.

The revelations have stunned the public, but cries of "Gimme my stuff back!" have been resounding through the art world for centuries - mostly falling on deaf ears. Greece still wants the Elgin marbles back from Britain. (They were named for Lord Elgin, who chiseled them off the Parthenon two centuries ago.) Greece may well get them soon, say observers, because the political climate and national attitudes about culture have changed.

The bad old days of Indiana Jones-style museum acquisition no longer fly. Countries have laws regarding the exportation of artwork, and what's legal in one country may not be in another. And even if it's legal, it may not be ethical.

Many in the art world say the media blitz surrounding the Italian charges makes this a defining moment. From here on, says Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it will be more difficult for museums to have questionable items in their collections. "It's only going to get more and more embarrassing for them," he says, "as attorneys general start saying, 'What is a nonprofit organization doing with this kind of ethics?' "

Even more important, art professionals hope the publicity will educate a public that appears not to care about or understand the murky world of "provenance" - that is, where a particular artwork comes from. "If we were talking about the importation of material from native American dig sites to China or Japan, we would be very aware of the damage being done to the cultural patrimony of the United States," says Malcolm Bell, an archaeologist and art history professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "The public needs to be aware of this problem so museum boards know what they think."

But provenance is tricky, even for experts, especially the provenance of antiquities. Paintings, drawings, and other works of fine art are generally well documented. But when it comes to items that could have come out of the ground yesterday or 3,000 years ago, how to proceed taxes the most experienced art connoisseur. A thriving black market for items looted from poorly guarded excavations or dug up and sold by impoverished locals keeps experts on the lookout for illicit treasures as well as forgeries. Museums often rely on third parties, such as art dealer Hicham Aboutaam, cofounder of Phoenix Ancient Art with offices in New York and Geneva. Mr. Aboutaam says people bearing "prized family heirlooms" walk into his offices regularly.

DRINKING CUP: This kylix from 480 BC is being returned voluntarily to Italy from the Getty, which determined it had been stolen.
AP/J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM/FILE GO ON-SITE TO VIEW PHOTO'S

This past year, a woman in her 80s came to him with two items she said her stepfather had gotten from Tutankhamen's tomb.

"Naturally, I didn't believe her," he says with a laugh. "But we had to investigate, all the same. We asked for any documents she might have, insurance papers, old photos, anything that might give some indication of where the items [a funerary jar and a statue of Osiris] came from," he says. She had nothing, but the inquiry intensified when Aboutaam discovered the woman's stepfather was Frank Compton, author of Compton's Encyclopedia. He had been researching topics in Egypt during the time King Tut's tomb was opened.

While Aboutaam and his team ultimately concluded the items were not from Tut's tomb, "they were genuine Egyptian antiquities," he says. The woman signed and notarized an affidavit, Aboutaam guaranteed his research, and the pieces were sold to a major US museum. (Such is the sensitivity of the issue that the museum asked not to be identified in an article discussing charges against the Getty.)

Museums are skittish about provenance policies, particularly museums with large collections. Many fear strict policies will drive art into private collections and encourage an already thriving black market. The first big step toward changing those attitudes came with a 1970 UNESCO draft treaty banning the purchase of looted art. The most important provision of the treaty: the exclusion of all artworks purchased before 1970, effectively grandfathering in the vast collections of museums worldwide. But the United States didn't ratify the treaty until 1983, and US museums have been slow to clarify their policies on provenance. Ironically, the Getty Museum has one of the strictest provenance policies on record. It states unequivocally that no works without airtight documentation will be purchased by the museum from 1995 onward.

While the spotlight may be painful for museums being targeted, the attention is an important tool for change, says Johanna Keller, director of the Goldring Arts Journalism program at Syracuse University in New York.

"Issues of provenance are coming up now because there's an effort to understand history in terms of cultural fairness," she says. "Provenance begins to look like an important cultural issue because we need to be talking about who owns what culture ... and culture is valuable not just for financial reasons, but because of what it tells us about who we are."

GALLERY TALK: J. Paul Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True leads a gallery discussion in this 1998 photo. Ms. True and two art dealers go on trial next week in Italy, charged with conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities.
AP/THE LOS ANGELES TIMES/FILE
. . . . .
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p13s02-alar.html?s=widep
~ ~ ~

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 10:02 AM

~ ~ ~
US envoy hints at strike to stop Iran

· Bolton says nuclear plant can be 'taken out'
· UN agency meets to send report to security council

By Julian Borger Washington

03/06/06 "The Guardian" -- -- The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran's nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran's nuclear activities to the UN security council.

The council will have to decide whether to impose sanctions, an issue that could split the international community as policy towards Iraq did before the invasion.

Yesterday the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said: "Nobody has said that we have to rush immediately to sanctions of some kind."
However the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, visiting Washington last week, encountered sharply different views within the Bush administration. The most hawkish came from Mr Bolton. According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, the envoy told the MPs: "They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."

It is unusual for an administration official to go into detail about possible military action against Iran. To produce significant amounts of enriched uranium, Iran would have to set up a self-sustaining cycle of processes. Mr Bolton appeared to be suggesting that cycle could be hit at its most vulnerable point.

The CIA appears to be the most sceptical about a military solution and shares the state department's position, say British MPs, in suggesting gradually stepping up pressure on the Iranians.

The Pentagon position was described, by the committee chairman, Mike Gapes, as throwing a demand for a militarily enforced embargo into the security council "like a hand grenade - and see what happens".

Yesterday Mr Bolton reiterated his hardline stance. In a speech to the annual convention of the American-Israel public affairs committee, the leading pro-Israel US lobbyists, he said: "The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve ... we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses."

The IAEA referred Iran to the security council on February 4, but a month's grace was left for diplomatic initiatives. By yesterday, those appeared exhausted. A meeting of European and Iranian negotiators broke down on Friday over Tehran's insistence that even if Russia was allowed to enrich Iran's uranium, Iran would enrich small amounts for research. Iran says that it needs enrichment for electricity.

According to Time magazine, the US plans to present the security council with evidence that Iran is designing a crude nuclear bomb, like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The evidence will be in the form of blueprints that the US said were found on a laptop belonging to an Iranian nuclear engineer, and obtained by the CIA in 2004. However, any such presentation will bring back memories of a similar briefing in February 2003 in which Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, laid out evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which proved not to exist.

While the US and Britain keep a united front over Iraq in the UN security council, there are clear differences over Iran. Britain has ruled out a military option if diplomatic pressure fails. The US has not. There is no serious consideration of large-scale use of ground forces, but there are disagreements in the administration over whether air strikes and small-scale special forces operations could be effective in halting or slowing down Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme.

Some believe Iran has secret facilities that are buried so deep underground as to be impenetrable. They argue that the US could never be certain whether or not it had destroyed Iran's "capability".

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12215.htm

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 10:10 AM

~ ~ ~
Bolton warns Iran of ‘painful consequences’
U.N. ambassador says U.S. has upped measures to stave off nuclear threat

Caleb Jones / AP

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, speaks Sunday during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual Policy Conference in Washington.
View related photos GO ON-SITE TO CLICK ON LINKS OR VIEW PHOTOS.

NBC VIDEO

• U.S. warns Iran on nuclear work
March 5: One day before an international showdown, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. said there will be consequences if Iran doesn't back down. NBC's Lisa Daniels reports.
Nightly News

Updated: 7:53 p.m. ET March 5, 2006
WASHINGTON - Iran faces “tangible and painful consequences” if it continues its nuclear activities and the United States will use “all tools at our disposal” to stop this threat, a senior U.S. official said Sunday, ahead of a crucial international meeting on Iran.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is “beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Monday’s meeting of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency governing board is expected to take stock of Iran’s continued defiance of U.S. and European demands to end sensitive weapons-related uranium enrichment activity and then hand the case over to the security council.

Security council concerns
Iran Sunday again threatened to begin large-scale nuclear enrichment if the case is taken up by the security council.

“The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve,” Bolton warned.

“The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences,” he told 4,500 delegates to the annual convention of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel U.S. lobbying group.

He said Iran poses a “comprehensive threat” as a state sponsor of terrorism as well as a nuclear aspirant and so “we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses.”

The United States has had sweeping sanctions on Iran since after the 1979 Iranian revolution but is looking at ways to further use its Proliferation Security Initiative to deny Iran materials it needs for its nuclear program, he said.

Bolton reaffirmed that the United States does not see the security council moving quickly to impose sanctions on Iran, but he pointedly noted that “many other governments have begun to include the word sanctions in their discourse on Iran,” implying they may take action outside the security council.
.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11684031/
~

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 02:57 PM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tomgram: Weaponizing the Shark and Other Pentagon DreamsShark and Awe
From the Annals of Full-Spectrum Dominance
By
Tom Engelhardt

We already have "stealth" aircraft, but what about a little of the stealth that only nature can provide?

Navy Seals, move over -- here come the Navy sharks. According to the latest New Scientist magazine, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the blue-sky wing of the Pentagon, has set yet another group of American scientists loose to create the basis for future red-in-tooth-and-maw Discovery Channel programs. In this case, they are planning to put neural implants into the brains of sharks in hopes, one day, of "controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling." In their dreams at least, DARPA'S far-out funders hope to "exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted."
So far they've only made it to the poor dogfish, "steered" in captivity via electrodes keyed to "phantom odors." As it happens though, DARPA-sponsored plans are a good deal lustier than that: Next stop, the blue shark, which reaches a length of 13 feet. Project engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island claims a team will soon be putting neural implants "into blue sharks and releas[ing] them into the ocean off the coast of Florida." To transmit signals to the sharks, the team will need nothing less than a network of signaling towers in the area. This has "anti-ballistic shark system" written all over it.

Actually, it's not the first time the military has invested in shark technology. As Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org pointed out last July, "The Navy has tapped three firms to build prototype gadgets that duplicate what sharks do naturally: find prey from the electric fields they emit." One of them, Advanced Ceramics Research, Inc., limned the project's potential benefits this way: "If developed, such a capability might allow for the detection of small, hostile submarines entering a seawater inlet, harbor or channel, or allow objects such as mines to be pinpointed in shallow waters where sonar imaging is severely compromised." And then there's that ultimate underwater dream, the Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System, that could lead to all sorts of Navy breakthroughs, perhaps even -- if you'll excuse a tad of blue-skying on my part -- blue shark/human tracking teams, or if not that, then lots of late-night-TV Aquaman jokes.

Of course, the Navy has been in nature's waters in a big way for a while with its Marine Mammal Program in San Diego. There, it trains bottlenose dolphins as "sentries" and mine detectors. Such dolphins were "first operationally deployed" in Vietnam in 1971 and a whole Dolphin patrol (like, assumedly, the shark patrol to come) is now on duty in the Khor Abd Allah waterway, Iraq's passageway into the Persian Gulf. To the embarrassment of the Navy, a dolphin named Takoma even went "AWOL" there in 2003, soon after the invasion of Iraq began.

As Nick Turse has pointed out, DARPA funds research into weaponizing creatures that inhabit just about any environmental niche imaginable -- including bees capable of detecting explosives; "eyes" patterned after those of flies that might someday make "smart" weaponry even smarter; gecko wall-climbing and octopi concealment techniques; and electrode-controlled rats capable of searching through piles of rubble. In addition, between nature and whatever the opposite of nurture may be, there's been an ongoing military give-and-take. Consider, for instance, BigDog, highlighted in the same issue of New Scientist. Compared to a pack mule, goat, or horse, this "robotic beast of burden" is being developed by Boston Dynamics to haul over rough terrain at least 40 kilograms of supplies soldiers won't need to carry, while being able to take a "hefty kick" in the legs without crumpling to the ground.

From sharks to robots, from hacking into your nervous system to manipulating the weather, the Pentagon seems determined to exert "full spectrum dominance" especially over that top of the line primate, us. To achieve this, it sponsors blue-sky thinking with a vengeance. Nothing that moves or breathes on the planet, it seems, is conceptually beyond conscription by Uncle Sam into possible future-war scenarios.

This is undoubtedly what happens when you have an administration that considers the Pentagon the answer to all our problems and gives it a $439.3 billion budget to play with -- and that's exclusive of actual war-fighting money (which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated $120 billion for the year, will come in supplemental requests to Congress). And remember as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does not include the $9.3 billion the Department of Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the budget at least close to the $600 billion range. Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs estimated that all military-related outlays -- that is, the real Pentagon budget -- totaled closer to $840 billion dollars.

Even taken at face value, the 2007 budget accounts for more than half of the $873 billion in federal discretionary spending -- the funds that the President and Congress decide to spend each year. For 2007, education, the second largest discretionary budget item, amounts to just over $50 billion, a piddling sum by comparison. But there is probably no way to put any version of the Pentagon's finances into perspective. Militarily speaking, it throws other military spending on the planet into the deepest shadow. As Frida Berrigan, senior research associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center and co-author of Weapons at War 2005, points out, "The Pentagon accounts for about half the world's total military expenditures of $1.04 trillion, spending alone what the 32 next most powerful nations spend together."

The United States is also by far the planet's largest exporter of weapons and military hardware. An annual Congressional Research Service report found that, in 2004, global weapons deliveries totaled nearly $37 billion -- with the United States responsible for more than 33% of them, or $12.4 billion, and it hasn't gotten better since.

No other country puts anything like such effort, planning, and dreaming into the idea of projecting planet-spanning military power, caught so grimly in that phrase, "full spectrum dominance." To Pentagon minds this seems to mean: from 20,000 leagues down to 20 miles up (and everything that creeps, crawls, swims, or flies in between). The phrase first gained attention with the release in 2000 of the Air Force's Joint Vision 2020 statement -- a supposed look into a future world of American war-making. It's one of those terms that sticks with you -- and not just because of the full-spectrum weaponry that's now on the drawing boards, ranging from hypervelocity rod bundles meant to penetrate underground bunkers from outer space (ominously nicknamed "rods from god") to the Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), "an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that [by 2010] would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads" anywhere on the planet within two hours, or that permanent base on the moon the Bush administration has called for by 2020 (and the array of Star Wars-style space-based weaponry that would ring it).

Full-spectrum dominance turns out to include even the United States where, in 2002, the Bush administration established the United States Northern Command or Northcom whose website at present has the following from a visit by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale as its reassuring quote of the week: "I'm leaving with a clear sense of confidence in the vision and planning of NORTHCOM to deal with any emerging threat, whether an occurrence of pandemic flu, a 2006 hurricane ... or a terrorist attack still being planned by our adversaries."

While the Pentagon quietly begins to take over tasks that once were delegated to civilian agencies, its blue-sky weapons planning extends into the distant future. Take, for instance, the Air Force Futures Game 05, held for several days last October in the Dulles, Virginia office of consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. The exercise was dedicated to "looking at scenarios for the year 2025," especially one in which a nuclear weapon is loose in a "Middle Eastern country" and a major war is in the offing. Like many other Pentagon war-gaming exercises, this one was largely committed to confirming the usefulness of as yet nonexistent or hardly existent weaponry, especially in the areas of "space access" and "electronic warfare." According to Col. Gail Wojtowicz, Air Force division director of future concepts and transformation, the gamers were "also looking at one of the trickiest issues the Air Force or another service may have to face: what the Pentagon can do on American soil." Indeed.

Military analyst William Arkin wrote about these particular Air Force games, meant to boost "laser, high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons," at his Washington Post Early Warning blog. Such blue-sky exercises, he explained, advance new weapons systems (and their corporate sponsors) "along the familiar development path of boosters and patrons feeding information to war gamers who feed study participants who feed researchers who feed manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is hard to tell whether high powered microwaves and laser came into being because someone conceived it out of need or because its existence in the laboratory created the need."

To support letting inventive minds roam free outside normal frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I bet there's no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the government funding the equivalent for education 2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence 2025. To have this happen, I'm afraid, you would have to transform them into Northcom war games.

Now it's true that much blue-skying may never come to be. Those U.S. Navy stealth sharks may not patrol our coasts and a good, swift enemy kick to some unexpected spot on BigDog's anatomy may fell the "creature," if budgetary or high-tech wrinkles don't do the trick first -- just as an unexpected series of low-tech blows to our full-spectrum military has left the Pentagon desperate and the Army unraveling in Iraq.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if official blue-sky thinking didn't always mean mobilizing finances, scientists, corporations, and even the animal kingdom in the service of global death. Wouldn't it be nice to blue sky just a tad about life?

[Note: Special thanks for Pentagon facts and figures in this piece go to Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute's invaluable Arms Trade Resource Center. To keep up with the latest Pentagon full-spectrum dominance projects, be sure to check out Noah Shachtman's entertaining as well as useful DefenseTech website, heavily mined for this piece, and William Arkin's Washington Post Early Warning blog.]

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=66469
Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 05:43 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
INTERESTING. IS THIS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY? OR IS THIS JUST A FLOATER? NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND IT, BUT THERE ARE POINTS WHICH SOUND IMPORTANT PERHAPS EVEN DOABLE, NO MATTER HOW I FEEL ABOUT NEWT. DOES ANYONE KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS OR UNDERSTAND IT BETTER THAN I? I'M NOT ALL THAT FAMILIAR WITH HOW EVERYTHING WORKED IN NEW YORK CITY UNDER RUDY. I KNOW HE CLEANED IT UP, THRILLING SOME AND MAKING ENEMIES OF OTHERS. SOME OF THE IDEAS ARE JUST GREEK TO ME. SRH
~
Rumsfeld Pushes Gingrich Long War Strategy
By
Pamela Hess
United Press International
Monday 06 March 2006

Washington - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is circulating a strategy paper by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, asking top deputies to take another look at the QDR with it in mind.

"What does he propose that we have overlooked?" wrote Rumsfeld in a Jan. 30 memo marked "for official use only" to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, Vice Chairman Adm. Edmund Giambastiani and Eric Edelman, under secretary of defense for policy. "Are there any adjustments to our (Quadrennial Defense Review) roadmaps that could benefit from his ideas?"

Former House Speaker Gingrich wrote the paper, "Essential Strategic Changes in National Security 2005-2007," in October. Responses to Rumsfeld's questions were due back last week.

Gingrich posits the creating an "Intelligent Effective Limited Government" which will use "entrepreneurial public management and modern information systems to modernize the government into a system compatible with the speed, agility, flexibility and efficiency of modern global companies."
Dismantling the government bureaucracy is a subject dear to Rumsfeld's heart. The day before the Pentagon was attacked in 2001, Rumsfeld unveiled his plan for transforming the business side of the Defense Department. His plans have hit a rough patch: while he got a rewrite of the hiring, firing and promotion rules governing the military's 700,000 civilian workers, a federal court essentially gutted the proposed system last week. Other components have made slow progress, in no small part due to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Gingrich goes much further, prescribing a societal transformation, including a new national "theory and system" for dealing with "the irreconcilable wing of Islam" and a national math, science and basic research initiative to ensure the United States is prepared to compete economically with China and India in years to come.

Gingrich proposes a seven-point plan.

The first is establishing a "values and goals based" metrics for senior leadership, which would extend throughout the national security departments. He advocates the method used by then-May Rudolph Giuliani to reform the New York City Police Department, with daily reports to senior leadership on what has been achieved each day, combined with increased tactical authority for lower-level officials. He contrasts that with the "cumbersome World War II-style" monthly progress reports conducted for the Iraq war.

The second would be a massive overhaul of the non-defense agencies and departments involved in national security along the lines of the 1980's Goldwater-Nichols Act, which strengthened the Joint Staff and the combatant commanders, and created Special Operations Command. This new act would compel and ease interagency coordination across departments "to bring to bear all aspects of national power to achieve national and homeland security."

"None of the civilian systems have the habits, structures, training and career tracks needed to be complete participants in an effective system of national and homeland security," Gingrich writes.

One of the changes he envisions would be integrating the Defense, State and intelligence budgets into a single integrated whole.

"Only by presenting the national security system as a single system can Congress begin to understand that an effective foreign service may be as important as an effective training program for the military," he writes.

The third step is establishing a "theory and system" for winning the Long War with the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam." Gingrich suggests the war could last as long as 70 years, and complains that there is no central guidance for this new struggle on par with George Kennan's 1949 "Long Telegram" and Paul Nitze's 1950 NSC-68, both documents that described the problem of, and proposed a policy for, defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Gingrich says that theory must be developed, as well as a strategy for keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of dictators or rogue regimes that might give them to terrorists.

"Twenty-two years after the Marines were killed in Beirut and five years after the 9/11 attack on the American homeland, we still do not have a clear and compelling explanation of the Long War, the theory on how to win it, and the strategy and structures which that victory will require," he writes.

Fourth, Gingrich calls for a theory and strategy for defeating terrorists - terrorism being a method of fighting distinct from the philosophies of Islamic extremists. He says the United States must find a way to ensure peace and stability in places like Baghdad, Gaza and London with exponentially greater intelligence and urban warfare skills and capabilities now at hand.

The effort put into Japanese code breaking during World War II should be trained on penetrating al-Qaida, which communicates both actively and passively over the Internet, Gingrich states.

He also calls for dramatic increases in funding for urban warfare, putting it on par with conventional warfare systems which annually command tens of billions of dollars.

"We need to see dominating the urban battle space as comparable to dominating the air or dominating the sea," he writes.

Fifth, Gingrich states the government must come to terms with the uniquely challenging nexus of three factors: the rapidly expanding base of scientific knowledge around the world; the growing economic power of China and India; and the "continued evolution of a worldwide market in arms that will make very dangerous capabilities available to "underdeveloped countries" that otherwise could not build them on their own.

"The United States must confront these three challenges by developing a national security strategic plan for both math and science learning and for basic research to enable the United States to remain the leading scientific and technological nation for the next half century," Gingrich writes.

"This is literally the second greatest challenge facing American after the Long War ... and it should receive the attention and intensity of effort that position implies," he writes.

Sixth, Gingrich wants to create a parallel, competing system for the development of defense doctrine, equipment and acquisition to compete with the entrenched methods of doing the same things "to see if the explosion in scientific knowledge and entrepreneurial talent can provide dramatically more effective defense at the same or much lower cost."

The "Team B" would be advised by a panel of private industry CEOs and be started with a $5 billion budget, and challenged to devise systems that can defeat regular forces and regular systems in a head-to-head competition.

Gingrich would offer prizes as incentive for the private competitor, and look to see if the competition spurred the government bureaucracy on to more creative, efficient heights. He seems to have dim hopes for the latter.

"Truly revolutionary breakthroughs have to grow outside of the systems and cultures they challenge or they are smothered by their more powerful established elders," he writes.

Finally, Gingrich says the seventh point is selling the above plan in "simple, clear language" so the American public, Congress and the media "to understand what they should insist on and how to measure progress and failure."

"Once the American people understand these challenges they will support the resources necessary and endure the problems which may be unavoidable," he writes. "The question is not the courage of the American people. It is the courage, consistency and persistence of their leaders."
~
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030706O.shtml
~ ~ ~

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 07:05 PM

. . . . . . .The Backlash Against Democracy Promotion
By Thomas Carothers
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

THE AUTOCRATS PUSH BACK

In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a controversial new bill imposing heightened controls on local and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the country. The new legislation, which requires all NGOs in Russia to inform the government in advance about every project they intend to conduct, is another marker of the country's dispiriting slide back toward authoritarianism.

The law is also a sign of an equally disturbing and much broader trend. After two decades of the steady expansion of democracy-building programs around the world, a growing number of governments are starting to crack down on such activities within their borders. Strongmen -- some of them elected officials -- have begun to publicly denounce Western democracy assistance as illegitimate political meddling. They have started expelling or harassing Western NGOs and prohibiting local groups from taking foreign funds -- or have started punishing them for doing so. This growing backlash has yet to coalesce into a formal or organized movement. But its proponents are clearly learning from and feeding off of one another.

The recent "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and the widespread suspicion that U.S. groups such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House, and the Open Society Institute played a key behind-the-scenes role in fomenting these upheavals have clearly helped trigger the backlash. Politicians from China to Zimbabwe have publicly cited concerns about such events spreading to their own shores as justification for new restrictions on Western aid to NGOs and opposition groups. Yet there is something broader at work than just a fear of orange (Ukraine's revolution came to be known as the Orange Revolution). The way that President George W. Bush is making democracy promotion a central theme of his foreign policy has clearly contributed to the unease such efforts (and the idea of democracy promotion itself) are creating around the world. Some autocratic governments have won substantial public sympathy by arguing that opposition to Western democracy promotion is resistance not to democracy itself, but to American interventionism. Moreover, the damage that the Bush administration has done to the global image of the United States as a symbol of democracy and human rights by repeatedly violating the rule of law at home and abroad has further weakened the legitimacy of the democracy-promotion cause.

Just as the sources of the backlash have been multilayered, so too must be the response. To remain as effective in the next decade as they have been in the last, groups that promote democracy must come to grips with how the international context for their work has changed. This will mean rethinking some of their methods. The Bush administration, meanwhile, must also face some unpleasant realities, specifically about how the president's "freedom agenda" is perceived around the world, and must engage seriously an effort to build credibility for its democracy endeavor.

