The SanityPrompt

Wordle of the SanityPrompt

2010-12-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

Why the Left is So Mad - Pt II

2010-12-13T22:31:00.000-07:00

This shows shockingly bad judgment on Peter Orzag's part and goes to the heart of the Left's complaint with this Administration. Despite a campaign based on promises of change and addressing what Washington had become, in its bailout of banks, its tolerance of corporate theft by CEOs (AKA - executive compensation and bonuses), its stimulus, it's failure to push hard for a public option, its indifference to the most progressive and necessary of financial reforms, it has worried progressives that today's Democratic leaders and wonks are so embedded in the oligarchic power structure of the country that they cannot change it.

Does Peter Orszag Have No Shame? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:

That they are perhaps its embodiment.

Why The Left Is So Mad

2010-12-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of head shaking going on at the White House and in pundit circles right now about those 'crazy progressives' who want to scuttle the Obama-McConnell tax deal. If you want to understand why they're so pissed off though, it would behoove interested parties, such as, say, a President who may be seeking re-election in 2 years, to try and uncover the source of the anger instead of assuming they fully understand it.

In the bunker mentality that is any Democratic White House, the enemies appear to lie on all sides so it's easy to scoff that those crazy liberals just don't get it. They want the ideal, or so Obama proclaims, and then he proudly proclaims that he is a pragmatist and wants to get things done. And the political center applauds him. The Right is still unimpressed and the Left fumes.

So what gives? Are the liberals simply impassioned radicals who would sacrifice progress for principle? Can they not see the good that will come from an extension of unemployment benefits? Can they not appreciate that the deal provides about $120 billion in benefits to those with incomes over $250,000 and about $400 billion in benefits (that had been opposed by Republicans) to those who live paycheck to paycheck?

As the dust settles I am sure progressives will come to see the merits of this deal. Hopefully they will also come to see the political realities that Obama faced. It's true Obama could have stared down the GOP and tried to argue in January, when taxes went up, that the GOP was responsible because they preferred tax increases for everyone over tax increases on the rich. But the fact is that January would have seen a GOP Congress' first order of business being an across the board extension of all tax cuts, no pay roll tax cut for working people, and no unemployment benefits extension. Then, the Democrats in the Senate or the White House would have had to veto a GOP extension of Bush tax cuts for all. Democrats would have instantly lost the ability to accuse the GOP of increasing rates.

What the White House fails to realize though is that the deal isn't what drives progressives and liberals crazy. It's the lack of fight. It's the appearance of a preference for deal making over any kind of stand on principles (or self respect for that matter). And that may describe Obama perfectly.

But what they cannot square at all is why Obama appears to save his sharpest rhetoric, most pointed barbs and most strident anger for them. Take the example being shown now around this very tax deal.

WH warns tax defeat could trigger new recession - Yahoo! News

Who comes in for the sharpest criticism? Those 'idealists.' Who is threatening recession? Those 'idealists.' Who is endangering the welfare of the country? Those idealists.

Those idealists stand around looking at each other bewildered. They think - 'You're being called a socialist Muslim terrorist by the other side and they are obstructing good economic policy (tax cuts for the middle class, health care reform), social policy (DADT), and security policy (START) -- but WE are the one's threatening the welfare of the country?"

I'm sure the White House doesn't remember this incidenty but I can tell you most progressives do. This summer, just weeks after folding like a cheap suit on the public option, Medicare drug negotiations, and all other manner of good, progressive, fiscally sound health policy without so much as a whimper, let alone a cry of anger, the White House threatened to veto Financial Reform. What got their anger up? Was it some poison pill from the Right? No, it was a modest proposal to audit the Fed for its role in the TARP bailout of banks.

Noam Schreiber ascribes the most recent deal to the GOP victories in November, arguing that this finally allows Obama to be the President he always wanted to be. Here's another reason that Progressives tear their hair out. Obama would rather govern with a GOP House and only 53 Democrats in the Senate than with a solidly Democratic House and almost 60 votes in the Senate?

To believe Obama prefers to govern under the first scenario, one would have to assume Obama is much much more conservative than the middle of Congress was in the just past Congress. Or one would have to assume that Obama prefers the image of the dealmaker to actually getting progressive victories like Health Care Reform and Banking Reform and improving the lot of the working and middle class. Neither possibility is very reassuring to progressives.

What drives progressives and liberals crazy is not that Obama is a pragmatic deal maker. It's that he doesn't appear to share their values at all.

The White House doesn't see that it's lost credibility with the Left because it HAS threatened stands on principle -- but those stands have typically been anti progressive or targeted against progressives.

When it's come to taking a stand on gay rights, on progressive policies like the Public Option, on rational security policies like opposing torture, illegal incarceration or ending the disgrace that is Guantanamo, or fighting for truly progressive financial reforms Obama has raised a limp hand and whispered "I'm with you." When it's come time to standing with the policy elites and the centrists of the Treasury, his economic council, or the New York Times editorial page though, Obama has been much more strident and forceful.

It's not that Obama is a progressive pragmatist that upsets. It's that Obama hasn't convinced anyone on the Left that he truly cares about anything those on the Left have cared so much about. They get that he's pragmatic. What they worry is that he's really not progressive at all. And that should be of genuine concern to this White House. Progressives will never vote Republican. But 40 million voters from 2008 stayed home in 2010. 3 million 'idealists' voted for Nader in 2000. Disillusioned Leftists make good fodder for ribbing at White House cocktail parties, but laughing at or scoffing at your base's principles makes for very bad politics.

Somehow Obama is going to have to convince them that there are just some things he won't compromise on. Clinton was able to do this although he never quite over came the degree to which he alienated the Left with his forceful positions on NAFTA over Global Warming, and Deficit deals over Health Care or Welfare Reform. He's another example of someone who appeared to fight hardest for those things the Left cared the least about or opposed most strongly. As Clinton's example showed, economic recoveries have a remarkable way of making political problems like disaffected bases go away. But without a recovery, Obama is going to need that base. Karl Rove understood this in 2002 and 2004. Will this White House?

DANA MILBANK - Andrew Romanoff's cynical fratricide

2010-06-14T22:46:00.000-06:00

The only thing I don't like about this article are the following:

I've also admired Romanoff's success in Colorado politics, where he was by all accounts a model legislator, a centrist Democrat who built consensus with Republicans on thorny issues such as immigration. But now he has hired Howard Dean's former strategist, Joe Trippi, and he's practicing the Dean style of Democratic fratricide, even as he acknowledges being an "imperfect messenger" for an anti-establishment uprising.

In what way is Democratic fratricide a Dean-style thing? If I recall 2000 correctly, it was a bunch of Democrats at the DLC, namely Al From and his buddy Paul Begala, who went out of their way to slip the knives into Dean's surge in Iowa. And since when is a model legislator "a centrist Democrat who builds consensus with Republicans?" Especially when the issue on which he build consensus is essentially how we can scapegoat immigrants a bit more for the economic problems we face.

George Bush and History | Mother Jones

2010-05-19T22:44:00.000-06:00

"There's an odd myth in Republican circles that presidents should act like CEOs, and the way CEOs act is to hire good people and then get out of their way. But nobody who's been a CEO actually believes that. Different managers have different appetites for hands-on management, but no good CEO thinks that she can just hand out some marching orders and then head off to the links for a quick nine holes. Execution matters. But George bought into the myth as thoroughly as any president in history, and he (and we) paid the price for that."

Read more at George Bush and History | Mother Jones

U.S. Senate: Legislation & Records Home > Votes > Roll Call Vote

2010-05-18T21:41:00.000-06:00

Dorgan's amendment to ban naked credit default swaps gets tabled by too many Dems and a White House that appears to live on planet Brain-Dead in the galaxy of Insanity when it comes to financial reform. This means Banks get to play, literally gamble, with taxpayer backed funds. Not sure how that makes economic sense...so is it only about the campaign contributions that explain this?

U.S. Senate: Legislation & Records Home > Votes > Roll Call Vote:

Akaka (D-HI)
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Bond (R-MO)
Brown (R-MA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Burr (R-NC)
Carper (D-DE)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Dodd (D-CT)
Enzi (R-WY)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagan (D-NC)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Inouye (D-HI)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
LeMieux (R-FL)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-NE)
Reed (D-RI)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Snowe (R-ME)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Warner (D-VA)
Wicker (R-MS)

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

The Nature of the Deficit

2010-05-11T22:26:00.001-06:00

There have been numerous stories about the first meeting of the Debt Commission last week. My of my state's Democratic Congressman recently celebrated that taxes were at their lowest since 1950. He seems to think that if we just cut defense spending by 15% and freeze discretionary spending, we'll be good to go. I'd like him to look at the attached charts.

What you'll see is a number of things that you won't hear among the conventional elites in DC as they blather about the deficit and the need to cut entitlements.

Look at Figure above first - You'll see that we don't have a spending crisis as much as we have a general revenue crisis. It's great that people are realizing that the budget crisis is most easily managed by tackling the spending in Social Security and Medicare - but note that they're getting the blame for the deficit, which isn't fair. In fact, the so- called Social Security Crisis that pre-occupied so much of DC's time in the Bush II era has always really been a general revenues crisis.

The next image, SS and Medicare spending as a percent of GDP, shows that Social Security (the blue line) isn't really slated to rise much in terms of spending as a percent of GDP. What growth you see is probably a function of demographics and an aging population. But it's hardly indicative of a problem in runaway entitlements' spending.

What you do see in this second attachment is that runaway Medicare spending (the red line) is a problem we have to get a hold of. We've only just touched the surface of the kinds of things we'll need to do to control Medicare spending in the health care reform bill. Nothing in the health care debate leads me to think this society and polity are prepared to discuss end of life issues and shaping benefits coverage to match tests of reasonableness for treatments and procedures. Continually cutting payments to doctors and hospitals for certain procedures will only take us so far. I'm skeptical that the deficit debate (and the Debt Commission) will ever go there, despite their political insularity.

But most importantly, the top most graphic shows that General Revenues as a percent of GDP have fallen off the cliff. This is where our real budget problems lie. Yes, in the last 10 years spending as a % of GDP has risen substantially above historical levels - we have GWB to thank for that. And much of the last two years growth is directly related to the bailouts and stimulus so they are temporary (see the purple line below).

However our structural problems lie fundamentally on the revenue side. We've cut taxes repeatedly for the middle class, so that only the highest earners or those without homes and children pay substantial amounts of tax on their income. The tax base itself is so dependent on the wealthy that it's extremely prone to economic fluctuations. Much of the deficit would disappear if growth would simply return. Sadly, what is needed is a broad tax base that can also be fair and progressive. But the Debt Commission, the President, the Congress and the public seem unwilling to acknowledge or discuss this fact. Maybe in 10 years Bruce Bartlett thinks. I think he's optimistic.

There have been three periods of significant declines in general revenues - two times under Bush II and once early in the Reagan years. There was also a modest decrease in general revenues under Bush I. But otherwise, general fund revenues rose under most of Reagan's and Clinton's terms - most likely because economic growth was so robust.

However we don't have a Social Security crisis. We don't really have an entitlements crisis. We don't even have a spending crisis once we get past the stimulus spending. If we had preserved the Clinton era surpluses we'd have some savings to tap for the time (in the next 5-10 years) when entitlement outlays exceed entitlement revenues -- which is what we were supposed to do with the 1986 fix to Social Security - save those funds for the rainy day when our General funds needed to subsidize elderly entitlements. Yet the heart of the US fiscal crisis - like all historical fiscal crises dating back to the English Revolution that cost King Charles his head - is at heart a revenue crisis. We simply refuse to raise the general funds to pay for our general funded program appetites.

Why the Democrats Can't Govern

2009-03-31T09:03:00.000-06:00

Sigh...

What was is that Will Rogers said? I am not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.

"George W. Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, with only 50 Republicans in the Senate. After his disputed election, pundits insisted Bush would have to scale back his proposed massive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items. Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline.

"Obama has come into office having won the popular vote by seven percentage points, along with a 79-seat edge in the House, a 17-seat edge in the Senate, and massive public demand for change. But it's already clear he is receiving less, not more, deference from his own party. Democrats have treated Obama with studied diffidence, both in their support for the substance of his agenda and (more importantly) their willingness to support it procedurally."

Cry me a freakin' river

2009-03-01T09:58:00.003-07:00

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (March 01, 2009) - The View From Your Recession

A reader writes into Andrew Sullivan:

I work for a small, 5-year old non-profit arts organization in Illinois. A couple of our usual big donors have indicated we should be prepared for smaller donations this year, and possibly none in the next couple of years. The are mentioning Obama's tax plans and their need to save money now in anticipation of that. A lot of my colleagues in the not-for-profit world are really scared right now, and we are not happy with Obama. We hear the rhetoric that the government is going to have a reserve to give to non-profits that will make up for some of the lost donations, but the fact is, we have never received federal aid, and likely never would (assuming the organization could even make it that far). Organizations are going to be killed under Obama's plan. I may have voted myself out of a job, and voted a whole community of kids out of art-making opportunities. Frankly, this sucks.

Too bad. I'm sorry you may lose your job. But I'm also sorry millions have already lost their jobs...and their health insurance. If Obama's tax hike on wealthy families causes your non-profit some financial discomfort, it will be because our nation is finally righting an embarrassing wrong from over the last 100 years. While all of our developed competitors and allies offer health insurance to all their citizens, we do not. Obama's tax increase will finally assure health care to all Americans. If a few kids have fewer arts opportunities as a result, you want me to what? Cry for you? DON'T WAIT AROUND TOO LONG.

From the Brothel to the Broadsheet

2009-02-18T21:06:00.001-07:00

Eliot Spitzer joins the people at Slate to opine on the issue of CEO pay. And talks some sense. The issue has never been the pay. It's been the collapse of corporate governance and the failure of institutional investors and boards to do their jobs.

G

How Far Are We from the Swedish Bank Bailout Model: And What does the Market Know?

2009-02-14T11:06:00.003-07:00

Andrew Sullivan, whom I'm liking more and more each day, has some interesting speculation about the Obama Bank Bailout 3.0 which casts the whole thing in a whole new light for me.

There are two lines of speculation about the direction the Obama team will go. One, the most likely, is the 'bad bank' model in which the government buys up the toxic assets and helps get the banks off their feet; the other is nationalization, in which the government applies a "stress test" on the largest most troubled banks, and for those that fail, declares them essentially insolvent, wiping out the shareholders and taking them over directly (aka the Swedish model).

Some feel the secret plan is to pursue the Swedish model covertly, since the country is not ideologically ready for it and the GOP will make tons of political hay over it. But most feel that Geithner won the debate with more politically populist elements in the Administration such as Emanuel and Axelrod ie., the Bad Bank model won. Hence, the Administration is likely to have to seek trillions more from Congress to buy up those assets and face the politically troubling question of what price to pay. When asked directly, Obama has ruled out nationalization, although not in a way that inspires confidence that he understands what nationalization would entail. More and more economists are coming forward with the stated realization that Nationalization is probably the way we have to go.

Observers of Geithner's weak performance this week commented that markets didn't like the vagueness and ambiguity of the plan, so they went down sharply on the day he spoke. But what if we look at this another way? What if the market's direction provides an indication by buyers and sellers of the way in which the Administration is likely to go. If indeed bank shareholders are worried that they are going to have a bad year, and if indeed there are a number of large banks that are essentially insolvent, then bank stocks' downward direction is not a statement that the Administration is being vague, but an expression of the likelihood that the Administration will eventually need to adopt the Nationalization strategy and wipe their value out. If I were an owner of bank stocks, I'd be really, really nervous right now.

It's in the Administration's strategic interest to keep the question open for as long as they can, so they can hedge their policy bets. But it's in the bank shareholder's interests for Obama to commit to the 'bad bank' model as quickly as possible. Here's hoping he chooses continued ambiguity and options over assuaging the shareholders.

It's the Priorities Stupid

2009-02-05T22:26:00.001-07:00

Between 2003 and today, the United States spent almost $600 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan without anyone in Congress batting an eyelash. Most of that money went towards Iraq of course and to this day, no one can explain in an either coherent or compelling fashion what was at stake in that country and what threat it posed to the United States. But today, some in Congress such as John McCain or Susan Collins or even the Democrat's Ben Nelson can't swallow the size of the stimulus package when our entire economy is in dire trouble? The recently defeated McCain alternative to the stimulus came in well under $500 billion, far less than any economist who thinks government should work to end the recession has said is necessary.

The United States just spent a decade handing out tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, with limited job creation and a paltry economic growth rate and now, essentially nothing to show for it. As we all painfully know, the Bush years have ended in the worst economic contraction in 60 years. And now the GOP's main objections to the stimulus are that there is not enough being spent on tax cuts and that the tax cuts need to go to,...wait for the other shoe to drop,...wealthier taxpayers. The GOP house members and Senators object that too much of the tax breaks in the bill are going to working class and lower income families.

It might seem shocking that after so many years of being told that we should wait for the rich to shower down their wealth upon the rest of us, after we watched Congress and the White House vote trillions in economic benefits for corporate America and the wealthiest taxpayers, that we are asked to believe yet again in this Golden Calf. But the capacity for shock seems to have long left the building.

The sad truth is, that despite all protestations to the contrary, the GOP isn't interested in fixing the stimulus package but in rendering it less effective. As their chief advisor, Rush Limbaugh has said, they don't want Obama to succeed. They don't want the Democrats to succeed. They have a vested interest in their failure. In fact, many on the Right feel that the recession should be allowed to run it's course so that Americans develop a proper appreciation for the fickleness of the market's awesome power. If you don't believe me, ask the several hundred Right-wing economists the CATO Institute got to sign an ad in the New York Times.

When James Carville felt that the Clinton campaign staff was failing to pay proper attention to the message that would draw the proper contrast with their opposition, he famously wrote on a board in the campaign office, "It's the economy stupid." Well someone ought to go into the bullpen, or wherever it is Democratic strategists meet these days to ponder how to counter the avalanche of duplicitous concern demonstrated by their bipartisan colleagues from across the aisle, and write upon the wall "It's the priorities, stupid."

A quick glance at the proposed cuts by the 'moderate cabal' reveals that those who confess opposition to the structure of the stimulus package aren't driven by ideology or a coherent philosophy. They certainly aren't driven by any kind of rational economic thought. State and local governments, school districts and public universities are facing drastic budget cuts that could force layoffs and will certainly be recessionary in their impact. Medicaid rolls are swelling just when states have no money to pay the tab for thousands of newly impoverished and needy enrollees. Whether taken as a layoff, a furlough or a salary reduction, a 10% reduction in state personnel costs is 10% of state payroll taken out of the economy. But the moderate cabal has proposed axing state stabilization money, dollars intended to help governments deal with the fiscal impacts of the recession, by $25 billion, and a further $15 billion in direct assistance for states.

They've proposed cutting $6 billion from education programs. At one point they were considering cutting $14 billion from Pell Grants, even though seeking education and retraining is an economically sound way for a person to deal with a layoff or a drop in employment opportunities. You might be tempted to think that transportation spending would be at the heart of any stimulus package supported by a member of Congress, regardless of Party affiliation. But the 'Moderate Cabal' has proposed cutting Transportation grants. They've taken an axe to 5.5 billion in energy efficiency programs.

After all this, the group could still only come up with $77 billion in cuts. It's become popular to decry the waste in the stimulus package and lament its composition. Liberals bemoan the pork and the pet projects that may not be stimulative. But a look at the dubious spending propositions the Moderate Cabal has left in the bill and been unwilling to cut underscores that they've been driven by expediency rather than any kind of judicious or economically informed standard.

Could the bill be improved? Certainly. Would it be preferable if we didn't have to watch the Congressional sausage fest up-close. Absolutely. But the fact is that it is impossible for our democratic institutions to tackle a challenge of this sort without allowing local politics and pet projects to creep in. It is economically impossible to almost spontaneously inject nearly $1 trillion in new government spending into the economy within 18 months in a way that doesn't occasionally raise eyebrows or cause consternation. Think of the billions that we know were wasted in Iraq. But Americans, and certainly the members of the Moderate Cabal, never let that stop them from approving the flood of dollars into that fiscally porous endeavor.

The main objective the Democrats should focus on is the difference in Republican priorities and their priorities. Republicans want to give more tax cuts to the rich; Democrats want to give direct assistance to state governments to prevent drastic budget cuts and rollbacks in services. Republicans want to spend less than any sound economist recognizes is needed; Democrats want to spend what is necessary to get the economy, and revenues for every level of government back on track as soon as possible. Republicans want the wealthy to spend. Democrats want to make lasting improvements to the physical infrastructure and capital assets of this country. Republicans want to dither, while Democrats want to act.

Economists estimate that $1-1.3 trillion is being pulled out of the economy by this recessionary collapse. Poorly conceived tax cuts won't put that money back. But soundly conceived tax cuts and large amounts of government spending are the only ways to offset this loss of money. No other entity in American Society can rise to this challenge. The Fed has tried and it has nearly exhausted its policy options. The states cannot because they cannot spend more than they raise. And the private sector, as we all know, is bereft.

