To Each His Own
Mood:  lazy
Topic: Politics
Strong States' Rights Not Likely Key to Left, Right Unity
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
By Radley Balko

Election 2004 gave Republicans, for the first time in a generation, unquestionable control of the White House and both chambers of Congress ? the culmination of a trend that began a decade ago with the Gingrich revolution.

In those 10 years, as the Right has grown more powerful in American politics, it has also abandoned its traditional support for a restrained federal government ? the principle of federalism upon which the U.S. was founded ? in favor of an activist federal government that promotes conservatism.

Consider ?virtues czar? William Bennett's post-election gloating in National Review. Voters had given President Bush a mandate to push conservative values on the rest of the country, ?through both politics and law,? Bennett wrote. Bennett was joined by conservative talk radio, which also urged President Bush to stick it to the gay-rights groups and ?cultural elite.?

The Bush administration has epitomized this new ?big government conservatism.? Avowed states-righters like former Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the supremacy of federal law to overrule the will of the states on issues such as drug prohibition, capital punishment, and physician-assisted suicide. President Bush and congressional Republicans championed more federal involvement in education. Republican committee chairmen secured loads of pork-barrel spending for their home states and districts, just as the Democrats did when they chaired those same appropriations committees.


Just a few weeks ago, on the National Review Web site, conservative author David Frum wrote that ?nearly all conservatives? support Medicaid and Medicare, two of the three largest programs the federal government runs. Not only that, but Frum recommended a tax on high-calorie foods to encourage American consumers to make better decisions about what they eat ? the very kind of social engineering conservatives have long opposed.

However, committed states-righters and libertarians can take heart. Apparently, federalism is not dead. The left, long proponents of big, activist federal government, finding itself unquestionably in the minority, is discovering the virtues of federalism. Facing what could be the lengthy reign of a conservative government, many blue-staters are thinking hard about the advantages of local rule.

Liberal Swarthmore historian Timothy Burke wrote on his blog shortly after the election:

[I]t is a shocking thing to wake up the next morning and feel that one is really the target of hatred, to recognize that one's country is now in the hands of people who hate you, disrespect you, and intend to leave little room for you to live the life you prefer on the terms you prefer to live it ?

Burke then suggested that the left abandon the idea of an influential federal government that dictates top-down policy for the entire country in favor of allowing blue-state jurisdictions to live by blue-state policy and red-state jurisdictions to live by red-state policy.

He isn't alone. University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole suggested on his Web site that the best way for Democrats to defuse hot-button cultural issues such as gay marriage is to privatize the institution, a position long held by libertarians.

Crooked Timber's Belle Waring went a step further, openly courting libertarians to join a coalition with the left. Salon and The Nation have also run pieces entertaining a left-side embrace of states' rights.

Principled federalists such as Tech Central Station's Nick Schulz (writing for FOXNews.com), Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, the New York Post's Ryan Sager and George Mason University's Don Boudreaux have correctly welcomed such sentiment.

The left's newfound interest in local rule, while baldly self-interested, is heartening. Even the most oppressive of public policies are tolerable if the people subjected to them are free to move to cities or states whose laws are more in line with their beliefs. The idea, to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, is to have 50 ?laboratories of democracy? at the state level, and hundreds more at the municipal level, each setting its own laws, each competing for citizens and taxpayers.

But while the left's flirtation with federalism is encouraging, there's also plenty of room for skepticism. The political right once professed allegiance to federalism ? until they started winning elections. Now, after decades of wanting to be left alone, the right intends to use its power to impose its values on the rest of country. And now, after decades of trying to foist one-size-fits-all policy onto the rest of the country in nearly every facet of life ? from gun control to labor and environmental policy to driving laws to education ? the left, now out of power, simply want to be left alone.

Neither is all that surprising. Most people think everyone else should live they way they do. And at the same time, most people resent being told how to live.

Yet, the suggestion that the right and left could find common ground in federalism is problematic, to say the least. Any right-left federalist coalition would require the acceptance on both sides that life in Utah and Wyoming may be very different than life in Massachusetts and California ? even if those states have different laws on gun ownership, stem cell research, minimum wage, or the influence of religious beliefs on public policy. Both left and right would also have to come together to make the kind of cuts and rollbacks in the federal government necessary for federalism to thrive, and would then need to avoid the temptation to use the federal government to subvert federalism during the periods thier "side" happens to be in power.

A state's only obligation would be to respect the basic rights of its citizens inscribed in the U.S Constitution.

Call me a pessimist. But much as I'd like to see it, recent history offers little evidence that any of these things will happen.

Radley Balko maintains a Weblog at: www.TheAgitator.com.

Powell Said Poised to Leave Bush Cabinet
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Politics
Powell Said Poised to Leave Bush Cabinet
By George Gedda
The Associated Press

Monday 15 November 2004

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell has told top aides he intends to resign from President Bush's Cabinet, high-ranking State Department officials said Monday.

