Spring Showers Bring May Flowers

The wheels are starting to come off. These are the first three stories at the top of Sean-Paul Kelly's excellent blog The Agonist tonight:

New Details Emerging From Early in the White House About Plans to Attack Iraq

Aired March 31, 2004 - 11:30 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Frustrated that Iraqi gunners were shooting at American planes, within weeks of coming into office, President Bush approved war plans for a massive retaliatory attack on Iraq if a U.S. pilot had been shot down.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says the new options were justified by the threat.

White House won't let adviser testify on Medicare drug costs

By TONY PUGH

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to allow President Bush's chief health-policy adviser, Douglas Badger, to testify Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee about early administration estimates that the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit would be far more costly than many lawmakers believed when they voted for it.

And this one is really off the effing wall. Phillip Zelikow is the Executive Director, the principal administrator of the 9/11 commission:

RAQ:
War Launched to Protect Israel - Bush Adviser

Emad Mekay

Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.

WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 -- the 9/11 commission -- in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East.
....
Zelikow made his statements about ”the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president.

He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.

”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.

It sounds like the White House is living on speed and Ambien. Let's see what they sound like after a couple more months of investigation reports and hits of their own devising.

There is a school of psychology, to which I do not subscribe, which says that those in real trouble scream for help. I don't buy it, I've watched too many a**holes bury those around them and get off scott-free. But I note that all these stories broke in the last 24 hours, and they got reported, Air America launched today (no, I didn't listen, I've launched radio programs before myself and it is a kindness to give the first week a pass, just like I don't go to new restaurants in the first month) and I hear Atrios got great reviews, and Kos will be on in future segments. The stars are beginning to align.

Spanked to Baghdad?

No Clear Favorite for Top U.S. Job in Iraq
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: March 31, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 30 — It is described as the most challenging diplomatic assignment in the world, and the toughest to fill. Three months before sovereignty is restored in Iraq, the Bush administration is still looking for an ambassador to replace L. Paul Bremer III as the chief American political presence in Baghdad.

With at least 3,000 employees, the new ambassador will run the United States' largest and most complex embassy. President Bush is said not to have settled on a choice, but diplomats agree that whoever it is will need excellent rapport with Mr. Bush, American military commanders and top State and Defense Department officials who have feuded over Iraq for a year.

Not least, the new ambassador will have to keep uppermost Mr. Bush's political needs in an election year in which anything that goes wrong in Iraq could ignite a political furor.

"The first thing you'd have to ask about this job is, who would want it?" said an administration official. "I can't imagine a more impossible job, in a more nasty place. But you could make an awfully big difference."

Among the names being discussed within the administration are Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; retired Gen. George A. Joulwan, a former NATO commander; Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who now directs Iraq policy at the White House; and two veteran diplomats, Thomas R. Pickering and Frank G. Wisner.

The selection process has been complicated by squabbling between Mr. Bremer, who reports to the president through the Pentagon, and the State Department, to which the ambassador will report July 1.

Mr. Bremer, administration officials said, has been resisting a transfer of power to the new embassy in stages leading up to the June 30 deadline, not wanting any perception of diminished power for himself. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, some officials said, had to insist on Mr. Bremer's cooperation when he was in Baghdad this month.

One senior official said, with admiration, that Mr. Bremer was "a little bit of a control freak" who feared a diminution of his stature at a time when he is trying to broker an accord among Iraqis on what sort of government will take power on June 30.

This is all about the B/C re-elect, it's a political move, not one that has anything to do with actually assisting the transition to the UN, the only thing which has the ghost of a chance of keeing Iraq from erupting.

What LUNATIC put Paul Wolfowitz on this list? The man is a monomaniac so sure of his own brilliance, with no diplomatic credentials--he's a technocrat--that his choice would guarantee the disaster we seem to be headed for, anyway. Juan Colehas a post up tonight saying that this is the name being heard around Washington. I'm not hearing it. The man has been so spectacularly wrong about everything that even the Bushies must have noticed. A Baghdad posting could be seen as punishment.