Public spending of any type will flow directly into the economy and ripple through, lifting economic activity and offsetting the imminent job losses and wage cuts facing millions of Americans. This cash will be used to pay salaries and build things that will last long after the recession passes. It will help states prevent adding a further drain onto our already troubled economy. It will keep stores open and factories running and work crews humming. Economists call this the multiplier effect of public spending. Some projects have higher multipliers than others. But with so much money coming down the pipe, policy makers have to scramble to find any policy that promises to multiply its benefit across the economy and some of those will do more for job creation and capital development than others.

But only government can do this -- can help our fellow citizens and heal this nation. Americans used to know this. The Republicans and their media brethren have hypnotized them into worrying about a misspent billion or two. Americans are once again worrying that tax dollars might go to a fellow citizen who is somehow unworthy. It's up to Democrats to remind them why in November they found their faith in change and in the power of government to stabilize our lives and secure our future. And how to find it again.

Matt Damon - Most Effective Obama Ad so far...

2008-09-12T23:44:00.001-06:00

What Obama Needs To Do Now

2008-04-29T18:58:00.006-06:00

Barack Obama continues to struggle in the polls in the wake of the return of the Rev Wright affair. His campaign appears to be faltering at a crucial time and we'll find out just how much tomorrow. His loss in Pennsylvania was just large enough to raise questions and concerns about him as a nominee, but not large enough to swing the election back to Hillary as a credible front - runner -- Nancy Pelosi's "leader after all the primaries are done."

Obama had no choice but to make a sharp clean break with the Reverend Wright. After Wright's performance, his clownish high-fives, declaring Zionism a gutter religion, that it was equivalent to racism, that the American government could have released AIDS in a ploy to decimate minority populations, etc etc etc., Obama had no other choice. His sadness at the development was evident on the day of his press conference. But his anger was somewhat muted. And the move, while it may have stopped the hemorrhaging of support, hasn't stopped the slow bleed. Hillary now leads Obama nationally among Democrats 47 to 40, which is fateful heading into a convention. She leads in Indiana and has closed the gap in North Carolina. So how can Obama win back momentum, shake the perception that he's too liberal, distance himself sufficiently from his divorce from Wright so that it won't be seen through the lens of political expediency at best, and a serious failure of judgment in the first place for having trusted Wright so much?

He needs to return to the big picture, thematic messages of his 'big-mo' period in February and March. Not to the policy particulars, and not just the small scale meet-and-greets and one-on -ones of Iowa. He needs to find an issue where talking about ideas, and about realities captures the imagination of people, reminds them that here is someone different, and restores the confidence and faith that has been shaken by the last three weeks.

No surprise there -- the challenge is how to do this.

My humble (OK I admit it, not so humble) suggestion is that he take on the social challenge of race in America in the way that only he can. After his speech on race in Philadelphia, one wag wrote that one benefit of Obama's stature, his candidacy, and a potential presidency was his capacity to tackle the problem of race from the full spectrum of both the politics and substance of the problem. In a speech in Texas that the author (Newsweek's Jonathan Alter) cites, Obama is quoted as addressing the problems within the black family that can often undermine and stymie a child's social and educational development and success (for an alternative perspective see here).

A woman asked about health care and Obama explained how, for the first time in human history, thousands of obese children, many of them black, were being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes—a disease that is killing millions and helping bankrupt the health-care system. He told the crowd that kids couldn't keep on "drinking eight sodas a day," then went in Bulworth's direction. "I know some of y'all got that cold Popeye's [chicken] out for breakfast. I know," Obama said with a smile. He continued: "That's why y'all laughing. You can't do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school … It's not good enough for you to say to your child, 'Do good in school,' and then when that child comes home, you got the TV set on, you got the radio on, you don't check their homework, there is not a book in the house, you've got the videogame playing." Instead of being jeered, he was cheered wildly.

Obama has been tarred, by Wright's actions and words, by HRC's campaign, and by the Right-Wing attack machine, as a liberal elitist. Implicit behind this is, of course, the subtext these code words fill-in for -- the subtext that plays on the dark heart of America's soul -- it's fear of the 'other,' it's unwillingness to confront racism and it's legacy, and blackness itself. The counter offensive in other words has moved Obama from a figure of hope appealing to the mainstream to a figure on the radical fringe of society. They have made Obama black in white eyes. Black like Al Sharpton. Black like Jesse Jackson. Black like Louis Farrakhan. Such figures are popular in the black community but have limited appeal beyond it and are threatening to millions of (admittedly mostly white) Americans.

Figures from the black community like Oprah, Michael Jordan, and, for a time, Michael Jackson, who achieve extreme success across the spectrum and full market of American society seem to conquer white society by appearing to 'transcend' their blackness. I know I am on dangerous ground here and I am not speaking sympathetically of this perception, but it almost seems that Americans forget that their hero is black. There is, of course a term or two in the black community to describe this development. Initially, Obama's candidacy was greeted skeptically and warily by black political leaders. Many endorsed HRC early and his support nationally among African American voters was, before the Iowa caucus, divided almost evenly with her. His success changed all that, of course, once the possibility of an African American leader of this nation became a suddenly viable possibility. But this early hesitation, combined with Obama's message and his background made him also a figure, unlike Jesse Jackson (much to Bill Clinton's befuddlement and bemusement) who appealed across the racial, economic and political spectrum of this society. Obama's challenge now is to return to this state and I think the way there is to channel Bill Cosby for a moment. Consider for a moment the following:

48% of all black children grow up in homes without a father.
Blacks constitute 63 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons
Blacks comprise 49 percent of those in prison
Black male life expectancy is 68.8 years while that of white males is almost 76 years
The black drop out rate from HS is twice that of whites
Black children spend more time watching television than children of any other racial or ethnic group

Does racism persist in America? Of course. Has racism become institutionalized within the fabric of society in the form of unequal opportunities, services, and infrastructure? Sure. But can black families begin taking initiatives that will directly improve the lives of their children and themselves without waiting for whites to wake up? Absolutely. And millions of Americans know this complex reality but are frustrated that no one takes it on.

Obama can exercise leadership on this dimension. The very leadership on which his campaign is predicated. The kind of leadership that can cross divisions in society and heal old wounds. The kind of leadership that can begin to solve problems that are not just a matter of tax dollars or government programs. The kind of leadership Americans of all colors, religions, and creeds long for.

I recognize that this is dangerous ground socially. I understand that he may be criticized by some as blaming the victim. I recognize that some in America will see no further than his critique of black social dysfunction to accept their own culpability in and obligation to address the underlying problems. I am fully cognizant that this position can be easily accused of being just another instance of liberal racism. My hope is that eventually Obama can establish sufficient social and political capital with white society that he can tackle the full spectrum of American hypocrisy about race.

In my mind the culpability lies on both side -- who are complicit in an unwritten social compact in which white and black agree not to call the other to account. Following the early successes of the Civil Rights movement, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, it faltered in its momentous surge to transform American society. And with the murder of leaders like the Kennedys and King, the self-immolation of Johnson (and American Liberalism) over the fires of Vietnam, it became convenient for whites to reassure themselves that their work was done. Of course all the nation had accomplished was to grab the low-hanging fruit of political expediency. The rise of debates over affirmative action and economic and social injustice (and the nation's economic stumbles in the Seventies) eventually turned the political tide against a further consideration of racial policy. And the country settled down into its current self-satisfied, and unsustainable compact. Whites wouldn't criticize the black community's problems or failures of leadership, and blacks wouldn't push too hard for social justice or in pointing out the pathological racism inherent in the system. To see just how real (and powerful) this social compact was, just consider for a moment how marginalized in political society figures like Jeremiah Wright and William Bennett are.

In one sense, my suggestion is admittedly a cynical political move. I suggest that Obama tackle race again by addressing the short-comings that the black community needs to tackle and address in order that he can restore the comfort level of potentially sympathetic whites. I suggest that he campaign by moving to the right of HRC. To the right even of McCain for a time. Is this potentially a move to appeal to the worst in America in order to appeal to what might become the best in America? Yes. But it is a move that returns Obama to a position of leadership AND race neutrality. It allows him to recapture the spotlight in a way that playing basketball, or bowling, or visiting a barbecue in Fort Wayne will never do. It's a move that Shelby Steele has alluded to but doubts Obama will ever make. And it's a move that positions him to once again recapture the imagination of millions of Americans who dream about what his victory could portend for this country nationally and internationally.

60 Minutes, the US Attorney's Scandal, and the Democrat who went to jail

2008-02-24T22:41:00.003-07:00

To my friends,

Imagine this. A local leader of the political opposition in a country is targeted by the party in power — which controls all branches of the government. The President’s henchmen line up a criminal case against the opposition figure, but their first effort is thrown out of court. On their second try the jury deadlocks twice over the trumped up charges before ultimately voting to convict the political figure for corruption. The leader is sent away to prison for 7 years, with his legs and wrists shackled. With their main rival behind bars, the President’s Party goes on to capture two local elections in a row.

Where is this? Putin’s Russia? Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? Assad’s Syria? No, sadly, it’s right here in the USA.

Tonight, 60 Minutes documented the disturbing story of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Several months ago he was sentenced to jail for 7 years for bribery. That’s not a remarkable story — until you hear the details. First, remember that behind this story lies the broader question of whether the Bush White House put pressure on US Attorneys throughout the country to file criminal charges against it’s political enemies. And then it fired and replaced those who wouldn’t go along with these efforts to enlist the justice system to settle political scores.

Then consider the details in this case. Don Siegelman was the successful Democratic governor of Alabama, a mostly Republican state. His enemies, under instructions from Bush Svengali Karl Rove, first hired investigators to catch him in compromising sexual positions. But that didn’t pan out. So they enlisted the help of two US Attorneys in Alabama — one of whom was married to the campaign manager of his gubernatorial opponent. Their first effort to try Siegelman was thrown out of court by a judge after hearing opening arguments — so flimsy was their case. So they tried again. On their second try, prosecutors charged him with bribery. His crime? Accepting $250,000 for a campaign effort to pass a lottery in the state that could be used to pay for improving public education. According to the Justice Department, businessman Richard Scrushy gave $250,000 to the lottery campaign fund in return for a promise to be re-appointed to a state board charged with determining the clinical need for hospital and related health care construction in the state. Now there are two problems with this allegation from a legal and ethical standpoint.

First, the state’s case rested on the testimony of one man, a former aide, who claimed he saw Siegelman emerge from a meeting with Scrushy with a $250,000 check in his hand and heard Siegelman explain that the check was in return for the seat on the state board. But there were two problems with this testimony. First, the check was actually cut many days after this supposed meeting, so the aide could not have seen it when he claimed. Second, the aide was himself facing charges of extortion for misusing his office and looking at a 10 year sentence unless he agreed to cooperate. He has claimed that it took him several days and repeated attempts to write out his testimony as the prosecutors wanted it. But the prosecutors never provided these various versions of testimony to the defense, as they were legally obligated to. In fact, the Justice Department has repeatedly declined all requests for an explanation about this missing testimony, even subpoenas by Congress.

Second, focus on the charge of bribery for a moment. Typically, in a bribery case, an individual derives a direct, personal benefit from the use of his political office. In an unrelated case, a former Republican governor of Alabama, Guy Hunt, personally pocketed $200,000, but prosecutors sought probation — not jail time. In this case, however, the money went to the Lottery Campaign Foundation — an effort to raise money to improve the state’s schools. If this is bribery, then by this reasoning any time a political donor is named to an ambassadorship, or a deputy cabinet position, or any state board, there’s been a crime. In other words, every governor, numerous Senators and Congressmen, and even the President are guilty of bribery. But in those cases the money pays for person’s own election effort. Here, the money went for school improvement! I probably dislike the campaign finance system as much as anyone, but I don’t think our current system represents a violation of bribery laws.

There have been many occasions during the last seven years of the Bush Administration to weep for America. A senseless war whose justifications evaporated about the same time it became evident that it was being mismanaged into catastrophe. The sullying of our international reputation by first the effort to justify torture and then the vast evidence that our country has both sanctioned and executed torture repeatedly in the last six years. Invisible and visible ‘detention’ centers around the globe, where ‘enemies’ of America can be held without charge merely because the Administration has labeled them ‘enemy combatants.’

But this case sticks in the throat like few others. Here, the victim is an American citizen. A high ranking member of the political opposition. Governor Siegelman may be no saint. But the decision to run for office ought not to subject you to the threat of prosecution by your enemies. Sadly, under our criminal justice system, any one of us can be indicted for one thing or another. As a friend once told me, “with a Grand Jury, you can indict a head of cabbage.” And if anyone looks hard enough, long enough, they’ll find something on just about anyone. That red light you ran last week, that time you drank and drove last year. That pot you smoked in college. The error you made on your tax form. That’s why the justice system is not to be used to investigate people but to investigate crimes.

In this case, Bush’s Justice Department tore apart a man’s life looking for one thing on which to build a case. They looked until they found what they felt was something, no matter how small. The Republican governor's campaign manager’s wife (Leura Canary, wife of Bill Canary) led the investigation and filed the charges, despite a clear conflict of interest. She only recused herself after the case was in the courts. The judge who tried the case had been appointed by the Republican governor. A former Republican aide has testified that she heard the governor’s son, Richard Riley, state that the Judge would “hang Don Siegelman.”

Siegelman has been in jail for 242 days and still has not received a trial transcript to ready his appeal. Yet the law requires that the transcript be delivered to the defendant within 30 days of conviction. The law also allows a defendant 45 days after conviction to prepare for surrendering to the Bureau of Prisons so that affairs can be put in order and a legal appeal readied. In Siegelman’s case, on conviction, the Judge ordered the governor shackled and bound in the courtroom, where he was immediately removed and taken away to Federal prison — a practice typically reserved for the most dangerous criminals or the criminally insane. 44 former state Attorneys General, both Republican and Democrat have signed a letter urging Congress to investigate the circumstances surrounding this case.

I don’t normally write these kinds of letters. I don’t normally involve my friends in these kinds of email chains. But I simply cannot sit still and do nothing in the face of this gross injustice. But there’s more than injustice here. There is a perversion of our democracy, a sullying of everything we believe in as American’s. Because democracy cannot thrive where the state can be enlisted to take sides in political debates, and its power can be used to crush dissent and opposition. Please take a moment to visit the website of Don Siegelman’s friends to learn how you can help.

http://www.donsiegelman.org/pages/MAIN/home.html

Copy and paste this in an email and forward it to your friends. Write your Congressperson. Write the Judiciary Committee. Or donate to the legal defense fund. Thank you

Dr Kwanda

PS. Oh, and if all this wasn’t enough to send chills up your progressive spine, how’s this tidbit from Siegelman’s Wikipedia entry: “He was defeated for reelection in November 2002 by Representative Bob Riley by the narrowest margin in Alabama history: approximately 3,000 votes. The margin was controversial, as a voting machine malfunction in a single county produced the votes needed to give Riley the election. The recount, however, of that county's votes was affirmed by the state's Attorney General.”

Mourning the Passing of Jacob Wilhelmus Smit

2006-11-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

I just opened the Nov/Dec CC Today and discovered with shock and sadness that Professor Jacob W. Smit (Professor Emeritus History Columbia) had passed away earlier this fall. I never had the privilege of knowing him as Wim although I have taken a great appreciation in reading the remembrances posted at a memorial site and in the memorial tributes of his friends and family. I am sorry that I never got to know him like this, but my exchanges with him were no less profound for that failure.

I had Prof. Smit for CC or Contemporary Civilization in my Sophmore year. It was the first profound intellectual experience of my life and I can say easily and honestly from the vantage point of 20 years on, that Prof Smit touched my life as few have and helped Columbia to shape me as the person I am today.

Unfortunately, I only had Prof Smit for one semester as he traded off the spring term with Prof Ainslee Embree. But the fall semester remains indelibly in my mind and I remember the envy of my dormates and classmates as I described the fascinating lectures and discussions of that fall term.

I came to Columbia from a family of professors and intellectuals, Univ of Chicago grads and Litvaks. So I arrived with an especial eagerness for the famed core curriculum. My dad, an English professor, spoke of how reading Plato, especialy the Symposium, at Chicago in the late 30s had changed his life. In my freshman year I struggled with Lit Hum. I too read Plato, The Republic, The Symposium, The Apology. But they didn't change my life. They seemed distant and opaque. I didn't really connect to the readings until late in the spring semester when we read Crime and Punishment. And my struggles further alienated me from a father who seemed somewhat aloof to begin with, to inhabit a world far different from mine.

I like to think that Prof Smit had a role in changing some of that. I entered CC in my second year and we began by taking up the Republic again. And this time, through Prof Smit's eyes it was like reading a new book. The text came alive. The notion of Platonic ideals took on deep and personal meaning. And the hypothesis that justice is called for because we know in our hearts it is right connected with me on some deep and almost anti-intellectual level.

I still read my Columbia alumni publications religiously and with great interest. It always amuses me a little the way the College pats itself on the back for its Core. But I realize that for me the Core worked. It did its magic. I discovered the wonderful life of the mind. I put together the natural questions of a (somewhat) engaged 19 year old with the canonical works of generations and was able to explore them within the structured approaches of great minds that have come before us. I went on to major in American History and came to see the relationships between our structure of government and the way the Founders thought on the one hand, and the works of Locke, Hobbes, Montesquie, Rousseau on the other.

When I first struggled with Lit Hum my freshman year, I went, being the earnest freshman I was, to see my professor to ask what was wrong with me. 'Why did I hate the readings and feel they were so dry when my father claimed they changed his life?' My professor at the time laughed and told me to be skeptical of anyone who claimed reading Plato changed his life. Maybe reading Plato didn't change my life, but I discovered in the next year that reading Plato with Prof. Smit changed the way I thought about life and justice, and politics, and policy, and how to live, for the rest of my life.

I went on to get a masters in public affairs at Princeton and a doctorate in public policy at Harvard and my first reaction at both places was the immediate sense of how different the campuses were because they did not have a core curriculum. Harvard struggled to reform its Core when I was there and I could only feel bemused by the great difficulty they had in realizing what Columbia realized 80 years ago and continues to realize today. Intellectual life seemed more vibrant at Columbia. The students seemed more engaged in their classes and in the world. I am sure some of this is attributable to self selection. But what was striking to me was how the students in Professor Smit's class seemed to feel as I did that what we were talking about was life today, not the life of the ancients, about the questions of the globalized, modern world, not the questions of ancient Athens. That the world outside the campus at Morningside Heights mattered and that what we discussed in class actually related to that world. I am sure this is unfair, but at Harvard and Princeton, students, by and large, seemed no different from my grade obsessed, ambitious high school classmates for whom courses, classes, homework, and school were all means to an end rather the end in themselves.

I never had the courage to speak up in class because I was amazed at the pace of our discussions, of the way the ideas would flow and the dialogue unfold. Before Prof Smit and some of the other students I always felt three steps behind. But I knew I was in the presence of greatness in the classroom so I would steal to his office hours to talk with him about the works of the week. He was always gracious and kind and eager to talk about the works, even though we would often go over the same ground that we would discuss in class. I remember the way his office smelled, the smell of books and what seemed in my mind to be a lingering sense of a farmers lunch of good dutch cheese with bread. Prof Smit did for me what no one had yet done. He made me rediscover how fun and engaging school and study could be. He helped me connect with my father on a level we hadn't until then. He was in short my most profound and heartfelt connection to what is best about Columbia and I mourn along with those here his too soon passing. I wish his family and friends the best and treasure the moments I shared with this great man.

You have to do this

2006-10-26T21:29:00.000-06:00

From time to time you have to post to your blog to keep it active I suppose.

Learn Something New Everyday

2006-05-31T21:49:00.000-06:00

Baseball Almanac - Hall of Fame Fast Facts

So I was wondering tonight if pitchers have a fair shot at getting in the Hall of Fame. Checking out the evening's box scores I realized that as good a pitcher as Mike Mussina is (he almost threw a six hit shutout and is 7-1), he isn't likely to get into the Hall of Fame. And the thought struck me that it must be really hard to get into the Hall of Fame as a pitcher. Such a player has to win a lot of games, avoid losing a lot of games, have a good number of strikeouts and shutouts and such, AND, (and this is key) help himself by winning some major championship caliber games -- playoffs and World Series. So I wondered, if 10-11 pitchers are on every 25-man roster, are a similar proportion in the Hall of Fame? Do pitchers have a similar likelihood of getting into the Hall of Fame given their frequency in the game? What would constitute evidence of bias?

But along the way to finding out, something else happened. I learned that trivia lovers record all kinds of statistics about the Hall, including, the number of inductees from each team. Guess which team has the most inductees?