Powell, who long has been rumored planning only a single term with Bush, told his aides that he intends to leave once Bush settles on whom to succeed him, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Word of Powell's imminent departure kicked off a new week of Cabinet shuffling for Bush, who is planning his second term.

"I do expect some announcements shortly regarding members of the Cabinet," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters at the White House Monday morning. "There are a few resignation. I expect four today."

McClellan said he did not expect any announcements Monday on replacements, however.

The White House was preparing an announcement to confirm Powell's resignation. According to one official, Powell expects that his departure date will be sometime in January. It was not immediately clear whether he would leave before Bush's second inauguration, on Jan 20.

Most of the speculation on a successor has centered on U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, a Republican and former U.S. senator from Missouri, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Powell has had a controversial tenure in the secretary of state's job, reportedly differing on some key issues at various junctures with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Powell, however, has generally had good relations with his counterparts around the world, although his image standing has been strained by the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Powell, a former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the Bush administration argument at the United Nations for a military attack to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, arguing a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat that the administration could never buttress.

Powell submitted his letter of resignation to the President on Friday. He will go about his usual schedule and will continue at full speed until a successor is named and in place, a senior administration said.

Powell was scheduled to meet later Monday with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and was to attend a meeting of Asian in Chile Wednesday and a mutinational conference on Iraq next week.

He told some two dozen staff members of his projected departure at the start of the day.

For many months, Powell had been viewed as a one-term secretary of state but he has always been vague about his intentions. He had said repeatedly in recent weeks that he serves at "the pleasure of the president."

One senior official said that Powell's departure was part of a much broader Cabinet shakeup, details of which should be disclosed soon.

There had been speculation that Powell might elect to stay on until after the Iraqi elections at the end of January, but the senior official made no reference to that possibility.

Iraq has dominated Powell's attention during his nearly four years as secretary of state. Powell will perhaps be best remembered for that U.N. Security Council appearance on Feb. 5, 2003, during which he argued that Saddam must be removed because of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.

There is no evidence that those claims had any foundation. Powell has maintained all along that the use of force of by the American coalition in Iraq was justified.

Secretary of State Powell Expected to Resign
Mood:  d'oh
Now Playing: My Brother and Boyfriend Babbling About PMS
Topic: Politics
Secretary of State Powell Expected to Resign
By Mike Allen and William Branigin
The Washington Post

Monday 15 November 2004

Resignations from heads of Agriculture, Education, and Energy also expected.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who has sparred for four years with the more hawkish members of President Bush's war Cabinet, plans to announce his resignation today, administration officials said.

Powell's departure - along with the previously announced resignation of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft - signals a transformation of Bush's national security team.

Says he's VERY disappointed with the way things have been handled in Iraq....

The resignation of Powell, 67, a 35-year veteran of the Army who rose to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is among four that the White House plans to formally announce today, adding to a growing list of departures from the Bush administration as the newly reelected president prepares to begin his second term.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to be specific about the latest resignations, but administration officials said Powell submitted a letter of resignation to Bush Friday and told top aides this morning that he would be leaving.

Among the other Cabinet officials resigning is Education Secretary Rod Paige, who informed the president of his wishes last week. News services reported today that Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham also will be leaving. Abraham - like Powell - intends to stay on until his successor is found, the news services reported.

In addition to Ashcroft, Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans has already submitted his resignation.

Administration officials said the departures would be staggered.

The exodus - including the previously announced departure of Ashcroft, who is in charge of several aspects of the fight against terrorism - raises questions about whether Bush will have the continuity that his staff has said he wanted.

Bush is launching the most ambitious legislative agenda of any of his years in office, and his aides are constantly cognizant of the possibility of having to respond to a terrorist attack.

"That's doesn't mean they're leaving today," McClellan said of the officials involved in the latest resignations. "They'll continue to do their job."

The resignation letters carry a variety of dates, indicating that the White House has received a stream of them since the election and has been packaging the announcements.

Administration officials said the list includes Paige, who wanted to stay but was not invited to remain. He will be succeeded by Margaret Spellings, Bush's domestic policy adviser, administration officials said.

Recount in Ohio a Sure Thing - Call on Kerry to Reverse Concession
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Halo 2 - We're Kicking Ass Again
Topic: Politics
Recount in Ohio a Sure Thing
t r u t h o u t | Press Release

Monday 15 November 2004

Green Party Campaign Raises $150,000 in 4 Days, Shifts Gears to Phase II

WASHINGTON -- November 15 -- There will be a recount of the presidential vote in Ohio.

On Thursday, David Cobb, the Green Party?s 2004 presidential candidate, announced his intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio.

Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline.

That question has been answered.

?Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio,? said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

?The grassroots support for the recount has been astounding.

The donations have come in fast and furiously, with the vast majority in the $10-$50 range, allowing us to meet our goal for the first phase of the recount effort in only four days,? said Bobier.

Bobier said the campaign is still raising money for the next phase of the recount effort which will be recruiting, training and mobilizing volunteers to monitor the actual recount.

The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African American voters.

A number of citizens? groups and voting rights organizations are holding the second of two hearings today in Columbus, Ohio, to take testimony from voters, poll watchers and election experts about problems with the Ohio vote.

The hearing, from 6-9 p.m., will be held at the Courthouse, meeting room A, 373 S. High St., in Columbus. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign will be represented at the hearing by campaign manager Lynne Serpe.

A demand for a recount in Ohio can only be filed by a presidential candidate who was either a certified write-in candidate or on the ballot in that state.

Both Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik will be demanding a recount.

No other candidate has stated an intention to seek a recount and no other citizen or organization would have legal standing to do so in Ohio.

The Cobb-LaMarche campaign is still exploring the possibility of seeking recounts in other states but no decision has been made yet.

Who Are the Activists Now?
Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: Linkin Park - Breaking the Habit
Topic: Politics
Who Are the Activists Now?
By Michael Kinsley
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 14 November 2004

Judges that rule for Bush escape that nasty label.

What does President Bush mean, if anything, when he says that his kind of judge "knows the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law"? Every judge sincerely believes that he or she is interpreting the law properly.

Read More...

But has anybody read the 2004 Republican platform on abortion? It doesn't merely call for reversal of Roe vs. Wade. It calls for "legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment's protections apply to unborn children," and for judges who believe likewise. How's that for activism? If fetuses are "persons" under the 14th amendment, which guarantees all persons "equal protection of the law," abortion would be illegal whether a state or the Congress wanted to keep it legal it or not. More than that: There could be no legal distinction between the rights of fetuses and the rights of human beings after birth. So, just for example, a woman who procured an abortion would have to be prosecuted as if she had hired a gunman to murder her child. The doctor would have to be treated like the gunman. And that includes capital punishment in states that have it. And the party that now controls all three branches of government says this is already the case. Only legislation is needed to "make it clear," and judges are needed who will enforce it.

But no "activism," please. The Republican Party can't stand that.

FOCUS: Roe vs. Wade at Crossroads
Mood:  down
Topic: Politics
Roe v. Wade at Crossroads
Newsday

Saturday 13 November 2004

Abortion foes are just one Supreme Court justice away from victory.

Anyone who thinks abortion rights aren't in serious jeopardy should consider the plight of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Specter has been a Republican for 40 years. He's in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January. He has voted to confirm every single one of President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. Despite that record, angry conservatives are determined to block his rise to chairman. Why?

Because Specter supports abortion rights. And because he had the temerity to state the obvious: That Bush would have trouble winning Senate confirmation of any Supreme Court nominee who is notoriously anti-abortion rights. That's a simple mathematical fact.

It takes only 51 of 100 Senate votes to confirm a judicial nominee. But it takes 60 votes to cut off debate and move to a confirmation vote. Come January, there will be 55 Republicans in the Senate. Do the math. That's not enough to derail a determined Democratic filibuster. Specter said he was alluding to that numerical reality when he made the remark that has haunted him all week.

But conservative foes of abortion rights have been emboldened by the perception that they provided Bush's margin of victory Nov. 2. They aren't of a mind to tolerate even the barest hint of resistance to their agenda, which is reversal of Roe v. Wade. That would be a tragedy. It would strip women of the right to control their bodies and turn the clock back to the grisly days of back-alley abortions.

Bush has a choice to make. Option 1: He could opt for polarizing political warfare by nominating anti-abortion absolutists for the top court. He could push for a change in Senate filibuster rules to deprive Democrats of that time-honored tactic and rely on raw political power to beat back all opposition. Option 2: Do what he promised during the campaign - impose no abortion litmus test for judicial candidates, while nominating people who will strictly interpret the Constitution rather than legislating from the bench. That's the better course.

Partisan warfare over the abortion positions of Supreme Court nominees would inflame the country's political division and undermine public confidence in the independence of the judicial system.

Bush has the right to nominate people who share his political views. But he should engage Democrats in the process in search of nominees acceptable to both sides. Democrats have blocked 10 of his lower court picks, employing the filibuster as their weapon of choice. But Bush is in the driver's seat. The Senate confirmed more than 200 of his judicial nominees, many of whom share his anti-abortion convictions.

Anti-abortion forces won't like a less confrontational approach because they're just one justice away from achieving their objective. Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, commanded a 7 to 2 majority in 1973. More recent abortion decisions have seen that majority slip to 5 to 4. There are no immediate Supreme Court vacancies. There haven't been any for a decade. But the court is aging and Chief Justice William Rehnquist was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer. There will probably be one or more spots to fill in the next four years.