JUST SAYING NO

The most systematic and forceful resistance to Western democracy aid has come from Russia under Putin. The NGO law is just one of a series of recent actions Moscow has taken to constrain or challenge democracy-promotion groups. The Kremlin has also attacked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for its election-monitoring work in Russia and neighboring countries. Several U.S. democracy-promotion groups have experienced minor but pointed harassment from Russian authorities. Putin's government has criticized Russian NGOs working on human rights or other politically sensitive issues for accepting outside funds, and senior Russian officials have denounced external democracy aid as subversive and anti-Russian. President Putin has also taken to warning fellow autocrats in surrounding countries of the dangers of allowing such aid, and Russia has started building its own capacity to provide parallel forms of assistance, through election monitors and political consultants. Putin's supporters have cast his campaign against pro-democracy groups as a security imperative, asserting that the United States is trying to encircle Russia with pro-Western governments and subvert its political order.

Russia is not the only country pushing back against Western democracy assistance; the resistance has become a widespread post-Soviet pastime. Uzbek President Islam Karimov is currently in the process of shutting down most of the Western democracy programs in his country, as well as most of the domestic NGOs that work on democracy issues: in 2005, more than 60 percent of Uzbekistan's active NGOs were put out of business. Articles in the state-controlled media have accused the United States of trying to undermine Uzbek sovereignty through the Trojan horse of democratization. Meanwhile, in Belarus, President Aleksandr Lukashenko has also forbidden most external political aid and has relentlessly stamped out political challengers and independent civil society. After first putting all foreign funding destined for local NGOs under state control, in 2003, Lukashenko banned foreign funding of any political or educational activities in the country. The Tajik government announced new regulations in April 2005 requiring foreign embassies and foreign organizations working in the country to give the authorities notice before making any contact with local political parties, NGOs, or media organizations. Government-controlled newspapers in Tajikistan have accused the United States of criminality in its support for Ukrainian and Kyrgyz activists and have praised Belarus for its resistance to Western interference. Nearby in Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has enacted similarly tight restrictions on cooperation between foreign entities and Kazakh political parties. In a speech last September, he added his voice to the regional chorus warning foreign NGOs not to try to destabilize former Soviet states.

The backlash against democracy aid has also started to spread outside the former Soviet Union. One enthusiastic participant is China. Last April, an article in the People's Daily condemned the United States' "democratic offensive" in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere as self-serving, coercive, and immoral. The following month, the Chinese Communist Party reportedly mapped out a strategy for resisting U.S. and European efforts to promote color revolutions in China and its neighborhood. Beijing has delayed the passage of a new law that would liberalize the rules on NGOs in the country and has cracked down on various local groups that receive foreign funding, including a human rights group supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private foundation funded by the U.S. government devoted to supporting democracy worldwide. Beijing is also tightening restrictions on foreign media by stepping up measures to scramble external radio broadcasts and reversing an earlier decision to allow the local publication of foreign newspapers. Elsewhere in Asia, governments have enacted similar restrictions: in Nepal, for example, after 15 years of relative openness to Western democracy programs, the government recently issued new regulations sharply restricting such activities.

The backlash is spreading to Africa as well. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has driven out Western NGOs and forced the closure of many local groups that get external support, claiming that they are fronts through which Western "colonial masters" subvert the government. In December 2004, Zimbabwe's parliament passed legislation prohibiting local NGOs from receiving any outside aid. Mugabe has not yet signed the bill but has kept up his rhetorical attacks on alleged Western meddling. Further north, Ethiopia expelled the IRI, the NDI, and IFES (formerly the International Foundation for Election Systems) prior to national elections last May. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi stated on Ethiopian television that "there is not going to be a 'Rose Revolution' or a 'Green Revolution' or any color revolution in Ethiopia after the election." And in Eritrea, the government enacted a new law last year forbidding local NGOs from engaging in any work other than relief activities and blocking them from receiving external support. In August, Asmara asked the U.S. Agency for International Development to cease operations in the country, stating that it was uncomfortable with the agency's activities, which include promoting citizen participation in economic and political life.

In South America, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez regularly blasts U.S. democracy promotion as being part of a Bush administration campaign to oust him. Chávez has accused groups such as the NED and the IRI of supporting the Venezuelan opposition and has intimidated many local NGOs that receive outside funding. And like Putin, Chávez is not content just to block U.S. aid at home. He has allegedly used his petrodollars to support anti-American parties and candidates in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and elsewhere, in the hope of spreading what he calls his "Bolivarian Revolution." Although Chávez remains an extreme case, wariness of U.S. democracy promotion is rising in the region, which is rife with anti-Americanism and increasingly dominated by left-leaning governments. The rejection last year by the Organization of American States of a U.S. proposal to establish a new regional mechanism to monitor governmental compliance with democratic norms reflected this growing skepticism.

SEEING ORANGE

What exactly explains this global backlash against democracy promotion? The recent revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan were clearly important events. The dramatic upheavals in these countries showed what huge numbers of ordinary citizens can do when they rally bravely for democracy. But as accounts multiplied of U.S. support for key civic and political groups in these countries, the color revolutions also spread the idea that the United States was the shadowy guiding force behind these events.

Although fear of democracy aid as a tool of the United States may have spiked with the color revolutions, it is best understood as the culmination of a longer trend. When democracy promotion first flourished, during the rapid democratic expansion of the late 1980s and early 1990s, activists usually had to work in one of two contexts: in authoritarian societies, where the door to democracy promotion remained firmly shut, or in newly democratizing countries, where the door to such activities was generally wide open. As time passed, many of the newly democratizing countries evolved into another, intermediate type: the semiauthoritarian state, which proliferated in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East.

Such regimes typically attempt an artful political balancing act. Their leaders allow enough political freedoms to gain themselves some credit and legitimacy as reformers. Typically, this means holding regular elections and permitting the creation of a few opposition parties, a scattering of independent civic groups, and an independent newspaper or two. But these regimes also maintain a strong enough hold on the levers of power to ensure that no serious threats to their rule emerge.

At first, many pro-democracy organizations found themselves stymied by such semiauthoritarian arrangements. Over time, however, the more experienced groups (such as the NDI, the IRI, IFES, and Freedom House) settled on a more effective approach. Drawing on lessons some of these groups had learned during earlier successes, such as their support for the opposition to General Augusto Pinochet in the Chilean plebiscite of 1988 and for the opposition to Sandinista rule in the Nicaraguan elections of 1990, the approach consisted of providing technical and financial aid to a broad range of local civic and political groups working together to challenge the government through elections. The aid focused on improving local capacity in several, mutually reinforcing ways. First, Western groups helped locals gain the ability to do independent election monitoring, including the capacity to hold parallel vote counts, in order to ensure that citizens could at least learn the real results of elections. Second, they provided backing to independent civic groups, often including dynamic new student organizations, that could foster broad civic engagement in the electoral process. Third, they trained and sometimes provided equipment or other material assistance to opposition parties to help them campaign effectively. And they encouraged these parties to work together and build broad coalitions.

At the end of the 1990s, this approach was brought to bear -- first, in an incomplete form, against Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar of Slovakia and President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and then, more fully, against President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. U.S. and European pro-democracy groups mounted a well-coordinated and well-funded (to the tune of $60 million to $100 million) aid campaign to help Serbian civic and political groups mount an electoral challenge to Milosevic, who was already under pressure from Western economic sanctions and punitive diplomatic measures. As the 2000 elections unfolded, all the pieces fell into place: with Western help, Serbian civic groups convinced large numbers of ordinary citizens to bet on change and engage in the electoral process; the opposition parties performed better than they had in the past; and independent monitoring efforts laid bare Milosevic's effort to override the results. The outcome was the autocrat's ouster in a largely peaceful "electoral revolution."

Since then, Western groups have applied similar strategies -- although never as amply funded or as strongly backed by diplomatic pressure -- in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, and have frequently been met with accusations of illegitimate political meddling. The groups usually respond by pointing out that they work openly, not in secret, and by arguing that their goals are not to achieve specific electoral outcomes, but just to ensure reasonably free and fair elections. Outside aid is necessary, they argue, to level electoral playing fields and create safeguards against the manipulation of the process by regimes.

The truth, however, is that although most external democracy activists may indeed be primarily interested in achieving free and fair elections, they also frequently hope that their efforts will increase the likelihood that autocrats will lose office. The motives of U.S. government agencies that fund (but do not specifically direct) many of the democracy groups are similarly complicated, ranging from the principled to the instrumental, depending on the country in question and the officials in charge. Not surprisingly, these subtleties are generally lost on the targets of democracy-promotion drives, who tend to view such efforts as concerted campaigns to oust them, instigated or at least backed by powerful Western governments, especially the United States.

FAKE FEARS?

Although autocratic leaders regularly cite concerns about outside influence and the threat of instability as their motivations for resisting pro-democracy efforts, a question naturally arises: Are they genuinely afraid that relatively modest Western democracy-training programs and financial aid for often weak civic and political groups will undermine their hold on power, or is this fear just a convenient justification for repressive measures they would take anyway? The answer varies, depending on the country.

In some places, especially larger countries such as Russia and China, the latter explanation probably holds. The Russian and Chinese governments enjoy a strong grip on power and face no significant challengers. Putin's offensive against Western democracy aid appears to be a way for him to portray his authoritarian project to Russians as a defense of the country's national security. The Kremlin may have been somewhat rattled by the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, but it worried more about the influence it would lose in neighboring states than it did about a political uprising at home. Moreover, denigrating the Orange Revolution as the result of U.S. machinations helped Putin put a positive spin on what was one of his most glaring foreign policy failures: namely, his support for the losing side in the Ukrainian elections. Similarly, the Chinese government's recent invocations of the color revolutions appear to be nothing more than the presentation of a convenient rationale for broadening the antiliberalization campaign it has been conducting for several years.

In other cases, especially in smaller, weaker countries, some genuine fear seems to be at work. The specter of clever U.S. political operatives quietly fomenting local revolutions does seem to have spooked some strongmen, even though in actuality Western democracy aid is not so powerful. Although Washington may spend more than $1 billion on pro-democracy programs this year, the money is spread over more than 50 countries and goes to a wide range of efforts, including court-management programs and assistance for government decentralization efforts. Like all types of external assistance promoting political, economic, or social change, this aid is far from being a magic elixir. It can help boost existing civic groups and opposition parties. But it cannot create them where they do not exist or strengthen them when they are fundamentally weak. Even in the case of Serbia -- a high-water mark in terms of pro-democracy programs' assertiveness and scale -- outside aid played only a supporting role for the courageous and skillful local activists who led the way. And the very same types of assistance have so far proved far less effective in countries such as Belarus, where the political opposition and civil society are relatively weak and the regime is very powerful.

And yet, many people around the world -- not just autocrats feeling the heat -- view external democracy assistance skeptically. They assume that if the United States decides to shape political outcomes in relatively weak countries, it can do so. In many places, the current wave of assertive democracy aid conjures up memories of covert U.S. actions during the Cold War, when Washington did try, and sometimes succeeded in, swinging elections or overthrowing legitimate governments.

To make matters worse, some Western NGOs, whether propelled by hubris or the desire to convince funders of their importance, have a tendency to claim substantial credit for political events in which they played only a very minor role. Occasional stories in the Western media that portray U.S. democracy-promotion programs as having been the crucial factor in certain countries' transitions to democracy also contribute to the misperceptions.

A (DIM) LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS

The backlash against democracy aid can be understood as a reaction by nondemocratic governments to the increasingly assertive provision of such aid. But it is also linked to and gains force from another source: the broader public unease with the very idea of democracy promotion, a feeling that has spread widely in the past several years throughout the former Soviet Union, western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. President Bush, by embracing democracy promotion in the way he has, is largely responsible for this discomfort.

Washington's use of the term "democracy promotion" has come to be seen overseas not as the expression of a principled American aspiration but as a code word for "regime change" -- namely, the replacement of bothersome governments by military force or other means. Moreover, the Bush administration has also caused the term to be closely associated with U.S. military intervention and occupation by adopting democracy promotion as the principal rationale for the invasion of Iraq. The fact that the administration has also given the impression that it is interested in toppling other governments hostile to U.S. security interests, such as in Iran and Syria, has made the president's "freedom agenda" seem even more menacing and hostile. This is especially so since when Bush and his top advisers single out "outposts of tyranny," the governments they invariably list are those that also happen to be unfriendly to the United States. Meanwhile, friendly but equally repressive regimes, such as that in Saudi Arabia, escape mention.

This behavior has made many states, nondemocratic and democratic alike, uneasy with the whole body of U.S. democracy-building programs, no matter how routine or uncontroversial the programs once were. It also makes it easier for those governments eager to push back against democracy aid for their own reasons to portray their actions as noble resistance to aggressive U.S. interventionism. And the more President Bush talks of democracy promotion as his personal cause, the easier he makes it for tyrannical leaders to play on his extraordinarily high level of unpopularity abroad to disparage the idea.

The Bush administration has further damaged the credibility of U.S. democracy advocates by generally undermining the United States' status as a symbol of democracy and human rights. Even as the president has repeatedly asserted his commitment to a "freedom agenda," he has struck blow after self-inflicted blow against America's democratic principles and standards: through the torture of prisoners and detainees at U.S.-run facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan; the holding of hundreds of persons in legal limbo at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the rendition of foreign detainees (sometimes secretly abducted abroad) to foreign countries known to practice torture; the establishment of a network of covert U.S.-run prisons overseas; eavesdropping without court warrants within the United States; and the astonishing resistance by the White House last year to a legislative ban on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of any person in U.S. custody anywhere. Taken together, these actions have inflicted incalculable harm to the United States' image in the world. This fact is plainly and painfully evident to anyone who spends even modest amounts of time abroad. Yet it is one about which President Bush and his team, with the possible exception of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, appear unaware or unconcerned. Yet the damage has made it all too easy for foreign autocrats to resist U.S. democracy promotion by providing them with an easy riposte: "How can a country that tortures people abroad and abuses rights at home tell other countries how to behave?"

PUSHING BACK, CAREFULLY

So how should the United States respond? There are two answers, corresponding to the two interconnected but different facets of the problem, namely, the efforts by some governments to shut down democracy aid and the growing global distrust of democracy promotion in general.

With regard to the former, Washington should closely monitor measures by other governments to block democracy aid and develop a coherent, nuanced way to express U.S. opposition to such measures and to reverse them when possible. The Bush administration recently succeeded in persuading Putin to water down certain aspects of the Russian NGO law. This effort was reasonably well executed, but it represented a one-time scramble, not part of a systematic plan to address the more general issue.

Fighting the antidemocratic pushback will require a subtle diplomatic hand. In some cases, going public or pushing back hard may get results; in others, it may only fuel nationalist sentiments and be counterproductive. U.S. officials must be reasonable about what they expect from foreign governments in this area, and deciding what is reasonable is not always easy. There are relatively coherent international norms about democratic political practice, embodied in a raft of multilateral and regional agreements. But there is no well-settled body of norms about acceptable forms of involvement in democratization across borders. In fact, the line between reasonable and unreasonable restrictions on outside political aid is not at all clear. Simply pushing other governments to follow U.S. or Western standards in this area will not help much. To the extent there are generalized standards, they generally allow less space for outside influence than Western democracy promoters usually seek. Would Washington countenance the presence, during elections, of foreign organizations -- especially ones funded by a powerful, possibly hostile government -- that underwrite and help carry out voter-education campaigns, the training of and provision of material aid to political parties, parallel vote counts, and citizen-mobilization efforts?

To overcome objections to this double standard, U.S. democracy promoters need to stress (and sincerely believe) two things. First, they must underscore that democracy promotion is not, as President Bush invariably portrays it, a singularly American endeavor. Many established democracies, as well as multilateral organizations, are part of the democracy-promotion community. U.S. democracy groups usually work alongside or directly with European groups and international organizations such as the OSCE and the UN Development Program. Second, they must emphasize that the point of assertive democracy aid is to help or push governments with a record of violating democratic norms to comply with them, not to allow any outside country control over their politics.

No matter how well democracy promoters make their case, however, many people in countries on the receiving end of such efforts will not be persuaded of the legitimacy of their efforts. Democracy promoters may believe that poor democratic performance reduces a country's right to invoke its sovereignty to block external intervention. That idea may be gaining currency in established democracies. Yet it is unlikely to command wide support in the developing and postcommunist worlds, where sovereignty is jealously guarded by governments of all political stripes.

Western democracy advocates thus face a hard choice, which they have yet to frame or debate openly. Should they keep mounting sophisticated, pointed aid campaigns to support challenges to foreign despots, or should they trim their sails to avoid fueling a backlash that might prevent them from doing any work at all in a growing number of countries? The question boils down to how best to ensure the maximum reach and impact for democracy aid.

RETURN TO THE LIGHT

There is only so much the Bush administration can do to ease the broader discomfort with democracy promotion generally. The close association of democracy promotion with U.S. military intervention will not go away for the remainder of President Bush's term. Moreover, even if a relatively stable, peaceful, and democratic regime is achieved in Iraq in the next few years, Washington should not expect this to change many people's minds about the legitimacy and desirability of using military force to promote democracy. On this issue there is a fundamental rift between the thinking of the Bush team and the bulk of world opinion -- a rift that will continue to seriously taint the president's "freedom agenda" in many people's eyes.

President Bush can, however, win back some credibility by showing that he is serious about democracy promotion as a matter of principle, not just as an expedient way to justify military action or the use of other tactics of regime change against unfriendly governments. Pursuing democracy as a matter of principle does not mean focusing only on lofty ideals and ignoring hard interests. But it does mean acting with at least a modicum of consistency. In his second inaugural address, Bush seemed to acknowledge this point when he promised to abandon Washington's unfortunate history of supporting autocratic regimes that served U.S. economic and security interests. Arguing that repressive societies breed extremism that can evolve into anti-Western terrorism, he pledged to stand up for freedom everywhere.

So far, however, he has yet to put his money where his mouth is. In regard to the most significant cases -- Russia, China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia -- the Bush administration has spoken mildly, at best, about the need for political reform. Meanwhile, it has carried on business as usual with these countries. The same goes for U.S. relations with Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. Last autumn, the pro-U.S. autocrats in all three of these countries faced national elections. Commendably, the Bush administration let all three know that it wanted them to hold free and fair elections. But all three leaders played the classic game of friendly tyrants facing a bit of U.S. pro-democratic pique: they made some modest improvements early on in the electoral process; then, in the crucial late stage of the elections, they cracked down hard on opposition groups, tampered with the votes, and took other measures to ensure they would win lopsided victories. Faced with these tactics, the Bush administration also reverted to the old script, making too much of minor achievements and too little of major failures. Since then, U.S. officials have said little in public about the events. It seems that all three of these strongmen will pay no significant price for their antidemocratic defiance.

Of course, it is unrealistic to expect Washington to become perfectly consistent in its promotion of democracy. But having staked his reputation on the idea that fighting terrorism requires abandoning the United States' cozy relationship with friendly tyrants, President Bush must do something to make good on his pledge. Obviously, a drastic reversal of U.S. relations with important governments would be neither feasible nor desirable. But letting phony elections pass with little response only solidifies the already widespread perception that Washington is hypocritical.

The Bush administration could also burnish its democracy credentials by getting its own house in order. In this area, too, the damage is not going to be remedied anytime soon; actions such as the torture of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers are now indelibly etched on the minds of foreign observers. But the administration can and must do better. The necessary remedial steps are hardly mysterious. They range from rectifying once and for all U.S. mistreatment of prisoners and detainees abroad to coming clean on secret prisons, renditions, unlawful abductions, and unauthorized domestic eavesdropping. very country facing a terrorist threat struggles to find the right balance between security and respect for civil liberties. But unless the Bush administration resolves the staggering contradiction between its unapologetic proclivity to violate individual rights in the name of fighting terrorism and its preaching to others that liberty is an antidote for terrorism, its democracy-promotion agenda will continue to rest on a shaky foundation. Meanwhile, the democracy backlash will continue to grow.

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/

Reprinted by permission of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, March/April 2006. Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

. . . . .
How the Bush/Cheney administration's stated desire to instill "Democracy" throughout the middle east and the world has backfired. A desire for a peaceful USA controlled global economy isn't for them it seems.

Bush/Cheney policies, have sent the ones who are in the process of baby steps into a Democratic world reeling backwards on their heels, seeing what our goals really are. We want, or so it seems, a democracy which leaves the door open for the United States, and our allies to dominate the world. Our brutal way of handling those who are in our eyes are our enemy, subjecting them to horrors we only read about, only see in movies, horrors which are against all that we Americans stand for, have them thinking twice about what we are trying to get them to do, it has them looking around and saying no to Democracy. They now feel they need to guard against us anyway they have open to them. They saw the "victor take all" attitude we have, the idea that we are above international law. Backwards we all go once again. How cold will this latest war of stand offs be? I doubt that there will be the foresite that pervaded after WWII.

How is it that in less than a decade all we hold dear is threatened and much has been lost to us? Will there be a person of vision to step up to the plate and undo the damage this administration has done to us as a people and as a nation in so many short years? We're in desparate need of someone capable, powerful and trustworthy. Wow, TRUST, what a novel concept!
SRH

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 07:14 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Clash of Caricatures

By
Cem Özdemir
Posted February 16, 2006

The reactions to the negative depictions of the prophet Muhammad in the European press have fanned the flames of dangerous stereotyping. The European right and Islamist fundamentalists use the controversy to promote cartoonish depictions of each other that fuel their political agendas. Instead of deepening the divide, Europe’s leaders should reach out to moderate Muslims for practical ways to heal the wounds

All the rage: Muslims worldwide have protested the depictions of the prophet Muhammed in the European media.
John Moore/Getty Image
Go on-site to view
The publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the ensuing violent protests in the Middle East are proof to many Europeans that a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West is upon us—a clear-cut case of where the freedom of the press rubs against unreasonable fundamentalism. Politicians of all stripes throughout Europe, including myself, agree that the freedom to express one’s opinion is among the founding principles of democracy, and that there should be no limitations on this inalienable right. However, deferring to democratic freedoms is not sufficient means to solve this escalating conflict.

Basic rights are one thing, but the responsibilities that come with them are another. On that front, Jyllands-Posten’s explanation for publishing the drawings—a critique of the media’s supposed self-censorship of Islamic issues in Denmark—is disingenuous. The newspaper, in fact, is known to support the Danish right-wing political party Dansk Folkeparti. And it speaks volumes that in 2003 the paper was not willing to print caricatures of Jesus because it would have insulted its readers. Jyllands-Posten had only one intention in mind when it published the cartoons: provocation. And it worked.

However, what is currently happening in parts of the Muslim world is hardly a spontaneous popular uprising spurred by provocation. The reaction is too orchestrated and too dated; after all, the cartoons were first published last September. For Islamic fundamentalists, the issue is not really about their religious beliefs being insulted. Rather, it is about power and political interests, not a “clash of civilizations.” Portraying the “Islamophobic” West as the enemy conveniently distracts attention away from other internal problems, just as does the ever-convenient anti-Israel, anti-Semitic rhetoric espoused by radical imams. If Israel, or the West, is to blame for everything, then the radicals do not carry any responsibility for failures in their own communities. It is also hard to take the fundamentalists’ complaints of religious disrespect seriously, considering that they applaud cartoons that portray Israel and Jews in the worst possible light.

So, then, what can be done to diffuse such tensions? Some have suggested that there is a need for new press regulations, such as the voluntary media code of conduct suggested by European Union (EU) Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini. That is not necessary. The ones we have already suffice. We do, however, need a broad, public debate about the limits of good taste and respect for religious convictions. That must include European politicians—and journalists—recognizing the sensibilities of Europe’s multicultural societies.

A close dialogue with Europe’s religious minorities can act as an early warning system inside and outside our borders. This vehicle for intercultural mediation is used far too infrequently. Shortly after the initial publication of the cartoons, the ambassadors of several Muslim countries requested a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Rasmussen, noting the anger of his own Muslims, should have accepted the meeting instead of only referring to the freedom of the press’s infallibility. A meeting wouldn’t in any way have threatened the freedom of expression and press rights. Indeed, the prime minister could have used the occasion to explain why he couldn’t censor Jyllands-Posten, even though he found the images offensive.

The European politicians who focus on violent overreactions abroad should note the peaceful reactions of the estimated 15 million Muslims here in Europe. After all, embassies are being attacked in Damascus, not Berlin. I am thinking in particular of certain German politicians who, since 9/11, have viewed Muslims primarily as a security risk and keep coming up with new ways to raise the bar on naturalization. In my home state of Baden-Württemberg this year, the conservative government introduced a new “citizenship questionnaire” to test the loyalty of Muslim applicants. Among the queries: “Do you think that forced marriages are consistent with human dignity?” and “Some people accuse the Jews of being responsible for all that’s bad in the world and even go so far as to blame them for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. What do you think of such accusations?”

Instead of humiliating Muslims and showing prejudice against Islam, a better approach is to strengthen the hand of moderate Muslims. Beyond soft diplomacy, the best way would be to support Turkey in its bid to join the EU. Many would regard such a step to be imprudent. But as a democratic and Muslim country, Turkey can play a special role. The Turks too have reacted in a level-headed manner to the current controversy. The Turkish government has made it clear that it sees no contradiction between the freedom of opinion and the respect of religious values. Turkey may still have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to freedom of expression, but it is already proving to the world—and particularly to Europeans—that Islam and free speech are not mutually exclusive. By bringing Turkey into closer dialogue, Europe can bridge the divide between the Western and Muslim worlds.
~
Cem Özdemir was the first German of Turkish descent elected to the German Bundestag and is now a Green member of the European Parliament.
. . .
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3366
. . .