Nope, not the Yankees. The Giants! And the funny thing is, it's not even close. 23 Giants players are in the Hall. The runner up is the Cardinals with 16. After that the Yankees have 15 and the Cubs (yes the Cubs!) have 14 to round out 4th place. The Cubs have as many players as the Negro Leagues. Which tells you something about the voting process and the influence of large media markets. How many Cubbies fans around the world think that players like Ron Santo, Dick Williams, and Dave Kingman are Hall of Fame material?

Now let's looks at team performance. The Yankees have lost more Series than all but four other teams have been in total. They have won 26 Championships. Overall, they have been in the Series 39 times. The Cubs have been in 10, which isn't shoddy, but have only won it all twice -- and we all know how long that's been. The Giants have been in 17 Series (3rd place on the all-time list) with a neck squeezing record of 5-12.

Go figure!

Oh, and the fraction of pitchers in the Hall? 31%

The fraction on a typical Major League roster? 44%

Peter King calls Derek Jeter the best ever?

2006-05-31T11:07:00.000-06:00

Early favorites - NFL - Yahoo! Sports: "2. I think I said something to my bride the other night that I never thought I'd say about a New York Yankee. As many of you may have divined from this column over the years, that's not my favorite franchise on earth. Anyway, I said to her: I'm not sure about this, but I think when Derek Jeter retires, I will say he's the best baseball player I ever saw.

Living in Jersey, I see the man come to bat maybe 300 times a season, and I watch him in the field maybe 40 percent of his innings. But Jeter personifies effort every time he puts on the uniform; there is never anything but 100 percent effort. Every at-bat is quality. Every ball hit to him, and some only close to him, are gobbled up with certainty. And the way he carries himself ... He is baseball's Tiger Woods. He is this Yankee generation's DiMaggio. And I think he'll go down as better than Mantle, because though Mantle was truly great, he also squandered much of his ability through wild living."

That's pretty impressive praise for a guy who isn't the best fielder or hitter at his position on his own team. But one I completely agree with. The guy is just a winner through and through and I would take him over ARod on my real team (not fantasy) any day.

Had Enough?

2006-05-30T13:13:00.000-06:00

Can someone make this into a bumper sticker already?

Had Enough? - Yahoo! News:

The Nation --

"Had Enough?

"It's a phrase Newt Gingrich adapted from an ad exec in 1946 and popularized. Now he's telling Democrats to use it against his own Party. For once, Democrats should heed Newt's advice."

Two Days in October

2006-05-30T12:11:00.001-06:00

Excellent, excellent, moving documentary about events involving the Vietnam War both abroad and at home in 1967. Catch it on TV if you can or read the transcript here (click below). Dr. Maurice Zeitlin of the University of Wisconsin, Madison gives just about the most perfect take on that troubled time and the actions of men and women on both sides of the debate at home over the war.

American Experience Two Days in October Transcript PBS:

"Maurice Zeitlin: I have only respect for the men who fought in that war, because they didn't make the war, they didn't choose to fight in that war, but they accepted a responsibility that they thought was theirs as an American citizen, okay? They carried the burden of being an American citizen. When they were sent to war, they fought. And I carried the burden, not at all comparable, of being an American citizen by opposing that war. And I had the choice and they didn't. And, for that, I was privileged and they weren't, but we were both doing our duty."

Feingold Draws Little Support for Censure - Yahoo! News

2006-03-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

Profiles In Courage

Feingold Draws Little Support for Censure - Yahoo! News

By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, maneuvering to prevent a vote that could alienate swing voters. Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal.

"Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy," Vice President Dick Cheney' told a Republican audience in Feingold's home state.

Feingold, a potential presidential candidate, said on the Senate floor, "The president has violated the law and Congress must respond."

"A formal censure by Congress is an appropriate and responsible first step to assure the public that when the president thinks he can violate the law without consequences, Congress has the will to hold him accountable," Feingold said.

Even as he spoke, Democratic leaders held off the immediate vote that Majority Leader Bill Frist requested. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he didn't know if there ever would be one.

Throughout the day, Feingold's fellow Democrats said they understood his frustration but they held back overt support for the resolution.
Several said they wanted first to see the Senate Intelligence Committee finish an investigation of the warrantless wiretapping program that Bush authorized as part of his war on terrorism.

Asked at a news conference whether he would vote for the censure resolution, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada declined to endorse it and said he hadn't read it.

Sen. Joe Lieberman', D-Conn., said he had not read it either and wasn't inclined simply to scold the president.

"I'd prefer to see us solve the problem," Lieberman told reporters.

Across the Capitol, reaction was similar. Feingold's censure resolution drew empathy but no outright support from Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi "understands Sen. Feingold's frustration that the facts about the NSA domestic surveillance program have not been disclosed appropriately to Congress," her office said in a statement. "Both the House and the Senate must fully investigate the program and assign responsibility for any laws that may have been broken."

Hello! Yo Pelosi - it's not that they didn't tell Congress. It's that they broke the law and eavesdropped without a warrant. In defiance of established law.

Former Navy Aviator Returns his Wings

2006-03-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

As a young man I was honored to serve our nation as a commissioned officer and helicopter pilot in the US Navy. Before me in WWII, my father defended the country spending two years in the Pacific aboard the USS Hornet (CV-14). We were patriots sworn "to protect and defend". Today I conclude that you have dishonored our service and the Constitution and principles of our oath. My dad was buried with full military honors so I cannot act for him. But for myself, I return enclosed the symbols of my years of service: the shoulder boards of my rank and my Naval Aviator's wings.

Until your administration, I believed it was inconceivable that the United States would ever initiate an aggressive and preemptive war against a country that posed no threat to us. Until your administration, I thought it was impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to "disappear" them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. Until your administration, in my wildest legal fantasy I could not imagine a US Attorney General seeking to justify torture or a President first stating his intent to veto an anti-torture law, and then adding a "signing statement" that he intends to ignore such law as he sees fit. I do not want these things done in my name.

As a citizen, a patriot, a parent and grandparent, a lawyer and law teacher I am left with such a feeling of loss and helplessness. I think of myself as a good American and I ask myself what can I do when I see the face of evil? Illegal and immoral war, torture and confinement for life without trial have never been part of our Constitutional tradition. But my vote has become meaningless because I live in a safe district drawn by your political party. My congressman is unresponsive to my concerns because his time is filled with lobbyists' largess. Protests are limited to your "free speech zones", out of sight of the parade. Even speaking openly is to risk being labeled un-American, pro-terrorist or anti-troops. And I am a disciplined pacifist, so any violent act is out of the question.

Nevertheless, to remain silent is to let you think I approve or support your actions. I do not. So, I am saddened to give up my wings and bars. They were hard won and my parents and wife were as proud as I was when I earned them over forty years ago. But I hate the torture and death you have caused more than I value their symbolism. Giving them up makes me cry for my beloved country.

Joseph W. DuRocher

The Silence is Deafening

2006-01-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

Several great posts by angry blogger David Sirota. If this stuff doesn't make you angry then you are not paying attention.

What his posts make clear is the urgent need for public financing of campaigns. There I said it. Let's not pussy foot around this anymore. There is simply no other solution than to take the business of campaign contributions out of the political process for they amount to nothing more than legalized forms of bribery -- whatever the Supreme Courts warped view of bribery as constitutionally protected speech. All the reforms about gifts and junkets and meals will come to nothing until the central problem is recognized and dealt with -- politicians depend on fundraisers and lobbyists use the fundraiser as the coin of the realm to buy their way to influence.

Sirota skewers both the Democratic and Republican efforts at casting themselves as reformers. If our media was worth anything they would have already persuaded Americans that the proposals amount to little more than window dressing which preserves the central perks of the incumbents.

He also highlights the scandalous emergence of United from bankruptcy protection. Not only is United practically back on its feet, but the bankruptcy judge approved a plan to award a large fraction of the shares in United to a small handful of executives. And this comes on top of news that United, which managed to wring concessions totalling $4 billion from its workers, has awarded executives at the company $500 million in bonuses.

He goes on to tackle issues like pension reform, identity theft, and the Abramoff scandal. Always a great read, this stuff is guaranteed to get your blood boiling. But the central point is clear, the pathetic response of Democrats, the failure to honestly tackle corruption and to highlight the scandalous pillaging of American companies by corporate executives stems from the essential need to keep those with the deepest pockets placated so that the political contributions flow. A politician who wasn't beholden to those interests might be more willing to shine the light on the scurrying cock roaches as they make off with our future.

If you don't believe sports has something to teach you about life

2006-01-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Check out this discussion of the NFL's byzantine rules in Salon.

Salon.com King Kaufman's Sports Daily: Why Does Football Have Such a Complex Rules Book?

"Good question. A capital-letter-eschewing oedipus has an answer, pointing out that 'soccer is governed by only 17 laws, the first six of which are essentially administrative ... However, it's this byzantine codification that gives Americans something they pride themselves on doing: creating unnecessary government.'

Case in point: The various American soccer bodies, which govern youth soccer, high school, college, etc., have added complicated rules on top of the FIFA set that works for the rest of the world.

'It's an American concept to complicate something as simple as sport so that you create a field of 'knowledge experts' who have something to be experts on,' oedipus writes.

I don't know if it's native to the Colonies to complicate things up, but it's certainly the prime directive of the NFL, the most bureaucratic, technocratic operation in North American team sports. "

It's not government that is corrupt and inefficient by nature. It is the way a people approach their government which helps determine the degree to which inefficiencies and inanities dominate the business of government. Because Americans are so afraid of their government and so terrified of "waste, fraud, and abuse," they saddle public action with complex reporting requirements and rules of behavior. When you don't want partisanship & cronyism to dominate the hiring process, you develop complex civil service rules that prevent managers from flexibly employing the best candidates. When you are terrified that civil servants will appropriate resources and steal, you make them go through a central administrative purchasing agent that must approve every purchase and make you follow a rigorous set of procedures. When you emphasize the democratic process and the right of Congress to oversee every step of the bureaucracy, you get a system dominated by cautious bureaucrats who won't take any initiative not pre approved by Washington politicians. Americans emphasize process over results - hence we have a rules-based, process oriented system. And we rarely get the results we want. We see this in the overwhelming bureaucracies of our public schools. In the myriad forms of the public health system. In the list of requirements for public programs like welfare.

The football example and the anecdote from soccer chillingly reminds us that our love of rules pretty much gets in the way of getting the government we want -- flexible and efficient and responsive to immediate challenges.

For more on this topic check out my favorite bureaucratic tome -- James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy which begins with the example of the the French fighting the Germans in World War II. Despite our collective perception of the vaunted German fighting machine, Wilson informs us that the French had more tanks, more soldiers, and more weapons than the Germans. What they didn't have was the initiative based system under which German officers were allowed to make decisions on the fly and held accountable only for results. The French, by contrast had a hierarchical system in which they had to check on every decision with the very top so their units were less mobile and less reactive. We like to think that decisions take a long time in the public sector because that is the way of things. But they don't have to. We design public systems this way in our legislatures.

The Death Penalty and the Culture of Life

2006-01-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

CNN.com - Death row elder needed 2 injections - Jan 18, 2006:

"Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.

'At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life,' said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. 'We would resuscitate him,' then execute him.

But the barrel-chested prisoner's heart was strong to the end: Doctors had to administer a second shot of potassium chloride to stop it.

I think the statement speaks for itself.

Focus on the Family Comes out in Favor of Incest

2006-01-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

I suppose when you are truly homophobic, anything looks better than same sex domestic partnerships.

The Colorado Domestic Partnership Act would give gay couples the right to make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner, provide access to health-care and family-leave benefits and protect inheritance rights when a partner dies.

Tom Minnery, vice president of Focus on the Family, called the proposal discriminatory because it would not protect adult siblings who live together.

I think that relatives already have medical care rights. Inheritance rights are easy to resolve with something called a will. Those of us more literal, supposedly secular humanists have heard of it. But as arguments go this has to be one of the stranger ones.

Good Question

2006-01-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

I have wondered about this too.

Don Banks of SI.com (Snap Judgments (cont.) - Sunday January 8, 2006) asks:

"I know the Edell Shepherd non-catch was the right call by rule in the Bucs-Redskins game, but here's what always has made me scratch my head when it comes to what constitutes possession in the end zone:

How is it you can score by merely breaking the plane of the end zone, even if you fumble the ball away a millisecond later, but you can have what looks to be a catch ruled incomplete even after you've had the ball for a step and a half in the end zone?"

Post Game Notes: Pats over Jaguars

2006-01-08T15:17:00.000-07:00

1) That was probably one of the closer 28-3 ball games you'll see. But it's a great win and the Pats are definitely playing their best ball of the season. Whether this is enough, we'll see. Their two biggest challenges ahead of them are having to play inside on the Indy Speedway or having to play in the altitude of Denver.

2) I think it's silly for people to say weather did not play a factor in the game. How did they think that was going to manifest itself? That Jacksonville would curl up in a ball and wimper on the 40 yard line? Anyone who has played football in the cold knows where it affects you -- on your hands and in getting hit. The hits hurt that much more and your hands are just that much less flexible and agile. Hence the dropped passes by both teams. The fumbles after big hits. And most importantly, the missed tackles. You tend to miss a tackle in the cold when you just try to grab someone or simply hit them. And finally - Belichick passed on two field goals under 50 yards. And this on a day when we were told wind would not be a factor. Maybe this explains why the Jaguars kicker missed a field goal and barely made another.

3) Finally, looking forward - The Pats lost to both Indy and Denver this year. If I were a betting man I would head to the window and put cash down on the Pats. Belichick's record in rematches against quarterbacks who beat his team earlier in the year? 14-0. 'Nuff Said.

That Commander in Chief Excuse

2006-01-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.net: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

Bush's (and associated sycophants like Berkeley law professor John Woo (and Samuel Scalito?)) excuse for his warrantless wiretapping is that Congress gave him the authority to do so when it authorized him to defend the "homeland" (da, uber alles) under his Constitutional perogratives as Commander in Chief. Well, has anybody bothered to look at the relevant Constitutional language? Cause there's not a whole lot there that says that a Commander in Chief in his duties in war time is above any law passed by Congress (and signed of course by yours truly the President).

The relevant paragraph is above and it sure is thin on justifications. I don't see how you parse an argument that the President as Commander in Chief of the army cannot have his prerogatives abbreviated or abrogated by Congress. Well it's no stretch to see that a Congress, without taking upon itself any Commander in Chief duties such as setting strategy or telling Generals what to do, has every right to pass laws that limit the amount of money flowing to the armed forces and to pass any number of laws that dictate how soldiers are to conduct themselves in times of war and peace. Do we honestly think that all such rules are the sole reserve of the generals and President and that they dictate all these parameters of behavior? If so, then I guess we live in a much less democratic country then we are all led to believe. The notion that a President can eavesdrop as he wishes in the name of National Security, can emprison indefinitely without charges or trial any one including a citizen of the US, just on his say so that the person is a threat to security, can authorize torture in the name of national security, even when he himself has signed legislation banning the practice is altogether ludicrous. The President is not above the laws of the land. We are supposed to be a nation of laws. I like to think that we are a nation governed by people and that is what makes us great, but the conservatives like to repeat their mantra that what makes us great is that we are a nation of laws. So how about it? Are we or are we not? And don't those laws apply to the elected and appointed officials of our government no matter the circumstance. This argument seems to me as plain as the nose on my face so I just don't get how the MSM can get away trumpeting the argument that this is an esoteric argument between civil libertarians and legal experts and those concerned about our "security." No, it's a clear case of someone putting himself above the law and saying "I don't need no stinking warrants. F- U and the justices you rode in on."
The issue is not invasions of American's privacy. It's simply why did this President not feel that he was subject to US law and submit his supposed security concerns to the court set up to monitor the balance of security and liberty?

Yet Another Example of What Is Wrong with Progressives & Liberals

2005-12-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg's Word Choice Still Under Fire - Yahoo! News:

"NEW YORK - Four days after the city's transit strike ended, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was still coming under fire for his use of the word 'thuggishly' to describe the actions of the leaders of a union that is mostly minority.

'Michael Bloomberg, don't be nasty and mean,' attorney Norman Siegel said Monday, standing on the steps of City Hall. 'Be positive. Together, we can improve race relations in New York.'

The civil rights attorney noted that more than 70 percent of the Transport Workers Union's 33,000 members are "of color." And while he didn't believe Bloomberg's use of the word was in itself racist, Siegel said, "The perception out there is that it is racist. And the reaction has enormous racial overtones."

Bloomberg used the word Dec. 20 during a briefing on the first day of the three-day strike that forced millions of riders to spend extra hours commuting. The mayor complained that union leaders had "thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service."

Some criticized him for using the word, saying it was racist in the context of a mostly minority union. A Bloomberg spokesman said it was wrong to bring race into the situation."

It's not only wrong but it's misdirected. In typical fashion liberals make the issue one of race when this is really about economics and economic power and race is just incidental. It is not that race and thug are often paired which should concern liberals but that union and thuggish are often paired. This is the stereotype that Bloomberg was playing to. And this stereotype does more to weaken the interests of working people than do racial allusions. If they cannot organize for their economic advancement and employ one of the few tools available to them to exert some kind of economic influence, their ability to extract fair value from their labor is dimished. While liberals play into the hands of economic power by agreeing that the essential conlicts in society are between races, they prevent any kind of alliance across racial lines within a progressive labor movement that might promote the interests of working people everywhere.

The Immigration Boogeyman

2005-12-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

Democrats are awaiting the Republican's Rovian divisive pitch in 2006 with all the uncertainty of a batter in the box facing Mariano Rivera. You know they only know how to throw one pitch and by now it's clear that the Right will be targeting immigration. The first hints were there in the Colorado campaign over C&D when opponent Caldara trotted out, three weeks out from Election Day, when things looked bleak, the weak line that cutting benefits for immigrants could save more money than C would raise. In 2006 the Right will have an anti-immigrant initiative on the ballot. And while Bush is tacking left with his guest worker program, he has left room to tack right should he need to and start bashing illegal immigrants. Peggy Noonan recently raised the colors of the flag in a WSJ opinion piece so shot through with holes and shoddy intellectual parsings it would simply be an embarrassment if not for the potency of her anti-elitist rhetoric.

WSJ - OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Here is what is true of my immigrants and of the immigrants of America's past:

They fought for citizenship. They earned it. They waited in line. They passed the tests. They had to get permission to come. They got money that was hard-earned and bought a ticket. They had to get through Ellis Island or the port of Boston or Philadelphia, get questioned and eyeballed by a bureaucrat with a badge, and get the nod to take their first step on American soil. Then they had to find the A&S.

They knew citizenship was not something cheaply held but something bestowed by a great nation.

Did the fact that they had to earn it make joining America even more precious?

Yes. Of course.

We all know it is so often so different now. Perhaps a million illegal immigrants come into the United States each year, joining the 10 million or 20 million already here--nobody seems to know the number. Our borders are less borders than lines you cross if you want to. When you watch videotape of some of the illegal border crossings on a show like Lou Dobbs's--who is not a senator or congressman but a media star and probably the premier anti-illegal-immigration voice in the country--what you absorb is a sense of anarchy, an utter collapse of authority.

It's not good. It does not bode well.

The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.

What does it mean that your first act on entering a country--your first act on that soil--is the breaking of that country's laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?

If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?

When you don't earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? When you are allowed to join a nation for free, as it were, and without the commitment of years of above-board effort, do you experience your joining that country as a blessing or as a successful con? If the latter, what was the first lesson America taught you?

These are questions that I think are behind a lot of the more passionate opposition to illegal immigration.

There are people who want to return to the old ways and rescue some of the old attitudes. There are groups that seek to restore border integrity. But they are denigrated by many, even the president, who has called them vigilantes. The New Yorker this week carries a mildly snotty piece by a writer named Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in which he interviews members of a group of would-be Minutemen who seek to watch the borders with Mexico and Canada. They are "running freelance patrols"; they are xenophobic; they dismiss critics as "communists" and "child molesters."

How nice to be patronized by young men whose place is so secure they have two last names. How nice to be looked down on for caring.

And they do care, that's the thing. And pay a price for caring. They worry in part that what is happening on our borders can damage our country by eroding the sense of won citizenship that leads to the mutual investment and mutual respect--the togetherness, if that isn't too corny--that all nations need to operate in the world, and that our nation will especially need in the coming world.

This is what I fear about our elites in government and media, who will decide our immigration policy. It is that they will ignore the human questions and focus instead, as they have in the past, only on economic questions (we need the workers) and political ones (we need the Latino vote). They think that's the big picture. It's not. What goes on in the human heart is the big picture.

Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?

Our elites are lucky people. They were born in a suburb, went to Yale, and run the world from a desk. Which means this great question, immigration, is going to be decided by people who don't know what it is to sleep on a bench. Who don't know what it is to earn your space, your place. Who don't know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country. Who don't know what it is to feel you're a little on the outside and have to earn your way in to the inside. Who think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.
The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.