Replacing Rehnquist, a solid vote against abortion rights, isn't likely to alter the court balance. But that balance could tip decisively should any one of the abortion-rights supporters leave the bench. That includes Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, as well as swing voters David Souter, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, whose positions on abortion are less black and white.

The nation may be approaching a legal sea change that could end or sharply curtail a woman's right to abortion. But change that profound should be approached through reasoned debate, not a political beat-down.

The Architects of Defeat
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Politics
The Architects of Defeat
By Arianna Huffington
The Los Angeles Times

Thursday 11 November 2004

For Kerry's team, it was the economy. Stupid.

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars.

After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room - confidently, almost cockily - that the election was in the bag.

"If we can't win this damn election,"

the advisor to the Kerry campaign said,

"with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs - if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."

Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done.

But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.

At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing - salvaging their reputations.

They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry's message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq.

"News events were driving this," said Shrum.

"The economy was not driving the news coverage."

But shouldn't it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign?

Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the '92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames.

That the campaign's leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer "the economy, stupid," was the tragic flaw of the race.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I've heard a recurring theme:

that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me:

"I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality - they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."

Vallely, together with Kerry's brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator's closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the

"Truth and Trust Team."

This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush's greatest cl.

his leadership on the war on terror.

"When Carville and Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative,"

Thorne told me this week, "they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum.

So we never defended John's character and focused on his leadership with the same singularity of purpose that the Republicans put on George Bush's leadership.

A fallout of this was that the campaign had no memorable ads.

In a post-election survey, the only three ads remembered by voters were all Republican ads - and that was after we spent over $100 million on advertising."

Cam Kerry agrees.

"There is a very strong John Kerry narrative that is about leadership, character and trust. But it was never made central to the campaign," he said.

"Yet, at the end of the day, a presidential campaign - and this post-9/11 campaign in particular - is about these underlying attributes rather than about a laundry list of issues."

It was the "Truth and Trust Team" that fought to have Kerry give a major speech clarifying his position on Iraq, which he finally did, to great effect, at New York University on Sept. 20.

"That was the turning point," Thorne, who was responsible for the campaign's wildly successful online operation, told me.

"John broke through and found his voice again. But even after the speech the campaign kept returning to domestic issues, and in the end I was only able to get just over a million dollars for ads making our case."

Despite a lot of talk about "moral values," exit polls proved that Iraq and the war on terror together were the issues uppermost in people's minds.

And therefore as Thorne and Vallely, among others, kept arguing, if the president continued to hold a double-digit advantage on his leadership on the war on terror, he would win.

But those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them the economy was the way to go.

"We kept coming back from the road," said James Boyce, a Kerry family friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, "and telling the Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about safety and Iraq than healthcare.
But they just didn't want to hear it. Their minds were made up."

Boyce, along with Cam Kerry, were instrumental in bringing to the campaign four of the more outspoken 9/11 widows, including Kristin Breitweiser, who had provided critical leadership in stopping the Bush administration from undermining the 9/11 Commission.

"We told the campaign," Breitweiser told me, "that we would not come out and endorse Kerry unless he spoke out against the war in Iraq. It was quite a battle. In fact, I got into a fight with Mary Beth Cahill on the phone. I actually said to her: 'You're not getting it. This election is about national security.' I told her this in August. She didn't want to hear it."

The campaign's regular foreign policy conference calls were another arena where this battle was fought, with Kerry foreign policy advisor Richard Holbrooke taking the lead against the candidate coming out with a decisive position on Iraq that diverged too far from the president's.

Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart consistently argued against Holbrooke, and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden expressed his disagreement with this ruffle-no-feathers approach directly to Kerry.

But until the Sept. 20 speech in New York, it was Holbrooke who prevailed - in no small part because his position dovetailed with the strategic direction embraced by Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

Jamie Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, had also argued that Kerry should stick close to the Bush position, and even told the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would probably have invaded Iraq.

Kerry was reportedly apoplectic but did not ask for Rubin's resignation, thereby letting the damage linger for two weeks before Rubin told Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times that he was not speaking for the candidate.

Just how misguided the campaign's leadership was can be seen in the battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign's debate negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum.

"They were so opposed," someone close to the negotiations told me, "to Jordan's accepting the first debate being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up."

It was a familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.

Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage - a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper.

Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues.

Another good illustration of how the clash played out was the flu vaccine shortage, which ended up being framed not as a national security issue (how can you trust this man to keep you safe against biological warfare when he can't even handle getting you the flu vaccine?), but as a healthcare issue with the Bush campaign turning it into an attack on trial lawyers.

"This election was about security," Gary Hart told me.