The Sink Hole

I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Published: March 31, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 30 - The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.

The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

The disclosure, to a House Ways and Means subcommittee, came near the end of a routine hearing into the I.R.S. budget after most of the audience, including reporters, had left the hearing room.

It comes as the White House is fighting to maintain its image as a vigorous and uncompromising foe of global terrorism in the face of questions about its commitment and competence raised by the administration's former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and its first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill.

Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat whose question to a witness about one line on the last page of a routine report to Congress prompted the disclosure, said he was dumbfounded at the budget decision.

"The zeroing out of resources here made my jaw drop open," Mr. Pomeroy said. "It just leaps out at you."

In other budget news:

House Republicans Stop Effort to Limit Tax Cuts

By Alan Fram
Associated Press
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A04

The Republican-led House defeated a fresh Democratic effort yesterday to limit Congress's ability to approve new tax cuts, averting an embarrassing setback to President Bush's agenda of continued tax reductions.

By a near party-line 209 to 209 vote -- one vote short of the majority Democrats needed to prevail -- the House turned down the Democratic provision urging budget bargainers to reimpose rules requiring that tax cuts or benefit increases be paid for with other budget savings.

Republican leaders held the voting period open an extra 23 minutes to persuade a handful of Republicans who initially supported the Democratic move to instead vote with their party.

Talk about your party of fiscal responsibility.

Guess What? We're "Elites!"

Emotional Elder Bush Attacks Son's Critics
Tue Mar 30, 2004 06:20 PM ET

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son's Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics.

It is "deeply offensive and contemptible" to hear "elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail" dismiss progress in Iraq since last year's overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention.

"There is something ignorant in the way they dismiss the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world," he said.
....
The former president, who waged the first Gulf War against Saddam in 1991, described progress in Iraq as "a miracle."

"Iraq is moving forward in hope and not sliding back into despair and terrorism," he said.

9 Killed in Separate Attacks in Iraq
Bodies of 4 Contractors Brutalized; Five U.S. Soldiers Killed by Roadside Bomb

By Sewell Chan and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; 2:41 PM

FALLUJAH, March 31 -- Four civilian contractors were killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah Wednesday in an attack that left their vehicles in flames, and afterward at least three of the burned bodies were mutilated, dragged through the streets and suspended from a bridge while a group of Iraqis danced in the streets. Separately, in nearby Ramadi, five U.S. soldiers died after their armored vehicle hit a roadside bomb.

Fallujah residents interviewed said the incident involving the contractors was the most savage behavior they had seen in the city since the U.S. occupation began.

From comments to a post by frequent Bump commentor paradox atThe Left Coaster:
We are waiting to see if my family member is one of the fallen. It's been a tough day so far.
Posted by Ga6thDem at March 31, 2004 09:57 AM

They Don't Even Try to Hide It

Pentagon report indicates Boeing investigations have widened

By Joseph L. Galloway and Alan Bjerga

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A Defense Department inspector general's audit report on the negotiations between the Air Force and the Boeing Co. on a new aerial tanker indicates that investigations into possible criminal conduct have widened, according to officials who are knowledgeable about the report.

The audit report finds that the Air Force tailored the Operational Requirements Document to the Boeing 767, and the Air Force and Boeing failed to meet important requirements that would make the aircraft fit for war, the officials told Knight Ridder, speaking on condition of anonymity because the report isn't expected to be released until next week.

The inspector general's office is examining whether Boeing and the Air Force improperly negotiated a $23.5 billion deal to supply the military with 100 tankers. Congressional investigators told Knight Ridder it was increasingly clear that the contract was based on an invalid specifications document and didn't meet the needs of the military services.
,,,,
The audit report suggests that at least one Air Force official, who hasn't been identified, may be subject to a criminal investigation into whether he was truthful with officers who work for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The allegations involve an Air Force briefing to Joint Chiefs of Staff officers on the revised tanker specifications.