You just have to marvel at this piece of troglodytism masquerading as intelligent populism. Noonan gives voices to the erroneous notion that the immigrants of our parents' and grandparents’ generations all earned their citizenship, got here legally, and have some halo of sanctity for their struggles while today's immigrants waltz across the border in Mercedes. She promenades the notion that today, unlike our glorious past, immigrants have no allegiance to the US and come and go as they please. That they have it so easy.

All of this glosses over the regular stories of individuals who die in the desert from heat and thirst trying to make it here, of families bundled into the back of baking semis. It ignores that families are often separated as they try for better lives for themselves. That some travel up through Central America by foot, plodding towards the modern version of freedom’s shores. Would Noonan’s beloved, law-abiding Irish ancestors have waited patiently in Ireland had they not been separated from the US by 3000 miles of ocean? I think not. Previous generations haven’t immigrated illegally because of a thing called distance, geography and technology. In 1900 it was pretty hard to sneak into New York Harbor in a boat. This notion that those who came before valued it more highly while today Mexicans come and go with impunity and little allegiance or interest in America is simply fasle. In fact, as John Whiteclay Chambers showed in a 1992 book, immigrants 100 years ago often made the return trip home within 5 years of arriving here and came only for short term work. It’s nice to think that everyone who came here fell in love with the place and never intended to go back but large proportions of them did go home.

Noonan implies that we are so together now. That they are, by contrast, so different. In other words, they are so Latino. Noonan ignores those illegal immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe. If this isn’t a not so subtle way of playing the race card I don’t know how much clearer she would have to be. Maybe she should shout “Hey they are brown non English speakers don’t forget. Note how she claims to not be interested in economics or facts or statistics. Rather she is concerned “with what it is to be human.” The baldness of the prejudice quite takes your breath away doesn’t it? Could she have more explicitly suggested that these waves of illegal immigrants are somewhat less than human and therefore exempt from our humane consideration?

Oh yes, things are so different now, as Noonan says. But are they? Only if you note that the difference lies in the origin of these people. Otherwise things aren’t different at all. There is little evidence to suggest that Hispanic immigrants have endured less hardships, have had it easier, have been more indifferent to civic obligation, have been less American than previous generations of immigrants. My grandfather spoke little English and spent most of his life speaking in Yiddish. Maybe Noonan would throw him in the less than human category too since he wasn’t a native English speaker. I don’t know. But the ridicule she heaps on a New Yorker reporter for having two last names pretty much lets you in on what she is up to.

Noonan is playing on the worst kinds or prejudice against all of the enemies of the white working class. She is tapping the economic resentments of the so-called Reagan Democrats -- the less educated working class people who have seen a diminishment in their standard of living (in part due to globalization rather than immigration) and who struggle now to make ends meet and sustain the lifestyles and cultural dominance they enjoyed after the Second World War. These are the folks who feel the prosperity of the 90s passed them by or has long since left them. The poor New Yorker reporter may have a hyphenated name for a lot of reasons but Noonan goes out of her way to draw lines between us and all the thems out there – those effete liberal snobs with two names and an education sufficient to insulate them from the vagaries of the global economy or to actually improve their lot. Those poor dust covered brown folk who stumble across a desert trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. Yes, they may be breaking our laws but at least have the decency to recognize the sacrifices they are making, the hardships they endure, and their hope for a better life, which they happen to share with all of us.
Republicans know that there is a large swath of their base simmering in resentment at their lot in life. At the rise of homosexuals in prominence in American society. At the rise of previously unseen and unheard from minority groups. At the decline of the white male and the rise of the female in the work force. At the deterioration in economic opportunity, political, and social influence that has attended all of these changes for a large segment of Americans. At the same time that their economic prospects have eroded they have watched other groups rise in the social strata. The immigration question taps that resentiment (yes I meant to spell it that way) and suggests that you have a solution to those problems. That you are on their side.

But their problems have little to do with immigration and a lot to do with global integration – which we as a nation and the Republican Party in particular have been championing for some time now. And few Republican policies are aimed at doing anything to redress the economic plight of this voting block. The Democratic failure to articulate an agenda that these people could believe might help them has left them open to choosing the candidates that best tap their current resentments and anger. Clinton in ’92. Bush in ’04.Immigration is a serious and complex issue, but we aren't going to make good policy if we rely on cheap arguments and error filled (and often misleading) claims to advocate for one side or another. Those like Noonan, Congressman Tom Tancredo and, in our state legislature, Representative Welker are the ones who would like you to think this issue is an easy one. But for the nation to make progress on the policy side we need to do a number of things.

First we need to be honest about who wins and loses because of illegal immigration and have an honest accounting of the public and social costs and benefits. This means we will have to decide if we want to pay more for our agricultural produce in order to achieve reduced immigration. More to get houses built and sidewalks paved. Then we need to decide if we want a wall between us and Mexico. Yes an actual wall which one proposal on the table and is not unprecedented in history nor an ineffective solution. We will also need to decide if we want to spend more on enforcement and if we will be willing to raise taxes to do that. Finally, we need to dedicate ourselves to greater social and economic justice throughout Latin America and Asia. Unless those people enjoy freedom, freedom to start businesses, to bargain collectively, to stand up to the oligarchic powers which control their societies, oppress and exploit them and their poverty, there will always be millions willing to come to America. And we will have an immigration issue.

Lock Him Up and Throw Away the Key

2005-12-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that life has become cheaper, nastier, shorter and more brutish in the last 5 years. first we have human behavior after New Orleans. We have our reprehensible behavior towards suspects in the war on terror and suspected 'enemies of the state.' We have more poor people. More people without health care. Now folks are hoarding flu medicines and can you blame them? Why should they think that any kind of organized and reasonable response to a crisis will be forthcoming from our revenue starved and incompetently run government. Still, in spite of this I read the article below and say "what do you mean he's not a monster?"

Drivers told cops of run-ins with road-rage murder suspect
By Amy Herdy Denver Post Staff Writer

Looking back, Michael Clark realizes things could have turned out in a more frightening way.

On July 5, Clark was driving south on E-470 when a man in a pickup truck tailgated him and then nearly hit his car, blaring his truck's horn and extending his middle finger at Clark, who was left shaking and angry.

"I've been driving for 30 years, and this was one of the most aggressive drivers I'd ever seen," Clark, 46, who is in the Air Force, recalled of that afternoon. He immediately called 911, wrote down the truck's license plate and reported the incident.

Later, Clark discovered that State Patrol officers identified the driver of the truck as Parker resident Jason Benjamin Reynolds, 32, a heavy-equipment operator charged with murder in a Nov. 8 road-rage incident on E-470 that killed two people.

In the past two years, records show, Reynolds has been reported to law enforcement in seven other incidents of alleged aggression and violence, with most stemming from his actions while he was behind the wheel of either his Ford pickup or Jeep Wrangler.

"He's pretty scary," Clark said. "The guy needs to be removed from society for a while."

On Wednesday, the day he was due to be sentenced for a July reckless-driving charge in Douglas County, Reynolds instead stood in an Arapahoe County courtroom, charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of vehicular homicide in the Nov. 8 deaths of Greg Boss, 35, of Lone Tree and Kelvin Norman, 50, of Highlands Ranch.

Reynolds is being held without bond. Both he and his family were in shock over the murder charges, said his attorney, Michael Steinberg.

"He is stunned. His family is stunned," Steinberg said, adding that the media has wrongly depicted his client as someone without a conscience.

"He is someone who cares very deeply about the other individuals and the families involved," he said. "He's being portrayed as a monster, and he's not."

Family members of the deceased men declined to comment.

The arrest affidavit in the case quotes a witness saying that Reynolds was driving his Jeep Wrangler southbound on E-470 shortly after 5 p.m. when he began to tailgate Norman before passing him and then swerving back in front of him, slamming on his brakes. Reynolds later told investigators his boot became jammed on his brake pedal while changing gears. He claimed that Norman intentionally rammed him.
According to the witness, Norman swerved to avoid Reynolds and then lost control of his Toyota 4Runner, which hit the rear of Reynolds' Jeep before it flipped and landed upside down in the northbound lanes on top of a Ford Explorer driven by Boss, who died in the collision.

Norman, who was wearing a seat belt, was "explosively ejected" by the force of the impact, which also decapitated and dismembered him, the report said.

A tow-truck driver called after the accident, Joseph Wentz, 35, described Reynolds' demeanor at the scene as "very aggressive and almost heartless."

"His response to the fact that the man in the 4Runner had died was, 'I hope it doesn't seem mean, but he got what he deserved and what he had coming,"' the arrest affidavit shows.

One investigator noted that during his interview at the scene, Reynolds "seemed irritated and his attitude was indifferent to the deceased drivers of the other vehicles."

"We are making them powerful over there so we don't have to fight them here

2005-12-14T23:18:00.000-07:00

The Shia will walk away from Friday with the lion's share of control over the Iraqi government. The two most powerful Shia political parties, the ones that will come out of this with the big wins, are the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is known by the initials SCIRI. Both were founded and funded by Iran in the 1980s. Both have a history of spectacular violence against the United States and other nations. "These guys are murderers," says former CIA agent Bob Baer, who dealt with Dawa during the 1980s. "They were the core element that blew up our embassy in Beirut in 1983."
Paul Mulshine, writing last week for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, encapsulates this amazing turn of events. "What would you call someone who wants to hand over control of Iraq to a group of terrorists that first made its reputation by blowing up a couple of American embassies?" wrote Mulshine. "I'd call him President Bush. The group is called the Dawa party. In the early 1980s, Dawa terrorists bombed our embassies in Kuwait and in Lebanon. They were universally recognized as vicious America-hating, Iranian-supported terrorists. Now they're part of the coalition that is expected to win control of the new Iraqi parliament in Thursday's elections."
"The other coalition partners aren't much better," continued Mulshine. "The sanest group on the Shi'a side is the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. A 1984 Washington Post story portrayed the group, known by its initials SCIRI, as 'a kind of parent organization for four operational terrorist groups.' SCIRI was founded in Iran a couple of years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini with the goal of taking control of Iraq. Now, they're about to do so, courtesy of George W. Bush."
A walk through history serves to remind those afflicted with short attention spans of who exactly is about to take control of Iraq.
A story from US News and World Report dated December 26, 1983, titled "The New Face of Mideast Terrorism" describes the bombing of the American embassy in Kuwait: "The terrorist who detonated the truckload of explosives at the US Embassy in Kuwait was identified as a 25-year-old Iraqi belonging to an outlawed Moslem unit, the Iranian Dawa Group."
A story from the Associated Press dated February 11, 1984, titled "Trial of Bomb Blast Defendants Opens" describes the trial of 21 people charged with bombing American and French embassies: "Of the other defendants, 17 are Iraqis; two, Lebanese, three, Kuwaitis and two are stateless. Most of them said they belonged to Al-Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, an Iraqi movement of Shiite Moslem fanatics who are pro-Iranian."
A story from the Associated Press dated December 27, 1986, titled "Five Groups Claim Responsibility, Iraq Accuses Iran" describes the attempted hijacking of an Iraqi jetliner that resulted in the deaths of over 60 people: "The hijackers acted in cooperation with the Dawa party of pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites."
Etc.
A sharp indictment of SCIRI and its ties to Iran and terrorism can be found, of all places, within the pages of the report put forth by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. This commission, put together to investigate the events of and leading up to September 11, heard expert testimony from Mark Gasiorowski, professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies at Louisiana State University.
In his testimony, Gasiorowski stated, "From the early 1980s until about 1996, Iran was directly involved in a wide variety of terrorist activities. It provided extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups such as Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Afghan Northern Alliance and its precursors." Gasiorowski goes on to state that Iran continues to support several terrorist groups, and includes SCIRI among them. "They are most strongly committed to Hezbollah and SCIRI," said Gasiorowski, "with which they have worked closely for over 20 years."
Excellent. It seems the best path to electoral victory in Iraq, besides kissing babies and avoiding assassins, involves a long history of terrorism and extreme violence against the United States. Former CIA agent Bob Baer stated in Mulshine's article, "So now we have a Shia terrorist state. Was this worth $6 billion a month?"
Almost certainly, we will hear apologists for both the Bush administration and the invasion downplay the incredible terrorist histories of the groups about to take over the Iraqi government. "Sure they were terrorists," we will hear, "but they're OK now." In other words, they are terrorists, but they are our terrorists.

What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?

2005-12-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

Oh no not this again.

Bob Novak Says President Knows Leak Source - Yahoo! News
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Columnist Bob Novak, who first published the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, says he is confident that President Bush knows who leaked Plame's name.

Novak said that "I'd be amazed" if the president didn't know the source's identity and that the public should "bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is."

Novak's remarks, reported in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, came during a question and answer session Tuesday after a speech sponsored by the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Keep in mind that Bush is (and Cheney too) purported to have told Fitzgerald that he doesn't know who the source of the leak is. The key here becomes when did Bush learn what Novak says he knows. If it's before he went to the grand jury then it's Clinton redux, only this time it's a national security investigation rather than a sexual harassment investigation that provides the context for perjury.

Thank God for Ahmadinejad

2005-12-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

By rights the Iranians aren't Arabs but Persians, nevertheless I think that Abba Eban's old adage still holds -- only it should be broadened here: "the ~~Palestinians~~ Arabs/Persians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

Iran's Ahmadinejad says Holocaust a myth Reuters (via Yahoo! News):

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that the Holocaust was a myth, ramping up his rhetoric and triggering a fresh wave of international condemnation.
....

Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guardsman who was elected president in June, said in October Israel must be "wiped off the map," provoking a diplomatic storm and stoking fears about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Washington accuses Tehran of seeking nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is only for generating electricity.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the Holocaust remarks could weigh on European Union efforts to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

The wonderful thing about nutjobs like Ahmadinejad is that they help pull back the shroud of obscurity around which Arabs have learned to wrap all their statemnents about Israel and Palestine. They appeal to European sympathies and support by saying that they merely want "their" land back and that is all. But you will rarely find an Arab politician explicitly say that their interests are limited to the lands of the West Bank and Gaza. This usefully serves the European's purposes of saying that the Arab position is quite reasonable, while allowing the Arab politicians to turn and wink at the Arab street, who fully understand that "our land" encompasses all of Israel.

There are three positions one can take on the settlement of the Palestinian problem or Israeli question -- choose whatever represents how you look at the situation. There can be two nations that live side by side and coexist peacefully. There can be a single nation ruled by whatever kind of pluralistic system can manage this mess of various cultures and ethnicities that often hate each other. Or the Palestinians can drive the Jews out of the land (and into the sea if you wish) to go live elsewhere.

Most Europeans wonder why the solution cannot be the second, although they seem to forget that there is nothing in their history that suggests that a multi-cultural nation can live in peace without eventually finding reason to start slaughtering one or another of its own ethnic groups. In fact, the only model of such a system that has so far worked for a sustainable amount of time is found here on our shores and our own history highlights how difficult this task really is. The Arab street really wants the last option while a few Arab moderates can envision the first option but cannot see how they are going to accomplish this within the current situation.

Of course, a fourth view not presented above might be called the Likud view which might be called the greater Israel view which would argue that there is already a Palestinian nation called Jordan and that all of the historic Biblical territories should be incorporated into Israel's boundaries. It is the limited reality of this idea that is causing the political fissures in Israeli politics we see today.

A Few Bad Apples?

2005-12-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

If you don't think that the secret CIA prisons story, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition and all the other related stories of torture and abuse being connected to America aren't together one of the greatest threats to our national security and the most significant issue to damage our national name you have your head so deep in the sand you think that kicking being delivered to your posterior is another Ostrich coming up to say hi.

U.S. Envoy Says Detainee Abuse Was Worse Than Described - New York Times:

"RAMADI, Iraq, Dec. 13 - The American ambassador in Iraq said today that more than 100 detainees had been abused in two Iraqi detention facilities, more than had been previously disclosed"

What is also clear is that this idea that Abu Ghraib was just the work of a few bad eggs or rotten appples is a bunch of bull. The policies related to abuse came from the highest levels of government, are at best condoned by Rummy and Cheney, and if there were excesses that came from soldiers and others getting carried away, well what do expect? You start rolling a boulder down the hill and sooner or later its going to jump the fence and start crushing things.

Historians Say...

2005-12-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

It had to come to this. That a reporter would take the rules of media treatment of subjects so far as to suggest that everything is subject to interpretation.

Iran's president questions Holocaust - Yahoo! News

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday expressed doubt the Holocaust took place and suggested the Jewish state of Israel be moved to Europe.
....

Historians say six million Jews were killed at the hands of Germany's 1933-1945 Nazi regime. Ahmadinejad's remarks drew swift rebukes from Israel and Washington.

Historians might say that the Civil War was fought over economic reasons. They might say that the German people had a willingness to do Hitler's work. But historians don't say it is Monday when it is Monday or that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. These are facts and they speak for themselves.

Where Have You Gone Joe Leiberman?

2005-12-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

A Party Turns It's Lonely eyes to You. Boo Hoo Hoo

Daily Kos: Feel the Joementum

by kos
Wed Dec 07, 2005 at 10:07:05 AM PDT
People get emails:

From: Sherry Brown
To: 'Sherry Brown'
Sent: Tue Dec 06 21:31:36 2005
Subject: Sorry for the blast email....

But the Courant is doing an online poll in which we have just fallen behind between Lowell Weicker and Joe Lieberman. We've been ahead all day, but one of the internet bloggers got hold of it and is promoting it among the extreme lefties.

Go to the Main Page - see Joe's picture and then there is a link "Weicker - the antiwar candidate?" click onto that page - scroll down - right hand side there is a poll.

Let's turn it around!!! Thanks. (and please note that I did NOT ask you for money, which may be a first)

It's kind of funny talking about "extreme lefties" voting for Weicker, a former Republican. It's also kind of funny hearing talk about "extreme lefties" coming from a Democrat.

Update: The poll can be found on this page.

I would take Weicker in the Senate over Leiberman. How about you?

Joe Leiberman Hikes Up His Pants and Jumps in the Deep End

2005-12-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

...The war debate, Lieberman said, is being too poisoned by partisanship....

"We can't tolerate the kind of division that current exists in our country," the senator said. "Why are we fighting among those who have the same goals?"

Excuse me? The public's poor opinion of the war in Iraq is a product of Democratic whinging? The acrimony of Washington is driven by Democratic political posturing? What side is this guy on and who is he appealing to? Or has he just lost the plot? I have to say I have never quite understood his pom pom enthusiasm for the war in Iraq. I could understand if he felt that once there we need to prosecute it right. But his position all along has been a bit shaky and even today he quite can't admit he has been sold a bill of faulty goods by the Administration. Democrats haven't undermined the Administration's credibility. The Administration has. Ask Tucker Carlson or David Brooks, even they will agree to this.

Is It Any Wonder?

2005-12-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Check out how cynical our society is becoming. On MSN's tax advice page today we have this gem of an idea.

A last trick -- and it's legal!Here’s one trick I’ll bet you don’t know. I call it the Schnepper-Malagoli Charitable Tax Grab. Rent your home to any charitable organization during the year -- up to 14 days total -- and pay zero tax on the rental income. (Internal Revenue Code Section 280A (g), for those of you who feel compelled to look it up.)

Say your church, synagogue or any recognized charity rents your home for a board meeting. They pay you $500. That money is completely tax-free. Then, without any compulsion or prearrangement, you contribute $600 to this same charity. If you’re only in the 25% bracket, you save $150 in tax. The result: With the $500 tax-free rental income, you’ve got a total of $650 more in your pocket, less the $600 contribution, which gives you a grand total of $50 and your favorite charity $100.

One meeting per month (12 is less than 14 days) and you’ve “made” $600, while the charity is up $1,200! Was it intended when Congress drafted the tax code? Clearly, no. Is it completely within the clear wording of the code? Absolutely, yes! Just because it’s a loophole doesn’t mean you can’t legally do it. And, there’s nothing wrong with doing well while you’re doing good.

The key here is the phrase "without any compulsion or prearrangement." The whole deal of cycling money through your charity to reduce your tax bill rests on a tacit understanding between you and your church or synagogue or whatever. But unless you belong to some kind of Congregation of the ESP, I don't quite know how you are going to arrange for a rental fee of $500 a day for use of your home and a kick back of $600. Are taxes that onerous? They pay for relief efforts in the Gulf. They pay for our troops over seas. They build our roads. They maintain our public health. They fund important scientific research. The list goes on. But here we have someone counseling us to enter into fraud with a charitable institution. It's only fraud of course if the agreements are explicit. But how else would you arrange this? And anyway, who would belong to a church with this kind of cynicism?

Barnett's Future

2005-12-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

One rumor emanating from Betsy Hoffman's departure is that Governor Owens and Coach Barnett friend and confidant on the Regents, Pete Steinhauer cut a deal that Barnett could stay if Hoffman were to go. Well, in the wake of CU's 70-3 drubbing at the hands of Texas today, I wonder if we can make the argument that, "forget the scandals, the guy can't coach." Barnett has a great coaching record, but for that matter so do a number of others who clearly overstayed their welcome. After too long, players tune a coach out. If Colorado aspires to football eminence and wants that to be a rpiority (not that I think this should be in college), then performance dictates that they need a coaching change.