But when he suggested that Kerry should talk about jobs and energy and other issues in the context of security, Hart said, he was "constantly confronted with focus group data, according to which the people wanted to hear a different message focused on the economy."

The last few days of the campaign, in which national security dominated the headlines - with the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq, multiple deaths of U.S. soldiers, insurgents gaining ground and the reappearance of Osama bin Laden - show how Kerry could have pulled away from Bush if, early on, his campaign had built the frame into which all these events would have fit.

How the campaign handled the reappearance of Bin Laden the Friday before the election says it all.

"Stan Greenberg was adamant," a senior campaign strategist told me, "that Kerry should not even mention Osama. He insisted that because his polling showed Kerry had already won the election, he should not do anything that would endanger his position. We argued that since Osama dominated the news, it would be hard for us to get any other message through. So a compromise was reached, according to which Kerry issued a bland statesman-like statement about Osama (followed by stumping on the economy), and we dispatched Holbrooke to argue on TV that the reappearance of Bin Laden proved that the president had not made us safer."

As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness.

Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes?

In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters.

It appears that you couldn't teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It's time for some fresh political puppies.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arianna Huffington's latest book is "Fanatics and Fools: the Game Plan for Winning Back America" (Miramax).

The Curse Of Bush II : The Devastion Will Be Extreme...
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Politics
The Curse of Bush II
By Dennis Jett
Salon.com

Monday 08 November 2004

Yes, the devastation will be extreme.

The good news?

He'll sow his own destruction.


At some point in the next four years there will be a great scandal that will make Watergate look like a fraternity prank.

All the elements are already in place.

During its first term, the Bush administration took the approach that its policies were divinely inspired and above reproach even though George W. Bush had lost the popular vote in 2000 by over half a million votes.

During the current election administration officials began to crow about Bush's having received more votes than any other president in history before the polls had closed.

The fact that his opponent got the second highest number of votes of any candidate ever won't slow the incumbent down for a moment.

President Bush waves during a victory rally Wednesday in Washington.

(Photo: Ron Edmonds / AP Photo)


In his acceptance speech, Bush spoke of his "duty to serve all Americans."

Vice President Cheney, however, noted that Bush ran on a clear agenda and the nation responded by giving him a mandate.

Therefore Bush's statement that "a new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation" will last as long as the echo of those words did in the auditorium where he gave his victory speech.

At one of his rare press conferences, a day later, Bush said:

"I've earned capital in this election, and I'm going to spend it."

It's clear Bush and Cheney see this mandate and their moral certainty as all they need to justify anything they do.

That mandate will be used to return to business as usual:

using the resources of government to serve the core Republican constituencies and to enrich those in power politically and economically.

More money will be funneled to the religious right and favored defense contractors.

Forty percent of the Pentagon's budget already goes to Halliburton and other companies in no-bid contracts, and that percentage will increase as social programs are cut to spend more on the military.

Bush stressed in his speech that reforming the tax code and Social Security are his priorities for the next term for a reason.

Shifting even more of the tax burden to the middle class is a way to reward the wealthy for their support.

And better yet, it comes with no political cost, since Bush's moral masses apparently worry more about the sanctity of life in a petri dish than their economic self-interest.

Privatizing Social Security will generate billions in commissions for the financial services industry.

And a portion of those profits will be faithfully recycled as campaign contributions to those who made the windfall possible.

Subjecting people's retirement income to the vagaries of the marketplace will pale in comparison to subjecting people's freedoms to the vagaries of the government's security apparatus.

Six months ago the Justice Department was arguing that Yaser Hamdi, who was born an American citizen, was so dangerous that he should be denied every one of his most basic civil liberties.

When the Supreme Court said even Hamdi deserved his day in court, Justice shipped him back to Saudi Arabia and gave him his freedom rather than go before a judge to argue that someone who at best was a Taliban foot soldier was a grave threat to the republic.

But any abuse is permissible if the administration decrees someone an enemy of the state because we are at war - and we will be at war until Bush decrees otherwise.

According to the White House's lawyers, the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war do not apply.

Any obligation, be it law or international treaty, can be ignored if it is inconvenient.

Torture can be outsourced and, even when done by Americans, is permissible as long as the intent is not to murder.

Since the intent of torture is to extract information, murder is never the goal, and so the circular logic winds up back where it wanted to be.

The ends justify any means and the ends can be defined to be whatever is most convenient for the government.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the coming scandal, whether financial or merely moral, is that it may well go undetected and unreported.

With solid majorities in both houses, a partisan Republican Congress will cease to provide a check or balance on the power of the executive branch.

To call the Republicans in Congress the lap dogs of the White House is to insult Chihuahuas everywhere - they at least bark on occasion.

It is no surprise that Bush has been the first president since the earliest days of the republic not to use his veto power.