Saundra Hummer

March 7th, 2006, 08:24 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~Coffee May Spell Heart Trouble for Some
By
LINDSEY TANNER,
AP Medical Writer
30 minutes agoCHICAGO - Here's a real caffeine jolt — heart attacks might be a risk for coffee drinkers with a common genetic trait that makes caffeine linger in their bodies, a study suggests.

Research on more than 4,000 people in Costa Rica found that about half had the trait and were considered "slow caffeine metabolizers." The other half had the opposite trait, which caused their bodies to rapidly break down or metabolize caffeine, and coffee-drinking in this group appeared to reduce heart attack risks.
Among slow-metabolizers, those who drank two or more cups of coffee daily were at least 36 percent more likely to have a nonfatal heart attack than those who drank little or no coffee. Even higher risks were found for younger slow metabolizers — those under 50. They were up to four times more likely to have a heart attack than slow metabolizers in their age group who drank little or no coffee.

The findings, though preliminary, might explain why there have been such mixed results in previous studies investigating caffeine's effects on the cardiovascular system, said University of Toronto researcher Ahmed El-Sohemy, a study co-author.

Caffeine is thought to block the effects of a certain chemical that is believed to help protect against tissue damage, he said.

Some previous research has linked coffee-drinking to a higher risk of heart disease, but other studies have suggested the opposite. While there's evidence to suggest caffeine can cause short-term blood pressure increases, a study last year said coffee-drinking didn't appear to cause long-term high blood pressure, at least in women.

The new study "clearly illustrates that one size does not fit all," El-Sohemy said. "Perhaps in the future we'll be making different (dietary) recommendations based on people's genetic makeup."

For now, there's no easy way to know if you're a fast or slow caffeine metabolizer. Staying awake all night if you drink coffee in the afternoon doesn't mean you're a slow metabolizer, and a genetic test that could answer the question is used in research but is not commercially available, El-Sohemy said.

His study, conducted with researchers from Harvard's School of Public Health and the University of Costa Rica, appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Participants were 2,014 men and women aged 58 on average who'd had a nonfatal heart attack between 1994 and 2004, plus a control group of 2,014 healthy men and women. Genetic tests of blood samples determined which ones were slow caffeine metabolizers and which were fast metabolizers.

El-Sohemy said the prevalence of both traits is similar in other population groups but that worldwide prevalence varies.

"This data is very provocative and very interesting," said Dr. Roger Blumenthal, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School who was not involved in the study.

Still, even if future research confirms the findings, it's likely that caffeine plays a much smaller role in heart attacks than conventional risk factors like high blood pressure, cholesterol and smoking, Blumenthal said.

Dr. Nieca Goldberg, an American Heart Association spokeswoman, said that while the results aren't conclusive, "One good message that we can give people is that life is about moderation."

The study "doesn't say you can't have caffeine," but drinking several cups of coffee daily is probably excessive for some people, she said.

Coffee can trigger heart palpitations in people who are sensitive to caffeine. Those palpitations may not be harmful but they can be frightening, Goldberg said. She noted that caffeine is found in other foods including colas and chocolate..
http://news.yahoo.com/

Saundra Hummer

March 8th, 2006, 11:31 AM

*
Your mind is made up
Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

03.08.06 - AUSTIN, Texas -- South Dakota is so rarely found on the leading edge of the far out, the wiggy, the California-esque. But it has now staked its claim. First to Outlaw Abortion This Century. The state legislature of South Dakota, in all its wisdom and majesty, a legislature comprised of sons and daughters of the soil from Aberdeen to Zell, have usurped the right of the women of that state to decide whether or not to bear the child of an unwanted pregnancy. THEY will decide. Women will do what they decide.

These towering solons, representing citizens from the great cosmopolitan centers of Rapid City and Sioux Falls to the bosky dells near Yankton, are noted for their sagacity and understanding. When you think "enlightenment," the first thing that comes to your mind is "the South Dakota Legislature," right?
As well it might. The purpose of the law is to force a decision from the United States Supreme Court, where the appointments of John Roberts and Sam Alito have now shored up the anti-choice forces.

The South Dakota Legislature has made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion under any circumstances except to save the life of the mother. There are no exceptions for rape, incest or to preserve the health of the mother. Should this strike you as hard cheese, State Sen. Bill Napoli, R-Rapid City, explains how rape and incest could be exceptions under the "life" clause. Napoli believes most abortions are performed for "convenience," but he told "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" about how he thinks a "real-life example" of the exception could be invoked:

"A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl, could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life."

Please stop and reread the paragraph above. See? Clearly Napoli's exception would not apply to the South Dakota woman also interviewed by the NewsHour. "Michelle" is in her 20s, has a low-paying job and two children. And says she simply cannot afford a third. She drove five hours to the state's only abortion clinic.

"It was difficult when I found out I was pregnant. I was saddened because I knew that I'd probably have to make this decision. Like I said, I have two children, so I look into their eyes and I love them. It's been difficult, you know, it's not easy. And I don't think it's, you know, ever easy on a woman, but we need that choice."

But who is she to make that choice when Bill Napoli can make it for her? He explains: "When I was growing up here in the wild west, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again. ... I don't think we're so far beyond that, that we can't go back to that."

I find this so profound I am considering putting Sen. Napoli in charge of all moral, ethical and medical decisions made by women. Certainly lucky for the women of South Dakota that he's there, and perhaps that's what we all need -- a man to make decisions for us in case we should decide to do something serious just for our own convenience.

Look at some of the incompetent women we have running around in this country -- Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, now there are a couple of girls in need of guidance from the South Dakota legislature. Female doctors, lawyers, airplane pilots, engineers and, for that matter, female members of the South Dakota Legislature -- who could ever trust them with an important decision?

In South Dakota, pharmacists can refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives should it trouble their conscience, and some groups who worked on the anti-abortion bill believe contraception also needs to be outlawed. Good plan. After that, we'll reconsider women's property rights, civil right and voting rights.

For years, the women's movement has been going around asking, "Who decides?" as though that were the issue. Well, here's the answer. Bill Napoli decides, and if you're not happy with that arrangement, well, you'd better be prepared to do something about it.

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20454

Saundra Hummer

March 8th, 2006, 11:41 AM

<.>
Sirotablog

Real-world wisdom from outside the beltway.
3.7.06
New U.S.-Vietnam free trade push raises a taboo question
The shills who have pushed America to eliminate all labor, wage, human rights, and environmental standards from our trade policy often smarmily tell us that they are really doing so because they want to help poor workers abroad. They call this "free" trade even though it is anything but. And at first, their happy logic seems sound - investment in underdeveloped countries will bring resources to those countries, and a rising tide lifts all boats. But even if you ignore wealth stratification statistics and actually believe that nonsense, one taboo question, inadvertently raised by a new Businessweek article, never gets answered: what happens when companies find even cheaper labor markets than the original one?
Here's what I am talking about. NAFTA was supposed to help improve conditions for Mexicans. Ten years later, statistics show 19 million more Mexicans live in poverty. Meanwhile, economist Jeff Faux notes:

"Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are actually lower than they were [since NAFTA]. Two and a half million farmers and their families have been driven out of their local markets and off their land by heavily subsidized US and Canadian agribusiness. For most Mexicans, half of whom live in poverty, basic food has gotten even more expensive: Today the Mexican minimum wage buys less than half the tortillas it bought in 1994."

This is, in part, due to the fact that soon after we inked NAFTA, we signed the China PNTR deal and brought China into the WTO, meaning both American and Mexican jobs got shipped off there. This is a trade policy that does justice not to workers, but to people like GE CEO Jack Welch who famously said "ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge" - with the "free" trade policies allowing that barge to move operations to find lower and lower wages in more and more desperate countries.

Now, even as U.S. wages stagnate thanks to free trade deals undermining worker bargaining power, we see our government is publicly pushing for a new free trade deal with Vietnam. And as Businessweek indicates, that would logically help the "barges" exploit even worse conditions. In a story about Intel opening a factory there, the magazine notes:

"A big reason for the [new investment] is rock-bottom wages. As labor shortages in some regions of China drive up costs, factory hands in parts of the mainland can earn more than five times the $55 per month that Vietnamese workers in foreign-owned factories are paid. That differential is a big reason why Sparton Corp. (SPA ) of Jackson, Mich., chose Vietnam over China last year when it made its first investment outside North America... And Vietnam this year might wrap up negotiations for World Trade Organization membership. That would be a huge boon."

So there you have it. $225-per-month Chinese wages are simply too high - so the corporate elite join hands with the corrupt politicians to move forward another round of "free" trade deals - stripped of wage/labor/human rights/environmental protections - to open up even cheaper pools of exploitable, oppressed workers. The moment workers start making any economic gains at all - out comes another trade deal to open up another pool of oppressed labor so that the corporate barges can cut costs.

This, of course, begs a question that no one wants to answer: When does it all end? We inked a free trade deal with the wildly corrupt government of Mexico - a deal that eliminated environmental and wage protections. Then we inked a free trade deal with communist China - a deal that eliminated human rights standards. Recently, we began finalizing negotiations to sign a free trade deal with the United Arab Emirates - a deal that ignores all national security concerns. And now our government is pushing a free trade deal with Communist Vietnam - a deal that allows corporations to not only undermine American workers, but undermine workers in our trading partners who we promised would benefit from our trade policies in the first place.

So again, when does it all end? As I wrote in my upcoming book Hostile Takeover, "Will we soon see a 'free' trade agreement with North Korea – a country whose dictator has quite literally enslaved his population? Forget about 'low-wage' labor – Big Business would have 'no-wage' labor. Are our politicians going to suddenly start telling us that’s a good thing that America’s trade policy should encourage and reward?"

Seriously folks, when will this downward spiral end?

Posted by David Sirota at 8:53 PM

http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/

Saundra Hummer

March 8th, 2006, 12:30 PM

I PUT THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AND COMMENTS ON IT IN THE FREE PRESS THREAD BY MISTAKE SO HERE IS THE LINK TO IT, OR READ IT IN THE OTHER THREADTopping today's Blue...

THE RANT: What did you expect? -- In reality, did anyone expect the Republican voters in Tom DeLay's district to send him packing in Tuesday's Texas primary? Get real. These are the same people who sent the Houston exterminator to Congress in the first place and keep returning him to Washington even though they know he's a crook whose ethics stink like a Texas swamp.
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/blog/2006/03/what_did_you_expect.html

IF HE'S A THIEF, BUT YOU STILL WANT THE BACON, I GUESS ONE OVERLOOKS WHERE IT COMES FROM, AND THE DIRTY HANDS IT'S BEEN IN. HE'S A THIEF, BUT HE'S YOUR THIEF. SRH

Saundra Hummer

March 8th, 2006, 12:52 PM

<<<<<>>>>>
See Dick Loot
By
Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 08 March 2006
Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) have been making hay in the burning Iraqi sun for years now. It is, of course, no coincidence that the man sitting as vice president played a key role with his influence in obtaining the lion's share of contracts in Iraq for the company he was CEO of prior to his self-appointed position. Yet none of this is news. What is news, however, is that the ties that bind Cheney to Halliburton also link him to groups with even broader interests in the Middle East, which are causing civilians on the ground there, as well as in the US, to pay the price.

Cheney had much more at stake than pure altruism in making sure Halliburton/KBR obtained so many no-bid contracts in occupied Iraq. Despite his claims of not having any financial ties to Halliburton, the fact is that in both 2001 and 2002 he earned twice as much from a deferred salary from his "old" company as when he was CEO.

But that wasn't the beginning. When Cheney was US Secretary of Defense in the early 1990's under Big Bush, Halliburton was awarded the job of studying, then implementing, the privatization of routine army functions such as cleaning and cooking meals.

Following this study, when Cheney was finished with his job at the Pentagon, he scored the job as CEO of Halliburton, which he held until nominating himself for the position of Little Bush's running mate in 2000. Remember, it was Cheney who was given the task of finding a running mate for Bush. After searching far and wide across the US, Cheney ended up generously offering his own services for the job.

As if Cheney didn't already have enough conflicts of interest, it is important to note that he assisted in founding the neo-conservative think tank, the "Project for the New American Century (PNAC)," whose goal is to "promote American global leadership," which entails acquiring Iraqi oil. Complimenting this, Cheney was also part of the board of advisers to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) along with John Bolton, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (all PNAC members) before becoming vice president. JINSA, self-described as a "nonsectarian educational organization," does things like nominate John Bolton for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and works to "explain the role Israel can ... play in bolstering ... the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel."

Their Mission Statement adds, "The inherent instability in the region [Middle East] caused primarily by inter-Arab rivalries and the secular/religious split in many Muslim societies leaves the future of the region in doubt. Israel, with its technological capabilities and shared system of values, has a key role to play as a US ally in the region," which happens to be quite similar to the stated goals of the PNAC for the region, but I digress.

By the end of 2002, Cheney owned at least 433,000 unexercised Halliburton stock options worth over $10 million. And that was before the invasion of Iraq, when the games really began.

In March 2003, the month the invasion began, Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract worth $7 billion from the Pentagon. The blatant awarding of this "reconstruction" contract to Halliburton even led Representative Henry Waxman to comment, "The administration's approach to the reconstruction of Iraq is fundamentally flawed. It's a boondoggle that's enriching private contractors."

Of course the invasion and occupation of Iraq aren't only about oil.

Remember, it was Cheney himself who, at a VFW convention in August 2002, said "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon, we cannot really gauge."

Cheney then, solely in the interests of protecting the American and Iraqi people of course, made sure the US would go into Iraq and take care of that nuclear trouble-maker Saddam Hussein.

Just to be safe, Halliburton was paid $40 million for providing housing and transportation for teams searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. For with each contract Halliburton is and was awarded, Cheney's bank account grows.

The one place where there were remnants of a nuclear program in Iraq, albeit over 20 years before the 2003 US invasion, was the Osirak Nuclear Research Facility on the outskirts of Baghdad. US-made Israeli warplanes bombed it back on June 7, 1981, and when I visited the place in January 2004, all I found were empty warehouses which the American military wasn't concerned about enough to prevent from being looted.

Villagers in nearby al-Tuwetha, ignorant of radioactive waste stored in old drums, looted them in the chaos following the invasion and had been using them as water containers - thus irradiating the entire village.

One example of what it looks like on the ground in Iraq when Halliburton fails to fulfill its contractual obligations is the life of Adel Mhomoud. The 44-year-old beekeeper in al-Tuwetha told me, "I have cancer, and I know I'm dying. My white blood cell count is 14,000, and I don't have enough red blood cells. We are all sick; our joints ache, my hips are killing me, and my blood is bad. But nobody will help us here."

Certainly not Halliburton.

Cheney, who received no less than five military deferments during the Vietnam War despite being a supporter of that war (Sound familiar?), had shamelessly told the veterans at the VFW, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

So that was the door Cheney took to bring Iraq his Halliburton.

And of course, once through that door, Halliburton promptly went to work.

Aside from the aforementioned awarding of no-bid contracts worth billions of US taxpayer dollars, as early as December 2003, the US Army found out Halliburton was overcharging the government $61 million for fuel transportation and $67 million for food services in Iraq. I remember being in Baghdad when this occurred - seeing the enormously long gas lines at petrol stations whilst knowing Halliburton, not only failing to provide Iraqis with their own petrol, was even charging the US taxpayer three dollars per gallon for fuel that local companies could have imported for under one dollar.

But that was barely the beginning.

Let's take a brief glance at some of the more recent Halliburton/KBR rogueries:

27 February 2006 - US Army decides to reimburse KBR nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair equipment in Iraq, despite Pentagon auditors identifying over $250 million in charges as "potentially" excessive.
-
17 February 2006 - KBR executive hired to fly cargo into Iraq pleads guilty to inflating invoices by $1.14 million to cover fraudulent "war risk surcharges."
-
6 February 2006 - KBR employee in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity, says "We pay our locals [in Iraq] $5 to $16 dollars a day and you can see where [KBR] put it down [on the military requisition] as $60 a day." Military requisitions reveal KBR to be paying between $5-$16 per day in wages to third world laborers in Iraq whilst billing US taxpayers between $50-$80 per day.
-
30 January 2006 - Bush administration settles dispute between Pentagon and Halliburton by agreeing to pay company $199 million in disputed gasoline charges in Iraq. To date KBR has been awarded nearly $16 billion in total revenue from Iraq contracts.
-
23 January 2006 - Halliburton fails to alert American troops and civilian contractors at US base in Ramadi that their water was contaminated. Despite allegations which came from Halliburton's own water quality experts, the company denies there was a contamination problem.
-
27 December 2005 - KBR, linked to human trafficking-related concerns via its work in Iraq (such as forced prostitution and labor), Halliburton benefits from Defense Department's refusal to adopt policy barring human trafficking.
-
1 December 2005 - UPI reports KBR workers in Iraq ("third country" nationals) found to be paid as little as 50 cents an hour.
-
5 November 2005 - UN auditing board finds that US should repay Iraqi government $208 million from Iraqi oil revenue for fraudulent contracting work.
Then there is how these "policies" Halliburton is following in Iraq affect US soldiers and contractors, including its own employees.

With contracts in Iraq now worth up to $18 billion, there is nothing stopping Halliburton from abusing the lack of oversight and obvious conflict of interest between their free reign and their ties to the vice president.

An example of this is Jim Spiri, who was hired by Halliburton/KBR in January 2004 to work as a logistics coordinator. Sent to Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, he worked the flight line handling passenger movements, as Spiri had 20 years of aviation experience.

"During my time there, I assisted nightly with medevac [medical evacuations] operations and was highly respected among all military medical folks," he told me this week. "I had a good name throughout the theatre."

But problems were immediately apparent to him.

"I witnessed much alcohol abuse, in an environment where alcohol is strictly prohibited. I made note of this and reported it to my superiors, who actually were the ones abusing the system. It was obvious that the fox was guarding the hen house, so to speak."

He told me his entire flight line operation was "run in a gang-like manner" and "the work was never done in an efficient manner." Instead, according to Spiri, the motto was, "Do as little as possible for as much as you can, for as long as you can."

On February 5th of this year, while working the night shift which he had for the last two years, Spiri witnessed something that made the thought of continuing to work for KBR intolerable.

After watching a fallen soldier loaded onto a plane without the proper ceremony of honor, Spiri told me he "wrote an account of what I experienced that night." After this, "It was published, and ... all hell broke loose about 36 hours later."

Spiri was fired by KBR after writing an article detailing the event and criticizing Halliburton's policies in Iraq.

Now he wants to shine light on how KBR operates in Iraq. "What they don't want to let out is the type of workers they have over there, that it's the largest gravy train operation, it's the largest welfare system I've ever seen in my life. It's pathetic," Spiri said in a recent interview while adding that over half the people KBR employed in Iraq were "grossly under-qualified and highly over-paid."

His work entailed three people, but by the time he left there were 10 people on his team, most of whom "sat around listening to their iPod's and DVD players."

Yet firing an employee for raising awareness about corruption and his questioning of policy is minor compared to the treatment of Iraqis meted out by the company.

When I was in Amman last May, I met Ahlam al-Hassan, a young Iraqi woman who had worked for KBR in Diwaniyah.

Two gunshots by assailants who attacked her for collaborating with occupation forces left her blind, and her former employers would not return her calls or requests for assistance.

For her three months of work for KBR she was paid $475, having taken the job to support her family. "My two bosses at KBR, Mr. Jeff and Mr. Mark, were very good and gentle with me," she explained to me in Jordan, "They told me it wasn't dangerous to work for them." But after spending months in hospitals for what happened to her on her way to work, "After this, they have made no attempts to contact me."

Note that on May 31, 2004, an Army Corps of Engineers email revealed that Cheney's office "coordinated" Halliburton's multi-billion dollar Iraq contract. Cheney, like most common criminals, denied having anything to do with the no-bid contract.

More recently, on January 26th of this year, Halliburton announced that its 2005 profits were the "Best in our 86-year history," as all six of its divisions posted record results. Halliburton stock price doubled in the last year, and Dick Cheney's tax returns indicate that he earned $194,862 from his Halliburton stock in just the last year.

Loot Dick, Loot!

Is that clear enough?

All of this begs the question: Do you approve of your tax dollars being used in this fashion?

If not, then what are you willing to do about it?
<<<< >>>>
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City this January. He writes regularly for TruthOut.org, Inter Press Service, Asia Times, TomDispatch, and maintains his own website dahrjamailiraq.com. < >
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030806Z.shtml << >>

Saundra Hummer

March 8th, 2006, 05:23 PM

.
Hundreds of Human Genes Still Evolving
Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Wed Mar 8, 10:00 AM ET

A comprehensive scan of the human genome finds that hundreds of our genes have undergone positive natural selection during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.Genes are the instructions organisms use to make proteins. They are encoded in genetic material, usually DNA, and some come in different versions, called “alleles." Positive natural selection occurs when one allele is favored over another due to changes in the environment.

Researchers from the University of Chicago analyzed the genomes of 209 unrelated individuals from three distinct human populations: East Asians, Europeans and Yorubans from Nigeria. Each population contained roughly 250 positively selected genes; however, most of the affected genes differed depending on the group.

“This study addresses the question 'Are humans still evolving?', and the answer is 'Absolutely,'" study team member Benjamin Voight told LiveScience.

Other studies have also reached the same conclusion.

Links to history Go on-site to use links

The new study links genetic changes to major events in the history of our species.

“There have been a lot of recent changes—the advent of agriculture, shifts in diet, new habitats, climatic changes—over the past 10,000 years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a human geneticist at the University of Chicago who led the study.

Many genes were found to be evolving in all three of the human populations studied. The specific functions of many of the genes are not known, but the researchers were able to separate them into broad categories. These categories include:

Olfaction: the researchers found many genes important for taste and smell Reproduction: involved in things like sperm mobility and egg fertilization Increasing brain size Bone development and skeletal changes Carbohydrate metabolism: positive selection was observed for genes involved in breaking down mannose in Yorubans, sucrose in East Asians, and lactose for Europeans. (Mannose is a sweet secretion found in some trees and shrubs, sucrose is common table sugar, and lactose is a sugar found in milk.) Disease resistance and pathogen protection Metabolism of foreign compounds, such as exotic plant proteins or animal toxins

A tradeoff

The researchers also found positive selection in four pigment genes important for lighter skin in Europeans that were not known before. Scientists think humans evolved lighter skin in Europe as an adaptation to less sunlight.

And in East Asians, they found strong evidence of positive selection in genes involved in the production of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), a protein necessary for breaking down alcohol. Many East Asians can't metabolize alcohol because they carry a mutation that prevents them from making ADH. The new finding suggests that the mutation may confer some currently unknown additional benefit.

The study, which used data collected by the International HapMap Project, is detailed in the March 7 issue of the journal Public Library of Science-Biology.

How Evolution Works Darwin's Natural Selection Still at Work in Humans Study Suggests Human Brains Still Evolving Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution Top 10 Missing Links

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Amazing Images, Image Galleries, Interactive Features, Trivia and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!
http://news.yahoo.com/
.

Saundra Hummer

March 9th, 2006, 10:45 AM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts.": Thomas Jefferson

~

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." : H.L. Mencken

~

"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.": Thomas Jefferson~ ~ ~

Saundra Hummer

March 9th, 2006, 06:47 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Quake aid gives radical Islam a stage
Militant groups have become a vital part of Pakistan's quake relief, raising concerns that extremism will spread.
By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

MUZAFFARABAD, PAKISTAN - The long-bearded doctor won't reveal his name or where he's from, but he's certain his camp has the best medical facilities in town.

His organization, Jamat-ud-Dawa (The Society of the Call), was once suspected of ties to terrorist groups on the Indian side of Kashmir, but today it's a lauded front-runner in the dispensation of earthquake relief aid. And unlike some donors and nongovernmental organizations, it seems to have no sense of fatigue.

"The camps will close, but we will remain," the doctor says. "We will establish dispensaries in each and every area, in every village."

Radical Islamist groups like his have become an indispensable part of the relief effort following the devastating Oct. 8, 2005, earthquake. Their efforts are greeted with hearty gratitude by survivors and local officials alike. But this newfound prestige has some analysts worried that the extremism of Jamat-ud-Dawa and other groups will only spread, shrinking the space for tolerant thought.

In nearby Balakot, Nasir Uddin is proud of the largess bestowed by his organization, Al-Rasheed Trust, which is blacklisted by the US State Department for its alleged ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. Uddin says the group's popularity has grown so much that its tents are overflowing with donated food items.

"We are working only for the will of the almighty Allah," he says, revealing behind a tent door more than a hundred children attending daily Islamic instruction.

"Being a government official, I have no help from any [nongovernmental organization or international nongovernmental organization]. If someone from Jamat-ud-Dawa offers their help, why should I resist? A hungry person needs bread," says an official in Muzaffarabad, who asked not to be named. Many, including President Pervez Musharraf, have shared in this sense of gratitude, winning radical groups unprecedented praise from Kashmir to Islamabad.