$300,000 Is a High Price to Pay for the Myth of Shared Governance

2005-12-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

Faculty Council Chair Rod Muth has been forced to retract the eminently reasonable suggestion that, since it appears that Hank Brown is likely to become the permanent President of CU, perhaps we could save our institution the $300,000 set aside for the search and spend it somewhere else. Is this the kind of fiscal sensibility that passage of C & D wrought?

CU faculty chief drops idea of halting president search

The leader of the University of Colorado's Faculty Council retreated Thursday from a proposal to suspend the presidential search and stick with interim president Hank Brown. Rod Muth didn't even present his idea to the 39-member council, which voted instead to remind regents not to stray from a search that involves all levels of the campus community.

Faculty were outraged last spring when regents appointed Brown to take over for the resigning Betsy Hoffman without campus input. A 12-member committee that includes administrators, professors and a student is searching for CU's permanent president.

A month ago, Muth told regents the $300,000 presidential search is a charade that will end up with Brown as president. He criticized regents for excluding faculty in the past but said they should save money by postponing the presidential search. He suggested resuming the search after Brown, 65, announces how long he would stay.

I believe in shared governance and in fact I study it for a living. But let's call a spade a spade. It's currently a fiction here so why pay a professional search firm $300,000 (a ridiculous notion to begin with) to find a replacement for Betsy Hoffman?

The Regents do what they want in regards to leadership selection so let's dispense with the notion that our input contributes anything to the process. The only group benefitting from the search process is the consulting firm we will hire and pay a quarter of a million dollars to sift through all the resumes that come in and give us five of the most outstanding ones. That's a line of work I need to get into.

Why such a search should cost more than the price of an ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education is completely beyond me. It's not like we need to be secretive about our search. And a search committee could certainly find a way to provide candidates confidentiality. And it is doubtful that we will need to approach candidates because they were not aware the job was open. But given that Muth is right and the outcome seems predetermined, why pretend that spending this money gives any honor to the notion of shared governance? If anything -- it makes even more of a mockery of it. Better to vote a motion of disapproval of the Regent's first actions, dispense with the search firm, evaluate Brown as a permanent candidate and pass along to the Regents a recommendation up or down on the idea of Brown remaining as permanent President rather than merely acting.

Problem

2005-11-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

Woops. Seem to have lost my comments.

Am I the Only One...

2005-11-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't get how the apparent contradiction in this case can be reconciled?

Suspects in court over 'Jazeera bombing' leak - Yahoo! News:

"LONDON (Reuters) - Two men appeared in a British court on Tuesday accused of leaking a secret document which a newspaper said showed that U.S. President George W. Bush wanted to bomb Arabic television station Al Jazeera.

The hearing came a week after the Daily Mirror reported that a British government memo said British Prime Minister Tony Blair had talked Bush out of bombing the broadcaster's headquarters in Qatar in April last year.

The White House has dismissed the report as 'outlandish' and on Monday Blair denied receiving any details of a reported U.S. proposal to bomb Al Jazeera.

Defendant David Keogh, a civil servant who used to work at the Cabinet Office, was charged with making a 'damaging disclosure of a document relating to international relations.'

His co-defendant Leo O'Connor, once a researcher for a former member of parliament, was charged with receiving a document which he knew, or had reason to believe, was protected against disclosure by Britain's Official Secrets Act."

How can it simultaneously be the case that the report is outlandish and Blair claims he never received any reported US proposal to bomb Al Jazeera while at the same time the two men in question are in court for having breach official secrets? Wouldn't a libel claim (something emminently prosecutable in the UK) seem a more reasonable charge? I mean, if the documents in question do show this and they are official secrets then how can they not be true?

I Love This Excuse

2005-11-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

Catholic hospitals under fire (Denver Post)

Catholic nonprofit hospitals - including Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives - are increasing income while charging high prices to patients with no health insurance, according to a report by a Latino advocacy group.

The study, based on annual tax returns filed by CHI and six other large Catholic hospital systems, found net income doubled between 2003 and 2004.

At the same time, uninsured patients are being charged up to seven times as much as those covered by federal Medicare, according to the report.

The advocacy group that prepared the report, Calfornia- based Consejo de Latinos Unidos, is urging the Roman Catholic Church to intervene on behalf of the poor and uninsured.

"Rather than defending their congregation, the Catholic Church continues to let their nonprofit Catholic hospitals price-gouge," said K.B. Forbes, the group's executive director.

A spokesperson for the group representing Catholic health care providers said the uncertain nature of the U.S. health care system forces them to have plenty of reserves.

There is so much to be said here but I think this statement at the end really says it all. A Catholic nonprofit organization that has forgotten its mission. A health care system that is broken. And the indifference of us all.

First Mis-step

2005-11-22T17:03:00.000-07:00

Obama Calls for Troop Reduction in Iraq:

"CHICAGO - Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday called for a troop reduction in Iraq and criticized the Bush administration for questioning the patriotism of people who have spoken out against the war.

'I believe that U.S. forces are still a part of the solution in Iraq,' the Illinois Democrat said during a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. 'The strategic goals should be to allow for a limited drawdown of U.S. troops, coupled with a shift to a more effective counter-insurgency strategy that puts the Iraqi security forces in the lead and intensifies our efforts to train Iraqi forces.'"

I haven't been following Obama's career so far in the Senate enough to know if this is his first mis-step, but I can say that this is pretty lame and weak. Whatever your position, trying to have it both ways only makes you personally look weak and indecisive and like just another politician. All the evidence so far indicates two things. 1) That the insurgency, while currently targeting Shia, is an outgrowth of the US presence. and 2) That the US needs more troops not less in Iraq. Richard Holbrooke was recently on Charlie Rose and noted that if the US had used the same proportion of troops in Iraq as it did in Bosnia and Kosovo, we would have had 600,000 troops at least on the ground, not an armed force smaller than the New York City Police Department.

So either you should take the Murtha route and call for an immediate withdrawal, a principled and not totally unreasonable position, or you should call for a time table and a boost in troop numbers. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that a gradual step down of troops starting now with out evidence that the Iraqis are ready to take over will do anything other than worsen an already terrible situation. The pockets of insurgency will strengthen and spread and chaos becomes more likely, not less.

Is This News?

2005-11-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Vatican Rejects Actively Gay Priests:

"VATICAN CITY - Reiterating its stand against sexually active gays in the priesthood, the Vatican also says in a new document that men with 'transitory' homosexuality must have overcome their sexual tendencies for at least three years before entering the clergy."

What exactly is news about this position? Wouldn't it be odd for them to embrace actively homosexual men but not actively heterosexual men? Doesn't that kind of come with the whole celibacy thing?

A Couple of Things

2005-11-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

The Flu Levee

Remember that $250 million Republicans cut from the Army Corps of Engineers request to shore up New Orleans levees? Well last night's supposed attempt to restrain federal spending cut $8 billion from the effort to prevent a flu pandemic from wiping through the U.S.

Wait Till Next Year

There ought to be a law against an elected official setting a target date for a policy at a year after he or she will be out of office.

President Bush's press office issued a statement from Pusan, South Korea, where the president was meeting with leaders of Southeast Asia, praising the action on the budget cuts.

"I applaud the Republican Members of the House who passed a significant savings package that will restrain spending and keep us on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."

This is so comforting

2005-11-16T23:39:00.000-07:00

Capitol Hill Blue: White House keeps dossiers on more than 10,000 'political enemies':

"Spurred by paranoia and aided by the USA Patriot Act, the Bush Administration has compiled dossiers on more than 10,000 Americans it considers political enemies and uses those files to wage war on those who disagree with its policies.

The "enemies list" dates back to Bush's days as governor of Texas and can be accessed by senior administration officials in an instant for use in campaigns to discredit those who speak out against administration policies or acts of the President."

Don't Forget to Ask...

2005-11-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

Wednesday the Senate committee votes to confirm Ben Bernanke (disclaimer: my old Macro professor) as Fed Chief.

Latest News and Financial Information from Reuters.com - Bernanke sees Fed mandate for jobs, stable prices :

"At a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on his nomination as Fed chairman, the White House economic adviser pledged to be independent of politics and expressed confidence in the economy's vigor despite recent hurricanes."

I wonder if anyone bothered to ask him if that included statements about policy choices such as tax cuts, benefit cuts to Social Security, and plans like privatization? Seems to me Greenspan could have used a primer on the Fed Chief's role in that regard.

About that GM Pension Plan...

2005-11-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

It pains me to har that GM will have to declare bankruptcy because of its health care obligations.

Consumer Reports Article - MSN Autos: "See Best and worst for a list of the models that have earned the best and worst Predicted Reliability Ratings in various vehicle categories. Following are some of the more notable survey findings:

Of the 31 cars that earned top rating, 29 were Japanese. Of these, 15 were from Toyota and its Lexus division and eight were from Honda. Some redesigned or new Japanese models from Toyota and Honda, however suffered 'first-year blues.' The new Scion tC and the redesigned 2005 Acura RL, Toyota Avalon, and Honda Odyssey earned only average reliability scores, for example.

Of the 48 cars that earned the lowest rating, 22 carry American nameplates, 20 are European, 4 are from Japan (all from Nissan and its Infiniti division), and 2 are from South Korea."

Sorry but it will declare bankruptcy because of mismanagement. But health care is still a crisis.

As a Nation, We are New Orleans in the Face of Katrina - Does Anybody Care?

2005-11-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

A 'fiscal hurricane' on the horizon - From USA TODAY

Sadly, it's no laughing matter. To hear Walker, the nation's top auditor, tell it, the United States can be likened to Rome before the fall of the empire. Its financial condition is "worse than advertised," he says. It has a "broken business model." It faces deficits in its budget, its balance of payments, its savings - and its leadership.

Walker's not the only one saying it. As Congress and the White House struggle to trim up to $50 billion from the federal budget over five years - just 3% of the $1.6 trillion in deficits projected for that period - budget experts say the nation soon could face its worst fiscal crisis since at least 1983, when Social Security bordered on bankruptcy.

Can't Say As I Agree

2005-11-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

Rodriguez edges Ortiz for AL MVP Award

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez captured his second American League Most Valuable Player Award on Monday, edging out Boston slugger David Ortiz.

Let's see, Rodriguez batted about 20 points higher than Ortiz and also played third while Ortiz is the DH. Other than that Ortiz was infinitely more valuable to the Red Sox. He won 20 game by himself in his last at bat and is a proven cltch hitter. Rodriguez? Well that performance in the playoffs about sums it up.

If He Didn't Exist, You Would Have to Invent Him

2005-11-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster - Yahoo! News:

"VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they 'voted God out of your city' by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.

All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce 'intelligent design' - the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

'I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,' Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's '700 Club.'"

La La Land: Or, How Not to Make Message

2005-11-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

Excuse Me, But This is Not How You Play Tit For Tat

Congress's top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.
The Post's article, published on Nov. 2, has led to new questions about the treatment of detainees and the CIA's use of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The issue dogged President Bush on his recent trip to Latin America and has created consternation in Eastern Europe.

"If accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) wrote in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Hastert is obviously Speaker because he just does what he is told. I can't believe he is this stupid. Where is the outrage and demand for investigations of the allegations themselves? If all the GOP can do is get ginned up about the leak and think this is some moral equivalent to the Plame case, they clearly miss the point of both cases.

Frist Worried About Leak, Not Prisons
JONATHAN M. KATZ (AP) Thursday, November 10, 2005; 12:59 PM
WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he is more concerned about the leak of information regarding secret CIA detention centers than activity in the prisons themselves.
Frist told reporters Thursday that while he believed illegal activity should not take place at detention centers, he believes the leak itself poses a greater threat to national security and is "not concerned about what goes on" behind the prison walls.

Lions and Republicans Eat Their Young

LOS ANGELES - The across-the-board collapse of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot propositions came down to this: They were ideas with narrow appeal, further damaged by a flat-footed campaign and an unpopular messenger, the governor himself.

And that's just what his fellow Republicans said.

Kansas Education Board First to Back 'Intelligent Design'
Schools to Teach Doubts About Evolutionary Theory
Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 9, 2005; Page A01

TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 -- The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation's scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

By a 6 to 4 vote that supporters cheered as a victory for free speech and opponents denounced as shabby politics and worse science, the board said high school students should be told that aspects of widely accepted evolutionary theory are controversial. Among other points, the standards allege a "lack of adequate natural explanations for the genetic code."

I think this story speaks for itself. Or it should.

John Bogle Tells It Straight

2005-11-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

A great interview on NPR by Rene Montaigne today about a book that most Americans won't hear much about by the press but which pretty much puts its finger on what has gone wrong in our capitalist system -- written by that great capitalist himself John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Investments.

A financial expert explains what’s wrong in corporate, investment, and mutual fund America, the reasons behind the problems, and what should be done about it.

There is no one better qualified to tell us about the failures of the American financial system and the grotesque abuses that have taken place in recent years than John Bogle, who as founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard mutual funds group has seen firsthand the innermost workings of the financial industry. A zealous advocate for the small investor for more than fifty years, Bogle has championed the restoration of integrity in industry practices. As an astute observer and commentator, he knows that a trustworthy business and financial complex is essential to America’s continuing leadership in the world and to social and economic progress at home.

This book tells not just a story about what went wrong but, more important, the story of why we lost our way and of how we can right our course. Bogle argues for a return to a governance structure in which owners’ capital that has been put at risk is used in their interests rather than in the interests of corporate and financial managers. Given that ownership is now consolidated in the hands of relatively few large mutual and pension funds, the specific reforms Bogle details in this book are essential as well as practical. Every investor, analyst, Wall-Streeter, policy maker, and businessperson should read this deeply informed book.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Keep the Spotlight on Cheney

2005-11-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

If you didn't see it, find someone who had the foresight to record it because it was a tour de force of hard-nosed prosecutorial straight talk. The guy is completely untouchable by the Republicans and they will make fools of themselves if they try any of the arguments that they have been floating in this their most desperate week in the past five years, like "it's a technicality" or "the charges are partisan." The Bush-Cheney cabal has been fooling people about their fundamentally corrupt nature for so long that when someone like this (a doorman's son from Brooklyn no less!) comes along and says basically "the VP's chief of staff lied repeatedly to FBI investigators and the grand jury in the course of a national security investigation about the disclosure of the identity of a CIA officer" it totally punctures their balloon.

Rove may yet escape (although he will continue to twist in the wind) but unless Bush can find it within himself to do what he seems incapable of doing - namely clean house from top to bottom and make it clear that Dick Cheney is not the president - he may as well just go back to Crawford now and start planning for McCain's inauguration in January 2009. (Sorry Hillary.)

It's interesting to see the various reactions in the 48 hours since the indictments were announced. I saw a segment on CNN with an editor from the Nation and an editor from the WSJ. Both were incredibly lame. The editor from the Nation couldn't help overreaching: this indictment is all about the war, etc., which it might me eventually but as Fitzgerald himself said, correctly, it's not now.

One thing his press conference should have shown both sides is that in these matters precision in language is very important. What is clear from the indictment itself is that Libby learned about Wilson's status as a CIA employee from a number of sources inside the government, including the sitting VP.

This fact, in itself, raises very serious issues that the Democrats need to focus on like a laser. The fact that Cheney learned of Wilson from Tenet and then passed that information on to Libby is the thread around which whatever else comes will be woven. Every single Democratic elected official should be asking one question, and one question only, right now, and they should be asking it every time a television camera or microphone is close by: What exactly was said among Tenet, Cheney, and Libby when they talked about Valerie Wilson? That's what the public has a right to know and if Dick Cheney is not willing to talk about it (Scooter's reticence is understandable since he is under indictment) then he should resign.

Of course, the WSJ editor was beyond absurd. His argument was two-fold: First, Joe Wilson wasn't truthful either, a charge that keeps being repeated by the right, although I couldn't tell you what the nature of his untruthfulness was, and it clearly wasn't in the context of a criminal investigation. Moreover, so what? You mean someone being untruthful places them and their family at risk of fragging by the forces of the administration? The second argument, which has been adopted, sadly, by the supposedly reasonable right-wingers at the Times, Tierney and Brooks, is that the indictment shows that there was no underlying crime (Tierney) and no underlying conspiracy (Brooks).

These guys either weren't paying attention to Fitzgerald or are simply falling in line with the White House spin machine. Both conclusions are false. As Fitzgerald made clear, he didn't charge under the 1982 Espionage Act because he couldn't figure out the facts because Scooter Libby lied about what happened. That's why the penalties for perjury and obstruction are the same as for the underlying crime; because those crimes prevent the investigators from discovering the truth and confirming whether or not a crime was committed.

Regarding the conspiracy theories, I agree that the usual cast of characters on the left are already overplaying their hands, but again even the facts we know from the indictment show that a number of government officials, including the VP himself, were making it their business to know about Valerie Wilson and the net result of their doing so was that she was outed. This does not reflect well on anyone involved and whether or not a crime was committed we as Americans have the right to expect that the people on our team like Valerie Wilson will not be attacked by other people who are supposedly on our team, especially not by people at the very top like the VP.

From the political rather than criminal perspective, of course, we also have the right to ask whether this kind of behavior was limited to this instance and whether it continues to this day. My guess is that the answers to those questions are no and yes. How far it goes we may never know until someone (including but not limited to Scooter) talks. My intuition is that if we could know what happened we would see a distinct difference between the Bush team and the Cheney team. Bush defers completely to Rove, who appears to relish walking up to and then dancing just on the line between nasty, amoral, hardball politics and criminal activity. Cheney thinks he gets to draw the line itself, and when it comes to his own actions the chalk stays in his pocket.

-ckallaher

Douglas Bruce: Nimrod

2005-10-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

Doug Bruce is either the stupidest man in Colorado – giving David Harsanyi, Denver Post columnist a run for his money, or the most banefully indifferent to the truth.

Last week he held a press conference on the steps of the Capital decrying the salaries at CU. He claimed that over 1,800 people make over $90,000 a year (the Governor’s salary). There are so many things pathetic about this attack that I don’t even know where to begin. For one thing, the issue here isn’t CU – it’s the rest of higher ed in the state. CU gets only 8% of its revenues from the state anyway. What is at stake with Referenda C & D regards what citizens want for the other institutions in the state. The fact is that we face a 20% cut in higher ed funding next year if C&D fail. That’s the non-partisan office of the budget and planning talking. And with cuts like these the future of places like Fort Lewis College, Metro State, and Adams State is bleak indeed.

I am not quite sure what Bruce wants from higher education. Why are the people who choose this profession supposed to take a vow of poverty? They are highly trained and highly able who happen to have most of the kinds of skills that people need in the new economy of the US. They are actually highly mobile. I know shills like he and Mike Rosen would like to think that the folks in higher ed couldn’t go anywhere else and earn a living, but the fact is that most of them actually could do better in the private sector. The Right typically has in mind the erudite scholar of Sumerian hieroglyphics or the Latin scholar. But for a wide number of disciplines, the ability to think mathematically, or scientifically, or to write clearly are skills that actually come at a premium in this society. They also come at a premium in academia and if faculty don’t get their due here they can go elsewhere and they will. There are lots of states and lots of public institutions (Texas A&M comes to mind) desperate for skilled faculty who right now would prefer to stay here.

Bruce targeted one fellow in particular who earns over $750,000 – woah highway robbery you say! Well he is a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University Medical Center who happens to lead the faculty in that department. That’s not exactly a skill we in society don’t pay a premium for nor is it likely that this person has few other employment prospects. The salary he earns is what is necessary to get him to focus on imparting his skills to others for our benefit rather than keeping his head down in the chests of his own patients earning himself another Mercedes or Lexus. Nevermind that less that $2,000 of his salary comes directly from tax revenues supplied by the state.

Such folks on the Right are typically the first to scream socialism when we decry the outrageous salaries of CEOs and others in this society. But the fact is that academics actually face a labor market that functions a heck of a lot better than the market for CEOs. It’s quite competitive. Sure you can have a flagship filled with faculty who cannot make more than $90,000. But they will be mediocre faculty and your state will be well on its way to making Mississippi look like the Research Triangle or Silicon Valley. In fact, why cast aspersions on Mississippi? Colorado ranks below that state in per pupil funding for K-12, in funding for health care and in funding for higher education. I still don’t get why the advocates for C&D never just ran ads with those facts statistics in them. Let the people see how pitiable the public sector is in comparison to 49 other rivals in area after area.

Why suggest dire circumstances in the future when the situation is already not just dire but laughable. Public spending in one of the wealthiest states in the union is a joke and if people don’t think they will eventually pay a price for that I have some oceanfront property to sell them down in Arizona. States are competing with each other to attract businesses and skilled workers. So far, Colorado’s natural amenities have compensated for its woeful public infrastructure. But the rate at which students graduate and go on to college, student performance on test scores, and other indicators suggest Colorado will soon be breeding a large segment of youth without skills or prospects and no place to go. Think about that for a moment.