The audit report says the first 100 versions of the Boeing 767 tanker wouldn't meet the Air Force's key requirements. For example, they wouldn't be able to refuel multiple aircraft simultaneously and wouldn't be able to be used for other missions, such as medical evaluations. The Air Force plans to buy more tankers in the future.
....
During a June 7, 2002, briefing of the Joint Requirements Board, officials on the board asked the Air Force official who was giving the briefing a direct question: Has this document been tailored to fit the 767? The briefer replied, "No." The IG report indicates that that wasn't the truth.

The officials said investigators also were focusing on whether Boeing's alleged participation in modifying the Air Force specifications involved misconduct and conflict of interest.
....
Fallout from Air Force tanker negotiator Darleen Druyun's later employment at Boeing continues to make the program a political hot potato. Druyun worked closely with Boeing and congressional supporters to pass the 2001 appropriations bill that steered the contract to Boeing, the documents indicate.

Air Force Secretary James Roche told a House of Representatives defense subcommittee Tuesday that while he thinks the deal the Air Force and Boeing negotiated is a good one, he's open to whatever the government tells the Air Force to do, including reopening negotiations with Airbus.

Knight Ridder obtained some of the emails between Boeing and DoD discussing this transaction. They are quite revealing:

There is this, from Boeing tanker boss Bob Gower to half a dozen Boeing executives, titled "Darleen/tankers":

"Meeting today on price was very good. Darleen (Druyun, then still an Air Force official) spent most of the time bringing the USAF (U.S. Air Force) pricer up to our number. ... It was a good day. She may be running her own covert operation on this one, so we probably don't want to discuss openly."

And this one from Walter Skowronski, the vice president for finance and treasurer:

"Briefly, the OMB A-94 Business Case Analysis will most likely pass the test. But this test measures the illogical conclusion that it is better to lease now than to buy now. This won't make sense in the newspapers. Further, neither Boeing nor SSMB (Salomon Smith Barney) would ever put its hand on a Bible and say that makes economic sense."

Your tax dollars at work.

Media Notes

Al Gets Gore-TV

by Joe Hagan

The Observer has learned that former Vice President Al Gore and business partner Joel Hyatt, an entrepreneur and Democratic fund-raiser, will close the deal to pay around $70 million to French-owned Vivendi Universal this week, making them the owners of the tiny digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI), moving Mr. Gore from politics to mini-media-moguldom.

As far as the dovetailing between Air America Radio and Mr. Gore’s project, Mr. Franken said, "It’s all part of the same thing. It’s fighting back …. I think that the country—there’s an odd idea that the mainstream media is liberal, and it just isn’t. And I think the mainstream media has become scared of its own shadow. Basically, their testicles have been sucked up into their body cavity with a slurping sound."

Quite frankly, "fair and balanced" would be kind of a novelty at this point in time. Those of you who are younger than I probably will never have seen or heard it.

Here is a link to Air America Radio, which went live with Al Franken about 40 minutes ago. They are using a syndication strategy which is a mistake, I think, when the war is one of ideas. The first five markets they are airing in are already Democratic ones, preaching to the choir.

As Mel Goux says:

Instead of following Clear Channel’s lead and gobbling up lots of tiny radio stations in rural areas for peanuts, Central Air Media went for the high dollar stations in all the major markets. And instead of focusing on creating nationally syndicated content, while keeping overhead low, they’ve now got the world’s biggest nut. Basically, they couldn’t have gotten less bang for their buck if they’d done what Greg Proops jokingly suggested and hired carrier pigeons to deliver their message.

You'll need Windows Media Player or Real to use the link.