There is hope that groups like Jamat-ud-Dawa, having seen the benefits of relief work, are trading the mantle of militancy for social work. Others say this might be a sign that Jamat-ud-Dawa is following the lead of Palestinian Hamas, saying it wants eventually to pursue more mainstream political ambitions.

"The earthquake suddenly gave them a new opportunity to serve the people. They realize that militancy and violence have no future," argues Ershad Mahmud, a specialist on Kashmir at the Institute for Policy Studies in Islamabad.

Pakistan officially cracked down on extremist groups after 9/11, when it sided with the US in its war on terror. Groups like Jamat-ud-Dawa, once allegedly supported by the state in Kashmir, were banned, but many adopted new names. The government also allowed the social welfare wings of some groups to continue operating, allowing them to thrive in the gray areas furnished by state policy.

Jamat-ud-Dawa enjoyed a reputation for effective social activism even before the earthquake, with a wide and well-funded network of clinics and schools. It insists it has no militant agenda, although many point out that its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, was once the leader of Lashkar-i-Tayyaba, a jihadi group that some Indian officials suspect for the recent serial blasts in the Indian Hindu city of Varanasi, where 14 died and 40 were injured Tuesday.

"There is no link between Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Jamat-ud-Dawa, as some people think," says Jamat-ud-Dawa's spokesman, Yayha Mujahid. "This is a religious organization to preach, educate, and propagate Islamic teachings in the society."

Many analysts welcome the participation of these radical groups. "It's a good opportunity to transform the militant workers into relief workers," says Mr. Mahmud.

"It's a process, it's a journey from extremism to liberalization to social welfare," says Arif Bahar, an analyst from Muzaffarabad. "If you are giving Hamas a margin in Palestine, why not Jamat-ud-Dawa in Kashmir?"

If such an agenda is in the cards, Jamat-ud-Dawa certainly isn't saying. It denies any such political ambitions, maintaining its only role is to provide welfare. "We do have our own opinion on different issues in Pakistan," says Mr. Mujahid. "But we don't have any ambition to take part in electoral politics like Hamas."

A greater role for Jamat-ud-Dawa is certainly not welcomed by all. "They have not said they have abandoned their path," argues Hasan Askari Rizvi, an independent defense analyst based in Lahore, adding that the group's Urdu language newspapers have never officially renounced a militant ideology.

"If you look at this in a broad context ... inherently it endangers the long-term project of promoting tolerance and democracy," he says.

If radicalism does spread, there's hope it can be counterbalanced by the goodwill generated by the US because of its role in earthquake relief. Because of American efforts, 78 percent of Pakistanis have a more favorable opinion of the US, according to a November 2005 poll released by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based nonprofit. The US, the poll says, also fared better among Pakistanis than radical Islamist groups.

On March 31 camp dwellers are scheduled to return to their villages, marking the beginning of the next phase of this tragedy. Some feel the influence of radical groups will wane, particularly if the government is efficient in its efforts to build schools and create jobs.

But Jamat-ud-Dawa and Al-Rasheed Trust see themselves as integral and lasting parts of that journey. "If the government decides to close down these camps, there is a lot more work to do in reconstruction; for example, construction of houses, mosques, and schools," says Mujahid of Jamat-ud-Dawa.

Their access to survivors may even surpass that of international agencies, some say. "NGOs are not so big in number that they can make these groups irrelevant," says Rizvi. " can go to a local mosque and give a sermon to reach the people. An NGO cannot."
~

[I]Cast your bread across the waters and it will return to you 1000 fold
???????
We've always been taught this and evidently we've learned little. So will it instead be "You reap what you sow"? "If you live by the sword - you will die by the sword?
SRH
~
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related linksfrom the March 10, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0310/p06s01-wosc.html
.

Saundra Hummer

March 10th, 2006, 03:35 PM

*

Rummy: rarely right

Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

03.10.06 - AUSTIN, Texas -- It was such a relief to me to learn we are making "very, very good progress" in Iraq. As the third anniversary of our invasion approaches, I could not have been more thrilled by the news reported by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on a Sunday chat show. Vice President Dick Cheney's take was equally reassuring: Things are "improving steadily" in Iraq.

I was thrilled -- very, very good progress and steady improvement, isn't that grand? Wake me if anything starts to go wrong. Like someone bombing the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra and touching off a lot of sectarian violence.

I was also relieved to learn -- via Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, so noted for his consistently accurate assessment of this war -- that the whole picture is hunky-dory to tickety-boo. Since the bombing of the mosque, lots of alarmists have reported that Iraq is devolving or might be collapsing into civil war. They're sort of jumping over the civil war line and back again -- yep, it's started; nope, it hasn't -- like a bunch of false starts at the beginning of a football play.

I'm sure glad to get the straight skinny from Ol' Rumsfeld, who has been in Iraq many times himself for the typical in-country experience. Like many foreign correspondents, Rumsfeld roams the streets alone, talking to any chance-met Iraqi in his fluent Arabic, so of course he knows best.

"From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation," Rumsfeld said. "We do know, of course, that al-Qaida has media committees. We do know they teach people exactly how to try to manipulate the media. They do this regularly. We see the intelligence that reports on their meetings. Now I can't take a string and tie it to a news report and then trace it back to an al-Qaida media committee meeting. I am not able to do that at all."

No horsepoop? Then can I ask a question: If you're able to monitor these media committee meetings, how come you can't find Osama bin Ladin?

But, Brother Rumsfeld warns us, "We do know that their goal is to try to break the will; that they consider the center of gravity of this -- not to be in Iraq, because they know they can't win a battle out there; they consider it to be in Washington, D.C., and in London and in the capitals of the Western world."

I'm sorry, I know we are not allowed to use the V-word in relation to Iraq, because so many brilliant neo-cons have assured us this war is nothing like Vietnam (Vietnam, lotsa jungle; Iraq lotsa sand -- big differences). But you must admit that press conferences with Donny Rum are wonderfully reminiscent of the Five O'Clock Follies, those wacky but endearing daily press briefings on Southeast Asia by military officers who made Baghdad Bob sound like a pessimist.

Rumsfeld's performance was so reminiscent of all the times the military in Vietnam blamed the media for reporting "bad news'" when there was nothing else to report. A briefing officer once memorably asked the press, "Whose side are you on?" The answer is what it's always been: We root for America, but our job is to report as accurately as we can what the situation is.

You could rely on other sources. For example, the Pentagon is still investigating itself to find out why it is paying American soldiers to make up good news about the war, which it then passes on to a Republican public relations firm, which in turn pays people in the Iraqi media to print the stuff -- thus fooling the Iraqis or somebody. When last heard from, the general in charge of investigating this federally funded Baghdad Bobism said he hadn't found anything about it to be illegal yet, so it apparently continues.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times Iraq is "really vulnerable" to civil war if there is another attack like the al-Askari bombing. By invading, said Khalilzad, the United States has "opened the Pandora's box" of sectarian strife in Iraq.

Could I suggest something kind of grown-up? Despite Rumsfeld's rationalizing, we are in a deep pile of poop here, and we're best likely to come out of it OK by pulling together. So could we stop this cheap old McCarthyite trick of pretending that correspondents who are in fact risking their lives and doing their best to bring the rest of us accurate information are somehow disloyal or connected to al-Qaida?

Wrong, yes, of course they could be wrong. But there is now a three-year record of who has been right about what is happening in Iraq, Rumsfeld or the media. And the score is: Press -- 1,095, Rumsfeld -- zero.
.
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20466
~

Saundra Hummer

March 10th, 2006, 03:54 PM

~

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
Logic out the window at the White House
By
Gwynne Dyer

03/09/06 "Cyprus Mail" -- -- The biggest pitfall in predicting the behavior of radical groups like the inner circle of the Bush administration is that you keep telling yourself that they would never actually do whatever it is they’re talking about. Surely they must realize that acting like that would cause a disaster. Then they go right ahead and do it.

“(The Iranians) must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means,” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told a group of visiting British politicians last week. “We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down.” In other words, he was calmly proposing an illegal attack on a sovereign state, possibly involving nuclear weapons.

Bolton knew his words would be leaked, so maybe it was just deliberate posturing to raise the pressure on Iran. But on Sunday, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Bolton repeated the threat: “The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve… We must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat…” He may really mean it -- and no one in the White House has told him to shut up.

With the U.S. army already mired in Iraq, the Bush administration lacks the ground strength to invade Iran, a far larger country. The National Security Strategy statement of September 2002 declared a new doctrine of “preemptive” wars in which the U.S. would launch unprovoked attacks against countries that it feared might hurt it in the future, and in January 2003 that doctrine was elaborated into the military strategy of “full spectrum global strike.”

The “full spectrum” referred specifically to the use of nuclear weapons to destroy hardened targets that ordinary weapons cannot reach. Earth-penetrating “mini-nukes” were an integral part of Conplan 8022-02, a presidential directive signed by Bush at the same time that covered attacks on countries allegedly posing an “imminent” nuclear threat in which no American ground troops would be used. Indeed, the responsibility for carrying out Conplan 8022 was given to Strategic Command (Stratcom) in Omaha, a military command that had previously dealt only with nuclear weapons.

Last May, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an “Interim Global Strike Alert Order” putting Stratcom on high military readiness 24 hours a day. Logic says there is no “imminent” danger of Iranian nuclear weapons: last year’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate put the time needed for Iran to develop such weapons at ten years. But experience says that this administration can talk itself into a “preemptive” attack on a country that really does not pose any threat at all.

So what happens if they talk themselves into unleashing Conplan 8022 on Iran? Thousands of people would die, of course, and the surviving 70 million Iranians would be very cross, but how could they strike back at the United States? Iran has no nuclear weapons, no weapons of any sort that could reach America. Given the huge American technological lead, it can’t even do much damage to U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region. But it does have two powerful weapons: its Shia faith, and oil.

Iran is currently playing a long game in Iraq, encouraging the Shia religious parties to cooperate with the American political project so that a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad will turn Iraq into a reliable ally of Iran once the Americans go home. But if Tehran encouraged the Shia militias to attack American troops in Iraq, U.S. casualties would soar. The whole American position there could become untenable in months.

Iran would probably not try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the choke-point through which most of the Persian Gulf’s oil exports pass, for U.S. forces could easily dominate or even seize the sparsely populated Iranian coast on the north side. But it would certainly halt its own oil exports, currently close to 4 million barrels a day, and in today’s tight oil market that would likely drive the oil price up to $130-$150 a barrel. Moreover, Tehran could keep the exports turned off for months, since recent oil prices, already high by historical standards, have enabled it to build up a large cash reserve. (Iran earned $45 billion from oil exports last year, twice the average in 2001-03.)

So a “preemptive” American attack on Iran would ignite a general insurrection against the American presence in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq and trigger a global economic crisis. The use of nuclear weapons would cross a firebreak that the world has maintained ever since 1945, and convince most other great powers that the United States is a rogue state that must be contained. All this to deal with a threat that is no more real or “imminent” than the one posed by Iraq in 2003.

No American policy-maker in his right mind would contemplate unleashing such a disaster for so little reason. Unfortunately, that does not guarantee that it won’t happen.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12261.htm ..

Saundra Hummer

March 10th, 2006, 05:34 PM

~
The Country's Going to Hell at Home and Abroad
By
Saul Landau
ZNet.com

Thursday 09 March 2006

"If the country's on the road to Hell, just claim that it's Heaven."

I don't meet many Republicans, but those few I do talk to agree that the world and the country are going to hell. That oft spouted cliché - has taken on new meaning given recent and very dire environmental news. The worsening of global warming may have brought about natural catastrophes - hurricanes. The almost comical incompetence by Bush's imperial managers compounded the disasters experienced by poor people. Yet, Bush's panorama in his State of the Union address and subsequent speeches reflected only optimism.

Bush's rosy picture contradicts certain economic facts. He attributed to tax cuts and free trade policies the news that "The Dow Jones rose above 11,000 in February on the basis of good economic news." An NPR reporter explained that "mild January weather spurred home starts."

I don't know what "above 11,000" means, but why didn’t the Dow react to the nearly $730 billion US trade deficit? This all-time record was dwarfed, however, by the $8.2 trillion national debt. The supposedly conservative Republicans spend like addicts hooked on wasting the public's money.

Nothing succeeds like failure, I suppose. Outgoing Fed chairman, Alan "The Enigmatic" Greenspan, in various farewell speeches lauded free-trade as a solid basis for the economy.

Did Greenspan mean the Chinese economy? In 2005, the US reported a $200+ billion trade deficit with China, an amount that grows every year. In addition, the United States ran record deficits with Japan, Europe and Canada; the US even ended 2005 minus $50 billion with Mexico.

Bush (41), Clinton and Bush (43) promised that NAFTA would buoy the US trade balance. It would also help create enough jobs in Mexico to cut back illegal border crossings. Promise 'em anything! Despite the maquila jobs created by NAFTA, Mexicans have not significantly raised their standard of living. Some 60 million of the 100 million people there live under the poverty line.

After Congress approved the trade treaty in 1993, US companies raced faster than ever to Mexico to take advantage of low wage labor, the absence of environmental and work place regulation, and no taxes.

Clinton was right about increasing US jobs, however. The $35 an hour skilled auto worker lost his job to a Mexican who made one tenth the amount. After losing his job, the auto worker might have begun bagging groceries in Safeway for $12 an hour; so did his wife, who used to stay home with the kids. Compare their combined $24 an hour with his previous $35. But thanks to NAFTA, the family had two jobs instead of one. And, a third job arose from this new economic agreement: the couple hired a baby sitter for $7 an hour.

Listen skeptically when officials declare that free trade creates jobs. Since Spring 2003, the Bushies claimed their economic policies produced more than 4.5 million new jobs, in addition to low unemployment (under 5%). Bush officials didn't mention, however, that the newly created jobs emerged in non-productive government work.

Since 2001, the United States exported almost 3 million manufacturing jobs, including in computers, software and electronics, once areas of US pride. Instead of making products here, the United States now imports them from places where corporations buy low-wage labor and avoid costly regulations that accompany "civilization."

My friend Joe, a Mexican American construction worker, said: "Bush talks about how well the economy is functioning. He's full of it. I'm working less than half the number of days I used to work, but for three companies instead of one. And I'm earning the same money, which means I'm making less because prices keep moving up."

Statistics bear out Joe's complaint. With inflation, wages have remained the same or dropped. In February, an Economic Policy Institute study showed "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months." Investors, brokers, bankers - speculators or free-traders - have loved the policies of both the Bushes and Clinton.

Investors never show much interest in the fact that tens of millions face increasing daily hardships. Nor do they worry about the harsh facts of Bush's foreign policy. His flag-waving initiative, fighting terror by making war against Iraq, has thus far benefited Iran, his newest and supposedly most dangerous opponent.

In mid February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice applauded the House International Relations Committee for drafting a resolution condemning Iran for violating obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and other commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The House overwhelmingly approved a decision to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council. Members urged permanent council members Russia and China to press for rapid consideration of the Iranian issue.

To show how much suffering the Iraqi people have endured to obtain democracy, Rice referred to the fact that "the Iraqi people have voted three times in the face of terrorist threats." What she forgot to say was that they voted for pro-Iranian religious parties that want the United States to leave Iraq and did not vote for the pro-US candidates.

Even strong pro-Israeli Members didn't scream indignantly at La Rice for Bush's policy of "losing Iraq to Iran" and making possible a Shi'ite belt from Teheran to Beirut.

But predictably, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Congresswoman representing the Israeli lobby and the most virulent anti-Castro exiles, accused Iran's government of deceiving and provoking the international community by declaring Iran's right to have access to nuclear arms and announcing they "would provide nuclear technology to other Islamic states."

Ros-Lehtinen did not mention that in the 1970s Iran got nuclear technology from US experts. At that time, the pro-US Shah appeared bound to rule eternally.

Facts don't seem to matter in the chilling atmosphere of the terror war. History seems to vanish into the aeries of the House dome. Democrat Tom Lantos asked his "colleagues to imagine this terrorist state [Iran], armed with nuclear weapons, and in possession of large amounts of nuclear weapons material. Even if it did not put these destructive materials up for sale, a nuclear-armed Iran would terrorize and destabilize the entire Middle East."

No Member mentioned Israel, which has invaded several of her neighbors, and has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons. Nor did anyone refer to the fact that only one nation had ever used nuclear weapons. That same nation de-stabilized the Middle East by illegally making war against Iraq.

Rice preached to the uncritical congressional choir. The United States is at "war against a group of terrorists who show no regard for innocent life, who spawn an ideology of hatred so great that they take innocent life without even thinking, whether it is the Twin Towers of New York or a Palestinian wedding party in Jordan, or whether it is schoolchildren in Russia or whether it is a metro in London." Note how she lumped certain terrorists together. "They take innocent life not as collateral to their efforts but as the target of their efforts. This is a different kind of war."

The innocent lives lost when US bombs hit school kids or people's homes - well, that's unfortunate, collateral damage. She assured Congress that Bush would "make certain that any peace that we achieve in that war will be a permanent one." In the course of fighting the war, he would "of liberty and democracy as antidotes to the ideology of hatred that we are experiencing in the world."

But if elections result in the wrong winners, Rice offered her treatment. "A vote and election is not the full story. With governing comes responsibility. And so what has happened in the Palestinian territories with an election for which the Palestinian people should be congratulated, an election that was free of violence, that was free and fair, but that brought to power Hamas, an organization that is a terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent people in its quest."

So, Israel cut off their funds. Rice said "tsk, tsk."

When elections "went wrong" in Iran, it became "a strategic challenge for the United States and for those who desire peace and freedom." She said Iran used "terrorism and terrorist surrogates...to destabilize this volatile region." So, she declared the government will offer $75 million to Iranian equivalents of Ahmed Chalabi to promote democracy in a country that just had a free election and returned religious zealots to power.

The Iraq war and occupation costs over $6 billion a month, a lot more than the initial Bush estimate of $65 billion total. That's quite a sum to have pro-Iranians taking over the Iraqi government. (Estimates claim it will have cost more than a trillion dollar when all is said and done. And as of Aug 2005, the cost was $251 billion, according to a study conducted by Linda Barnes and Joseph Stiglitz titled, "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War." $241 billion has been spent on the war so far.

More Republicans understand these facts. They also note the economic news about how Americans have stopped saving money while Chinese savings rise. "The average American now owes $9,000 to credit card companies."

Republicans and Democrats alike might well see that fact as a step toward Hell.

Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031006F.shtml
.

Saundra Hummer

March 10th, 2006, 05:51 PM

~ ~ ~ ~
Bush: A Deaf Man Spouting
By
Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian UK
Thursday 09 March 2006

A videotape of Bush's briefing before Hurricane Katrina exposes him as out of touch with reality Go on-site to view if you missed it by any chance. Link at bottom.

On the eve of George Bush's presidential campaign in 2000, the neoconservative Kenneth Adelman cast him as Prince Hal, who "puts the indiscretions of his youth behind him" and "redeems his father's reign." After September 11, Bush was wreathed with regal laurels as Henry V by a clerisy of pundits. From Ground Zero to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished") the president struck bold poses, but his choreographed gestures have especially illuminated his hollow crown in the darkened breach of New Orleans.
For the first time, last week, the public has seen the spontaneous Bush behind closed doors, in a leaked videotape that recorded his briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. Teleconferenced in from his Crawford ranch, Texas, Bush listens to disaster officials inform him that the storm will be unprecedented in its severity and consequences. "This is, to put it mildly, the big one," says Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre, warns: "This hurricane is much larger than Hurricane Andrew ever was." Bush asks not a single question, says, "We are fully prepared," and departs.

The Katrina videotape is defining for Bush's presidency. It exposes a deaf man spouting talking points. After the hurricane hit, he stayed on vacation, went to a birthday party, strummed a guitar with a country and western singer, and on September 1 said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." On his flight back to Washington, four days after landfall, his aides gave him a DVD of television news reports of the hurricane's impact about which he had done nothing to learn on his own.

As the catastrophe of the foreshadowed aftermath unfolded, he clapped Brown on the back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But soon the administration settled on Brownie as the scapegoat, prevented him from defending himself and forced him to resign. He was expected to fall on his sword.

Suddenly, last week, the sacrificial Brown stormed back, the betrayed turning on his betrayers. He proclaimed on every media outlet that he would no longer play the fall guy, detailed the warnings he had given, and named malefactors running up the chain of command.

In New Orleans, a sad Mardi Gras has come and gone, while crews from the morgue continue searching for bodies - still finding them. The city has lost more than half its population, most of the refugees are African-Americans, and their neighbourhoods remain scenes of devastation. Having rejected a plan for rebuilding, Bush travelled to New Orleans for another photo-opportunity this week to announce a programme that would supposedly give money to the homeless but absurdly will not permit destroyed housing to be replaced by new. Not one penny so far has been spent on new homes. Six months after the tempest, New Orleans, one of the glories of American life and culture, lies in ruins, and Bush visits to pose as visionary.

In a recently published hagiography on the theme of Bush-as-Prince-Hal, Rebel-in-Chief, written by the rightwing pundit Fred Barnes, Bush explained to him that his job is to "stay out of minutiae, keep the big picture in mind." To illustrate his self-conception, he "called my attention to the rug" in the Oval Office. Bush said that he wanted the rug to express that an "optimistic person comes here." He delegated the task to his wife, Laura, who designed a rug featuring bright yellow rays of the sun. In his Oval Office, Prince Hal imagines himself grown into a Sun King.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030906R.shtml
~ ~ ~

Saundra Hummer

March 10th, 2006, 06:34 PM

~
A MUST READ
TRULY AMAZING
Justice O'Connor Decries Republican Attacks on Courts
She told an audience at Georgetown University that Republican proposals, and their sometimes uncivil tone, pose a danger to the independence of the judiciary, and the freedoms of all Americans.Transmission date: 03/10/06 NPR
CLICK PLAY TO LISTEN. Go on-site to listen, click on link address at bottom of this post to listen. The transcript follows.
TRANSCRIPT

Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O’Connor no longer faces that obligation. Yesterday, the retired justice criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said they challenge the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. O’Connor’s speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.

Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O’Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors, as she put it “really, really angry.” But, she continued, if we don’t make them mad some of the time we probably aren’t doing our jobs as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won’t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But, said O’Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don’t protect judicial independence, people do.

And then she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay. She didn’t name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case. This, said O’Connor, was after the federal courts had applied Congress’ onetime only statute about Schiavo as it was written. Not, said O’Connor, as the congressman might have wished it were written. This response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O’Connor, her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the courts.

It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with. She didn’t name him, but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge’s home. O’Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms, recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with.

I, said O’Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

Audio - Audio
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12281.htm
. . .

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 12:15 PM

. . . . .

"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust." -- Demosthenes: Philippic 2, sect. 24

.

We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution, were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a person's duty to understand the world rather than simply fight for it. -- Ernest Hemingway

.

"It's important to realize that whenever you give power to politicians or bureaucrats, it will be used for what they want, not for what you want."-- Harry Browne

.
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." -- Pericles, 430 B.C.

. . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 12:29 PM

. . . . . . .
Externalizing the Cost of War
. . . . .

By
Charles Sullivan

03/10/06 "ICH" -- -- It must seem odd to the world that while our nation is coming apart at the seams, and every last shred of decency is being severed from the cloth of conscience, all we can do is watch American Idol and Survivor. According to author Mike Green (The Whole Truth about the U.S. War on Terror), there are one hundred and ninety-two recognized nations on earth, and the U.S. has troops stationed in one hundred and thirty-five of them. In total, we have in excess of four hundred thousand troops occupying a substantial majority of the world. The nation with the second largest number of troops deployed is Great Britain with thirty-five thousand, followed by France with twenty-three thousand. Apparently, bringing democracy to the world requires an extensive presence and lots of weapons. If only that were what this is about. It is really about hegemony, domination, global empire.
Perhaps America’s insatiable demand for entertainment is in fact a form of self medication whose delivery mechanism is television, rather than the hypodermic needle. Mind-numbing, irrelevant, sensory-depriving entertainment is a method to kill the pain of a truth that laves ceaselessly upon the shores of our eroded conscience—a truth so painful that we must suppress it at all cost. It is American Idol, a program whose mass appeal I have never understood, that keeps the white noise of reality at bay and allows so many to ignore the world’s pain and misery.

Reality television does many things. But one thing I am quite certain that it does not do is portray reality. Cheap and shallow entertainment only dulls the senses, like imbibing alcohol in excess to keep us comfortably numb, safely insulated from the reality that our nation is foisting upon the world. For many of the world’s people, America has reduced their reality to piles of broken rubble; lonely hours of endless terror called Shock and Awe; the filth and stench of secret gulags where torture is implemented on a scale known only to the CIA. The disquieting loss of life and its impact upon families is beyond the pale of comprehension. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not democracy and they never will be.

The cries of anguish can barely be heard above the din of our own personal struggles in a society that values profits above people. Better turn up the volume on the television to drown out the screams of The New World Order’s democracy. We wouldn’t want to feel uncomfortable about what the president is doing in our name. The suffering and anguish of faceless, nameless people of other nationalities is a small price to pay for the level of comfort we enjoy. As long as we do not allow reality to come rushing at us all at once, we can manage to live with ourselves. There is safety in ignorance—the refuge of all self-loathing cowardice. Thank God, we are a Christian nation steeped in a tradition of puritanical religion, with only the blood of the native peoples on our grasping white hands. Let us pray.