It would be nice to maintain the illusion that in a Democracy people could compare facts and arguments and make their opinions accordingly. But when the other side doesn’t really care about the truth or much of anything other than keeping their tax bill as low as possible (never mind what they end up paying in private insurance costs and maintenance fees on the gated communities they have to live in) what’s the point in pretending that democracy is what the other side is practicing?

Galbraith had it right: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Allow Me to Just Say

2005-10-29T10:55:00.000-06:00

That Daily KOS's Armando kicks butt and takes no prisoners.

Daily Kos: We Know Who Outed Plame

One of the most frustrating things I keep hearing on these idiotic cable shows is the line that even now we don't know who the leaker of Plame's identity was (I mean all of em, including Olberman.) Honest to Gawd if another person says that I am going to toss my TV. Were they NOT watching Fitzgerald's press conference? Did they NOT read the Indictment? Let me help them now. From Paragraph 14 of the indictment:

On June 23, 2003, LIBBY met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. During this meeting . . . Libby informed her that [Joe] Wilson's wife might work at the CIA.

[more discussion of Libby and Rove's role in the outing.]
....

There. Is that clear now?

Oh by the way, Libby resigned, but the President said this he'd fire leakers like Rove. Any chance of that? Any chance the Media will mention that?

Finally, and this is stupid, but Lou Dobbs had a poll tonight asking if the "millions" spent investigating Plamegate were worth it. Excuse me CNN, but Fitz has spent less than a million dollars so far:

In its first 15 months, the investigation cost $723,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.

You'd think the Press might have a sense that accuracy matters. But then they never have enforced that rule on their op-ed pages. One of the most curious things about the print and broadcast media is their sense that when journalism veers into the area of opinion -- whether or not that opinion is specified as such, rather than journalistic fact -- they suddenly lose the compunction to insist on accuracy. Witness John Stossell, Lou Dobbs, Little Mr O'Reilly, etc... But you see this too in op-ed articles where no fact checking ever occurs and people are free to repeat the worst distortions of reality -- whether it be problems in the Canadian health care system or facts about Referendum C & D here in Colorado.

As for that leaker question. People are still hung up my the misdirection play of Novak who explained that the person who leaked to him was a senior government official without ties to the White House. So folks are still waiting to find out who that was. But it's now clear that official A was Karl Rove so waiting around to find out it's Richard Armitage or Colin Powell is an idle past-time. For some reason people are willing to take Novak's word that he didn't out Rove or Libby when clearly he ratted 'em out like the squeezed stoolie he is.

What Exactly Did WHIG do?

2005-10-25T10:17:00.000-06:00

This is starting to make the October Surprise conspiracy theory look tame by comparison.

Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
By Martin Walker UPI
Monday 24 October 2005

Washington - The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war. And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission - and his disbelief - public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires. If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.

If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.

And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 - seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

One of the prime contentions of the Right has been that Wilson's story has never added up. Bill Kristol repeated the lie this weekend on the talk shows. They argue that Wilson went to Niger in October, before the forgeries surfaced. They argue that he wrote his piece only after they came about. But this story makes the chronology clear and suggests that rather than undermining Wilson's credibility, the appearance of the forgeries was timed in order to discredit Wilson and in order to create this like of attack now parroted by Kristol and others. That's keep you awake at night. Did the WHIG group engineer the forgeries? This would make the Watergate scandal positively look like a big brouhaha over a little blow job.

Larry Wilkerson: It Would Have Been Nice if Your Conscience Had Awoken Sooner

2005-10-25T09:59:00.000-06:00

Bob Herbert NYT
How Scary Is This?

The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration's arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.

"We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr. Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita ... we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were "presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, "You've got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq - a war that the administration foolishly launched but now does not know how to win or end.

Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.

At a recent meeting of nurses organized by the SEIU here in Denver, a nurse who had volunteered in Louisiana after Katrina said, "You better hope something like this never happens here. You better be prepared for a catastrophe, because this government will not be there for you if it happens." Is it any wonder that people are stockpiling retroviral drugs in anticipation of a flu pandemic this winter? Public health officials are begging people to not go out and buy these things now because it is driving up the price and because they need those drugs for people who actually get sick this winter. But can you blame people for this? After everything they have seen from this government? People understand they are on their own in this. They undrstand that they can't count on government protecting them or even basically functioning during such a crisis. Where is the public health response now to deal with what may be a shortage of such drugs resulting from the unfettered action of the free market?

The Why-for and Where-for

2005-10-23T12:39:00.000-06:00

This about says it all.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?

"It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war," writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted liberal supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass, tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave "not knowing the answer."

Maybe. But the leak investigation now reaching its climax in Washington continues to offer big clues. We don't yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a crime, but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real secret they wanted to protect: the "why" of the war.

For me, this remains the great mystery -- why exactly did we go to war. I don't mean the public reason because that has been obtuse and varied enough. I mean what was teh real rationale among the neo-cons and the political hacks in the White House. Was it merely to win the mid term elections? Was it merely to wag the dog ad Rich implies? I would like to believe not. But it certainly wasn't about oil -- the flow from Iraq is still pitiful. It wasn't about Democracy, unless the Neo-cons really are so incompentent that they can't see what a botch of a job they are doing in Iraq. And it wasn't about Al - Qaeda since we have pretty much abandoned our attentions to the region where Al Qaeda really is. Nor, obviously, has it been about WMD. So what was going through their mind? Did they really just think that if we get rid of Saddam that is enough and it will be enough? Did they really misunderstand this region so badly? I guess so. Unless you are hip to something everyone else seems not to be....

The Real Policy Crisis in America

2005-10-23T11:07:00.000-06:00

Excellent article in the Times about the failure of even families with good health coverage to stay abreast of mounting health costs when a serious and chronic illness appears.

When Health Insurance Is Not a Safeguard - New York Times

CAMBY, Ind. - Until the fourth trip to the hospital in 1998, Zachery Dorsett's parents thought their son was an average child who was having trouble getting over a passing illness. He was 7 months old, and it was his second case of pneumonia.

The Dorsetts, Sharon and Arnold, were concerned about Zachery's health, but they were not worried about the financial consequences. They were a young, middle-income couple, with health insurance that covered 90 percent of doctors' bills and most of the costs of prescription drugs.

Then the bills started coming in. After a week in the hospital, the couple's share came to $1,100 - not catastrophic, but more than their small savings. They enrolled in a 90-day payment plan with the hospital and struggled to make the monthly installments of nearly $400, hoping that they did not hit any other expenses.

But Zachery, who was eventually found to have an immune system disorder, kept getting sick, and the expense of his treatment - fees for tests, hospitalizations, medicine - kept mounting, eventually costing the family $12,000 to $20,000 a year. Earlier this year, the Dorsetts stopped making mortgage payments on their ranch house, in a subdivision outside Indianapolis, because they could not afford them. In March, they filed for bankruptcy.

"Zach was really mad at us when we told him we were going to lose the house," Mrs. Dorsett said. "We told him we had to make a choice: whether to pay for medical bills or the house
....

After decades in which private and government insurance covered a progressively larger share of medical expenses, insurance companies are now shifting more costs to consumers, in the form of much higher deductibles, co-payments or premiums. At the same time, Americans are saving less and carrying higher levels of household debt, and even insured families are exposed to medical expenses that did not exist a decade ago. Many, like the Dorsetts, do not realize how vulnerable they are until the bills arrive.

Lawyers and accountants say that for the more than 1.5 million American families who filed for bankruptcy protection last year, the most common causes were job loss and medical expenses. New bankruptcy legislation, which went into effect Oct. 17, requires middle-income debtors to repay a greater share of their debt.

On the Right people deny there is a problem serious enough for government to do anything about it. On the Left, the problem is typically cast in terms of the uninsured. But the problems are so much broader and deeper than that. For one there is the mounting costs. Or another, the declining quality of care -- yes declining. Talk to a nurse and she or he will tell you about staffing shortages, patient errors, and the health care crisis from the inside out. Premiums are rising annulaly. Often business picks up these costs. But the share of premiums born by employees is rising. As are annual deductibles and co-payments. Limitations on coverage and regulation in utilization. This is the health care system experiences by most Americans. The exceptions are the wealthy and the politicians who have voted themselves coverage sufficient to be immune to almost all aspects of the crisis. Congressmen don't feel it when an insurance company dubles premiums in one year. They don't have plans with limited prescription drug lists and large co-pays. They have little to no idea of the plight of small businesses and the self employed who struggle to get adequate coverage and receive almost no tax benefits -- unlike their employed bretheren.

The Sound of the Proverbial Fan Being Hit by Flying "Debris"

2005-10-22T13:49:00.000-06:00

Being corrected on accuracy by Ms. Miller is like being chided for bad health habits by Philip Morris.

Miller-N.Y. Times Spat Goes Public - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case.

In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Miller says Keller's criticism is "seriously inaccurate."

"I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him," Miller was quoted as saying in a Times story Saturday.

According to a Times story on Oct. 16, Miller told Taubman two years ago that the subject of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson's wife, Plame, had come up in casual conversation with government officials, but that Miller said "she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information."

In recent weeks, Miller testified to the grand jury in the leak probe that she had discussed Wilson and his wife in three conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June and July of 2003.

Keller wrote that if he had known of Miller's "entanglement" with Libby, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor who was trying to get her testimony for the criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's identity.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She was freed on Sept. 29 when she finally agreed to testify.

Responding to Keller's criticism, Miller told the newspaper, "I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it."

"As for your reference to my 'entanglement' with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source," Miller said.

Underlying the issue is Miller's own flawed prewar reporting on Iraq.

No deliberate campaign to discredit Wilson? Not aware she was a target of it? Oh yeah I forget -- we all got WMD wrong.

Free Trade and Freedom

2005-10-22T11:50:00.001-06:00

There has to be at least some minimum standard of democracy involved in joining the EU, eh non Giscard?

Novelist stands by Armenian massacre remarks - Yahoo! News:

"FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said on Saturday he stood by remarks about the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks and about the deaths of Kurds in Turkey that could land him in jail for three years.

Pamuk goes on trial in December for 'insulting and weakening Turkish identity' after talking about the massacre, a taboo in Turkey. He also said Turkish forces were partly to blame for the deaths of more than 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 90s.

'I repeat, I said loud and clear that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that,' Pamuk told a news conference in Frankfurt, where he is due to receive a major literary award on Sunday.

Turkey's most prominent writer said he had not used the word 'genocide' to describe the mass killings of Armenians in 1915. 'Whether it should be called 'genocide' or 'mass murder'... or something else, has to be decided by experts.'"

Facing South: ESP wonder; newspapers channel Bush

2005-10-22T00:27:00.000-06:00

via Eschaton

Facing South has noted that several papers are running the identical editorial as if it were the local opinion of the newspaper's editorial board:

"One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs."

It seems the culprit is one of us. Sort of.

Facing South: ESP wonder; newspapers channel Bush:

UPDATE IV: Quick, check out the comments -- the author of the editorial is here! His name is Sean Paige, editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette and a man with a rich history in right-wing politics. On his resume: "Staff Assistant for Communications, White House," personal aide to John Sununu (Chief of Staff to Bush I), and "Press Secretary: Keyes for Senate" (ouch). More on his history here.

And here's the best part: just this month, none other than Sean Paige penned an editorial slamming MoveOn.org members for sending "astroturf" letters to newspapers. Here's a choice passage:

I began noticing patterns in the e-mails — the same rote phrases or analogies that betray an orchestrated letter writing campaign, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of thoughts and feelings.
How COULD they?!

UPDATE V: Just a little context -- the anonymous "house" editorials penned by a GOP operative in Colorado sprung up in newspapers nationally just as Democrats had forced a House vote on a bill to overturn Bush's repeal of Davis-Bacon. 37 Republicans had recently signed a letter saying they wanted Davis-Bacon reinstated.

UPDATE VI (the last?): The great Pam Spaulding points to a piece from 2002 that shows this is likely part of a controversial move by Freedom Communications to have their papers run "joint content" -- stuff that appears local but really isn't:

... let's take a look at how The Gazette is pretending that some of its writers, who work in other states, are actually on staff and crafting their prose from the home office at 30 S. Prospect.

In a widely criticized move earlier this year, The Gazette's owner, Freedom Communications, based in Orange County, Calif., launched an exercise in what it calls "joint content." Essentially, the suits upstairs decided that film reviewing, travel and food were pretty much the same wherever you go.
Read the rest. It's one thing to do this for, say, film reviews. But house editorials that supposedly are the opinion of the local paper's editorial board? Kind of puts a damper on the "spontaneous outpouring of thoughts and feelings," don't you think?

Arianna Catches Miller Out Too

2005-10-21T11:56:00.000-06:00

Arianna Huffington: Sorry, Judy... Everybody Didn't Get it Wrong on WMD - Yahoo! News:

"In the Times' Sunday Judy-Culpa, Judy Miller said of her woeful pre-war reporting: 'WMD -- I got it totally wrong... The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong.'

To which a growing number of journalists are responding: No, we weren't.

Among them is Joe Lauria, a reporter who has covered the UN since 1990 for a variety of papers, including the London Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the Boston Globe. He bridles at Miller's claim. 'I didn't get it wrong,' he told me. 'And a lot of others who covered the lead up to the war didn't get it wrong. Mostly because we weren't just cozying up to Washington sources but had widened our reporting to what we were hearing from people like Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix, and from sources in other countries, like Germany, France, and Russia. Miller had access to these voices, too, but ignored them. Our chief job as journalists is to challenge authority. Because an official says something might make it 'official,' but it doesn't necessarily make it true.'"

This is Big

2005-10-20T20:15:00.000-06:00

Colorado Luis makes a very interesting point -- one Henry Cisneros would be happy to talk about at length.

Colorado Luis: Rule of Law

I'm one of those Bush hating liberal bloggers your mama warned you about. But I never felt terribly strongly about impeachment. Yeah, in a perfect world lying to America to start a war would be an impeachable offense, but you know. But this is a really interesting development -- Bush, who claimed all along that he just knew Karl Rove wasn't involved in outing a non-official cover CIA operative, apparently did know becaue Rove admitted it to him.

This is significant because although Bush did not testify before the grand jury that is investigating possible crimes related to the leak, Bush did give an interview to federal investigators working with Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution team (possibly Fitzgerald himself) in which Bush reportedly said that Rove told him that Rove was not involved in the leak:

"In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson, according to sources familiar with the president's interview. Bush said that Rove never mentioned the conversation with [Time reporter Matthew] Cooper."

It doesn't matter whether or not Bush was under oath. Making false statements to a federal investigator is a crime. Go ask Martha Stewart if you don't believe me.

Count me as officially on the impeachment bandwagon if this pans out. I don't care if partisan Republicans wouldn't impeach one of their own if he was caught murdering someone in broad daylight on the White House lawn. They established under the last president that lying in a legal proceeding is a "high crime and misdemeanor" suitable for impeachment. Beat them silly over the hypocrisy. It's about the rule of law, remember? It's not about the [war], it's about the lying!

Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt

2005-10-20T19:31:00.000-06:00

from the Newsweek story by Isikoff and Hosenball on the Administrations WMD games.

Miller, who had been among the most aggressive reporters in the country writing stories about the threat posed by Iraqi WMD, was quoted in a New York Times article that accompanied her piece last Sunday as saying for the first time" "WMD-I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them-we were all wrong."

Today, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the need for a federal "shield" law to protect journalists from having to disclose their sources, she elaborated a bit: "As I painfully learned while covering intelligence estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, we are only as good as our sources. If they are mistaken, we will be wrong." She made no reference to Libby.

Got it wrong? How about were lied to?

Whatever the implications for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's probe, Miller describes a conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on July 8, 2003, where he appears to significantly misrepresent the contents of still-classified material from a crucial prewar intelligence-community document about Iraq.

With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in Iraq and new questions being raised about the case for war, Libby assured Miller that day that the still-classified document, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contained even stronger evidence that would support the White House's conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs, according to Miller's account.
In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly released just 10 days later, and it showed almost precisely the opposite. The NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that had never been publicly acknowledged by the administration prior to the invasion of Iraq. It also included key dissents by State Department intelligence analysts, Energy Department scientists and Air Force technical experts about some important aspects of the administration's case.

There were lots of analysts who got it right. It was the Press, and in particular the WaPo and the Times who got it wrong by swallowing hook line and sinker the tall tales coming from the White House. It is clear that analysts for the Energy Dept and State and the Air Force could see the case was not black and white. The media would like us to believ that everyone was singing from the same hymn book but they weren't. The Times, in its mea culpa and the Post too both said that they blew this story because everyone took for granted that Saddam had WMD. It was a given. But it was only a given if you weren't willing to do the work or ask the hard questions.

The New Yorker Sees the Light

2005-10-20T12:52:00.000-06:00

George Packer outlines the need for a Democratic agenda -- bold, energetic, and principled.

The New Yorker - The Talk of the Town: Game Plan:

"Instead of trying to cobble together a hypothetical majority with a hodgepodge of small-bore policy proposals, the Democrats need to nationalize the elections of 2006 the way the Republicans did in 1994. A Democratic manifesto that unites the Party's own diverse factions would begin as a referendum on the ruling party: the White House and Congress have handed government over to corrupt interests, and, in so doing, the Republicans have betrayed basic American principles of honesty, competence, and fairness. There is no reason for Democrats to be on the defensive about moral values. On issue after issue, government by cronyism and corruption has sacrificed the interests of the middle class to those of the Administration's wealthy friends. The deepening inequality in American life threatens families and democracy, and it is neither natural nor inevitable.

As a new book, "Off Center," by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, points out, Republicans never won the war of ideas -- Americans remain almost implacably centrist -- but they created a powerful political machine that is tactically shrewder and far richer than that of the Democrats. To overcome these structural disadvantages, the Democrats' campaign approach needs to be broad and bold. Energy: The Republicans have made America more dependent on foreign oil while gas prices are skyrocketing; the Democrats will push for energy independence. Health care: The Republicans have allowed private companies to eliminate choice while costs go up and millions of Americans lack insurance; the Democrats will enact national coverage that restores choice and holds down costs. Taxes: The Republicans have shifted the burden from the top to the middle; the Democrats will reverse that trend, and will end the Administration's ruinous fiscal policies. National security: Republican incompetence has squandered our power abroad and failed to make us more secure at home, as the country learned after Katrina; the Democrats will rebuild the armed forces—making it at least possible for the Iraq insurgency to be defeated—and bring competence to homeland security.

Above all, the Democratic Party needs to overcome its own self-esteem problem. Its leaders have to show imagination and take risks, to be confident and aggressive, to proceed as if the current occupant of the White House no longer mattered—as if the Democrats fully intended to win and govern. The Democratic Party has to speak for the common good in a moral language; and it has to believe what it says, so that when the opposition’s attacks come, as they will, it can find the heart and the courage to fight back."

What's Wrong With Baseball in Miami?

2005-10-19T22:15:00.000-06:00

"Girardi takes over a Marlins team facing a likely roster shake-up. Spending cuts are possible after Loria approved a franchise-record $60 million payroll this season and was rewarded with a late-season meltdown, the second-lowest attendance in the National League and a stalemate in his bid for a new ballpark."

One of these days, someone is going to explain to me why Miami, with its Cuban and Central American populations, has the second lowest attendance in the National League. This isn't just a one time phenomenon. They have struggled with attendance from the start.

Judy Miller White House Shill

2005-10-18T15:52:00.000-06:00

Amidst all the information uncovered in the last few weeks around Plame-gate the clearest conclusion we can draw so far is that supposed First Amendment Martyr Judy Miller, Miss Run-Amok herself, was essentially just a propaganda tool of the Administration and happy to place herself as such. If that isn't ground for firing from a newspapers of supposed repute, I don't know what is. Here's from Frank Rich's piece in the NYT

The official introduction of that product (the War in Iraq) began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

And from the LA Times:

Critics inside the paper and in the wider journalism community said Monday that they found particularly disturbing the revelation that the newspaper's editors seemed unable to control Miller and that the reporter agreed to use a misleading identification to shield the identity of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

The Pentagon also raised doubts about Miller's contention that she had a special security clearance that allowed her to report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.Some critics were particularly harsh, noting that the 57-year-old Miller's work had been questioned before.Her editors had pulled her off coverage of Iraq and weapons issues in 2003 and later ran an unusual editors' note admitting that they could no longer stand by six stories about weapons of mass destruction, or WMD — including five that Miller wrote or co-wrote.
....

But some of her colleagues and others said her relationship with Libby appeared too cozy.They noted that Miller told how Libby asked her for an autographed copy of her book on biological weapons. And they were upset that Miller agreed to Libby's request to be identified as "a former Hill staffer" instead of "a senior administration official."

No reason was given by Ms. Miller on why she didn't just identify Libby as a "former 3rd grader."