Pentagon Papers Redux

Holy Shft! Is today the Whitehouse Tapes Day? Just got this email from the Center for American Progress:

FOUND AT STARBUCKS
The Pentagon's Papers

Well, others in the Bush administration did, apparently, make an appearance at the local Starbucks. And as the Washington Post reports today, one of them -- obviously readying himself to prep Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- left his notes on the table. Talking points, hand-written notes on spin tactics, and a hand-drawn map to the Secretary's house were found by a resident of DuPont Circle, who made them available to the Center for American Progress. The name of said resident is being withheld at his request, as he fears that he may be accused on national television of being "disgruntled." We've published the documents -- which we've dubbed The Pentagon's Papers -- on
our Web site.
Download The Pentagon's Papers as PDF,

Oh, my. We are going to be busy little readers today. Most of the guts are on the Post link, above, if you don't want to PDF.

Cancer of the Presidency

Salon is doing the same deal with their John Dean interview that they did with their Richard Clarke interview a week ago: no ad. Go read. Impoverish yourself further by ordering the book from your favorite merchant.

Creepier than Nixon
The man who brought down Richard Nixon says Bush and "co-president" Cheney are an even greater threat to the country.

Colson was brutal, cruel and vicious before he found God (during Watergate). While he once famously said he would run over his grandmother to get Nixon reelected, today I suspect he'd run over his grandmother to convert a few heathens to Christ. Segretti did not engage in the kind of dirty politics that Colson liked to play. Segretti was a political prankster, who only by accident got associated with Watergate. Nothing that Segretti did, that I know of, could be called sinister. Colson, on the other hand, was as nasty a political operative as could be found. Indeed, to this day we don't know the full extent of Colson's activities. He even refused to tell Nixon some of the things he had done (while boasting to Nixon he had done things he didn't want to tell the president). Colson walked out of the White House with any of his papers and records that might cause him a problem. Karl Rove, from what I've seen, makes Colson look like a novice.

I have nothing to say. This leaves me with my jaw on the floor.

UPDATE: Credit to Suzie Madrak for the catch. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush is ready to ship.

The Amazon Bill is Getting Ridiculous

The briefing

Fit of conniption: I hear that "Plan of Attack," supersleuth Bob Woodward's still-secret study of President Bush's war on terrorism, will be very bad for the Bush reelection campaign - which is still reeling from gun-toting former terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration figures in "Against All Enemies."

Woodward's book, to be released next month, will receive not only a multipart series in The Washington Post, but also the Mike Wallace treatment on "60 Minutes" April 18 - when I am absolutely confident that the common corporate ownership of CBS and Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will be mentioned.

And John Dean's book comes out next month, and Joe Wilson's book comes out next month...,

At the Center of the Storm Over Bush And Science
By JAMES GLANZ

Published: March 30, 2004

But to a degree not seen in previous administrations, a wide range of influential scientists — even many who say they like Dr. Marburger personally and respect him professionally — express dismay at White House science policy.

"I think this is as bad as it's ever been," said Wolfgang H. K. Panofsky, a retired Stanford physicist who has advised the government on science and national security since the Eisenhower administration. "This is an extremely serious issue. I believe it is true that there is such a thing as objective scientific reality, and if you ignore that or try to misrepresent it in formulating policy, you do so at peril to the country."

Other experts have been blunter. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Dr. Howard Gardner, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, said, "I actually feel very sorry for Marburger, because I think he probably is enough of a scientist to realize that he basically has become a prostitute."

Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Gardner said he had made the reference but added, "I wish I'd used it as a verb rather than as a noun."

Chris C. Mooney has devoted his blog to exposing Bush's bad science and comments on the NYT piece:

Interestingly, lots of high level members of the administration talked to by Glanz are singing Marburger's praises and saying the president likes him a lot--which may or may not be true. These are the same people who told the press repeatedly--and in retrospect unbelievably--that the President was "agonizing" over his stem cell decision.