Ask no questions and you will receive no answers. Ask the wrong questions and you will get the wrong answers. But with the right questions everything comes into clear focus and understanding becomes possible. Be warned, however, that if you choose to know truth that it will frequently repulse you and make you sick to your stomach. But truth alone will set us free—so know it we must.

The fact that our government spends so many of our tax dollars on the implements of death, on militarism and weaponry, and so little on humanitarian causes tells the story of America. Fifty two cents of every tax dollar finds its way into the coffers of the Pentagon in some form. The consequences are visible both at home and abroad. This explains why America is seen as the Great Satan in the Middle East and beyond. How would you feel if you and your kin were the recipient of American democracy, delivered through the sites of an AK-47 or a carpet bomb?

No matter how hard we try we cannot escape the truth and its consequences. America is still the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. We neglect our own poor even as we impoverish the rest of the world, subjecting them to imperial rule and colonialism. We are the only nation to have used the atomic bomb. If this is democracy, the world can stand no more of it. So let us party as if there were no tomorrow. Let us dance and have a good time as we ignore the ice bergs that drift through the darkness in silence and pretend that our Titanic is not sinking. We’ll have a wonderful time—right up until the cold dark waves wash over us and carry us into the void.

Reality has been so altered here that speaking truth is akin to living in an insane asylum. Behind the walls of empire speaking truth equates to treason—an act of sedition. Either the inmates do not realize they are out of their minds, or they pretend that insanity is healthy and normal. Irrationality makes perfect sense to them in their state of dementia and denial. Dwelling among the mad is itself maddening for those who remain rational and intelligent, and caring of the needs of others. It would be easy, even rational, to leave them to their own self-destructive devices. But this is our home and we have a moral obligation to set things right. We owe it to the world to try.

We must cease to invest in death and destruction. A bad tree will never bear good fruit. Let us invest in hope and life. Our military should not be the iron fist of oppression acting at the behest of capitalism and empire. It should exist purely for defensive purposes. Let other people empower governments of their own choosing. Our chief export should not be terrorism and militarism—it should be our humanity and our reverence for life. The evil and corrupt cabal at the head of this government is not representative of the great majority of the American people.

Those who choose to serve in the military should only do so as conscientious objectors. They should refuse to take up arms against other people who pose no threat to them or their country, people with whom in fact they share much in common. Let us send the chicken hawks—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice and the other cheer leaders for war—to assume their rightful place on the front lines of the armed conflict they foment. Let their final resting place be in the Arlington National Cemetery, where they have sent so many others. When it is the blood of the ruling class that flows, rather than the working class, there will be an abrupt end to war. No person of conscience should serve empire in any capacity. It is easy to spill the blood of other people; it is easy to borrow other people’s courage when you have none of your own; however, when your own blood is involved, war is no longer an abstraction. It becomes personal and costly, as well as sobering. Externalizing the cost of war upon others is an unforgivable act of moral cowardice. Let them do their own damned fighting!

We should be able to live in such a way that we do not feel compelled to apologize for being American. Most of us are good and decent people who do not believe in world domination or the subjugation of others. Many of us realize that we have more in common with the average world citizen—the Iraqi, the Iranian, the Chinese, the Brazilian and the Russian, than we have with our own political leaders. It is the rulers who send their servants to do horrible things to people who have never done us harm—people with the same needs and desires that we have. Working people should not wage war with other working people. We should wage war with the plutocrats that have hijacked our country. If the rulers want war, let them have it; but let them be the ones to do the fighting and the dying. War making is easy for those who are insulated from its consequences. We must make war as costly for our leaders as it is for us. To internalize the cost of war upon those who wage it is to end war.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer, social activist and free lance writer living in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He can be contacted at earthdog@highstream.net
. . . . . . .

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12272.htm
.

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 01:27 PM

~ ~ ~
HomeDiariesBreaking BlueE-WireNancy Pelosi's House Democratic Caucus and Its Insular Stubbornness
by
Matt Stoller,
Fri Mar 10, 2006
03:53:19 AM EST
~
A few weeks ago, Representative Louise Slaughter came out with a report called 'America for Sale' on the cost of Republican corruption. The link is no longer working, and I'll explain why in the next paragraph. The report itself was well done, and actually quantified the cost to taxpayers of what has been so obvious for so long, the looting of America by corrupted elites. The report elicited attacks from Republicans, who smeared Slaughter with charges that writing the report itself was an unethical use of taxpayer funds. Now, Louise Slaughter is a member of the House Rules Committee, so documenting the costs of corruption was completely reasonable. What is truly remarkable is that not one Democratic member stood by her. Not one issued a statement. No one from the progressive caucus - most of whom are in safe seats - came forward public to stand by their colleague. I'm sure there were pats on the back in private, but then, that's kind of the point.
And now, in a final insult, the report was removed from Pelosi's leader web site, apparently because of worries that the Republicans will file ethics charges against Pelosi for hosting it (it supposedly violates House Franking rules, which are incoherent and a huge mess and part of the tyranny of Republican rule in the House). Enough is enough. Whoever made the boneheaded decision in Pelosi's office is just out of touch. Leaders serious about ending corruption do not hang out to dry members who stand up against the looting of the country. Leaders serious about governing and wielding power do not scurry in hiding every time Republicans talk about ethics. They do not try to obey arbitrary incoherent rules that are written by Republicans and broken by the other side at will.

If Democrats win in 2006 (which is quite uncertain), Pelosi does not sound like she can do what is necessary to save this country. She acts like a small-minded summer camp councelor for spoiled Democratic members, and unless we are vigilant and aggressive this mindset is going to carry on over to whatever gains we make in 2006. Right now, there's this half-joke among Congresscritters that members don't speak in caucus meetings without first thanking everyone in the room. Members waste each others' time. Staffers are kept out of the loop, and lie to each other in vicious and pointless turf wars where the only goal is to get better offices. This diseased culture comes from years of being smacked around by Republicans, with little indignities like Republican Committee staffers getting better Blackberries and big indignities like Republicans changing rules whenever it suits them. The way to reverse this culture is to have leaders who do not back down.

Yes, it's that bad. I've been told that the way to gain power in the Democratic caucus is to get elected, and then this is key, to not die. That's how you become a committee leader. And apparently to become leader you promise not to rock the boat and make sure that every gets their precious little committee assignment, regardless of merit. Listen to this pathetic podcast by Representaive Frank Pallone, who jokes about what a bad job he's doing as the Democratic member in charge of 'message'. Yes, in fact that's his job as the Communications Chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, where he "coordinates the party's message on the floor of the House of Representatives."

And the symptom is that when House Republicans say jump, Nancy Pelosi says 'how high?' And that's not because we're in the minority. It's because Pelosi allows this kind of stupidity to hamstring the caucus. And if you think this will end if we ever take the majority, prepare to be disappointed.

Standing up to this ineffective, anti-progressive, anti-meritocratic mechanism that coddles Democratic members is going to be key, whatever happens in 2006. The rallying cry for Democrats in the House should not be 'Universal health care for Democratic incumbent Congressmen', as it seems to have been since 1994. New candidates coming into office should realize that it's time for open elections for committee slots, for leadership posts, and for every other position of power in the House.

I don't like Rahm Emanuel's politics and I don't agree with every part of his strategy in running the DCCC (as if I have proven some great capacity to win races...), but the reason he is respected is because he doesn't subscribe to this ridiculous and insulated mentality. He is blunt and aggressive, and that is a necessary tonic, and key to understanding the New Democrats in the 1990s. Partly they were lobbyist driven, but partly they were driven by an exasperated sense of unprofessionalism among traditional older progressives and lazy Democrats. Now of course the New Dems have become just as captured by insider-itis, but the same motivating impulse that frustrated them in the 1980s frustrates us today. New groups coming into Congress in 2006 should realize that it's time for a change, and time for openness, accountability, and democracy. Nancy Pelosi should realize this too. The time for kowtowing to Republicans on everything from where you host your web content to the war in Iraq is over and done with. In order to build a progressive America, we need to get a real cultural change in Congress, a change driven by strength and leadership.

That's what the netroots wants, and that's what we're going to get. It's going to take time, but we're coming. ~ ~ ~Go on site to read comments by viewers, some are pretty interesting at times.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/3/6/21247/73191~

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 01:33 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sirotablog
Real-world wisdom from outside the beltway.
3.11.06

Bush, pundits & Dems feign "concern" for national security
With the termination of the Dubai ports deal, President Bush now says he is "concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, especially in the Middle East." This line has been parroted by the punditocracy, which claims that legitimate questions of national security are "ethnic profiling" (aka. "racial profiling"). The hypocrisy is as thick as a milkshake - Suddenly, we're expected to believe George W. Bush and the pundits who pushed the Iraq War deep down really cares about the messages America is sending to the rest of the world. What an incredibly insulting joke.
Where was this so-called "concern" when Bush authorized the use of torture? Where was this "concern" when Bush decided to ignore the Geneva Conventions with respect to detainees? What about the "broader message" we sent to the world when Bush deliberately fabricated the perception of an "imminent threat" of WMD and used that perception as a justification to invade Iraq? Or, what about the "broader message" that Bush sent when he cracked a joke immediately after telling the press 30,000 Iraqis - many innocent bystanders - have been killed since the war began? Or what about the "broader message" that continues to be sent when Bush holds White House events to publicly fawn all over the most oppressive dictators on Earth? What kind of message does that send to the millions of ordinary citizens oppressed by those same dictators?

For the pundits, the hypocrisy is even more disgusting. They claim those who do not want the UAE - a country with very recent ties to terrorists - to control our ports are supposedly "racial profiling" all Arabs. These are the same pundits who, knowing that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists, loudly supported invading Iraq anyway because it would supposedly send a message "in the heart of the Middle East" - clear code for sending a message to all Arabs. The Iraq War was, in other words, the greatest act of indiscriminate ethnic profiling/targeting in America's recent history - ethnic profiling largely supported by the same class of elite pundits that now self-righteously berates those who courageously sought to stop the UAE deal.

The truth is, George W. Bush and the neoconservative opinionmakers that dominate today's news are people who have no "concern" for what the world thinks. Bush is a guy who has tried to slash funding for public diplomacy and foreign aid, and who most recently appointed Karen Hughes as America's top international public diplomacy official, despite the fact that her only experience is serving as a Republican political hack. He's the guy who thinks that reaching out to the world on foreign policy means insulting the world's intelligence by simply repeating over and over again that everything is going perfectly in Iraq. And incredibly, the neutered pundits and reporters, desperate to stay in good graces with their White House masters, has disgustingly interpreted Bush's contempt for the world as "toughness," no matter how much that attitude has actually weakened America's national security.

Democrats, of course, are not saints in all of this. Oh sure, they have courageous voices here and there. And the party as a whole says it wants to build its own credibility on national security and is "concerned" about the Bush administration's radically extremist policies. Yet the party has changed directions on the issue like a rickety weathervane in a tornado. As just one example, during the 2004 election campaign, Democrats were rightly screaming about the need to involve more countries in Iraq and the War on Terror generally. After the election, those calls went largely silent by top Democratic spokespeople, reinforcing the public perception of Democrats as having no core convictions.

Now, making matters even worse, leading Democrats like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) are actually refusing to take a serious position in contrast to the White House on the Iraq War - the most pressing national security issue of our generation. Meanwhile, Sen. Evan Bayh (D), the perfectly-coiffed son-of-a-Senator from Indiana who could double as the cure for insomnia, is actually running around self-servingly advancing right-wing lies about Democrats. Specifically, he is giving speeches adding credence to the idea that "toughness" basically means being a silver spooned politician sitting in a comfortable Washington office ordering in another carpet bomb of another group of dark-skinned foreigners.

No matter how many polls show strong opposition to the Iraq War and the Bush national security policy in general, it is no longer clear what it's going to take to get a real change in direction. Both parties and the President seem wholly uninterested in even acknowledging the public's deep desire for a change. Leading media voices like Tom Friedman, meanwhile, use their influence to actually deny that the public even opposes the war in the first place.

The public, in short, is seen as a nuisance, votes to be bought/manipulated on election day with huge amounts of corporate cash funneled to candidates by the insulated party operatives in Washington - nothing more. It is a sad state of affairs - one that clearly calls into question whether America is watching the final death throes of its proud democratic tradition.

Posted by David Sirota at 11:25 AM

Go on-site for the numerous links for more of the story

http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/
~

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 02:37 PM

<<<o>>>

Analysis: States Steadily Restricting Info
By
ROBERT TANNER,
AP National Writer
56 minutes ago

States have steadily limited the public's access to government information since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a new Associated Press analysis of laws in all 50 states has found. Legislatures have passed more than 1,000 laws changing access to information, approving more than twice as many measures that restrict information as laws that open government books.

Some things your government doesn't have to tell you about:• The safety plan at your child's school, if you live in Iowa.

• Medication errors at your grandparent's nursing home in North Carolina.

• Disciplinary actions against Indiana state employees.

The horror of the attacks spurred a wholesale re-examination of information that could put the country in danger, and the state actions roughly mirror those on the federal level. Federal agencies responded by shutting down Web sites, pulling telephone directories and rethinking everything from dam blueprints to historical records.

In statehouse battles, the issue has pitted advocates of government openness — including journalists and civil liberties groups — against lawmakers and others who worry that public information could be misused, whether it's by terrorists or by computer hackers hoping to use your credit cards. Security concerns typically won out.

The AP discovered a clear trend from the Sept. 11 attacks through legislative work that ended last year: States passed 616 laws that restricted access — to government records, databases, meetings and more — and 284 laws that loosened access. Another 123 laws had either a neutral or mixed effect, the AP found.

"What these open government laws do is break down that wall of government secrecy so that everybody knows what's going on," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "A democracy can only function if we have information. You can only have oversight of government if you have information."

Associated Press reporters in every state, often with help from their local press associations, tracked the government access bills introduced since the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon were hit by hijacked planes.

In every state, reporters tallied bills that were proposed each year, and then examined the laws that passed. They assessed the impact of each new measure and rated it as loosening existing limits on public access to government information, restricting the limits, or neutral.

While fear of another terrorist attack drove many new proposals, it wasn't the only motivator. Concerns about identity theft, medical privacy and the vulnerability of computerized records have sparked many pieces of legislation, too.

Lawmakers say they are recalibrating the balance between information that could be used against society and what society at large needs to know.

"Since Sept. 11, we're looking at information like plans for our nuclear plants, the records of our bridges and transportation systems. All of the critical information that is out there that we don't necessarily want to put in the hands of a terrorist," said New York state Sen. Nick Spano, a Republican who had proposed tightening legislation soon after the attacks.

"It's a very difficult balance between the public's right to know and the public's right to security," Spano said. A different security measure ultimately became law, limiting access to information about infrastructure from airports to cellular phone systems. Last year, Spano authored a law that strengthened public access by setting a strict deadline for state agencies to respond to requests for information.

The give and take of a legislature usually forces changes to such bills — like a measure proposed last year in Oklahoma, where freshman state Sen. Charles Wyrick, a Democrat, sought to completely exempt the state's new Department of Homeland Security from the Open Meetings Act and Open Records Act.

"I don't know why all of a sudden the holy grail of security and safety is now closing records," Mark Thomas, head of the Oklahoma Press Association, said after the bill was introduced. "It seems to me we would be more secure if we knew what was going on around us. ... Apparently there are those in government who want to close all these records and say, 'We'll keep you safe, trust us.'"

Negotiations brought a compromise. The law that passed allowed the department to keep communications between the agency and the federal government confidential, along with security plans for private businesses.

"We had to fight that out, and basically it ended up being an equal distribution of unhappiness," Thomas said.

Still, the numerical data shows which side got more out of negotiations overall: The AP analysis of 1,023 new laws dealing with public access to government information found that more than 60 percent closed access. Just over a quarter created new avenues of access. The rest had a neutral effect, often through technical changes to existing laws.

Those laws emerged from just over 3,500 bills. Often, several legislators interested in a topic will each introduce a bill knowing that only one is likely to pass. In some states, the same legislation is introduced in both House and Senate chambers to speed action and build support.

Across more than four years, 36 states passed more restrictive laws than laws that loosened access; seven states passed more laws that eased barriers to access; seven states passed equal numbers. The analysis did not attempt to quantify the impact of larger, sweeping laws versus smaller modifications.

The AP analysis also did not study legislation prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, though observers say the changes have been obvious.

"What we see nationwide is states really backing away from their open access laws," said Fred H. Cate, an Indiana University law professor who studies privacy and technology. Security threats are real — but some lawmakers are just "taking advantage of the public security tide," he said.

The law in Iowa requires that schools draft emergency response plans, but bars them from the public. In Indiana, legislators agreed to keep disciplinary actions against state employees secret — except when they are suspended, demoted or discharged.

In North Carolina, new advisory committees set up to examine medication errors in nursing homes keep their meetings and records confidential, though the medication error rates found in separate home inspections that exceed a higher, federal standard can be accessed through the federal government.

North Carolina, like other places, also took steps to open access, requiring local and state governments to more quickly provide details about government incentive packages to lure business.

Elsewhere, Oregon opened records on child abuse in cases involving a child who is killed or seriously hurt; South Carolina lawmakers required the governor to open his cabinet meetings; California voters approved an amendment to the state constitution requiring that the state's laws on open meetings and open records be broadly interpreted. After the amendment passed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made public his appointment calendar and those of two of his top aides.

Lately, privacy worries are starting to trump security fears.

"The great trend out there — that sweeps across any record — is privacy," said Charles Davis at the Freedom of Information Center in Missouri. "There's a push by government that every time Joe Citizen's name is mentioned in a government document, it's an inherent threat to Joe Citizen's privacy if that document is released."

Just this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced a new government-wide effort to target identity theft, barring access to driver's licenses, phone records and Social Security numbers. No longer, the governor said, should there be a presumption that government information is public. "That's backwards," he said.

Open government advocates disagree. The way they see it, if Pawlenty is successful, information that used to be public in Minnesota will soon be unnecessarily locked away.
~
AP researcher John Parsons contributed to this story
~
On the Net:
http:http://www.sunshineweek.org
~
Tomorrow: Federal agencies have lagged in their responses to public requests for information.
http://news.yahoo.com/

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 03:40 PM

<<O>>

TERRORISM: AL-QAEDA TAKES PROPAGANDA WAR TO SCHOOLS
Rome, 10 March. (AKI) - The most chilling footage in a new al-Qaeda video comes near the end of the hour-long extravaganza of bomb blasts, sheep-slaying, and maimed Americans. It shows hooded militants at work in a primary school class in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Children are asked to sing jihadi songs, quizzed on what they think of America and rewarded with pens, rulers and erasers. The video, of which Adnkronos International (AKI) has obtained a copy, is the work of Ansar al-Sunna, part of the galaxy of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and seeks to show the extent of militants' control in the restive al-Anbar province.
The video, shot in high resolution and professionally edited, is a collage of various propaganda excerpts, linked together by a presenter, wearing a balaclava, who gives his name as Abu Suleiman al-Ruwi, and says he belongs to the media division of Ansar al-Sunna.

Ansar al-Sunna, or Army of the Protectors of the Sunna [which refers to the collective teachings of the Prophet Muhammad], is a Sunni extremist group said to be linked to al-Qaeda and Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks and kidnappings in Iraq.

Children have appeared only on rare occasions in video propaganda material by al-Qaeda and its affiliates and this video is unprecedented in its use of children.

The hour-long film begins with a historical recap, from the start of the war in Iraq, (the marines landing, the toppling of the giant statue of Saddam Hussein and the speech by US president George W. Bush) to the emergence of Islamic militants attacking US military posts, as well as footage of anti-war demonstrations around the world, snippets from last year's Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and copies of the Koran being thrown to the ground or having pages ripped out.

This chronological review precedes the footage of the Ansar al-Sunna militants who are ready to launch missiles and attack US armoured vehicles, but also to support the local population.

In the segment dedicated to the town of Ramadi, hooded men are seen slaying and butchering sheep and then delivering cuts of fresh meat in black plastic bags to children in the street, a helping hand to the poorer families.

It is children of Ramadi who the terrorist formation are seeking to influence. In a segment entitled "Lions of the country in the city of Ramadi", a hooded man carrying a microphone and his camera-wielding colleague interview youngsters on the streets. The children contest the US presence and say they are happy that Ramadi remains under the control of the mujahadeen.

Forty six minutes in, the presenter announces the visit by mujahadeen to the schools of Ramadi. The first to welcome the men, again masked, are boys in class 6B, aged 10-11. As well as reciting jihadi songs, the youngsters are asked for an opinion on the US. "Americans kill children" one boy says.

The Ansar al-Sunna operatives then move on to talk to much younger boys, in their first years at primary school.

The school appears a modern, solid and well kept structure, albeit spartan; the children are clean, tidily dressed and seem well-nourished.
.

Rome, 10 March. The next stop is an all-girls class, where headbands outnumber Islamic headscarves, and the young girls appear giggling and far from fearful of their masked interlocutors.

Several girls, aged 8-9, are asked to sing Islamic songs. All classes are given pens, pencils, rulers and erasers.

Before the closing salute of the Ansar al-Sunna presenter, there are images of two small boys, clad in black tunics and wearing black ski masks, just like the adult jihadis. They hold each others' hands as the smaller of the pair struggles to hold aloft a pistol, too big for his tiny hand FROM A GREEK NEWS SITE

http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.273973330&par=0#
.

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 04:31 PM

. . . . . . .
VERY FANCY FRIST
CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE ON BUZZFLASH, THE ARTICLE'S PAID FOR BY THE "DEMOCRATIC SENATORIAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE, BUT IT IS INTERESTING JUST THE SAME. AS ARE THE OTHER INTERESTING TOPICAL STORIES.

HERE'S THE LINK, JUST CLICK ON IT AND SEE THE REST FROM BUZZFLASH http://www.veryfancyfrist.com/

Senator Bill Frist, Republican Leader, likes to lead the good lie... perhaps too much. Lavish hotel stays. Chartered flights paid for by big business. Investment schemes with the family fortune. And an utter failure of leadership. It makes you wonder, what would the folks back in Tennessee think?

Click on these links on-site and see how Frist Lives. And don't forget to check out his sidekick from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander

. Live like Frist ... BILL FRIST’S PAC REPORT SHOWS HE ENJOYS FINE HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS.
The year-end and February monthly reports for Bill Frist’s Volunteer PAC showed $857 in charges at Charlie Palmer Steak, along with thousands in luxury lodging charges at fancy hotels. Frist’s PAC spent $1,700 at the Four Seasons Miami, $1,000 at the Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, a popular resort destination, $1,890 at the Planters Inn in Charleston, SC where you can “awaken to breakfast on silver, brought to your room” and “return from touring to enjoy ice tea or cocktails in the Parlor,” $1,307 at the swanky Hotel George in Washington, $924 at the Willard Hotel, and $775 at the Campton Place Hotel, “San Francisco's renowned luxury boutique hotel.” [Volunteer PAC Year End Report, 2005; Volunteer PAC February Report, 2006; Grand Hotel <http://www.grandhotel.com/> ; Planters Inn South Carolina <http://www.plantersinn.com/home.cfm> ; Hotel George <http://www.hotelgeorge.com/> ; Campton Place Hotel <http://www.camptonplace.com/> ]

. Fly like Frist ...Frist Has Spent More Than $69,000 On Corporate Flights
Since 2001, Bill Frist has spent $69,030 to fly on corporate jets, $22,656 of which was for flights hosted by pharmaceutical companies including Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer Corp. and Schering-Plough. Of course, the actual cost of the chartered flights was much higher but members of Congress are only required to reimburse the corporation for the cost of a first-class commercial flight to the same destination. [The Tennessean, 3/9/06; Political Money Line, Political Use of Corporate Aircraft]

. Invest like Frist ...Investigations Have Begun into Frist’s Potential Insider Trading
The Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Justice Department opened investigations into Frist’s sale of stock in HCA, the health care company founded and managed by the Frist family, just before the stock price plummeted. Of the investigation, Jennifer E. Duffy of the Cook Political Report said, “I do think this hurts his future ambitions, even if he's exonerated.” [New York Times, 9/23/05; Washington Post, 9/24/05]

Report Revealed that Frist Charity Gave More Than $450,000 to Political Allies
The AP reported that Frist’s AIDS charity, World of Hope, Inc., “paid nearly a half-million dollars in consulting fees to members of his political inner circle.” Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics said, "One of the things people who are running for president try to do is keep their fundraising staff and political people close at hand. And one of the ways you can do that is by putting them in some sort of organization you run." [AP, 12/18/05]

. Lead like Frist...Frist Dodges Reporters on Dubai Ports Deal
At a press event recently, Bill Frist “would not even turn around” to answer reporters’ questions on the Dubai port deal, while his House counterpart, Dennis Hastert, spoke to reporters about yesterday’s bipartisan House action to block the port deal. Since the House took action yesterday, the Senate is Bush’s only hope to avoid a legislative fiasco and a potential veto. According to the AP, Republican Senate leaders “hope to delay a quick showdown with Bush on the issue.” [AP, 3/9/06]

Click HERE to see Frist’s exchange with reporters… Go on site to see all links that follow

Discussing Frist’s avoidance of reporters with congressional correspondent Ed Henry later on CNN, Lou Dobbs noted, “this is the same republican leadership in the Senate who wanted an up-and-down vote out of the judiciary on court nominees, but is refusing to accord that courtesy and apparently extend the leadership's patience to an up-and-down vote on something as important as the Dubai ports deal?” [“Lou Dobbs Tonight,” 3/8/06]

Click HERE to see Ed Henry and Lou Dobbs discussing Frist…

FRIST CALLED FOR DELAY OF DUBAI DEAL BUT VOTED AGAINST PORT SECURITY SIX TIMES. Bill Frist said, “The decision to finalize this deal should be put on hold until the Administration conducts a more extensive review of this matter. It is important for Congress be involved in this process. I have requested a detailed briefing on this deal. If the Administration cannot delay the process, I plan on introducing legislation to ensure that the deal is placed on hold until this decision gets a more thorough review.” But Frist has voted at least six times against efforts to improve port security since 9/11. [Frist Release, 2/21/06; Vote 64, 3/17/05; Vote 166, 9/8/04; Vote 300, 7/24/03; Vote 291, 7/22/03; Vote 120, 4/3/03; Vote 115, 4/2/03]

FRIST’S FLIP-FLOP ON DUBAI PORTS DEAL IS NOTHING NEW
Days after his initial comments , Bill Frist flip-flopped and said that he would now back the Bush Administration’s controversial Dubai port deal. Democrats said that Frist’s newfound confidence in the port deal follows his pattern of backing down almost immediately on the rare occasion that he actually confronts the White House on an issue.