George Bush's Island Hopping Strategy, Circa 2003

2005-10-18T15:42:00.000-06:00

I haven't seen this story get much play in the MSM at home.

Bush to Blair: First Iraq, Then Saudi
By Marie Woolf
The Independent UK
Sunday 16 October 2005

George Bush told the Prime Minister two months before the invasion of Iraq that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea may also be dealt with over weapons of mass destruction, a top secret Downing Street memo shows.

The US President told Tony Blair, in a secret telephone conversation in January 2003 that he "wanted to go beyond Iraq".

He implied that the military action against Saddam Hussein was only a first step in the battle against WMD proliferation in a series of countries.

Mr Bush said he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation", says the letter on Downing Street paper, marked secret and personal.

No 10 said yesterday it would "not comment on leaked documents". But the revelation that Mr Bush was considering tackling other countries over WMD before the Iraq war has shocked MPs. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have been close allies of the US in the war against terror and have not been considered targets in relation to WMD.

Remember "Al Gore 'Blogerizes' TV?"

2005-10-16T11:29:00.000-06:00

Last week's news about Apples new video Ipod got me to thinking about the future of the media. And it more and more looks to me like Al Gore is onto something with his new Current TV concept -- TV you can take with you and TV you can interact with.

The SanityPrompt: The Next Big Thing? Al Gore 'Blogerizes' TV

Daily Kos Picks up the Thread

2005-10-14T14:59:00.000-06:00

Daily Kos: Walter Cronkite's Letter to the NYT: An Idea for Dems

Now, the first part of Cronkite's suggestion will not be new to Kossacks: yes, Dems, don't tell us that you have a plan. Tell us specifically what the plan is. But to do this in the format of a midterm convention? What do you all think? Hey y'all, it's Friday and just that should put you in a positive mood. I'd love to see more concrete suggestions here. If we build it, will they come? I see one letter going out to Dean already...

The most striking thing is the number of responses this has elicited and the overwhelming response in favor of it from readers. Check out the poll on this site.

Woops He Does it Again!

2005-10-14T13:05:00.000-06:00

Walter Cronkie, in a small letter to the editor in Today's New York Times, calls for a Mid Term Democratic Convention.

Idea for Democrats: Midterm Convention - New York Times:

"To the Editor:

Re 'Democrats See Dream of '06 Victory Taking Form' (front page, Oct. 13):

The key to a Democratic success in next year's Congressional election is clearly in the party leadership's coming up with a campaign that does not concentrate on the Bush administration's failures but offers alternative programs to fix what it believes is wrong with the Republican agenda.

A suggestion by which the Democratic Party could command the greatest public attention for its positive agenda: It could within weeks call an extraordinary midterm convention to draw up its platform.

The convention would not need to be expensive. The delegates could be those who attended the 2004 convention. Their meeting would be open to the public and of course the press.

In sharp contrast to the secrecy of the Bush administration, it would let the public, if only remotely, share in the construction of the Democratic platform.

Although local issues might cause some candidates in next year's Congressional election to veer from the platform on comparatively minor issues, the basic principles of the party would be clearly apparent.

The voting population would for the first time in many years have an unobstructed view of those principles that differentiate the Democratic Party from those of the Republican Party.

Walter Cronkite
New York, Oct. 13, 2005"

I Feel So Dirty

2005-10-11T15:48:00.000-06:00

I got push polled by John Andrews today on behalf of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. I showered for 30 minutes afterward and still felt dirty.

Andrews is the past President of the state Senate and neo-troglodyte who is working against Colorado's Referendum C. The poll ostensibly wanted my opinion about a number of issues but it didn't seem like the tape recorded message from Andrews was writing any of my responses down. Still, I made sure to answer exactly how I knew they didn't want me to. Did I think judges should be elected rather than appointed? (no) Did I support Referenda C & D (yes) And so on.

Black Tuesday

2005-10-11T14:32:00.000-06:00

Yankees are out and the week after always sucks. Typical exit for this team in the last five years -- complete choke by the pitching staff and meltdown by the middle of the order. Matsui strands 8 runners on base (of the 11 the Yankees left). The Yankees outhit the Angels but muster only 3 runs. Rodriguez manages to bat below .150 for the series and drive in only one run. The only bright notes are that Jeter continues to cement his place in the Hall of Fame. Other than that who knows what is in store. My own preference would be for them to dump Matsui for a better clutch hitter. And buy A-Rod some psycho-therapy so he can deal with his inability to hit in the clutch and in pressure packed situations. He was so obviously pressing.

In other thoughts -- my first proclamations if I could be an old-style commissioner like Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

1) From now on, the season is 154 games long. It's too long today and 162 games is a luxury we can't afford with a 19 game post season. Baseball ought not to be played in November. It snowed yesterday in Denver. I don't want to see baseball players breathing steam. That's for football.
2) there will be 15 teams in each league. It makes no sense that the NL Central has 6 teams and the AL West has 4. But then the teams' schedules don't match up you say? That's what interleague play ought to be for. Instead of having it at the same time each year, rotate it around -- more like the NFL -- to balance the schedule. The current system leads to unfair differences in the schedule that aren't based on records (as they are in the NFL) but only on history. I would rather see the Yankees play the Dodgers and Giants than the Mets. But maybe that's my ham side.
3) No DH in the AL. Nuff said. Make the managers manage. Make the players field.
4) Pitchers have to make their pitch within a certain amount of time. The games take way too long as it is and need to move quicker.
5) Teams get to keep their gate receipts, but the League divvies up all TV money -- both local and national contracts. This can lead to more revenue sharing and maybe more league parity -- and the TV product is a combined product anyway. But the Yankees attract 4 million fans and ought to benefit from that. Tampa Bay can't attract a crowd to their crummy ball park and that's their problem.
6) TV rights ought to be sold locally for games throughout the nation. I turned on Fox the other night -- there were three playoff games going. And I was watching some alien show. Where's the baseball? If the networks don't want to run it, let some local station do it. And I don't mean ESPN which the cable companies hoard into their premium packages to make you dish out $50 a month to watch TV. I mean a local broadcast station with an antenna. If my local TV station wants to show a Yankees game, let em buy the rights.

Make Up Your Mind -- Are Profits Good or Bad?

2005-10-10T11:11:00.000-06:00

Perhaps this should be part of our marvelous media collection. Today, the New York Times tries to "balance" it's coverage by highlighting the money that former Clinton FEMA aide James Lee Witt is making after the hurricanes in the Gulf. Shock. Horror. A man makes money in America doing what he is expert at!

FEMA Director Under Clinton Profits From Experience - New York Times

In rushing into trouble when others were running away, Mr. Witt displayed the energy that won him wide praise for his service as the nation's top emergency official - and the nickname Master of Disaster. The much-criticized performance of FEMA after Hurricane Katrina hit has only enhanced his reputation. But as he applies his skills as a consultant, Mr. Witt is having to step deftly to avoid being perceived as a disaster profiteer.

"I just don't want anyone to say that we used this as a way to profit or to try to get new business," he said. "I just don't want that."

In Louisiana, he cut his usual hourly fee to $275 from $500 for the no-bid state contract and declined to take on any other business there, despite what his partners say are numerous requests. Just one day after his news conference with Allstate, he backed away from his lobbying work for the insurer to avoid conflicts with his advisory role to the state.

Mr. Witt is hardly the first insider to trade on his government experience. Administration officials generally are barred from lobbying their former agency for one year after leaving. Still, some critics find Mr. Witt's business troubling.

Witt cut his fee for no bid contracts. Has pared back his lobbying efforts. What exactly is he doing wrong? Working in an area he has worked at for 20 years or so, become expert and nationally renowned in? Is this supposed to stink of corruption? This isn't exactly the revolving door where Congressmen and staffers move straight into lobbying and call in old favors or administration flunkies set up corporations to get pork barrel projects. But the Times isn't interested in such distinctions. It wants to maintain the appearance of balance in reviewing the sins of both parties. It wants to suggest that any money made off of expertise in government is somewhat suspect. Who is supposed to get these contracts? Someone with no disaster experience or working past in FEMA? This is a similar tact to that taken by shallow man David Broder, whom the Washington Post would have us believe is an eminence gris because he is old. But that doesn't really confer much wisdom or eminence as Broder's case aptly shows. In criticizing the corrupting role of money in politics Broder has chosen to focus on the amount you raise rather than the source or dollar denominations of the money. Bush's fund raising prowess last cycle was well noted as was the fact that most of the money came in large bundles from wealthy contributors and corporate PACS. When Dean began to have fund raising success as well (by getting lots of internet contributions of under $200), Broder insinuated that the Democrats were just as guilty of the Republicans in soiling their hands with fundraising. The distinction of who was giving what to whom and who was owed what was lost to Broder. The stupidity of this argument is boundless.

What Should Be the Model of a Modern Major General?

2005-10-10T03:53:00.000-06:00

In looking for Rahm Emanuel's Meet the Press appearance I read the transcript of Gen. Abizaid's appearance on the same show.

What a performance.

Transcript for October 2 - Meet the Press, online at MSNBC - MSNBC.com

"Well, Tim, of course, you can parse the words any way you want."

"We've come a long way. Moreover, it's very important that people here in the United States understand that Iraqi soldiers are fighting and dying out there for their country."

"They're standing with American forces in the field."

"Look, if you were to look at the readiness system of the United States Army and parse it for the American public, you could come to the same conclusion that somehow or other there's a lack of readiness and a loss of capability. But I'm telling you, there's more people in the field fighting and participating in operations than at any time in the past and their casualty rate is double, if not triple that of which ours is, which means they're out there fighting."

"Well, there's no doubt that we have got to continue to tell the story of what's happening in Iraq. Iraq is a country in the middle of a counterinsurgency operation, and the Iraqis are more and more taking the lead.

"There are peaks and valleys that you go through, but overall, the trend is good. We're certainly confident. And the most important thing we're confident about is that the Iraqis want to do this. They want to take the fight. They will take the fight.

"Already Iraqi forces are taking the fight in key areas. For example, there are parts of downtown Baghdad where Iraqi security forces are in charge of the battle space. There are parts in the south where Iraqi forces are in charge of the battle spaces.

"So progress is being made. More and more Iraqi forces are in the fight. More and more Iraqi forces are developing."

"As far as public relations are concerned, it's very interesting. I go up on the Hill and everybody's wringing their hands and everybody's worried, but when I talk to my commanders in the field, when I talk to Iraqi commanders in the field, people are confident.

"I think that it is an art form getting the level of troops that are fighting any counterinsurgency operation exactly right. And, of course, what we're trying to do not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, is to help the nations in the region help themselves.

"Tim, I knew somehow or other the final throes question would come. I will tell you that the insurgency, as long as politics continues to move in the direction that it appears to moving and the Iraqi security forces continue to move in the direction that they're moving, the insurgency doesn't have a chance for victory.

"[The insurgency is] certainly alive and well, and I don't think any of us that are military people have ever said anything other than the fact that we've got fighting on our hands, especially as we go through this political process.

"Now, look, throughout the region, there is a tremendous surge of reform activity taking place in places where you would have never thought, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan. This reform activity is really revolutionary for the region."

"The promise of a better future is absolutely on the horizon, if they can grab ahold of the politics, if they can form legitimate security forces with our help and move towards a political reform that this very, very bright bunch of people is capable of presenting. I'm optimistic. I think many of the Iraqis are optimistic.

"We've got to stabilize Iraq. We've got to stabilize Afghanistan. We need to help Pakistan help itself. We need to help the Saudis. We need to do those things that bring an environment of moderation to the region, and unfortunately, it won't come without the help of American forces. But, over time, it can become less."

Cab you say shill? I get that according to the Constitution the President assumes the title of Commander in Chief of all armed forces under the US flag. But where does it say that the generals become part of the White House public relations (re political) team? Shouldn't generals in theory be something like the Fed Chief? Neutral in all politics with the responsibility only to give truthful answers to Congress and the public? General Abizaid surely digested his talking points well. He certainly got down that part about "Iraqis are in the field, it's a revolutionary change, we're making progress." But on four or five occasions Russert asked him specific questions that he flat out avoided answering.

The Sox are Gone!

2005-10-07T17:42:00.000-06:00

That would be the Red Sox. MLB - Chicago White Sox/Boston Red Sox Box Score Friday October 7, 2005 - Yahoo! Sports As a lifelong Yankee fan, I smile a contented smile.

Has This Story Gotten Any Play?

2005-10-07T11:05:00.000-06:00

Gore For It (from Change The Party):

Jamal Simmons
"Gore For It"
The American Prospect Online
Oct 3, 2005

"President Bush fell down on the job of leading us so badly in the days after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans that even the reporters at conservative-leaning FOX News could not restrain themselves from criticizing the administration for allowing literally helpless Americans to die from starvation, dehydration, drowning, and heat stroke while waiting days for rescue. The American people, faced with the irrefutable televised evidence of babies screaming for milk and the elderly left to die seems to be losing faith in the president they elected because they believed he would 'be about' protecting them. Thus, the twin tragedies of Katrina and Iraq have pushed Bush's poll numbers down to Watergate-era lows.
....

One man who did care enough to 'be about' leading people to safety was former Vice President Al Gore. Together with Greg Simon, head of the nonprofit FasterCures, Gore defied government bureaucracy, military regulations, and perhaps political interference to charter and accompany two airplane flights into New Orleans to rescue patients and bring them to safety at Tennessee hospitals. While other politicians appeared to be debating whether or not to leave their Labor Day vacations early or to be dithering with their consultants over the political ramifications of various actions and statements, Gore did what many of us watching television from our homes only wished we could do: He flew into New Orleans and rescued people. "

It's About Time

2005-10-06T09:49:00.000-06:00

A Dem steps into the leadership vacuum on health care.

Ill. Gov. Proposes Health Insurance Plan - Yahoo! News

By JOHN O'CONNOR, Associated Press Writer

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Gov. Rod Blagojevich is proposing to make Illinois the first state to offer health insurance coverage for all children, including 250,000 who now lack any such benefits.

Blagojevich planned to propose his "All Kids" program Thursday. The plan, which has the endorsement of Democratic legislative leaders, would target children in families that earn too little for private coverage but too much to qualify for existing state-funded programs.

The interesting question include, can he pull this off? How will this play politically? Net plus or net negative? Health care is a winning issue if Dems can have the courage of their convictions and put it front and center but complicated policy solutions and half measures like this are more problematic since there may not be enough politically significant winners to make the effort worthwhile. Children aren't the most powerful of electoral constituencies.

The Need for a Consumers Bill of Rights

2005-10-05T12:56:00.000-06:00

This is hardly a hot-button issue on everyone's mind right now. But slowly, with the advent of more and more sophisticated technologies, we are losing a large part of what many of us consider to be private. So my reference to a Consumers' Bill of Rights in my last post may have seemed curious to some. But the ACLU has an ad that is not too far fetched if you follow technology even remotely. It's very powerful. Click the link below to watch it

AdCritic Interactive - ACLU Pizza ad

When Will These Guys Get a Clue?

2005-10-03T17:28:00.000-06:00

Mark Schmitt has a great posting on an odd strategy (The Decembrist: Breach of Contract?) that has emerged from the DCCC in recent days -- arguing that Republicans have breached their 1994 Contract with America. This has to be one of the odder campaign tactics elicited in recent years (Schmitt lays out most of the reasons so read his piece) but it underscores how brain dead the Washington inner circle on the Left is these days. Is this the best we can do?

Schmitt points out that Dems are ignoring the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the latest Democracy Corps poll (also referenced by Dan Carol). Get a message - a positive message that articulates what you are going to do. Instead of harkening back to the Republican's message in 1994, get a message of your own. Tell the voters what Democrats will do in their first 100 days in office.

The elements of a powerful Democratic agenda are all there if the Democrats will only take their courage in hand and step into the breach (to mix a few metaphors all together in a blender). There are any number of issues on which Dems can cobble together some policies to communicate a coherent vision of the future and express their principles and their strength to do what is right. How about this for a start (with policy allies in parens and in no particular order)?

Nuclear Proliferation (NTI)

The New Yorker has a great short piece this week on the scandal of the Administration's failure to deal with the threat of nuclear terrorism and their inability to secure nuclear (or nucular if you will) materials. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar head up the Nuclear Threat Initiative which argues at the current pace, we will secure all weapons grade plutonium by 2022. But with a concerted effort (and a little money of course) we can get this done in four years.

Governmental clean up (Campaign for America's Future)

David Sirota and the DLC love to bash their heads together on their differences but on so many issues Dems across the spectrum see things the same way. Ethics has to be a central part of a Democratic message and cleaning up the way business is done in Washington is a first step. Compare the DLC view (here) and the Sirota wing (here here and here).

Election Reform (Common Cause)

In addition to ethics reform in the policy process, Dems have to look at (and continue to stress) reform of election laws and campaign finance. We need to press for further reforms designed to take money out of the decision process in Washington. Anyone who has worked on the Hill will tell you that in 99% of the offices, no decision on a vote is made without first asking -- "how is this likely to affect our fundraising?" That this happens is a scandal. That Dems are silent on the issue is just plain foolish. The continued presences of long lines in poor urban precincts and paperless ballot trails also have to end. But Dems can also gain stature by standing against gerrymandering and playing with disctrict boundaries for partisan advantage. A comprehensive set of campaign reform laws communicates a commitment to democracy, fairness, and the rights of the little guy in the system. Common Cause (& here) has a set of ideas on this issue as do the Center for American Progress and the DLC.

Apollo Alliance

'Nuff said. This one should be a no-brainer for Dems. But you rarely hear it mentioned among the Democratic talking heads. Here we have a union of labor and environmentalists who are committed to finding ways that start here at home to promote energy independence, a cleaner environment, reduce the risks of global warming, and produce jobs and economic growth to boot. Seems like a winner right? So where are the Dems on this? As Dan Carol notes, why spend $100 billion over the next 15 years to put a man on the moon (again) when we could spend that money here at home to make our own planet a more hospitable place.

Repeal the Bush Tax cuts & Tax Reform (Citizens for Tax Justice)

The evidence that these policies have been a fiscal disaster while providing almost nothing in the way of economic growth is mammoth. Under Clinton the Democrats established their bone fides as fiscal prudents. They can recapture that by tapping the growing sentiment that these cuts have primarily benefitted the wealthy but stuck our children and grandchildren with a massive bill at the same time that they will be picking up the tab for our retirement. These haven't been tax cuts but tax deferments that shifted costs from the wealthy to the middle class and the poor. Common ground on the issue exists on both the right (and here) and the left of the Party and even fiscal conservatives among Republicans are unhappy with this legacy. Hand in hand with this has to be tax simplification. The IRS is eliminating over 60 taxpayer help centers because of budget cuts even as the tax code grows more immense and complex from year to year. Democrats have to commit to making the payment of taxes easier and less onerous. And the Republican privileging of capital and wealth over work in the tax code (cuts for capital gains and dividends and increases in payroll costs) has to be underscored.

Consumer Protection (Consumers Union)

A host of privacy and consumer protection issues have emerged in recent years. Not only have Republicans been silent -- they have often aided and abetted the corporate push for expanded power and control at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Rather than fight for community internet, they have sided at the state level with cable company written bills that would prevent municipalities from setting up Wi-Fi networks. ID theft protection still awaits a serious consideration from policy makers and only at the state level has there been much in the way of legislative efforts. Consumers Union, the folks who put out Consumer's Report, have a host of ideas to help communities when nonprofit hospitals convert to for profit status, better product labeling (so consumers can navigate their way through food labels that don't tell you country of origin, provide you with everything you need to know about genetic engineering and other environmental tampering, and assure you of environmental quality), providing community internet, improved community communications and utility services, greater consumer privacy in the wake of further invasions through the internet and the sale of credit card information. In short - A CONSUMERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

Smart War on Terror (Center for American Progress)

"We are safer without Saddam." Do Americans still feel that way? Doubt it. Hendrick Hertzberg's discussion of NTI (above) has a great 100 word encapsulation that captures exactly why so many of us feel less safe four years after 9/11 because of the Bush presidency. What we need urgently is a smart war on terror. We need to get serious about capturing Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri -- that's going to take more men and more money. We need to win the war in Afghanistan and so far indications are that we are slowly losing it, allowing the Taliban to re-emerge and failing to secure large swaths of the country. Meanwhile, Afghani President Karzai rightly points out that much of what is going on in Pakistan is being ignored by the administration. We need to commit to prioritizing women's rights -- a move sure to help us widen the gender gap at home and one way to start is to look at the Global Fund for Women. We also need more citizen to citizen diplomacy along the lines of our Cold War efforts - think Peace Corps, Fullbright, etc... (Thanks Dan) And of course we need an exit strategy from Iraq. Not a deadline, bail out date, but a clear set of objectives and milestones we want to reach while also commiting the resources needed to get us there. If that means moving troops out of Germany, so be it. If that means some short term deficit spending, so be it (a case can be made that this bill will benefit future generations). There are a host of things we need to do right now -- from fixing communications networks so public safety personal can communicate across service boundaries (fire to police) and across geographic boundaries (county sheriffs to city cops); to improving port security and reasserting America's moral leadership in the world.