Why would Glanz downplay Marburger's promise to issue a refutation, especially in such a lengthy profile as this? It's quite clear, after all, that such a refutation, if it ever comes, may be the key standard by which Marburger will be judged. And if it doesn't come...well, Marburger will be judged on that basis instead.

Today, Bump received its 2,500th comment, on a total of 665 posts. Thank you!

A Passion for Books

Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Connecting the Dots
By JAMES RISEN

Published: April 11, 2004

Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored.

The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping good read.

The first - and by far the best - chapter is a heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, when Washington suddenly came blinking into a bloody new world. I hope Clarke has sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. You can guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that historic morning.

By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave the order triggering the Continuity of Government procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed locations.

With Clarke at the helm of a secure videoconference network linking the White House with other key agencies, in quick succession thousands of commercial aircraft were grounded; the country's land and sea borders were closed; the military went to Defcon 3, its highest alert level in nearly 30 years; and the Russians were notified. ''Damn good thing I did that,'' Clarke quotes Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as telling him. ''Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?''
....
''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective - and terrific - account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept. 11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.

Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has given us what is certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of Al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan. He has followed up that feat by threading together the complex roles played by diplomats and spies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States into a coherent story explaining how Afghanistan became such a welcoming haven for Al Qaeda.

In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.''

Coll overlaps with Clarke in his detailed recounting of the mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy. Unlike Clarke, however, Coll doesn't have an ax to grind, and so offers a more evenhanded view of the internal battles between the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top priority. As a reporter who struggled to cover many of the twists and turns in counterterrorism policy that Coll describes, I find ''Ghost Wars'' provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions.

As Coll seeks to explain why the Clinton team never mounted a serious effort to go after Al Qaeda, even after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, he finds plenty of blame to go around: ''Clinton's National Security Council aides firmly believed that they were the aggressive ones on the Al Qaeda case, pursuing every possible avenue to get at bin Laden over calcified resistance or incompetence within the C.I.A. and Pentagon bureaucracies. From the other side of the Potomac, Clinton's White House often looked undisciplined, unfocused and uncertain.'' ''Ghost Wars'' also corroborates many of Clarke's assertions that counterterrorism policy was largely ignored by the new Bush administration before Sept. 11. Coll notes, as does Clarke, that the Bush team didn't hold its first cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan until Sept. 4, one week before the twin towers fell.

Coll closes with the Sept. 9, 2001, murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan rebel leader who had been cooperating with the C.I.A. in its vain efforts to track bin Laden around Afghanistan. As with so many other warnings before it, the full significance of Massoud's murder was missed until it was too late. Here and elsewhere in ''Ghost Wars,'' Coll's riveting narrative makes the reader want to rip the page and yell at the American counterterrorism officials he describes - including Clarke - and tell them to watch out.

That oughta whet your appetite. Both of these guys have penned not just history but page turners. I'm looking forward to reading them.

Critical Mass

Rice to Testify Under Oath

Reuters
Tuesday, March 30, 2004; 10:30 AM

The White House offered to have national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly under oath about the Sept. 11 attacks before the 9-11 commission, Tuesday.

The White House released a letter to the independent commission from legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez outlining the offer. It also said it would make President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney available to speak before a joint private session of the full panel.

Both offers were on condition that they would not set a precedent under the constitutional separation of executive and legislative powers, an administration official said.

The offers follow bombshell allegations from former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke that Bush and his top aides ignored an urgent threat from al Qaeda in the months before the attacks on New York and Washington.

The 10-member bipartisan commission investigating the hijacked airliner attacks had unanimously requested that Rice testify publicly and under oath. Bush had previously insisted on meeting privately with only the chairman and vice chairman of the panel.

Up to now, White House lawyers have claimed executive privilege and refused to let Rice testify publicly based on a long-standing position that presidential advisers who have not been confirmed by the Senate cannot give public testimony.

Translation: Karen Hughes is back. I'm going to engage in some rank speculation. I've read various accounts about the complex relationship between Bush's two principal advisors, Rove and Hughes, which seem to function like the two hemispheres of his brain.