“Bill Frist was taken to the White House woodshed last week,” DSCC spokesman Phil Singer said. “On the handful of occasions that Frist has shown some backbone and stood up to the White House on an issue, he has backed down and flip-flopped. It’s tough to tell who has more influence with Frist: the Bush White House or the special interests that get him to pass their agenda – although there’s not much of a difference between those two things.”

After saying that he was against the Dubai port deal, Frist told a GOP gathering on Feb. 25 that he had no problem with Bush’s decision to turn control of American ports over to a foreign country. “We're behind the president 100 percent. We believe the decision in all likelihood is absolutely the right one,” Frist said. Frist’s comments followed his threat to pass legislation to stop the deal the week prior. [Lexington Herald-Leader, 2/26/06; Frist Release, 2/21/06; CNN, 2/21/06]

Frist’s flip-flop on the Dubai deal is nothing new. Democrats pointed to several instances where Frist ended up reversing himself after taking a position that ran contrary to the White House’s position:

ON SOCIAL SECURITY, FRIST EXPRESSED DOUBT; THEN CALLED FOR VOTE THE NEXT DAY. Last March, Frist said that he was unsure if a vote on Bush’s plan to overhaul Social Security would come in 2005 or 2006, saying that “In terms of whether it will be a week, a month, six months or a year, as to when we bring something to the floor, it's just too early.” However, the very next day, Frist changed his position, saying of Social Security reform, “We need to do it this year. Not the next year.” [ Washington Post 3/2/05 ; Frist Floor Statement, 3/3/05]

ON NUCLEAR OPTION, FRIST DROPPED NEGOTIATIONS WHEN KARL ROVE REJECTED COMPROMISE OUTRIGHT. After publicly stressing a willingness to seek a compromise on Bush’s judicial nominees last year that would abandon the Republican threat to ban filibusters of judicial nominees altogether, Frist rejected a Democratic compromise on the nuclear option a few hours after Karl Rove dismissed the idea outright. [ AP, 4/25/05; AP, 4/26/05; USA Today, 4/26/05; USA Today, 4/25/06]

ON BOLTON UN NOMINATION, FRIST SAID THERE WOULDN’T BE ANOTHER VOTE; THEN SAID HE’D PUSH FOR ONE AFTER LUNCHING WITH BUSH; THEN PASSED THE BUCK. On the morning of June 21, Frist said he wouldn't schedule another vote on Bolton's UN nomination. Two hours later, after he joined other GOP lawmakers for a luncheon with Bush, Frist said he would push for another vote. Yet the next day, Frist again seemed to wash his hands of Bolton. "It's really between the White House and Chris Dodd and Joe Biden," he said. Late that night, Frist arranged another conversation between Biden and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. But that conversation did not resolve the dispute over the nomination, and “Frist had little to show for his work but negative news reports and political headaches.” Washington Post, 6/23/05; Washington Post, 6/27/05
http://www.veryfancyfrist.com

http://www.buzzflash.com/
.

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 05:48 PM

<O>
Pentagon says Halliburton may be overcharging for hurricane cleanup

11 March, 2006

WASHINGTON, March 11 (HalliburtonWatch.org) -- Halliburton's KBR subsidiary may have over-billed the Navy for labor costs during clean-up work in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, the Pentagon's inspector general reported March 3rd. The report said KBR's subcontractors had been billing for labor at rates "significantly higher" than the prevailing market rate.

Hurricane Ivan came ashore near Gulf Shores, Alabama, on September 16, 2004 as a Category 3 storm.
"The rates paid to some KBR subcontractors for labor were significantly higher than the prevailing Bureau of Labor Statistics rates for the area impacted by the hurricane (Pensacola, Florida)," the report said, adding that "additional review" is needed to make a final conclusion. The inspector general is conducting a follow-on audit.

The report contained language seen in previous audits by the military of Halliburton's contracts, including criticism of the company's notoriously-flawed cost documentation system that conceals overcharges. It states: "The underlying documentation for the invoice that KBR submitted in January 2005 for the Hurricane Ivan recovery effort causes us concern about the ability of the Navy to obtain a fair and reasonable price for the labor and material needed to accomplish the tasks associated with natural disaster recovery efforts."

(A HalliburtonWatch report earlier this year showed that KBR submits labor invoices to the military in Iraq with exorbitantly higher costs added ontop of the wage costs, but it's unclear how and where these extra costs are incurred. See "Halliburton bills U.S. taxpayers $50 for $5 labor in Iraq," Feb. 6, 2006.)

The possible over-billing in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan occurred under Halliburton's Emergency Construction Capabilities III contract (or CONCAP III) with the Navy, worth up to $500 million over five years.

The inspector general's report chided the Navy for failing to consider Halliburton's past delinquent performance before awarding the CONCAP contract to KBR, including bribery and overcharges under its $13 billion Iraq logistics contract (or LOGCAP).

Although a company's past performance on government contracts is supposed to be considered before handing out new contracts, both the Army and the Navy failed to do so with regards to KBR, the report concluded. So, KBR's delinquent and illegal practices in Iraq were not entered into a military database that tracks contractor performance. The database is used by contracting officials to determine whether new contracts should be awarded.

Of the 36 task orders completed on the LOGCAP contract in Iraq, only one, worth $1 million, had made it into the database. The $209 million task order that included kickbacks worth $6 million paid to KBR employees was not entered into the database, and therefore was not considered by the Navy in its source selection. The Army has since entered the missing information, according to the inspector general's report.

For further information on the military's preferential treatment of Halliburton, visit this link.

CONCAP was first awarded to KBR in 2001, four months after former CEO Dick Cheney became vice president. The contract allows the Navy to direct KBR to provide emergency construction services at any time and under short notice. Under CONCAP, KBR is rebuilding areas afflicted by Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma. The prison facilities at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba that hold suspected al-Qaeda terrorists were built by KBR via CONCAP.

The Navy has paid KBR $295 million for reconstruction work since July 2004 under CONCAP, including more than $160 million for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction and mortuary services, $35 million for an additional prison and psychiatric facility at Guantanamo Bay and over $47 million for Hurricane Ivan cleanup.

The inspector general's audit was requested by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

More Information:

DOD-IG's report

DOD-IG's summary of the report

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/hurricane_overcharge.html

Saundra Hummer

March 11th, 2006, 06:12 PM

<<<O>>>A Lawless and Incompetent Leadership
Bush at the Tipping Point

By
Ralph Nader

03/11/06 "Counterpunch" -- -- George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two top outlaws smashing our country's rule of law and democratic liberties, are testing the American people's resistance. Every day they are testing. Every day they think by flaunting the words, "war on terror", they can get Americans to concede more and more of what makes the United States a constitutionally-abiding government under the rule of law.
You know what? With not enough exceptions, they are right. Day by day, we're giving up what our forefathers fought to bequeath us since that famous Declaration of Independence of 1776. They were determined that people in this country would not be arrested without charges and jailed indefinitely, that they would not be tortured, or sent to be tortured in dictatorial regimes, or deprived of habeas corpus to take their incarceration to our courts of law, or be snooped on at the whim of the President and his deputies or that people in faraway lands would be destroyed in the tens of thousands due to a fabricated war-invasion-quagmire.

They instituted a constitution so that people would not be jailed without "probable cause", or be lied to about taking this country and its soldiers to war, or have shoved aside the checks and balances represented by American courts and the Congress. All these are being done by two pro-Vietnam war draft dodgers!

What does all this tell you about all of us out there in the great United States of America? A giant yawn of "who cares" by citizens, nearly two-thirds of whom now have turned against these two White House fabricators in poll after poll regarding the war, the surrender to Big Business, the gross incompetence in managing taxpayer dollars and the Katrina disaster.

But listen, the rumble of resistance and opposition is getting louder and not just from the increasing number of public demonstrations around the country.

A new Zogby poll reports that 72% of American soldiers serving in Iraq think the U.S. should get out within the next year, including 58% of the Marines! Three-quarters of National Guard and Reserve units support withdrawal within 6 months. Every month, more former high-ranking military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats are declaring their opposition to the war.

For a few examples of many: Retired four-star General, Joseph P. Hoar, who commanded the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf after the 1991 war, described the Iraq war as "wrong from the beginning". Similar tough criticism has come from John Deutch, former head of the CIA, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter and Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the first President Bush.

Retired General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency and security adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote that the Iraq war "is serving the interests of Osama bin Laden, the Iranians, and is fomenting civil war in Iraq." He describes the Iraq war as "the most strategic foreign policy disaster in U.S. history."

More recently, internal memos of criticism or dissent, Inspector General reports from Defense the Justice Department, and former highly-positioned staff within the Bush Administration, like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, are taking apart the public relations sheen concocted by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triad.

Now comes the conservative American Bar Association--400,000 lawyers--whose House of Delegates has overwhelmingly approved a task force report accusing President Bush, in polite legal language, of violating both the Constitution and federal law. ABA President Michael S. Greco sent it to Mr. Bush with a cover letter dated February 13, 2006 . (Report full text)

The mass media, which has finally produced many exposes of the Bush war, ignored the significance of this condemnation by the nation's largest body of lawyers, written in part by attorneys who have served in the FBI, CIA and NSA. It should have been page one news.

There comes a tipping point, however, when the opposition of the establishment, the public opinion of the citizenry, the disgust of the soldiers--their spreading casualties, diseases and mental traumas - and the corruption of the large corporate contractors to whom much of the military's functions have been outsourced, all congeal and overcome the cowardliness of most members of Congress. Then a surge of Congressional followers and allies of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), war veteran and leading voice against the Bush Iraq policies, will come to the forefront.

The illegal, disastrous (to both Iraqis and Americans) Iraq war is now almost three years of quagmire old. The chaos and bloodshed are worsening.

It is time to make the spring of 2006 the tipping point period for constitutionalism, justice and a sane foreign and national security policy. More yawns must turn into growls from outside Washington, DC. See http://www.DemocracyRising.US for more information.

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comments (4) | Trackback (0)

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12293.htm

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 12:28 AM

~
Reid 'Ashamed' Over Katrina Mobile Homes
By
PEGGY HARRIS,
Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 11, 10:42 PM ET

Senate minority leader Harry Reid said Saturday he was "ashamed for our country" after visiting the thousands of FEMA-owned mobile homes lined up at Hope Airport that have yet to be used as shelters for hurricane victims on the Gulf Coast.

"I can't imagine that we could have a sea of 11,000 mobile homes sitting there, rotting, while people around the country can't find a place to live," the Nevada Democrat said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has said that it was unable to put the trailers to use because federal regulations prohibit placing them in flood plains, and many of those needing shelter after the hurricanes are in areas classified as flood-prone.

Cost estimates for the trailers have ranged from $350 million to $800 million. "I'm terribly mystified, disappointed and ashamed for our country," said Reid, who visited the site with Sen. Mark Pryor (news, bio, voting record), D-Ark.

The two senators said they wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to sign an executive order for a temporary exemption from the flood-plain regulations.

Reid said he was particularly appalled because he knows that, in Pass Christian, Miss., for example, more than 100 hurricane victims are living in a flood plain in tents.

"I ask you, are they better off?" he said.

Earlier, at Little Rock, Reid also said he was galled by Bush's suggestion last week during a visit to New Orleans, where many neighborhoods remain uninhabitable, that Congress was slowing down the recovery process.

Reid said that, if President Bush had presented a budget that included what would realistically be needed to bring Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama back from the disastrous conditions they were left in after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Congress would now be approving funding amounts that would meet those needs.

Bush has said Congress "shortchanged the process" by diverting $1.5 billion in levee-rebuilding money to non-New Orleans-related projects. He said Congress should rechannel that money to levee rebuilding and should approve a $4.2 billion allotment for housing in Louisiana, rather than spread that housing money among all the damaged states.

"I was kind of upset. He's blaming all this on Congress, and then he has the audacity to say what limited money he's helped us get, put it all on Louisiana. That's not fair," Reid said Saturday. "I'm very, very disappointed."
http://news.yahoo.com/ .

theyellowdart

March 12th, 2006, 04:43 AM

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 11:49 AM

What is with this thread? Seriously.

It seems like it's just Saundra Hummer posting anti-administration articles for hundreds of pages on end. Is this how you spend your free time? Prentensiously formatting text and making yourself look like a knee-jerk liberal? I am by no means a Bush supporter, but can you move on already?

I started this thread for the express purpose of putting things out there for everyone to see whether it is about science, projects for kids or just my own thoughts, etc. Then there is this - the outing of political and business wrongdoings, I do admit, this has become the main focus the past couple of years as the business of state and corporate America have progressed to such a state of disarray and corruption as to be overwhelming. So I post articles from several sources, they being the writings of those more in the know about politics and big business than I. I've posted writings of some brilliant reporters, and pundits, lots of OP ED material. They do know a lot more than me about all of what is happening to our country, & I believe the articles are, for the most part, good ones. They are showing the many things going on with this administration and others who have less than honest ways of doing business. I felt it needs to be shown and known. Whether it's the business of state, the corporate world, or just everyday shenanigans in all walks of life it is good to know of these things, even if you aren't in agreement, as seeing these things lets you form an informed opinion.

If and when dishonesty and corruption ends in government, and, in the corporate world - these sources having dried up - leaving nothing to relate - sure I'll quit posting. When these articles aren't being read by anyone, sure I'll quit. Or if asked to by the board. It has been a matter of contention before and so?

Thanks to everyone out there who have written to me about enjoying my posts. Thanks to everyone for thanking me for them, and, for reading them.

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 12:10 PM

. . . . .
Fifth columnists
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

03.10.06 - "There's a tone of gleeful relish in the way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information, and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors," says New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller. Remember, it was Keller's decision, in fall 2004, to sit on the NSA warrantless domestic spying story all through the November election -- and for over a year more after that -- that may well have given George Bush another term. When Bill Keller is crying wolf, you know things must be getting bad.

Keller's comment, coming from a newspaper wed to the hip to the country's political and economic elites, shows just how sweeping and dangerous is the Bush administration's secrecy fetish, its anger over leaks (including aggressive investigations to find and prosecute the whistleblowers who revealed the illegal NSA program and the equally illegal existence of a gulag of secret CIA prisons), and its hostility toward any and all critics, particularly those in the news media. "Critic," in this case, extends to anyone who reports or comments upon unflattering news the White House would rather not see publicized. If the private papers of the secrecy-obsessed Bush White House are ever pried out of the crypt, I'll lay odds there's an enemies list much longer than Nixon's, and that all the names on that list are among the key words now being used in NSA data mining.
In recent months, senior White House officials from Bush on down have repeatedly stated or implied that administration critics, especially in media or Congress, are, variously, traitors, treasonous, giving aid and comfort to "the terrorists," or are even actually sympathetic to "the terrorists." This is astonishing, serious language coming from a White House that politicizes everything and that oversees the nation's top law enforcement officials. It is the mindset of a dictatorship, a monarchy, a tyranny. And it is poisoning the political policy debates of a country already deeply divided by ideology but increasingly skeptical of Dubya's inept, destructive reign.

The White House tendency to attack its critics has funneled down to other federal agencies, too. In the most notorious recent example, a New Mexico VA clinical nurse, Laura Berg, was subjected to an internal Veterans' Administration investigation on suspicion of "sedition" after writing a letter last September to an Albuquerque newspaper critical of Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina. But Berg's trauma is all too symptomatic of the persecution and gagging, over the last five years, of countless numbers of federal critics, whistleblowers, or employees simply trying to do their jobs. All have run afoul of Bush political operatives due to the heretics' reliance on professionalism, morality, or the use of hard science.

And the Bush plague of free speech suppression has also apparently inspired others. Right now, a tempest is brewing in a New York City teapot over the membership, by world-renowned British architect Lord Richard Rogers, in a professional organization that has been strongly critical of Israel's military occupation of Palestine. Rogers is the lead architect redesigning the Jacob Javitz Center, and New York City politics around Israel being what they are, two Democratic state assembly members and several pro-Israel advocacy groups have called for Rogers' removal from the project due to his membership in the group. It's hard to imagine a more clear-cut corollary to McCarthyism, right down to the accusations of being a card-carrying member of a (to critics) unpalatable but legal organization. Only, in this case, the criticisms don't even have to do with the core mission of the organization, but its foray into an issue where the would-be blacklisters have an opposing view.

And so it has gone. The conservative echo chamber, on radio, TV, in print, and in blogs and on the web, has taken up the White House's various cries of treason and so on as if they were reading right off Republican National Committee talking points, which they probably are. And liberals and progressives (including me), while more limited in how we can abuse power since we have so little of it these days, are at times every bit as harsh and unforgiving, even censorious, in considering opposing views.

Let's be clear. At the risk of stating the obvious, dissent is not only protected free speech, it is a core American value, essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. Democracies rely on the informed decisions of citizens, and it's hard for citizens to be well-informed and to come to their own conclusions when they can only get one side's view of a given issue. It's even harder in the case of the Bush administration, when that one side is frequently spouting bald-faced lies. But without suppressed facts and opposing points of view, and with endless repetition by administration shills and the bonus of taxpayer-paid propaganda, how can any citizen be relied upon to make sensible, well-informed judgments?

The answer, of course, is that many such citizens can't, and won't, and that's why the Bush White House is pushing so hard with all its power to control the flow of political information in this country. And, alarmingly, that desire to control information is now well-established precedent and will probably be passed on to the next administration, regardless of party. In 21st Century America this is how politicians have learned to try to seize, retain, and expand power.

In the old Soviet Union, Soviets were actually remarkably well-informed about what was going on in the world, if not in their own country. That's because they knew that government officials and the state-controlled media could not be trusted, and so they huddled by their shortwave radios and sought out the BBC, the Voice of America, and other alternative viewpoints.

Sadly, contemporary America is adjusting to the unreliability of politicians and the media in a different way. Polls consistently show Americans don't trust either politicians or journalists, and the contemptuous tropes of "liberal media" and "corporate media" have more Americans than ever either tuning out current affairs entirely or turning to not just opinion but news sources -- whether it be Fox News or Daily Kos -- that reinforce what they already believe, leaving large masses of people as immutable in their opinions as Bush himself. Real political debate, and genuine dissent, have for similar reasons become endangered animals in American politics.

At this point, the greatest danger is coming from the Bush administration, which seeks figuratively and at times literally to criminalize any criticism of it. Given Bush's anemic poll numbers, that's a lot of criticism and critics to suppress. But Bush, Cheney, and company are trying, and so long as they do, it's incumbent upon media members and the general public to fight back and, as Bruce Cockburn once sang, kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. Good night, and good luck. If political criticism and the laying out of better alternatives is treasonous, I'm proud to be a fifth columnist.

(c) 2006, WorkingForChange.com

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20465

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 02:42 PM

~~O~~
Bid to give Bush the boot
Residents of a tiny Vermont town have joined forces in a growing fight to impeach the U.S. president.

But with plunging approval and a slew of scandals, an ouster attempt may be the least of his worries

TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Mar. 11, 2006. 01:00 AMWASHINGTON—When the townsfolk gathered in the tiny Vermont community of Newfane for their annual meeting, the agenda was daunting.

There was the town budget to be approved, then the school budget, plus they needed to approve spending $50,000 on the town's property reappraisal.

And, oh yeah. Move to impeach the president of the United States.

And so, at the end of a five-hour meeting, the assembled were asked to consider:
"Whereas George W. Bush has:

"1. Misled the nation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction;

"2. Misled the nation about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda;

"3. Used these falsehoods to lead our nation into war unsupported by international law;

"4. Not told the truth about American policy with respect to the use of torture; and

"5. Directed the government to engage in domestic spying, in direct contravention of U.S. law;

"Therefore, the voters of the town of Newfane ask that our representative to the U.S. House of Representatives file articles of impeachment to remove him from office."

All in favour?: 129. All opposed?: 21. Meeting adjourned.

For a president on the run, cratering at record-low approval ratings, losing battles with Republicans who are beginning to consider him toxic, seemingly having lost his political stride like an aging slugger who can't catch up to the fastball, impeachment is likely the least of his worries.

More worrisome for Bush is the perception he is so insulated during this second term that he has lost touch with the concerns of the nation, that he is still surrounded by the same top aides in notorious "burnout'' positions who came to power with him five years ago, that the "trust me" president has squandered that trust.

But as a barometer of discontent with the second-term Bush presidency in a mid-term election year, the fact that impeachment has moved from angry bumper stickers to dinner party discussion is telling.

Democrats in Congress, probably quite wisely, won't touch the question.

Michigan's John Conyers introduced a resolution last December requesting an impeachment inquiry to deal with Bush's "manipulation" of pre-war intelligence, but only 26 of 201 House Democrats backed him.

But that hasn't stopped others.

ImpeachPAC.org has endorsed and raised funds for three Democrats who vow to push for impeachment if elected in November's mid-terms.

The organization, led by Democrat Bob Fertik is an offshoot of AfterDowningStreet.org, founded by David Swanson, a former reporter and press secretary who tried to mobilize opposition to Bush after the release of internal memos from the Tony Blair government indicated the White House was intent on crafting the conditions for an invasion of Iraq.

Newfane is one of nine U.S. communities, all in Vermont and California, to pass impeachment resolutions, the largest of which was San Francisco where city supervisors voted 7-3 for impeachment, saying Bush has destroyed civil liberties in his wiretapping program, and failed miserably in his response to Hurricane Katrina.

Lewis Lapham, the outgoing editor of Harper's magazine and one of the country's most outspoken Bush critics, makes the case for impeachment in the March issue of his magazine.It includes this indictment:

"We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instil in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil; a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies.

"In a word, a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous."

Dan DeWalt, the 49-year-old Vermont woodworking teacher, furniture restorer and musician who introduced the Newfane resolution, says he wants to make impeachment a household word.

"We can't take up arms against our government, so we do what we can," he said.

"If we stand by and do nothing, we would be complicit in the immoral and illegal activities of the administration. If you do nothing, you are acting illegally and immorally yourself."

The litany of high crimes and misdemeanours in this grim era for Bush are well known.

It started shortly after his re-election, at a time when he was crowing about his "political capital" and there was talk of a conservative dynasty in the U.S. But when he spent much of that capital on an overhaul of Social Security, he found it couldn't be sold, even within his own party.

Then came the CIA leak investigation, a probe that clearly distracted the White House, ending with the indictment of Lewis "Scooter'' Libby, a top aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

It was during this period that it became clear the political radar on Pennsylvania Ave. was down.

His nomination of White House legal counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court foundered against opposition from the right and ultimately had to be withdrawn.

His laggardly response to last year's Hurricane Katrina became a case study of an administration asleep at the switch, bolstered by the recent release of video showing a seemingly disinterested Bush being briefed on the looming catastrophe.

Since December, when it was revealed in The New York Times, Bush has been fighting to justify a wiretapping program that has been denounced as illegal.

There was the tragicomedy shooting of a hunting pal by Cheney, a gun mishap that turned into a week-long crisis for the White House.

That was quickly followed by the Dubai ports controversy. Whether the deal should have been killed may be open to debate, but again the political skills of this White House were tucked away and the ensuing groundswell of opposition to turning port management over to a company from the United Arab Emirates left Bush belatedly sputtering about using his veto to keep the deal alive.

By week's end, he was in full retreat, having been stared down by a Republican congressional delegation which outflanked him on his vaunted strong suit, national security.

"They didn't see it coming," said New York Republican Representative Peter King who led opposition to the deal.

He told reporters in New York Bush administration officials have "got to get their antenna up much more on issues and bring the issues up in Congress. They need to realize we're now entering into a complex state of a post-9/11 world."

Against all this, is a war in Iraq nearing its third anniversary with an AP-Ipsos poll released yesterday indicating 80 per cent of Americans — including 70 per cent of Republicans — believe Iraq is heading to civil war.