Health Care Reform

It's only the most urgent domestic issue facing the country today. Whenever the issue comes up in a presidential election (or any election for that matter) the Right puts forward their "reform" plan. So, one year after the last election -- where is George Bush's vaunted plan? Voters have to realize that anything put forward by Democrats would be one more thing on the issue that they have been willing to do than Republicans have. You could comprehensively reform the health care system in any of 4 or 5 different ways (also here). Pick a plan. Personally, my preference is for Kennedy's Medicare for All pitch as the simplest way to seriously communicate a commitment to national health care (a proposal increasingly popular among the desperate members of the middle class). But you could also pitch a more modest set of proposals as first steps.

Corporate Governance Reform

You want an ownership society? How about giving power back to the owners -- the shareholders? This means governance reform to make shareholder democracy a meaningful term. Bush has looked the other way (not to mention Clinton as well) while corporate managers have pillaged American companies and run them as personal fiefdoms. Wall Street Brokerage scandals, MCI, Dennis Koslowski are only the more visible tip of the iceberg of corporate corruption which bloomed in the 1990s as stock incentive programs were converted into devaluing strategies that upped managerial compensation and CEO salaries ballooned to ridiculous (and non-market tested) levels [here, here and here] while corporate performance flatlined.

Fair Trade Deals

The debate up to now has been drawn as protectionists versus free traders. But free trade is cast in this debate as if it were a monolithic and universally agreed upon term. The fact is that the terms of free trade are always subject to human definitition -- what we in the social sciences call a socially constructed concept. Worker protections and environmental safeguards weren't included in the last round of free trade policy considered by Congress (CAFTA), but negotiators made sure to include intellectual property protections and benefits for the pharmaceutical industry. How we define free trade is up to us as a society and Democrats can lead the way by saying we are not going to (to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan) crucify the American worker on a cross made from Chinese slave labor. The old saw that we can reform China using trade incentives has been an empty promise and authoritarian countries the world over have found that the American government really doesn't care about freedom for their people, just freedom for its corporate elites to make a killing off low wage exploitative labor. Sherrod Brown has been a leading populist voice calling for a more sensible approach to trade policy. I am not sure I agree with him on all points but paying more attention to transition costs that result from trade deals and the terms of those deals and how they affect workers at home has to be a precondition for any further advancements in this area.

The list could go on from here. I haven't even mentioned education or policies to combat poverty, Social Security, or immigration, all issues that are likely to be salient in 2006.

The point of all this is that there is an agenda for Democrats for 2006. There are lots of areas where Democrats across the conservative-liberal spectrum can find common ground. Consensus is there. All that remains is for Democrats to start repeating to the voters exactly what they plan to do in the first 100 days of a Democratic-controlled Congress. This is one of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about the idea of a mid-term Democratic Convention. Democrats actually have a deep and well-thought out bench of ideas and policy workshops. They just lack a forum for bringing it all together to craft their vision for 2006. The convention idea is this forum.

The Washington Note Archives

2005-10-03T15:36:00.000-06:00

Further evidence that Democratic Leadership is bereft.

The Washington Note Archives: "Nancy Pelosi: You are Undermining Dems on National Security in Moving Harman Off Intel Committee"

I learned -- in great detail -- about Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's intentions to unseat Representative Jane Harman as Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence on Saturday, the 17th of September but sat on the story, both because I wanted to dig a bit deeper and also because I was being crushed by some other deadlines.

All that said, the story is out, and the Washington Post's Charles Babington has the best run down at the moment. Here is a longish excerpt of yesterday's story:"

I Have ESP

2005-10-01T00:59:00.000-06:00

Just take the opposite of what I say and that's likely to be the best bet. Looks like the White Sox win the Central and the Yankees and Red Sox seem to be battling for the Wild Card/East. But what do I know. At this point it could be anybody in the playoffs of the Indians Sox and Yanks.

The Great Transformation

2005-10-01T00:14:00.000-06:00

Watching a PBS documentary on the 60s the other night I heard from Bats Buchanan how he and Nixon conjured up the idea of attacking the liberal media, a calumny still repeated today. Well, just as Washington politicians rarely hail from the middle class these days, journalists aren't "one of us" anymore either. Journalists used to slave for little money and sided with the little guy because in the society, they were pretty little as well. (Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly has been pushing this story for years -- he still pays himself a pittance to publish his magazine). Here and here.

Peter Jennings leaves estate of over $50 million - Yahoo! News: "NEW YORK (Reuters) - ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who died of lung cancer in August, left an estate valued at more than $50 million, most of which was willed to his fourth wife and to two children from a previous marriage. "

Whatever Peter Jennings politics, I have trouble believing that anyone with this much money can possibly empathize with the struggles of ordinary Americans. Which is probably why we still don't have health care reform -- neither the media nor the politicians "get it."

Germany's Bizarro World

2005-09-30T23:57:00.000-06:00

In Germany, the left wing candidate attacks his opponent for not being strong enough to stand up for peace. In America the right wing candidate attacks his opponent for not being strong enough to stand up and defend America.

Schroeder, Merkel trade jabs on campaign trail - Yahoo! News:

"Schroeder drew loud cheers from a crowd of 5,000 near the Elbe River when he accused Merkel of lacking the strength to stand up for peace if 'powerful world leaders' were to try to pressure Germany into war.

'It's not just enough to have the will, it's a question if she's able to stand up to a powerful partner. She hasn't and that's why she's not capable to lead Germany,' said Schroeder, whose peace stance is popular in the formerly communist east."

Indispensable Reading

2005-09-30T12:54:00.000-06:00

Great Op-Ed by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson about DeLay stepping down but essentially about the Republican legislative edifice -- which stands in stark contrast to the disarray on the left in its singularity of purpose, vision and expression.

The Dispensable Man:

"The examples are endless, but two suggest the whole. The Republican leaders play a game called 'catch and release,' in which they allow moderate Republicans to vote against conservative GOP legislation, thereby burnishing their reputations for 'independence' -- but only once it's clear that the leadership has a majority. Along with their Senate compatriots, House leaders have also perfected their use of conference committees (which are supposed to 'merge' House and Senate bills) to shift legislation to the right and then slam it through Congress on an up-or-down vote.

Like DeLay, Blunt has been a major player in a key part of this new regime: the aggressive effort of GOP leaders to induce powerful private interests to work with and through them. In tandem with the White House, the leadership has encouraged major elements of the Republican coalition -- both politicians and organized interests -- to act as a team. Cooperation with the leadership is the price of access.

Not all of these efforts have been successful, but they've increased the willingness of key groups to cooperate with the GOP, which has enhanced the ability of Republican leaders to deliver the goods.

This edifice of power looks more vulnerable today than at any time in the past decade. But the House Republican leadership won't go down without a fight. Roy Blunt is a product and an experienced practitioner of contemporary GOP politics, and his rise to power promises more of the same. House Republicans may be ready to dump their beloved "

For another must read, check out the same authors indispensable diagnosis of the "ownership society" and the kinds of economic/social policies we really need at this time. Click here. & here. & here.

Congenital Blindness of Future Threats

2005-09-29T23:43:00.000-06:00

Yes, that would be the Republican Party that I am talking about. Katrina we all know about. The global warming charade of the Right is well known. No comes the refusal to believe that anything might happen because of the avian or bird flu.

Flu pandemic could kill 150 million, UN warns - Yahoo! News:

"Nabarro spoke on the same day as the U.S. Senate agreed to spend $4 billion to stock up on anti-viral drugs and increase global surveillance for the disease.

But the money, attached to an unrelated fiscal 2006 spending bill for the military, has not been embraced by the House of Representatives, where it faces an uncertain future.

Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), an Alaska Republican shepherding the defense spending bill through the Senate, said he would try to block the avian flu provision.

Stevens argued that avian flu 'has not yet become a threat to human beings,' and added, 'We ought to wait for the scientists to tell us what needs to be done.' "

We ought to wait....

In 1919 houses hung black wreathes on the doors signifiying a death in the family from the flu pandemic of that year. On some streets, hlaf the houses hung these wreathes. 40 million people died world wide. What are we waiting for. The question is not if but when.

Mea Culpa

2005-09-29T10:47:00.000-06:00

OK. The Indians are swooning and I have to admit I was wrong.

Yankees edge Orioles to take AL East lead - Yahoo! News

In addition -- Rodriguez breaks Lou Gehrig's righty home run record with 47. Think how many he would have hit if Yankee Stadium were right hand friendly? In addition -- manybe he is becoming somewhat of a clutch hitter these days.

Shawn Chacon shuts down the O's (not much of a feat I admit) and has been phenomenal for the Yanks. Clearly showing the talent that led the Rockies to make him their closer last year. Just another piece of evidence that the League and the Rocks are crazy to not deepen the fences, raise the fences, or better yet, store the balls in a hyperbaric chamber as a physicist has suggested.

In the meantime, let's all wait with baited breath for a fabulous weekend of baseball in Boston. Can you say sports bar?

Is This Number 2 Number 4?

2005-09-29T10:46:00.000-06:00

MyDD :: Media Finally Sees Through Bush's 'Number 2 Man' Myth:

"Ever notice how many times the Bush administration and the Pentagon tout the killing or capture of high level al Qaeda operatives? Just how many 'Number 2,' 'Number 3,' and 'Number 4' men can bin Laden and Zarqawi possibly have, anyway? I know, I know. It's an old joke. But while we may realize that, the media has seemed completely incapable of recognizing that maybe not every al Qaeda figure we eliminate is as important as the administration claims he is."

News of the Weird: Law School Prof Sees Pink

2005-09-29T10:39:00.000-06:00

press-citizen.com - Pink opponents make case: Comments made at NCAA review

By Gregg Hennigan
Iowa City Press-Citizen

:

"The pink visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium is intended to have a calming effect on Hawkeye opponents, but the famous color scheme is having the opposite effect on the University of Iowa campus.

Erin Buzuvis, adjunct lecturer at the UI College of Law, gained attention last week after saying the pink visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium promotes sexism and homophobia."

To be more precise she is a lecturer rather than a prof. Still if this is the kind of crisis this woman worries about, things in Iowa must be pretty good. Or she must be pretty silly.

With Friends Like These

2005-09-29T10:32:00.000-06:00

Also Tuesday, CU president Hank Brown said in a speech at the City Club of Denver that tuition could increase as much as $1,000 per student per year and that a community college and a four-year school in Colorado could close if Referendum C fails.

Funding for higher education has declined from 25 percent of the state budget in the 1970s to about 10 percent now, he said. Without Referendum C, he believes it will go to zero.
Referendum C is a November ballot measure that would allow the state to keep billions of dollars otherwise returned to residents under the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights.

Jon Caldara, an opponent of Referendum C, said the legislature has several options, such as cashing in tobacco-settlement assets or finding savings at the universities, that would avoid the dire scenario Brown has portrayed.

But Brown concedes that both sides are painting the worst-case scenarios.

"From my point of view, the debate over Referendum C will not set any record for accuracy on any side," he added.

So which comments of Brown's exactly stretch the truth. That has to be one of the odder moments in political theater. A politician makes his pitch and then tells the reporter we are all lying to your face. Instead of focusing on that, what about dissecting Caldara's claim that we can just raid the tobacco funds. Never mind that the money was never meant to pay for higher education. Never mind that the money is intended to help victims of cigarette smoke. Selling the tobacco settlement is window dressing and the kind of budget gamesmanship that the current administration has been playing for the last 5 years. It also isn't likely to raise the state 3.1 billion dollars as C will. Caldara is willing to lie and lie because he knows that no one is going to ever call him on it in this state.

Harry Shearer Finds Something Not So Funny

2005-09-28T13:13:00.000-06:00

Don't ever say Michael Brown can't ever get prepared for anything. When it comes to saving his own professional skin, he seems quite adept at inventing whatever falsehoods will suit his cover well in advance. In sworn testimony before Congress yesterday Brown first alleged that evacuation orders from the Governor only came right before the storm hit, when they were plainly made on August 27th. Then he alleged that this apparent screw up highlighted earlier here on this blog of omitting the most ravaged communities from the President's disatster declaration was actually the state's fault.

Harry Shearer: Brownie: Still a Heck of a Job The Huffington Post

Brown's unequivocal testimony that in Governor Blanco's proclamation of a state of emergency, she omitted Orleans, Plaquemine, and Jefferson parishes.

BUYER: I would like to ask some questions about the pre- landfall.

So I'd like to know why did the president's federal emergency assistance declaration of August 27th not include the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines?

BROWN: Under the law, the governor makes the request for the declaration and the governors of the states specify what areas, what counties they want included in that declaration.

And, based upon the governor's request, that's the recommendation that we make to the president. So if a governor does not request a particular county or a particular parish, that's not included in the request.

BUYER: All right.

Orleans Parish is New Orleans. I was listening to my colleague, Mr. Jefferson's, questions about when they talked about, you know, they asked for this assistance for three days and then president responded the very next day, not the day that it was made -- the request -- but the governor of Louisiana actually excluded New Orleans from the president's federal emergency assistance declaration?

BROWN: Again, Congressman, we looked at the request. The governors make the request by...

BUYER: Let me ask this. Since you went through the exercise in Pam, was that not shocking to you that the governor would excluded New Orleans from the declaration?

BROWN: Yes.

Pretty shocking indeed. The liberal site Think Progress reacted to its shock by digging up Gov. Blanco's request to the President for the Emergency declaration:
August 27, 2005

The President
The White House
Washington, D. C.

Through:
Regional Director
FEMA Region VI
800 North Loop 288
Denton, Texas 76209

Dear Mr. President:

Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing. The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

This is the kind of fact-checking major media should be able to do with one hand cut off by budget restrictions. How many caught Mike Brown in this act of apparently premeditated prevarication?

The man is either blatantly lying to Congress (still a felony I believe) or is more poorly informed about the realities of the Hurricane than previously revealed -- in which case he was rightly removed from his post -- albeit too late to save hundreds.

Dan Carol highlights the lights at the end of this tunnel

2005-09-28T13:02:00.000-06:00

Catch this great post from Dan Carol at the Huffington Post:

The Blog | Dan Carol: Eureka -- It's A Message! | The Huffington Post

I have written for some time that the search for one single, intelligent and coherent message from this thing people used to call "The Democratic Party" is an exercise in futility. But hey, I'm not above admitting when I am wrong.

Check out the new report from the folks over at The Democracy Corps which serves up a mighty simple roadmap for Democratic message. Here's the relevant portions which suggest four ways to go and a poo-poo for any notion of a blame game, backward-looking Katrina Commission. From a list of more than a dozen proposals from across the political spectrum for moving forward after Katrina, four specific ideas emerged and together form a compelling argument for Democratic leadership:

1. Designate a strong leader with unquestioned integrity to oversee the rebuilding process and the huge sums of taxpayer money going to it. It is most important that this individual have a proven record of efficient, effective management experience and a proven independence from the corporate ties of the Bush administration.

2. Reduce funding and troop levels in Iraq so we can focus more resources on defending and rebuilding our own country. As highlighted earlier, Katrina has fundamentally altered the debate on Iraq and created more support than ever before for this message. But the message framework for this is not about failure in Iraq, it is about taking care of your own home first. There is a growing belief that we are rotting from the inside, ignoring the growing number of poor, homeless, and uninsured in our country while trying to save the rest of the world, and images of people standing on rooftops or bodies floating in flood waters only reinforce this. Given the huge price tag for post-Katrina rebuilding and recovery, everyone but the Republican leadership recognize that hard choices will need to be made, and this is where Americans believe a large share of the funds should come from.

3. Equip first responders across the country with compatible equipment that operates on the same wavelength and allows them to communicate with one another in emergency situations. This relatively modest step is symbolic of the inexcusable failure to make needed changes after 9/11 and;
4. An Apollo project-level commitment to using American know-how to develop and produce alternative energy sources to achieve energy independence within ten years. The panic over gas prices, which we expect will only grow stronger as the weather turns colder, has clearly increased already-strong support on this issue. This is the kind of bold step that Democrats must take if they want to really separate themselves. This issue is very difficult for Republicans, who must either sign on or very publicly carry water for their very unpopular special interests allies.

One last possibility that we must address is the Democratic proposal for an independent commission based on the 9/11 Commission. Voters are not interested in anymore fingerpointing, but they definitively do want to know why government at all levels failed and what we must do to ensure this type of failure never happens again. Broad support for this type of commission is tempered by concern that there was not sufficient oversight and follow through to make sure the changes recommended by the 9/11 Commission were carried out. Americans need reassurance that any investigation include measures for oversight and accountability that will ensure needed changes are indeed made. After all, it is now four years later, and first responders in New York still cannot even communicate with one another in case of another emergency.

Read the full report here.

The Emergence of a Disturbing Pattern

2005-09-28T12:58:00.000-06:00

Well it has worked so well so far, why not keep using it until the well runs dry?

Once again the right wing blogosphere has leapt upon a few incidences of inaccuracy in a media accounting to try to discredit all coverage and accounts which emerged post-Katrina. The implicit message? "If one thing is true you cannot believe any of what you heard. The stories coming out of New Orleans and other places were fabrications of the liberal media." Tim Grieve underscores the emerging theme/meme.

Tim Grive @ Salon.com - War Room

It's quickly becoming conventional wisdom: The media reporting from Hurricane Katrina was largely false, and conditions in New Orleans weren't nearly as bad as the press made them out to be. The right is gloating about another Rather-gate triumph over the liberal media and saying that it's the press, not the federal government, that ought to be investigated. At the National Review Online, Fox News contributor John Podhoretz says that the media is guilty of "retelling fiction as fact." Rush Limbaugh says the press is still spreading false stories about Katrina with the "express purpose" of dividing the nation. And bloggers like Gateway Pundit -- proudly checking in "from the heart of JesusLand" -- are cataloging the "folklore vs. fact" of Katrina.

But before this goes too far, perhaps we should take a look at just what it is that the media got wrong. According to stories in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Los Angeles Times -- the reports on which the "it's the media's fault" meme seems to be built -- the press failed by passing on exaggerated claims about the violence that was occurring in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune says: "As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath have cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know." Building on the Times-Picayune's analysis, the Los Angeles Times reports on conclusions that "newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center."

So the media, oftentimes relying on rumors that spread through overcrowded evacuation centers and were then repeated by government officials, overstated the death toll of the storm and the barbarity of some of its victims. That ought to be good news and vindication for the citizens of New Orleans, who were often made out to be opportunistic looters and savages -- particularly by voices on the right who seemed to think that criminality was the biggest problem facing that city. But what do these reports say about the government's response to Katrina? How do they undercut criticism that the Bush administration cut funding for levee work, that Republican policies have exacerbated the problems of poverty and race, that the president was slow to return from his vacation, that FEMA bungled matters left and right? They don't. They simply don't say anything about those issues at all.

The same message also appeared yesterday on the Huffington Post. But in all cases the truth is that the poor black folks villified by the media and the Right post Katrina were not as badly behaved as they were depicted. So far, no one has steped forward to contradict the pathetic response of state, local and Federal officials. The Right is asking people to disbelieve their eyes -- of hundred of families perched precariously on rooftops waiting resuce sometimes for days. Of bodies rotting and swelling and floating in the streets. Of looting that went on before our eyes. Of people bearing arms and forming groups out of fear and an effort to stay alive in the mayhem. And what of the distortions?

This Huffington Post is somewhat guilty of glossing over the sordid reality by minimizing the situation. The author notes that only6 people died at the Superdome and far fewer people were raped than we were led to believe. Well, for one thing, I always thought the worst horrors were at the Convention Center, not the Superdome. Second, what kind of world do we live in where we minimize this kind of reality by saying '' it's really not that bad." The truth that should matter is not how badly behaved were citizens (turns out not that bad) but how badly did officials handle the situation. Recently resigned police chief Eddie Compass highlights the situation. He notes he responded to a rumor of gang raping at the Ritz Carlton by rushing over there himself since his daughter was staying there. But as the main official in charge of security -- where was he supposed to be? If the military this is called desertion. I have sympathy for a father's concern, but the police chief can also send officers over there. The Police aren't supposed to curry favoritism in their responses -- recall how many times we have heard stories of police arriving to save a colleagues family member and then leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

You have to give credit where credit is due

2005-09-27T11:38:00.000-06:00

Who said Republicans don't believe in welfare and handouts? Arabian Horse rules specialist Michael Brown, who has dabbled in emergency relief efforts, has been hired by FEMA as a consultant to aid in the post recovery/relief assessment efforts. Well he certainly knows about what happened their even if we can't quite call him impartial. A little kindness goes a long way. We wouldn't want to throw him out on the street with no way to pay his bills now would we? No one can accuse this administration of not taking care of their friends.