With ethically challenged Majority Leader Tom DeLay having an even larger majority in the House, there will be no challenge to the administration from that quarter.

Normally the judiciary could be counted upon to play its constitutional role and provide some brake on abuse of power by the White House.

We are, however, only a couple of nominees away from an Antonin Scalia-Clarence Thomas majority that believes in the unchecked power of the executive branch.

Given that the administration is so assured of its own virtue and correctness, it sees no need to share what it is doing with the American public.

As a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recently pointed out, the administration has waged an unprecedented assault on the public's right to know.

By restricting access to information and vastly expanding what is being classified, the administration has choked off public oversight of what the government is up to.

Some might think that whistleblowers will come forward and provide the information the public needs to know.

They will only if they have a particularly strong desire to commit career suicide.

FBI whistleblowers have been sent off to bureaucratic Siberias.

And for those who can't be assaulted directly, there are other tactics, like attacking the person's family.

When retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson pointed out that Bush was using a report, known to be false, that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium from Niger, the administration attempted to discredit him.

When that didn't work it thought nothing of damaging national security by revealing that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA employee.

Meanwhile, the FBI has spent months investing Halliburton's contracts and years looking into the alleged leaking by Larry Franklin, a midlevel Pentagon intelligence analyst, of classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying firm tied to Israel's far right.

Another Pentagon leak that has not been clarified is how its erstwhile favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, learned the United States had broken Iran's diplomatic codes.

He is said to have passed this information on to Iran in order to ingratiate himself to another patron.

Even when a leaker is identified, the damage done might never be made clear.

A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani who helped his country develop nuclear weapons, admitted on television that he provided nuclear-related information to other countries.

Bush claimed to have brought him to heel as an accomplishment of his war on terror.

But Khan was pardoned immediately by Pakistani President Musharraf; he has been under house arrest and kept away from the press ever since.

The White House knows the press will drop most stories after a couple of news cycles with nothing new and that stalling can stave off any lasting embarrassment.

At most a couple of small fish wind up taking the fall - as has happened in the case of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Apparently staff sergeants are the highest-ranking responsible officials in our armed forces.

Can the Washington press corps be depended upon to uncover any further administration wrongdoing?

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the Watergate scandal to vault from obscure reporters to media stars.

Today's media, however, are largely either compromised or cowed. Corporate interests dictate what Fox News portrays as fair and balanced, which is why its viewers are far less well informed than those of competing networks.

But it would be as much a mistake to think that people use the media to inform themselves as it would be to think that the media only seek to present the truth.

The bottom line drives the latter effort. And many readers, viewers and listeners would rather have their worldview validated than be presented with conflicting information.

What's more, never tiring of screaming about the liberal bias of the press, the right has successfully beaten much of it into submission.

And the right sees no inconsistency in using its domination of talk radio, cable television and pathetically predictable print outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdock's tabloids and the Washington Times to do it.

The press is now so timid that investigative reporting takes a back seat to providing an echo chamber for administration spokesmen in the name of balance.

And while its foreign policy has been a failure of monumental magnitude, the administration has been relentlessly successful at filling the airwaves with its alternative version of reality.

When the New York Times reported that 380 tons of specialized high explosives, one pound of which was used to bring down Pan Am 103, had been left to be looted in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the reaction by the administration's surrogates in the press was to attack.

They said it was a liberal media October surprise and that Saddam Hussein or maybe the Russians had moved the explosives before the war.

The Pentagon trotted out a couple of middle-grade officers to fill the air with smoke and claim they had not seen the explosives or had detonated several tons of them.

That neither officer knew anything about the disposition of the 380 tons in question was irrelevant, as the press felt obliged in the interests of balance to aid in the obfuscation.

By the time a Minnesota television station came up with videotape showing that the explosives were still under International Atomic Energy Agency seals after American troops had arrived, that incontrovertible proof was lost in the haze.

So don't look to the press to provide clarity or truth about the coming scandals.

If there is any silver lining, it is that zealots without constraints will eventually hang themselves on their own excesses.

While you can fool most of the people twice, you can't do it forever.

This administration loves to talk about Saddam's mass graves even though the most recent ones date from the mid-1990s.

They never mention the estimated 100,000 Iraqis, half of them women and children, who have been killed while being liberated.

But parallel realties can be constructed and maintained for only so long.

Eventually more people will realize that the Republican morality has no more depth than Bush's intellectual curiosity.

Then new ayatollahs will spring up and try to claim the mantle of the demolished majority, but they will also fail.

Eventually the people will figure out that taxes are the price we pay for a safe and just society and that morality, like democracy, has to spring from within rather than be imposed from above.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis Jett is a 28-year veteran of the U.S. State Department who served as ambassador to Peru and Mozambique. The author of "Why Peacekeeping Fails," Jett is now the dean of the University of Florida International Center.