Comic Bill Maher jokes the U.S. is suffering from "f-up fatigue" at the top.

They call it the six-year itch, the second-term cloud that seems to inevitably envelop any president who doesn't need to be elected.

Second-term presidents have dealt with sex scandals (Bill Clinton), out-of-control wars (Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman), arms scandals (Ronald Reagan) and political scandals (Richard Nixon).

But only Nixon has had approval ratings as low as Bush's 38 per cent average on a series of polls released last week.

The mystery in Washington is why Bush will not inject some new blood into his inner circle.

Chief of staff Andrew Card and deputy chief of staff and political strategist Karl Rove have been with him since day one.

"You can lose your political instincts, you become less sensitive to the political cross-currents,'' says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

"When you are falling on your face, faltering, stumbling around, it becomes all the more important to move the deck chairs around and bring in some fresh perspective and some fresh hope, plus a little renewed confidence for the country."

Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, says Bush has faced some big "screw-ups" that have cost him.

"The question on the street, from people who are not necessarily political, is whether the president is competent," he says. "Presidents get tired and I think Bush is tired."

Additional articles by Tim Harper
http://www.buzzflash.com/

http://www.thestar.com/
~O~

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 03:01 PM

~O~
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

by
Lewis Lapham
February 21, 2006

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
FROM HIS BOOK
Lewis Lapham has been the Editor of "Harper's" magazine for 30 years (retiring as Editor Emeritus this spring). In the March issue (not available online), Lapham calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush in that venerable publication. Have we got your attention yet?

Lapham concludes his impeachment call with these trenchant words: "It is the business of the Congress to prevent the President from doing more damage than he's already done to the people, interests, health, well-being, safety, good name, and reputation of the United States--to cauterize the wound and stem the flows of money, stupidity and blood.""Gag Rule" is a book Lapham wrote during these dark hours of Bushevism, a book that details his scorn for how the Republican Party has laid waste to democracy.

As one reviewer noted of "Gag Rule": If "dissent is Democracy. [Then] Democracy is in Trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and the salable sweep all uncomfortable truths from view.

"In the midst of the 'war on terror' - which makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like the Normandy landings on D-Day - we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. The Bush administration makes no secret of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates 'not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy but the protection of the American plutocracy from the American democracy.'

"Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in dissent and have those voices heard."

A review awhile back in "The Nation" notes of "Gag Rule": "One hundred years ago, in the wake of England's ruinous victory in the Boer War, a young Liberal politician excoriated the ruling Conservative Party and its imperial scam: 'A party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad ... sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand at the public exchequer, the open door at the public house, dear food for the millions, cheap labor for the millionaire.' As Lewis Lapham points out in Gag Rule, where this and a great many other nuggets of historically apposite and rhetorically scintillating prose are marshaled, these words of Winston Churchill fairly describe the Bush II Administration as well. (Substitute "church" for 'public house,' of course.) If only a few Democratic voices could find the young Churchill's register.

"...the Congress have joined the attack on democratic accountability and popular sovereignty. Executive-branch decision-making is increasingly insulated from public scrutiny and comment; more and more important documents are unavailable or unaffordable; the prerogatives of law-enforcement agencies are steadily expanded in the national-security area, though narrowed in respect of tax and securities fraud, air and water pollution, violations of labor law and occupational safety rules, and other constraints on profitability. Harper's has done stellar work in showing how the claims of the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions to "get government off the backs of the American people" merely camouflaged their sustained effort to keep the American people off the backs of the government and its corporate principals."

Lapham is an erudite writer and superb stylist of the old school, capable of penning sentences that are witheringly sardonic and painfully prophetic. He is a practitioner of the art of literacy and the power of the words to illuminate and lead us back to a civil society.

The challenge we face is that the Lewis Laphams of the world have been replaced by plasma television screens everywhere from supermarkets, to restaturants, to airports -- and, of course, to our homes.

America is increasingly a nation of people who develop their beliefs based on the passing images and advertising/news soundbites of the most mind-altering narcotic of our time: TV.

In "Gag Rule," Lapham rages valiantly against the dumbing down of our civil discourse into the sloganeering of demagoguery aided and abetted by the merger of entertainment and news. Is Lapham a supernumerary, a phantom reminder of the golden hope of democracy?

Or do we yet have time to drive the barbarians who betray our Constitution and our American heritage of justice and inclusiveness out of the White House, Congress, and off of the Supreme Court?
~ ~ ~Go on-site for other information on his book.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/06/02/rev06027.html ~o~

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 04:02 PM

~~O~~ AP: Study Warns of Lapses at U.S. Ports
AP: Lapses by Private Port Operators Could Allow Terrorist to Smuggle WMD Into U.S.

By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - WASHINGTON - Lapses by private port operators, shipping lines or truck drivers could allow terrorists to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States, according to a government review of security at American seaports.

The $75 million, three-year study by the Homeland Security Department included inspections at a New Jersey cargo terminal involved in the dispute over a Dubai company's now-abandoned bid to take over significant operations at six major U.S. ports.

The previously undisclosed results from the study found that cargo containers can be opened secretly during shipment to add or remove items without alerting U.S. authorities, according to government documents marked "sensitive security information" and obtained by The Associated Press.

The study found serious lapses by private companies at foreign and American ports, aboard ships, and on trucks and trains "that would enable unmanifested materials or weapons of mass destruction to be introduced into the supply chain."

The study, expected to be completed this fall, used satellites and experimental monitors to trace roughly 20,000 cargo containers out of the millions arriving each year from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Most containers are sealed with mechanical bolts that can be cut and replaced or have doors that can be removed by dismantling hinges.

The risks from smuggled weapons are especially worrisome because U.S. authorities largely decide which cargo containers to inspect based on shipping records of what is thought to be inside.

Among the study's findings:

Safety problems were not limited to overseas ports. A warehouse in Maine was graded less secure than any in Pakistan, Turkey or Brazil. "There is a perception that U.S. facilities benefit from superior security protection measures," the study said. "This mind set may contribute to a misplaced sense of confidence in American business practices."

No records were kept of "cursory" inspections in Guatemala for containers filled with Starbucks Corp. coffee beans shipped to the West Coast. "Coffee beans were accessible to anyone entering the facility," the study said. It found significant mistakes on manifests and other paperwork. In a statement to the AP, Starbucks said it was reviewing its security procedures.

Truck drivers in Brazil were permitted to take cargo containers home overnight and park along public streets. Trains in the U.S. stopped in rail yards that did not have fences and were in high-crime areas. A shipping industry adage reflects unease over such practices: "A container at rest is a container at risk."

Practices at Turkey's Port of Izmir were "totally inadequate by U.S. standards." But, the study noted, "It has been done that way for decades in Turkey."

Containers could be opened aboard some ships during weekslong voyages to America. "Due to the time involved in transit (and) the fact that most vessel crew members are foreigners with limited credentialing and vetting, the containers are vulnerable to intrusion during the ocean voyage," the study said.

Some governments will not help tighten security because they view terrorism as an American problem. The U.S. said "certain countries," which were not identified, would not cooperate in its security study "a tangible example of the lack of urgency with which these issues are regarded."

Security was good at two terminals in Seattle and nearby Tacoma, Wash. The operator in Seattle, SSA Marine, uses cameras and software to track visitors and workers. "We consider ourselves playing an important role in security," said the company's vice president, Bob Waters.

In theory, some nuclear materials inside cargo containers can be detected with special monitors. But such devices have frustrated port officials in New Jersey because bananas, kitty litter and fire detectors which all emit natural radiation set off the same alarms more than 100 times every day.

The study applauded efforts to install radiation monitors overseas. "While there is clearly value in nuclear detection at a U.S. port, that is precisely the concern it is already on U.S. soil," it said.

Finding biological and chemical weapons inside cargo containers is less likely. The study said tests were "labor intensive, time-consuming and costly to use" and produced too many false alarms. "No silver bullet has emerged to render terrorists incapable of introducing WMD into containers," it said.

Sen. Patty Murray, who advocated the study, said: "There are huge holes in our security system that need to be filled." The Washington Democrat said the study "shows us there are major vulnerabilities over who handles cargo, where it's been and whether cargo is on a manifest."

Part of the study tested new tamper-evident locks on containers and tracking devices.

"It's important to figure out what works and what doesn't," said Elaine Dezenski, Homeland Security's acting assistant secretary for policy development. She said the study "gave us a much better view of vulnerabilities." The U.S. is looking for weaknesses across the shipping system to learn where terrorists might strike, she said.

The study, called "Operation Safe Commerce," undercuts arguments that port security in America is an exclusive province of the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is not managed by companies operating shipping terminals.

The theme was an important element in the Bush administration's forceful defense of the deal it originally approved to allow Dubai-owned DP World to handle significant operations at ports in New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

Bush and senior officials sought to assure lawmakers that safety at ports would not decline.

"I can understand people's consternation because the first thing they heard was that a foreign company would be in charge of our port security when in fact, the Coast Guard and Customs are in charge of our port security," Bush said Feb. 28. "Our duty is to protect America, and we will protect America."

DP World promised on Thursday to transfer fully to an American company its U.S. port operations it acquired when it bought London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

It was unclear how such a sale might occur, but the divestiture was expected to involve major operations at the six U.S. ports and affect lesser dockside activities at 16 other ports in this country.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., a leading critic of the Dubai deal, said anyone suggesting that port operators and shipping companies were not involved with security was "living in La-La land."

"You can obviously have stuff in containers that doesn't make it onto manifests, either by design or from the actions of bad actors," Menendez said in an AP interview Friday. "A terminal operator is so involved in the overall security equation of ports."

Parts of the U.S. study examined the safety of containers sent to the same cargo terminal in New Jersey that DP World would have managed jointly and operated with its Denmark-based rival, Maersk Sealand.

Hundreds of pages of study documents obtained by the AP do not list specific security lapses at the New Jersey terminal. The final two cargo containers being tracked under the study were expected to arrive there this week from the Middle East.

But the study broadly described problems in warehouses and other storage areas that raised doubts about the safety of containers brought to New Jersey's port. It cited problems with protective fences and gates, surveillance cameras and emergency plans.

The lengthy study has been beset by problems. Japan refused to allow officials to attach tracking devices to containers destined for the United States. Other tracking devices sometimes failed. Many shipping companies refused to disclose information for competitive reasons.

Some containers in the study were aboard a ship the Coast Guard held 11 miles off New Jersey's coast for security reasons in August 2004. An anonymous e-mail had claimed a container filled with tons of lemons was deliberately contaminated with a biological agent. The lemons were fumigated and burned, but no trace of poison was ever found; the containers also were destroyed.

Parts of the study could not be finished at all. U.S. officials went to Pakistan to inspect how workers in Karachi handle cargo containers. But they canceled plans for a return inspection because of an outbreak of terrorist attacks there..http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/print?id=1715366