Josh Marshall observed last night:

It's been clear for some time that one of the key shortcomings of this administration is the presence of so many loyalists and ideologues who can usually be counted on to shout "Onward! Onward! Onward!" as the ship of state sails off the edge of the world.

More prosaically one might start with this Knight Ridder article from Sunday, the first sentence of which reads: "Accounts from insiders in the Bush White House describe a tightly controlled, top-down organization that pushes a predetermined agenda, shuns dissenting views and discourages open debate."

As Josh says elsewhere, the risk of this kind of operation is getting cut off from reality, and that is clearly what happened with the Condi testimony, a political miscalculation of truly amateur proportions.

The WaPo's Dan Froomkin reported yesterday that Hughes's new book has an index for Rove, Karl, disagreements with...Karen and Karl have been able to work together successfully in the past, but she has been the one with the message discipline. I'm going to be watching to see what happens when this fractious pair has to function under the kind of pressure that comes in a presidential campaign being waged under no fewer than ten investigations (and maybe a couple more coming.) Tightly wrapped, top-down operations which are isolated from reality have a nasty way of blowing up.

Grocery Settlement

The grocery workers are voting as I type. The WaPo article is oblique, but it looks like the Union will advise its members to ratify. The proposed agreement contains some serious hits for the workers, but is not so draconian as the contract agreed to by the Southern California local. Two-tier agreements are always unwelcome because they split the economic interests of the bargaining unit. The rest of the article is not very good: quoting a worker who wishes that they had received the contract earlier flies in the face of the way negotiations are conducted.

NPR is reporting that the Safeway workers have already ratified. Giant workers will be meeting at noon, and I'll update as soon as the vote is announced.

Grocers, Union Agree on Pact
Giant, Safeway Workers Vote Today On Contract With Reduced Benefits

By Michael Barbaro and Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 30, 2004; Page A01

Negotiators for Giant Food LLC, Safeway Inc. and the union representing their 18,000 Washington area workers have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract that, if accepted by the rank and file, would avert a strike at the region's two largest grocery chains, people familiar with the talks said yesterday.

Health care costs were some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations. Under the proposal, current workers will pay more for prescriptions and their annual deductible will increase from $100 to $200. New employees will pay a larger share of their health care costs. They will also receive less generous pay on Sundays and holidays, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by The Washington Post.

Union and company officials declined to comment publicly, saying the proposal will be explained to workers at a meeting this morning at the D.C. Armory, when workers will vote on the contract. A majority is needed to accept the contract. If it is rejected, the workers could vote to strike. Giant and Safeway stores will be closed today from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. while workers vote.

"This is a contract the leadership does not expect the workers to turn down," said Joslyn N. Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, which includes the grocery workers union as a member. Williams, who is not involved in the negotiations, called the tentative agreement "a positive indication that there will not be a strike."

The battle now moves on to the Northern California and Pacific Northwest locals.

UPDATE: Both the Safeway and Giant workers approved the draft settlement by acclimation. I sense huge amounts of relief.

Exodus

Big Pay Luring Military's Elite to Private Jobs
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

Published: March 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 29 — Senior American commanders and Pentagon officials are warning of an exodus of the military's most seasoned members of Special Operations to higher-paying civilian security jobs in places like Baghdad and Kabul, just as they are playing an increasingly pivotal role in combating terror and helping conduct nation-building operations worldwide.

Senior enlisted members of the Army Green Berets or Navy Seals with 20 years or more experience now earn about $50,000 in base pay, and can retire with a $23,000 pension. But private security companies, whose services are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, are offering salaries of $100,000 to nearly $200,000 a year to the most experienced of them.

The Central Intelligence Agency is also dangling such enticing offers before experienced Special Operations personnel that the Pentagon's top official for special operations policy, Thomas W. O'Connell, told a House panel this month that intergovernmental poaching "is starting to become a significant problem."