Oooh ooh... Pick ME!
Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: MTV - Choose or Lose 2004
Topic: Politics
Hello. My name is George Bush and I'm running for President. Please consider my accomplishments as set forth in the following resume.
---------------------------------------------------------------
EARLY RECORD
Please See Attached Page
POLITICAL RECORD (DOMESTIC)


I ran for President in 2000. My campaign was destined to be a miserable failure until I used a whispering campaign of lies in the South Carolina Presidential Primary organized by my chief political strategist, Karl Rove, to destroy genuine war hero and fellow Republican John McCain, claiming he had fathered an illegitimate negro child was emotionally unstable due to his torture as a POW in Vietnam and a possible brainwashed Manchurian Candidate.

In July 2001 I appointed Harvey Pitt to be the chairman of a "kinder, gentler SEC" to ease regulation of foreign businesses. The results have been the largest and most miserable failures of corporate accountability in modern corporate history: Enron, Worldcom, and now Fannie Mae.

I am the first President to unconstitutionally restrict my opponents' First Amendment rights by allowing my supporters to remain at the venue while restricting my detractors to "free speech zones," fenced-off areas up to half mile away from the media, the audience, and especially myself.

I've communicated less with the American people than any other president in the history of televised news, holding only one White House press conference every 3.25 months, compared to my father's 1.6 per month.

To prevent activist judges from rewriting the constitution to serve an agenda that Congress would never approve, I attempted to rewrite the constitution to serve an agenda they never came close to approving. My campaign for the Federal Marriage Amendment was a miserable failure: it failed to pass either house of congress. In the Senate the cloture call to end debate yielded only 48 votes, not the 67 required to pass the Senate, not the 60 votes required for cloture, not even the 50 votes of a simple majority.

My 2004 budget set the record for the largest deficit in history: either $477 billion or $521 billion (CBO and OMB numbers, respectively).

The value of the dollar has collapsed 30% during my term.

Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since I took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during my term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of my inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.

POLITICAL EXPERIENCE (FOREIGN)

As president I ignored Clinton's warnings about Al Qaeda, mentioning that organization only once in public statements on national security between January 20, 2001 and September 10, 2001. In the same time period I mentioned Saddam Hussein 104 times and missile defense 101 times.

On August 6, 2001 I received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" which warned that "the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking." For one month I dealt with numerous other issues until the unfolding of the most successful terrorist attack in US history on September 11, 2001.

With broad international approval I temporarily disrupted the Taliban government, which has now re-emerged to control much of southern Afghanistan after I abandoned this campaign for Iraq.

I campaigned strongly for war in Iraq. I claimed that:

Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (none have been found).


Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda (Iraq opposed Al Qaeda and successfully kept their operatives out of the country before September 2001. The strongest claim to support a connection came from Czech intelligence services and is now retracted. The 9/11 commission "did not believe that such a meeting occurred".)


Iraq would give their weapons of mass destruction to terrorists (A secular Saddam would never give his "ace card" to religious elements he opposed throughout his life and could not control)


The war would be "self-financing" through oil sales ($200 billion total has been allocated, and $138 billion has already been spent with more to follow).


The war would end quickly, with troop deployments down to 30,000 troops by Autumn 2003 (March 2004 troop deployment: 114,000 US plus 23,000 Coalition troops in Iraq; 26,000 US and Coalition logistical support troops in Kuwait).


Americans would be greeted as liberators (Public perception of Americans as liberators dropped from 43% at the time of invasion to 2% after Abu Ghraib).

By invading I would make it more difficult for terrorists to obtain Weapons of Mass Destruction (The only WMD 'discovered' in Iraq was successfully obtained by terrorists and used against Americans. As a result of the invasion, nuclear equipment and materials in Iraq formerly monitored by the IAEA has disappeared and may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or rogue countries. The results have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests.)

I punished those who spoke unwelcome truth:

I sent Joseph Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium, where Wilson determined that those claims were based on forged documents. Despite his report I continued to make public Iraq/Nigeria statements as late as January 2003. When Wilson publicly contradicted me, one of my senior officials exposed the CIA cover of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in an article written by Robert Novak and printed in the New York Times on July 14 2003. No one is sure which senior White House official leaked the order or who was aware, but the fact that I hired James Sharp in June 2004 to represent me as a personal criminal defense attorney is significant when you consider that there is no attorney-client privilege between a president and a White House counsel that allows the counsel to withhold information from a Federal grand jury.

I fired Lawrence Lindsey as my economics advisor in early December 2002 for claiming that the Iraq War would cost between $100 and $200 billion. ($138 billion has been spent and $200 billion has been budgeted... so far)


I fired Jay Garner as US Administrator of Iraq in March 2004 for calling for immediate elections instead of allowing American companies to privatize government-owned assets. (American privatization and lack of a legitimate Iraqi government is one of the major reasons for unrest in Iraq.)