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 04:31 PM

~~~o~~~Donald Rumsfeld makes $5m killing on bird flu drug
By
Geoffrey Lean and Jonathan Owen
Published: 12 March 2006
Donald Rumsfeld has made a killing out of bird flu. The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease.

More than 60 countries have so far ordered large stocks of the antiviral medication - the only oral medicine believed to be effective against the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease - to try to protect their people. The United Nations estimates that a pandemic could kill 150 million people worldwide.
Britain is about halfway through receiving an order of 14.6 million courses of the drug, which the Government hopes will avert some of the 700,000 deaths that might be expected. Tamiflu does not cure the disease, but if taken soon after symptoms appear it can reduce its severity.

The drug was developed by a Californian biotech company, Gilead Sciences. It is now made and sold by the giant chemical company Roche, which pays it a royalty on every tablet sold, currently about a fifth of its price.

Mr Rumsfeld was on the board of Gilead from 1988 to 2001, and was its chairman from 1997. He then left to join the Bush administration, but retained a huge shareholding .

The firm made a loss in 2003, the year before concern about bird flu started. Then revenues from Tamiflu almost quadrupled, to $44.6m, helping put the company well into the black. Sales almost quadrupled again, to $161.6m last year. During this time the share price trebled.

Mr Rumsfeld sold some of his Gilead shares in 2004 reaping - according to the financial disclosure report he is required to make each year - capital gains of more than $5m. The report showed that he still had up to $25m-worth of shares at the end of 2004, and at least one analyst believes his stake has grown well beyond that figure, as the share price has soared. Further details are not likely to become known, however, until Mr Rumsfeld makes his next disclosure in May.

The 2005 report showed that, in all, he owned shares worth up to $95.9m, from which he got an income of up to $13m, owned land worth up to $17m, and made $1m from renting it out.

He also had illiquid investments worth up to $8.1m, including in partnerships investing in biotechnology, issuing reproductions of paintings, and operating art galleries in New Mexico and Wyoming. He also has life insurance with a surrender value of up to $5m, and received up to $1m from the DHR Foundation, in which he has assets worth up to $25m, and $773,743 from the Donald H Rumsfeld Trust, in which he has assets of up to $50m.

Late last week no one at Gilead Sciences was available to comment on Mr Rumsfeld's sale of its stock. In a statement to The Independent on Sunday the Pentagon said: "Secretary Rumsfeld has no relationship with Gilead Sciences, Inc beyond his investments in the company. When he became Secretary of Defence in January 2001, divestiture of his investment in Gilead was not required by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Office of Government Ethics or the Department of Defence Standards of Conduct Office.

"Upon taking office, he recused himself from participating in any particular matter when the matter would directly and predictably affect his financial interest in Gilead Sciences."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article350787.ece ~~~o~~~

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 05:15 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I was reading the liner note to this album and found it interested me, so I'm posting it. "Cannonball" Adderly in my memory wasn't the first East Coast musician to record that sound there at the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse was full of East Coast musicians, just think Frank Rosolino, Stan Levey, Richie Kamuca, all of the regulars, and of their friends who frequented the place, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Elvin Jones, the list is a who's who of jazz. Dizzy "West Coast Cool"? Hardly. I doubt Dizzy recorded there however, as many didn't due to contractual restrictions, but the bootleg recordings must be something to hear, and I'm sure there's a lot of those in musicians hands, all from there.
SRH

"QUINTET AT THE LIGHTHOUSE"

Other Reissue: GO ON-SITE TO VIEW, AND TO USE LINKS

JULIAN "CANNONBALL" ADDERLEY, alto Sax ;

NAT ADDERLEY,cornet ;

VICTOR FELDMAN, piano;

SAM JONES, bass ;

LOUIS HAYES, drums.
Recorded 'live' at The Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach, California; October 16, 1960.

SIDE 1
1. Sack o' Woe (10:41) (Julian Adderley)
2. Big "P" (5:55) (Jimmy Heath)
3. Blue Daniel (7:24) (Frank Rosolino)

SIDE 2
1. Azule Serape (9:27) (Victor Feldman)
2. Exodus (7:39) (Vic Stanley)
3. What Is This Thing Called Love? (4:43)(Cole Porter)

This heart-warming exciting and deeply earthy album is the third -and in many ways the most satisfying-recording by the remarkable CANNONBALL ADDERLEY Quintet. a group that has proven to be one of the major, and certainly one of the very swiftest, success stories in Jazz.

Like their first LP (the phenomenally widely-enjoyed Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco), this one was taken down while the band was in the process of acting upon and re-acting to a richly enthusiastic and more than room-filling night club audience. The setting is the most celebrated of southern California jazz spots, The Lighthouse, located in a suburb of Los Angeles The occasion was a one-day, Sunday afternoon and night stand by the Adderley group, the culmination of a month-long triumphal stay in and around L.A. (onetime stronghold of "cool" jazz) by this thoroughly warm and soulful band.

The Lighthouse itself is something of a phenomenon among jazz clubs not only because it has 'stayed in business for a dozen years but even more because it has remained a relaxed low-pressure and resolutely popularly-priced club--and therefore, from a musician's point of view invariably a good place to play in and a magnet for good listening audiences. It has been famous for more than a decade as a focal point for the West Coast brand of jazz ; Cannonball's quintet is one of the few Eastern groups to have played there. They became the first non-cool group to record there largely because of the nature of the audience response a month earlier when the quintet had opened their Los Angeles stay in front of a consistently overflow Lighthouse crowd. The very next day Cannonball called New York to report enthusiastically that (a) the band, to which pianist Vic Feldman had just been added, would decidedly be fully ready and eager to record before leaving California, and (b) these stimulatingly appreciative fans were by all means the people to do it with.

There is really nothing surprising in the Californians' reaction to the group, for it has become quite clear that this quintet is just about universally recognized as one of the most invigorating ingredients ever added to the unique musical brew we call jazz. Organized in the Fall of 1959, they have enjoyed from the start an overwhelmingly widespread and passionate public acceptance. Their previously-mentioned first album (recorded almost exactly a year before this one, during their first sizeable engagement, which was at one of northern California's top clubs, The Jazz Workshop) was an instantaneous hit. It was followed by a steady flow of gratifyingly crowded appearances at clubs, concerts and festivals. Almost overnight, they leaped from nowhere to a spot somewhere near the top of the heap. There is actually nothing particularly mysterious about this jet-fast ride to fame. This is a group made up of two horns of immense jazz stature, buoyed up by a most enviable rhythm section. It is amazingly close-knit, both musically and personally. Julian and Nat are not only brothers but even more importantly (to repeat a phrase I have used before but like too well not to stick with) they are soul-brothers. Sam Jones has known and valued the Adderley's since Florida boyhood days ; Lou Hayes, a young but musically mature powerhouse, has meshed completely with the group from the first. As for the newcomer, Victor Feldman, his performance here tells (far more clearly than words could) just how exciting and funky a musician this young Englishman is and just how deeply his presence is welcomed by the others. Feldman is going to startle a lot of people: in four years in this country, spent mostly on the West Coast, he had given few indications that be could play like this. Maybe musical environment has a lot to do with it, but those of us who heard his very first rehearsal with the group had thereafter no doubt at all that Cannonball had made a totally right move in hiring him.

It is also quite obvious that these five are craftsmen, real professionals in the best sense of the word--a quality that is as uncommon in jazz as anywhere else in the world. There are superb soloists here, but listen to the ensembles and backgrounds and you'll become aware that this is far more than just another good 'blowing' band. It is also deeply apparent that they love and enjoy their work, and that this includes another rare trait: a real desire to have their listeners enjoy it, too. (This last point is firmly underlined by Cannonball's warm, witty and articulate spoken additions to the proceedings.)

The six selections here make up a strong and varied cross-section. Cannon's Sack o' Woe is irresistibly rhythmic and deeply in the "soul" groove ( a different version of it appears on Nat Adderley's "Work Song" album.) The bright and surging Big "P", written by tenorman Jimmy Heath, is named for his noted brother, bassist Percy Heath. By way of contrast is the almost delicate charm of Frank Rossolino's Blue Daniel. Vic Feldman contributed the unusual Azule Serape (approximate English translation: Blue Shawl), which has been described as "funky Latin." Exodus is a brisk and rather intricate line; and the closer is a romp through the standard What Is This Thing Called Love?

In the opening paragraph I called this album more "satisfying" than its predecessors. This is by no means whatsoever to belittle the earlier albums. ". . . in San Francisco" has a rare, captivating fire and spontaneity that renders completely irrelevant the fact that this was then a newly-formed group. "Them Dirty Blues" is, naturally enough, musically better-knit, more than compensating for the fact that it presents this volatile group in a studio, or non-audience-reaction, setting. We are more than proud of both. But the album in hand would seem to join the well-organized togetherness of one with the "live" vitality of the other combination that has to be pretty unbeatable.

produced and notes written by ORRIN KEEPNEWS

cover designed by KEN DEARDOFF recording engineer WALLY HEIDER mastered by JACK MATTHEWS (componements Corp.) on HYDROFEED lathe

(The cover photo, by William Claxton, shows-le/t to right Victor, Nat, Cannonball, Sam and Louis on the beach near The Lighthouse.)
http://www.cannonball-adderley.com/245.htm ...

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 07:18 PM

<<<O>>>
Why Did Bush Destroy Iraq?

Every Reason Put Forward Has Been Proven False

By
Paul Craig Roberts03/11/06 -- -- March 20 is the third anniversary of the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq. US military casualties to date are approximately 20,000 killed, wounded, maimed, and disabled. Iraqi civilian casualties number in the tens of thousands. Iraq's infrastructure is in ruins. Tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed. Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people had 36,000 of its 50,000 homes destroyed by the US military.
Half of the city's former population are displaced persons living in tents.

Thousands of Iraqis have been detained in prisons and hundreds have been brutally tortured. America's reputation in the Muslim world is ruined.

The Bush regime expected a short "cakewalk" war to be followed by the imposition of a puppet government and permanent US military bases.

Instead, US military forces are confronted with an insurgency that has denied control over Iraq to the US military. Chaos rules, and civil war may be coming on top of the insurgency.

On March 9, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who has been totally wrong about Iraq, told Congress that if the unprecedented violence in Iraq breaks out in civil war, the US will rely primarily on Iraq's security forces to put down civil war.

What Iraqi security forces? Iraq does not have a security force.
The Shia have a security force. The Sunnis have a security force, and the Kurds have a security force. The sectarian militias control the streets, towns and cities. If civil war breaks out, the "Iraqi security force" will dissolve into the sectarian militias, leaving the US military in the middle of the melee.

Is this what "support the troops" means?

President Bush's determination to remain in Iraq despite the obvious failure of the attempted occupation puts Bush at odds with the American public and with our troops. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that our troops should be withdrawn. An even larger majority of the troops themselves believe they should be withdrawn.

Yet Bush, who is incapable of admitting a mistake, persists in a strategic blunder that is turning into catastrophe.

Bush's support has fallen to 34 percent.

The war's out of pocket cost to date is approximately $300 billion--every dollar borrowed from foreigners. Economic and budgetary experts have calculated that the ultimate cost of Bush's Iraq war in terms of long-term care for veterans, interest on borrowed money, and resources diverted from productive uses will be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

What is being achieved for this enormous sacrifice?

No one knows.

Every reason we have been given for the Iraqi invasion has proved to be false. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
Reports from UN weapons inspectors, top level US intelligence officials, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, and leaked top secret documents from the British Cabinet all make it unequivocally clear that the Bush regime first decided to invade Iraq and then looked around for a reason.

Saddam Hussein had no terrorist connection to Osama bin Laden and no role in the 9/11 attack. Hussein was a secular ruler totally at odds with bin Laden's Islamist aims. Every informed person in the world knew this.

When the original justifications for the US invasion collapsed, Bush said that the reason for the invasion was to rid Iraq of a dictator and to put a democracy in its place. Despite all the hoopla about democracy and elections, no Iraqi government has been able to form, and the country is on the brink of civil war. Some Middle East experts believe that violence will spread throughout the region.

The brutal truth is that America's responsibility is extreme. We have destroyed a country and created political chaos for no reason whatsoever.

Seldom in history has a government miscalculated as badly as Bush has in Iraq. More disturbingly, Bush shows no ability to recover from his mistake. All we get from our leader is pig-headed promises of victory that none of our military commanders believe.

Our entire government is lost in confusion. One day Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tell us that we are having great success in training an Iraqi military and will be able to begin withdrawing our troops in a year. The next day they tell us that we will be fighting the war for decades.

Bush's invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Bush's attempt to cover up his mistake with patriotism will ultimately discredit patriotism.

America has to be big enough to admit a mistake and to bring it to an end.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comments (17) | Trackback (0)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12292.htm

Perhaps it's just to get in practice for bigger fish, a war game of sorts, much like canned hunts. . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 07:25 PM

<<<<O>>>>

It will be the duty of the Executive, with sufficient appropriations for the purpose, to prosecute unsparingly all who have been engaged in depriving citizens of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution: Rutherford B. Hayes - 19th President of the United States

<<O>>

"Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty." : Rutherford B. Hayes

<<O>>

"He serves his party best who serves the country best." : Rutherford B. Hayes
<><<O>><>

Saundra Hummer

March 12th, 2006, 08:59 PM

<<<>>>
"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them." - Mark Hertzgaard

<<>>

"If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country." - Michael Parenti

<<>>

"America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home." Mark Twain

<<>>

The power of the state is measured by the power that men surrender to it." ? Felix Morley

<<>>

Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein

<<>>

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do." - Edward Everett Hale<<<O>>>

Saundra Hummer

March 13th, 2006, 11:51 AM

<<<<<o>>>>>
WE NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR OUR RIGHTS
THEY ARE BEING ERODED,
SLOWLY BUT SURELY
SRH
.

FYI -

In case you didn't see, attached are two very interesting pieces
published in Wyoming's Casper Star-Tribune today. The pieces were
prompted by the recent release of a major report by the Progressive
Legislative Action Network. That report, written by Nathan Newman,
detailed how the conservative movement's American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC) is taking over America's states. This story,
focused only on national groups, is exactly the kind of thing that's
necessary in educating lawmakers and the public about who is really
behind the most extreme legislation being introduced in our
statehouses. You can find the report on our website at
www.progressivestates.org {http://www.progressivestates.org/}

- David Sirota
http://www.workingforchange.com
Where do ideas for legislation come from?
By
BRODIE FARQUHAR
Star-Tribune capital bureau
CHEYENNE n Wyoming’s legislators form a citizen’s legislature n ordinary people, who like yourself and your neighbors, work for a living and strive to do what’s best for the people of Wyoming, within the confines of the state and United States Constitutions.

Because Wyoming legislators put on their pants (or pantyhose) one leg at a time, they don’t necessarily come up with ideas for legislation all on their own, out of their own fertile imaginations.

Sometimes they get help, from local and national sources, some of which might surprise Wyoming citizens.
According to Wyoming legislators and legislative staff, there are several organizations out there that provide research, data and even model legislation to legislatures and legislators throughout the country.
These include:

• The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is a bipartisan

organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation's 50 states, its commonwealths and territories. NCSL provides research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers to exchange ideas.

Headquarters is in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1975 from several legislative organizations.

• The Council of State Governments (CSG) is a bipartisan organization that

serves the executive, judicial and legislative branches of state government through leadership education, research and information services.

Headquarters is in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 1933.

• The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bipartisan

membership association for conservative state lawmakers, to advance the “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.” Headquarters is in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who also helped found the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the Moral Majority and the Council for National Policy.

• The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL)

provides states with non-partisan legislation that is consistent from state to state. Headquarters is in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1892.

• The Progressive Legislative Action Network’s (PLAN) mission is “to pass

progressive legislation in all fifty states by providing coordinated research and strategic advocacy tools to forward-thinking state legislators.” Headquarters is New York, NY. Founded in 2005 with the backing of several unions, activist groups and progressive legislators n essentially an anti-ALEC.
Dan Pauli, legislative director for Wyoming’s Legislative Services Organization, said he’s in constant contact with NCSL and CSG on various studies and surveys, and has access to hundreds of bills that he and his staff can compare and contrast to Wyoming’s needs.

Occasionally, he receives model legislation from NCCUSL, and simply passes them along to relevant committees.

“It has been years since I’ve seen anything with the ALEC logo on it,” said Pauli, though he readily conceded that he couldn’t tell whether or not a bill was originated in ALEC or not.

NCSL, CSG and NCCUSL are stringently bipartisan, with no corporate or union leadership, even to the extent of alternating officials by political party (NCSL), year by year. Corporations, unions and other special interest groups or associations do have access to NCSL and CSG legislators and staff, via advertising in house publications, exhibit booths at meetings and attending conferences.

ALEC and PLAN have definite tilts to the right and the left, respectively, though claims of bipartisanship are undercut by ALEC being predominately Republican in orientation, while PLAN is predominately Democratic.

ALEC, which claims 2,400 legislator members, charges legislators $100 per biennium to join (constituting less than 2 percent of the annual budget), but then charges corporations (over 300) and associations graduated memberships at $5,000; $10,000; $25,000 and $50,000 to sit at the table with legislators and craft “model” legislation. Corporate funds underwrite travel scholarships, by which legislators and their families can attend national meetings.

ALEC’s corporate members have a keen interest in the bills that they craft.

For example, model legislation for "three strikes" and "minimum sentencing"

-- laws to keep convicted criminals in prison longer nwas partially crafted by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest private prison organization, when it sat on ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force.

PLAN’s officers are divided between New York and Helena, Montana. The organization is co-chaired by Steve Doherty, the former Minority Leader of the Montana Senate, and David Sirota, a Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

PLAN’s kickoff event last August was co-sponsored by, among others, Moveon.org, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Steelworkers of America, and progressive philanthropists Andy and Deborah Rappaport.

Too new to be called an opposite mirror of ALEC, PLAN is striving to build networks among progressive legislators and activist groups, and develop model legislation.

-30-

Information hard to come by from Wyoming’s ALEC chief By BRODIE FARQUHAR Casper Star Tribune capital bureau CHEYENNE n The odds are fairly even, that if you ask your state legislator whether he or she is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the answer will be “Yes.”

(Of course, every member of the Wyoming Legislature and Legislative Service Office is a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Council of State Governments, by virtue of being elected to or employed by the Wyoming Legislature.) The trouble is, ALEC itself and Rep. Pete Illoway, R-Cheyenne (a member of ALEC’s national board of directors) won’t tell you who is a member of ALEC.

Illoway did say that of Wyoming’s 90 state legislators, close to half are members of ALEC, but he refused to provide a list, though he said he has both Republican and Democratic members.

Interviewed earlier this week in his office, Rep. Illoway said he took great offense of a letter that had appeared that morning in the Casper Star Tribune, from Brett Glass.

Glass, an Internet access provider in Wyoming, charged that “ALEC drafts "model" bills which favor its corporate sponsors. It then encourages state legislators to introduce the bills in their home states. This year's concealed weapons bill, for example, contains language from ALEC's "Concealed Carry Outright Recognition Act," while the "duty to retreat" bill was based on ALEC's "Castle Doctrine Act" (as in, "a man's home is his castle"). Both were drafted by a committee chaired by a lobbyist from Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer of firearms and ammunition. A bill which would have increased tobacco taxes, and used the proceeds to fund substance-abuse prevention, was opposed strongly by legislators and lobbyists involved with ALEC -- none of whom were registered as lobbying for the group.”

Illoway said he’s used model legislation from ALEC once eight years ago n a bill against the Kyoto global warming treaty. “I haven’t used a model bill since then,” he said.

He said he didn’t know of any ALEC-oriented bills introduced this session, although an ALEC Report Card said five such bills had been introduced and one passed into law. (ALEC headquarters did not respond to a request about what those bills were.) Illoway said that as a conservative and as “an anti-tax guy,” he enjoys going to ALEC conferences mostly to interact with other like-minded legislators from around the country.

“It is good to see what others are up to,” he said. Such interaction gives him a chance to hear a range of ideas, Illoway said, “and I might come down in the middle.”

Illoway said the other legislative organizations do good jobs. He said NCSL is oriented toward legislative staff, because they’re the ones who actually draft bills for legislators who present ideas and ask staff to put those ideas in legislative language.

NCSL performs extensive research on hot legislative issues, said Illoway, to benefit Wyoming legislators. He said Senator Charles Scott, R-Casper, has developed considerable expertise in health issues with NCSL assistance, as has Sen. Robert Peck, R-Riverton, on revenue issues.

CSG also does a good job, said Illoway, who said he’s benefited from a regional meeting in Portland, Oregon.

”All these groups do good work,” said Illoway.

Rep. Dan Zwonitzer, R-Cheyenne, agreed with that assessment, saying he found value in all the main groups, primarily as a way to exchange ideas with other legislators around the country or in the West.

Zwonitzer said he viewed ALEC as a conservative alternative to NCSL, but believes ALEC model legislation is more common in other states than Wyoming.

He said ALEC tends to focus more on repealing legislation than other organizations. Last session, the only ALEC bill he knew of in the Wyoming Legislature was the Common Sense Consumption Act, designed to prevent lawsuits from people who ate too much fast food and became obese.

Rep. Del McComie, R-Lander, said he’s never joined ALEC, because it doesn’t seem right to accept big corporation money, in order to attend ALEC conferences. McComie said legislators have all sorts of sources for legislative ideas n from neighbors to lobbyists to national organizations.

-30-

More information on the Internet

You can review the bills passed this session by the Wyoming Legislature at {M7http://legisweb.state.wy.us/ See ALEC at {M7www.alec.org See NCSL at {M7www.ncsl.org See CSG at {M7www.csg.org See NCCUSL at {M7www.nccusl.org See PLAN at {M7www.progressivestates.org
http://www.progressivestates.org/
<<>>

Saundra Hummer

March 13th, 2006, 12:05 PM

<<<<O>>>>
I prefer a President who only screws interns
Typical political arrogance
March 10, 2006 10:40 AM / The Rant .
By
DOUG THOMPSON

Saw this bumper sticker while driving to Richmond Thursday:

I prefer a President who only screws interns

Yep. George W. Bush has managed to make us miss Bill Clinton.
New polls show Dubya's job approval and personal ratings in the dumpster. His own party revolted against him in the "lets give our ports to the Arabs" deal and we're heading into another hurricane season while still trying to clean up his mess from the last one.

As a reporter is said to have asked another President's wife: "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

We already know the Bush administration is the gang that can't shoot straight. Just ask Texas attorney Harry Whittington. He's still recovering from wounds at the hands of a wayward shotgun blast from Dick Cheney.

But you have to wonder just how Bush's Teflon presidency from the first term turned into such a mismanaged public relations disaster the second time around.

Three words: Typical political arrogance.

Typical political arrogance is a bipartisan Washington disease. It infects those in power, Republican or Democrat, with the belief they are above the law and do not have to answer to the forces of truth, justice or the American way.

In reality, Bill Clinton screwed a lot more than just an intern but the downhill slide of America into a fascist state causes many to overlook that fact and long for the good old days when we worried more about who was noshing on the First Member than thinking about 2500 dead American military men and women in a useless war.

Clinton, like Bush, is a mean, venal little man who thought nothing of using the power of the White House to ride roughshod over enemies and destroy if they got in the way. Unlike Bush, Clinton is a charming rogue, a Peck's bad boy who causes us to shake our heads in disbelief but still admire his ability to get away with things.

You could dump Bush's charm into a thimble and still have room left for a shot of bourbon. He's a shallow, humorless man who lacks the charm of a Bill Clinton or the humor of a Ronald Reagan. Both Reagan and Clinton overcame scandals to leave office as popular Presidents. Bush may well leave office as one of the most distrusted and despised Presidents in modern times.

Yet no President in modern times is, or was, an honorable man. Clinton's presidency will be remembered more for scandal than anything else and the Monica Lewinsky scandal wasn't the only case of questionable conduct in office. His associated attorney general, Webster Hubbell, went to jail for tax evasion and defrauding the government. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy took bribes and resigned in disgrace. Clinton lost his license to practice law for lying to a federal grand jury. And he lied about American involvement in Somalia, a "peacekeeping" operation that cost too many American lives.

Reagan's legacy is marred by Iran-Contra and a conservative agenda that still haunts the country today. Courts convicted a dozen members of his administration for misconduct or malfeasance in office. Jimmy Carter's credibility took a hit when Bert Lance, his director of the Office of Management and Budget, was indicted for financial misconduct and his brother signed on as a paid consultant to Libya. He recently has been linked to the UN oil-for-food scandal.

Yet Republicans still talk about the good old days when Reagan was President and Democrats say Clinton only lied about sex.

Sadly, both sides of the political spectrum suffer from selective myopia that allows them overlook failings of their own party while lambasting the same conduct by their opponents.

Presidents and Congressmen aren't the only ones who suffer from Typical political arrogance So do the party faithful, Republican and Democrats, who follow blindly and avoid the truth about failure.

© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue

Doug Thompson also publishes a personal blog at Blue Ridge Muse.
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/blog/2006/03/typical_political_arrogance.html
.

Saundra Hummer

March 13th, 2006, 02:02 PM

<<<>>>
NICE TO KNOW

AN ALL-TIME FAVORITE

GIVING BACK - A GREAT THING

Ronnie Lott, best known as a Hall of Fame football player, also has been a leader in community service. His 14-year NFL career culminated in his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 1989, he founded All Stars Helping Kids, a non-profit organization that helps disadvantaged youth in the Bay Area, and has created an All Stars Technology Room and children’s garden at UCSF Children’s Hospital. In 2001, he founded Olympius Capital, a minority-controlled firm committed to enhancing diversity in the financial services industry. In 2002, Lott was selected to join The Guardsmen, a service organization consisting of business and professional members devoted to advancing at-risk Bay Area youth by funding indoor and outdoor educational programs. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California.
<>

Saundra Hummer

March 13th, 2006, 02:14 PM

*

The Great Bail Out
Public Opinion Watch: Swing and independent voters are abandoning the GOP, along with a good chunk of the party's base.
Ruy Teixeira
March 09 , 2006 Bush’s approval rating is now consistently back in the ‘30s and the Democrats have been running strong double-digit leads in the generic Congressional ballot. These trends are being driven by what we might call “the great bail-out”, as not only are swing and independent voters moving sharply away from the GOP, but also a serious chunk of core GOP support. The latter development is truly frightening to Republican operatives and strategists who are only too aware of how dependent their election victories in the last several political cycles have been on rock-solid core support. Take that away and it’s a long way to the bottom.
Here are some data that illustrate the great bail-out.
1. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Bush’s approval rating is an anemic 36 percent, with just 75 percent support among Republicans. And in the new LA Times poll, his approval rating is 38 percent, with 77 percent approval among Republicans. The sub-80 approval rating among Republicans could be here to stay.

2. These two polls also illustrate how far south Bush’s strong suit–his handling of the war on terror–has gone. In the Quinnipiac poll, his approval rating on “handling terrorism” was 42 percent, with 52 percent disapproval; in the LA Times poll, his rating on “handling the war on terrorism” was 44 percent with 54 percent disapproval. Amazing. Two ratings on his absolute best issue that are both net negative by 10 points. Truly we are now living a new political world.

3. In the latest Gallup poll, the Democrats are running a 14 point lead (53-39) among registered voters on the generic Congressional ballot question. The Gallup report on the poll summarizes the significance of this gaudy lead:

Gallup's recent trends on this "generic ballot" question -- from October 2005 through early February 2006 -- found a smaller six- to seven-point lead for the Democrats. However, the current 14-point Democratic lead is similar to a 12-point Democratic lead recorded last August. It is also among the highest seen since the Republicans came into power more than a decade ago.

This is not the first election since the Republican Party won majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994 that the Democrats have held a double-digit lead on this important indicator of electoral strength, but it is fairly rare. Throughout much of 1996 and in a couple of polls in 1998, the Democrats enjoyed a 10- to 13-point lead. However, the norm has been for the Republicans to trail the Democrats by only about five points among all registered voters.....

One reason why Democratic candidates may be doing so well in the current poll is that they enjoy a 22-point lead over Republican candidates among independent voters: 51% to 29%. Secondly, Republican voters are not as supportive of their own party's candidate as Democrats are of theirs. More than 9 in 10 Democrats (93%) say they favor the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district; 88% of Republicans are backing the Republican candidate.

4. Just how thoroughly has the public lost faith in Bush’s economic stewardship? In the LA Times poll, just 19 percent say the country’s economy is better off because of Bush’s economic policies than it was five years ago when he became president. That compares to 52 percent who believe his policies have made the economy worse and 26 percent who believe his policies haven’t had much effect. Even among Republicans, only 33 percent can bring themselves to say his economic policies have actually improved the economy.

5. And then there’s the incompetence thing. As Alan Abramowitz pointed out in a Sunday Washington Post article on Bush’s tanking approval ratings:

The problem for President Bush is a growing perception that he simply isn't competent....

The predecessor whom Bush has begun to resemble isn't, as many liberal Democrats seem to believe, Richard Nixon. It's Jimmy Carter. Carter's political demise began when the American people, including many Democrats, started to perceive him as in over his head in the Oval Office. That's what may be happening now to Bush.

Competence is not a partisan issue.....[T]he way the port takeover was handled reinforced a growing impression among the public that nobody is really in charge in the Bush White House. How could the president not even have been consulted on an issue directly involving national security, Bush's strong suit in the minds of most Americans and especially most Republicans?

How indeed? And to underscore Abramowitz’ analysis, the Gallup poll cited above reports that only 40 percent now agree that Bush “can manage the government effectively, compared to 59 percent who disagree. Just the middle of last year, Bush was actually net positive on this measure, 53-45.

6. Finally, a very interesting new Democracy Corps analysis, “Cracks in the Two Americas: Republican Loyalists and Swing Blocs Move Toward the Democrats”, details the copious bleeding in the Bush coalition:

The most important shifts are taking place among the world of Republican loyalists, which will have big strategic consequences.1 It is reflected in the most recent Democracy Corps poll where defection of 2004 Bush voters to the Democrats is twice the level of defection of Kerry voters to the Republicans. Only 31 percent of voters in blue counties (those carried by Kerry) are voting Republican for Congress, but 41 percent of red county voters are supporting the Democratic candidate. The combined data set shows major shifts in the Deep South and rural areas (even before the most recent controversies), blue-collar white men, and the best educated married men with high incomes....

The other big shifts are taking place across the contested groups that form the swing blocs in the electorate. That is bringing big Democratic gains among older (over 50) non-college voters, the vulnerable women, practicing Catholics and the best-educated men. It is as if the entire center of the electorate shifted. This is why independents are breaking so heavily for the Democrats in each of our polls.

The great bail-out continues. And unless it moves back the other way, the electoral consequences for the GOP could be severe.

A slightly longer version of this article, with a section on public opinion concerning Iraq, appeared first at The Century Foundation's web site.

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. .http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/03/the_great_bail_out.html

Saundra Hummer

March 13th, 2006, 02:54 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Letters: The Case of the Phony General: FRONTLINE Responds
A cautionary tale for investigative journalists
Heroes in Error

March/April 2006 issue
Mother Jones

In "Heroes in Error" reporter Jack Fairweather outlines how both FRONTLINE and the New York Times were duped by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Specifically, Fairweather says one of two defectors provided by the INC was an imposter. The defector claimed to have witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad prior to 9/11.

Your readers should know that checking inside Saddam's Iraq at the time of the broadcast on the bona fides of Iraqis who had fled the country was virtually impossible. FRONTLINE did its best to vet the interviews with American officials and hired our own translators. In the broadcast we noted that these two defectors had come to us through the INC, a group whose bias we identified. We quoted an American official who cast doubt on the defectors’ claims: "It is unlikely the training on the 707 is linked to the hijackings of September 11." We also interviewed the Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N., who told us: "I know the area, this Salman Pak. . . . It is not possible to do such a program there, because there's no place for planes, for airplanes there."

Beyond these caveats, the program included such figures as Brent Scowcroft and Michael Sheehan who were cautious about much of the evidence against Saddam, specifically claims of a link between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackers. More importantly—and omitted from Fairweather’s article—is a 2003 FRONTLINE report in which we caught up with the INC leader Ahmed Chalabi and questioned him extensively on the false information that he and his organization had provided to FRONTLINE and others. Chalabi's answer then—"We're in Baghdad now"—was much the same as he gave to Fairweather two years later when he told him that the misinformation didn't matter.

Clearly, what was said in print and over the airwaves before the war does matter. The Salman Pak story is a cautionary tale for all of us who are committed to tough investigative reporting. But, as Fairweather notes, this was “only a small segment” of the FRONTLINE story that aired in November 2001. “Gunning for Saddam” was one of the first broadcast reports to give the American people an early look at the forces pushing for war against Iraq. Airing less than two months after 9/11, while attention was focused on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan, this FRONTLINE correctly anticipated what was coming next. And, for this, perhaps we deserve some credit.

Louis Wiley, Jr.
Executive Editor
FRONTLINE
http://www.motherjones.com/letters/2006/03/iraqi_general.html ~

Saundra Hummer

March 14th, 2006, 01:15 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The sickness called Potomac Fever
By
DOUG THOMPSON
Mar 13, 2006, 07:09

Does the heady atmosphere of Congress turn honest men and women into a criminal class? Or is elected office simply a magnet for those who lie, cheat and steal for a living?

Political scientists and Constitutional scholars say it could be a bit of both
"Politics attracts the glib, the fast talker and the con artist," says George Harleigh, a retired political science professor who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. "It's a natural place for those who think fast on their feet."

Congress has always had its share of rogues and scoundrels:

Adam Clayton Powell, the fast-talking Harlem Congressman who was re-elected even after Congress expelled him in 1967. Powell had survived charges of income-tax evasion (with a hung jury) even before his first election to Congress.
Wes Cooley, the Oregon Congressman who lied about serving in the Korean War, quit Congress under a cloud in 1996, and was later convicted of falsifying VA loan applications.
California Congressman Walter Tucker, who quit Congress in 1996 just before his conviction for accepting $30,000 in bribes and sentenced to 27 months in the federal pen.
Ohio Congressman Jim Traficant, the flamboyant former sheriff expelled from Congress and sent to jail for taking bribes, money laundering and racketeering. That didn't stop him for running for re-election from prison and he still received 15 percent of the vote.
And the most recent, California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, sentenced to eight years in prison for taking bribes and evading taxes in what prosecutors say was one of the most flagrant cases of abuse of office in Congressional history.
Congressmen have gone to jail for child molestation, bribery, fraud, misuse of public funds and various crimes and misdemeanors. Some have resigned in disgrace: Wayne Hayes because he put his mistress on his payroll as a secretary (she couldn't type) or Wilbur Mills because he messed around with a stripper.

Yet Gary Studds of Massachusetts seduced a young male House page, defied the House when it censured him and was re-elected several times. Dan Crane of Illinois had sex with a female page, cried and begged forgiveness on the floor of the House and lost his next election.

Rep. Barney Frank, also of Massachusetts, is the most openly-gay member of Congress and shared his Washington townhouse with a male prostitute who ran a homosexual whorehouse out of the residence. But that didn't stop him from winning re-election easily or serving as the primary Democratic defender of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

"Congressional corruption has no party, no ideology and no gender," says Constitutional Scholar Alan Baker. "It's bipartisan and soaked in history and tradition. It also often defies logic."

Sociologist Sandra Reeves believes public perception of widespread corruption among elected officials is one of the reasons for the widespread ambivalence over Bill Clinton's sex and money scandals or the many abuses of the Bush administration.

"If the public felt Congress was an honest institution, there might have been more outrage over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal or the current questions surrounding the Bush administration," Reeves says. "But many people feel that the people investigating or questioning the President are just as dirty."

Harleigh agrees.

"Right when the Republicans were trying to prove malfeasance on the part of the Clinton administration in accepting campaign contributions from foreign sources, they had one of their own (Congressman Jay Kim of California) convicted of doing the same thing," Harleigh says. "But instead of sending him packing, they embrace him and talk about what a great guy he is and how important he is to Congress and the party. What kind of message does that send?"

Congress is nearly always slow to act against its own. It took the Senate three years to investigate and finally get rid of serial sexual harasser Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon. Many of Packwood's Republican colleagues defended him right up until the end. The House Ethics Committee has been reluctant to do anything about the ethics problems surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

"The leadership of both Houses of Congress needs a serious wake up call," says Harleigh. "You can't preach morality and family values while you wink and look the other way when one your own breaks the law."

Andrea Wamstead knows far too well how Congress works. She worked on the Hill for nearly 20 years before leaving to get married.

"It's a game to a lot of members," she says. "Under the House rules, a Congressman doesn't have an expense account, per se. But he or she can be reimbursed for constituent expenses, so he simply tabs his regular meals as 'meals with constituents' and gets his office budget to pay for them. The game is all about how to get around the rules."

House rules also prohibit the paying of bonuses to employees, but Members get around this by raising staff member's salaries by 100 percent or more for one or two months.

"We're talking about a culture of 'I'm better than everyone else' and 'I don't have to answer to anyone,'" says Baker. "It is pervasive and it has been part of the Congressional culture for a long time. You may hear a lot of talk about accountability and reform, but it simply is not happening."

Even when a new member of Congress arrives in Washington, full of idealism about doing a good job, he or she is soon sucked into the system.

"When members get together in the Republican and Democratic cloakrooms, they don't talk about legislation or issues," says former GOP House staff member Jonathan Luckstill. "They brag about how much money they have raised for their campaign or how they conned a trade association into an speech invitation to a convention in Hawaii and turned it into a weeklong vacation. I've had more than one boss come back to me and want to know why I wasn't getting him a speech invitation to Hawaii."

Luckstill says the indoctrination also teaches new members that a crime is only a crime when the other party commits it.

"If a Democrat is caught breaking the law, that's justice," he says. "But when a Republican is charged, it's politics."

Capitol Hill Blue asked political scientists, Constitutional professors and sociologists is they thought the system could be changed. All agreed it would take drastic steps.

"I'd start by cutting Congressional salaries in half and limiting House and Senate sessions to 60 days a year," says Harleigh. "Congressional service should be just that - service, not a career."

Baker says candidates for Congress should have to be screened like any prospective employee.

"They should have to undergo extensive background checks as a requirement for candidacy, both criminal and financial. Financial disclosure requirements should be strengthened," he adds. "Voters shouldn't be asked to hire somebody on a promise."
Baker would also like to see an independent Congressional ethics committee that has the power to investigate members without control by either party in Congress or the White House.

"Have the committee answer directly to the Supreme Court," he says.

Baker admits his ideas would drive other Constitutional experts up the wall because they violate the checks and balances system that is supposed to exists between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, but adds that the Supreme Court alreay exercises control over Congress through its ability to declare laws unconstitutional.

"It would require some changes in constitutional definition, but that might be what is needed to bring the system under control," he adds.

Reeves advocates term limits for both members of Congress and their staffs.
"Some of the staff members on the Hill have been there longer than any member of Congress," she says.

Most members of Congress claim term limits isn't the answer. The voters, they say, impose term limits. But they also know that nine out of all ten incumbents will be re-elected in any given election.

Term limits was part of the "Contract with America" that Newt Gingrich and the Republican used to help win control of Congress in the 1994 elections.

However, the GOP soon forgot about term limits when they took control and several members who vowed to serve only three terms in 1994 are running for fourth terms in 2000.

"There's a good reason they call it Potomac Fever," says Baker. "It's contagious and leads to all kinds of problems."
~ ~ ~
Comment on this column or discuss it with Thompson on Blue Bloghttp://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8248.php ~