Evidence of a drain of seasoned Special Operations members, including elite Delta Force soldiers, is largely anecdotal right now, but the head of the military's Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan D. Brown of the Army, is so concerned about what he is hearing from troops in the field that he convened an unusual meeting of his top commanders in Washington last week to discuss the matter. "The retention of our special operating forces is a big issue," General Brown said.

Last December, he gathered 20 senior members of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets and Air Force commandos and their spouses, at his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., for a weeklong session to discuss career-extending sweeteners, like special pay bonuses and educational benefits. A special panel is now reviewing those recommendations.

"The kind of people we're training today, that are culturally aware, able to work overseas, experts with handguns and rifles, physically fit, hand-selected guys that also speak a foreign language," General Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday, "these kind of people are very attractive to those kind of civilian private industries that provide security services both at home and abroad."

General Brown and other senior officials acknowledged that the lucrative offers by outsiders presented a rare opportunity for career soldiers to gain financial security.

"They're not leaving out of disloyalty," said Gen. Wayne Downing, a retired head of the Special Operations Command who recently returned from Iraq. "The money is just so good, if they're going to be away from home that much, they may as well make top dollar."

As we've discussed at length earlier, Rummy has broken the Army in its current formation for years to come. Discovering that our most elite forces are about to be decimated by private recruiters--these are the forces who are hunting OBL--means that we are simply going to be much less safe in a world which is increasingly dangerous.

Bush's "more free, more peaceful" rhetoric is contradicted by the facts on all sides.

Take and Read

This may be the most important column Paul Krugman has ever written, and it is also some of the most cogent political writing I've ever seen in the 700-word format that The Bigs give their regular columnists.

In his autobiography, Confession, St. Augustine of Hippo tells the story of his spiritual life and conversion. It began, he said, when he heard a voice tell him, "tolle...lege..", take and read. Take this up and read it, print it and pass it to friends and family.

This Isn't America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 30, 2004

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."

A Picture is Worth...

If you haven't seen the cover of the new The American Prospect, you haven't seen the face of politics this week. Go look. It is a revelation. I'll be blogging a couple of the articles during the week, because it is just good stuff, but you have to see the cover. You have to. Go.

Stranger than Fiction

The site was down for a while. Sorry. We now return to our regularly scheduled program:

Inside of most writers is the delusion that there is a fiction writer waiting to be published. Most of us have the good sense to stifle this demon, but sometimes it gets out of the careful box most of us have constructed around our fantasy of the great American novel. I hope to write a decent book or two, history, spirituality and non-fiction, in the next couple of years and I'll let the market determine if they are any good. I have no delusion that I've got any gift for fiction. All writers are story tellers, but fiction writers have to spin a world and I know that's beyond me. But it ain't out of the mind of Lynn Cheney. This is a parody site, but... Some people shouldn't investigate the world of fiction. Kos excerpts:

Waiting for Sophie was a world where women were treated as decorative figurines or as abject sexual vassals ... where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husband's hunger ... where the relationship betwen women and men became a kind of guerilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted. In her effort to grasp the meaning of her sister's life and death, Sophie discovers the secret that tainted her life and begins to understand the experience of the vast majority of silent, trapped women...

I once tried to write this stuff for a buck and it is harder than it looks.

Go Say Hello

Jordan Barab's excellent blog Confined Spaces is celebrating one year of providing the best and most complete news on workplace health and safety in the blogosphere. Congratulations and good job, Jordan! I'm looking forward to launching the labor blog with you on Wednesday.

Maybe one of these days I'll actually meet some of these DC area bloggers instead of just blogging with them.

Impressment

An Insulting Waste

Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A22

"I WANT you discharged from the military -- but not just yet." That's the message Uncle Sam has these days for gay men and lesbians who serve in the military. Under the decade-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the number of patriotic Americans kicked out of the military for their sexual orientations rose steadily from 1994 through 2001.