I made US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki a lame duck in June 2003, defying precedent and announcing his successor 14 months in advance of his retirement after he announced that "several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq".

I threatened to have Medicare analyst Richard Foster fired if he replied to Congressional requests and reported that the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill would cost $551 billion, $156 billion over the White House's favored estimate of $395 billion.


After the Iraq Health Ministry released figures showing that US and Coalition forces killed twice as many Iraqis as the Insurgents the Iraqis are supposedly being protected from, I acted decisively by ordering the Iraq Health Ministry to not release any more figures.

I rewarded those who spoke welcome lies, paying Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress $340,000 per month for their false intelligence gathered about Iraq. Although Chalabi and the INC had been dropped from the CIA payroll in 1996 for being an unreliable source and also dismissed by the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) for the same reason, I continued to use Chalabi and the INC to support claims of WMDs in Iraq. Even after their information proved false and no weapons were found I remained so close to Chalabi that he sat with Laura Bush as my "Special Guest" during my September 2003 State of the Union address. I continued to pay the INC regularly until May 2004, when allegations surfaced that Chalabi had passed classified American intelligence to Iran.

I put tremendous pressure on the CIA to come up with information to support policies that have already been adopted (as determined by the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq). When the CIA and DIA refused to verify intelligence items I wanted to believe, Donald Rumsfeld and I created the Office of Special Plans. This independent department within the Pentagon was designed to bypass the CIA and feed the discredited and unreliable information I wanted to believe was true back into the intelligence stream in order to support conclusions that the CIA and DIA could not. The OSP took much of the discredited information from Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.

I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security for nine months, before turning around to take credit for its creation.

I opposed the creation of an independent 9/11 panel. After being forced to accept the commission, I gave it only $12 million in funding to do its work (compared to $50 million combined for Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky investigation) before turning around to take credit for its creation.

My war against Al Qaeda has been a miserable failure:

The International Institute for Strategic Studies' most conservative estimate (May 25, 2004) is that the occupation of Iraq has helped Al Qaeda recruit 18,000 operatives in more than 60 countries.

The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University has found that The war in Iraq did not damage international terror groups, but instead distracted the United States from confronting other hotbeds of Islamic militancy and actually "created momentum" for many terrorists. On a strategic level as well as an operational level, the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism.

By my State Department's own estimates, world terror attacks are now at their highest level in 20 years, up 36% since 2001.

I have held 660 prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba for over two years without trial or formal charge. My prisoners, several of whom were between the ages of 13 and 16, have never been formally charged. They are kept in steel cages, subjected to ongoing torture, and denied access to legal counsel in opposition to Supreme Court rulings (Rasul v. Bush). These prisoners are "the worst of the worst", "hard core, well trained terrorists" and their guilt is beyond doubt, which is why I've set 87 of them free without explanation or apology.

In the past year I claim to have trained 100,000 Iraqi police forces, but only 8,169 of those have passed the required 8-week training course. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained".

My Secretary of Defense is the first in US history to have acknowledged ordering an intentional violation of the Geneva Conventions, in which Abu Ghraib prisoners were held "off the books" and hidden from the Red Cross. When this order was made public I refused to discipline him in any way, instead complimenting him on his job performance.

After being informed of abuses at Abu Ghraib on January 16 (first reported on January 13) which included "Threatening male detainees with rape" and "Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick" I made "freedom from torture chambers and rape rooms" a centerpiece in my speeches until April 29 when the story finally broke on 60 Minutes II.

My administration is the first since the Civil War to imprison US Citizens (Jose Padilla) as "enemy combatants" without charges, trial, or access to legal counsel. In a 5-4 decision (Rumsfeld v. Padilla) the Supreme Court dodged the opportunity to rule on the legality, ruling that the case had been improperly filed.

My administration broke new legal ground by using material witness warrants to give effective life sentences to US citizens without charge, trial, access to legal counsel, or even plans to prosecute.

My justice department was the first in US history to attempt to enforce federal regulations while refusing to disclose what those regulations are.

My legal war against terror has been a miserable failure: I have detained more than 5,000 people on suspicion of terrorist ties, some of whom have been held without charge or without access to a lawyer. I have successfully convicted zero.

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bushresume@monkeydyne.com

It's Not A Terrorist Attack... I Swear...
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Linkin Park - Breaking The Habit
Topic: Politics
You know, this is what happened to Saudi Arabia when they didn't want to get involved in the war on terror - a terrorist attack occured on their own soil. What is it going to take for the world to realize that these bastards will bite off their nose to spite their face, bite the hand that feeds them, you get the idea. Russia will never admit that this was a terrorist attack because then they will be wrong in their handling of world politics. Surprise.

Two Russian Airliners Simultaneously Plummet To Earth.