But when America went to war after Sept. 11, 2001, all of a sudden the military found that those gay men and lesbians had useful skills -- and discharges dropped precipitously. In 2002, some 906 people were kicked out of the military and the Coast Guard -- down from 1,273 the previous year. Last year, according to a new report from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, the number fell again, to 787. (The Pentagon's official numbers differ only slightly.)

How badly, we wonder, has unit cohesion -- in whose name the gay ban is perpetuated -- suffered for all those gay men and lesbians whose service has been prolonged by military necessity? And if gay men and lesbians serve their country honorably and effectively during wars, where is the decency in drumming them out as soon as peace permits? The policy is insulting when enforced, insulting when not enforced -- and all the more so because the military continues to tolerate harassment of those who "don't tell" and are, therefore, still in the service. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network complains that the Bush administration and the military brass "continue to ignore a growing epidemic of anti-gay harassment within the armed forces," while the official anti-harassment plan "continues to collect dust on Pentagon shelves."

This is, of course, outrageous, and I'm glad the WaPo didn't pull one of its famous editorial waffles.

Louder, Louder

Mark Danner, writing in The New Yorker sums up with a "what do we do now?" piece.

In the United States, the debate over Iraq has encouraged a kind of corrosive, brutal politics that has at its center an appeal to personal fear. That leaves a powerful weapon in the hands of the terrorists, who gained enormously after the attacks in Madrid by appearing to swing Spain’s election against a major ally of President Bush. No one can say what effect a terrorist attack would have on the American election. But the tone and the terms of the evolving struggle for political dominance here present the possibility that such an attack could similarly strengthen those whom both candidates have pledged to destroy.

This is the atmosphere into which all of the other stories of this weekend submerge, and it explains the venomous way that John Kerry's scripture quoting and Richard Clarke's professional reputation have been savaged. Bush has used the nation's ultimate weapon, the one with the highest price, and he is left without justification for the lives, coalition and Iraqi, that this misadventure has cost. That this recklessness has left us manifestly less safe is now beyond question. Bush and his supporters have nothing left but volume to fall back on.

A Liberal Credo

Kevin Raybould of Lean Left has a particularly eloquent rejoinder to the back and forth between John Kerry and George Bush on the topic of faith. Remember, this is the president who told you that his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ, so judging him by Christian standards is fair game.

Campaigning yesterday in Missouri, Kerry said, "The scriptures say, what does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?" Kerry told the congregation at New North Side Baptist Church. "When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion?"

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry's comment "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of Scripture for a political attack."

Kevin's commentary:

As usual, when faced with a criticism, the Bush Administration runs from the substance and attempts to smear the critic. Anyone who says their favorite political philosopher is Jesus Christ had best be prepared to defend his actions in the light of Jesus' teachings.

The language of religion has always been spoken comfortably on the left, even if the principle of tolerance has caused it to occasionally be spoken too quietly. John Kerry is not speaking quietly now. Whatever George W. Bush may desire, whatever the editors of the Washington Post and New York Times may decree, Christianity and faith are not the property of the right wing. I have a faith, too, as does John Kerry and millions of others. It is strong, and sincere, and, as Kerry has reminded us, powerful. And in the face of provocation and distortion, it has no reason to be silent.

As a liberal and a Catholic, I can only say "Amen."

Out-Foxed

G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: March 29, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 28 — American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the doors after the occupation authorities accused it of printing lies that incited violence.

Thousands of outraged Iraqis protested the closing as an act of American hypocrisy, laying bare the hostility many feel toward the United States a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"No, no, America!" and "Where is democracy now?" screamed protesters who hoisted banners and shook clenched fists in a hastily organized rally against the closing of the newspaper, Al Hawza, a radical Shiite weekly.

The rally drew hundreds and then thousands by nightfall in central Baghdad, where masses of angry Shiite men squared off against a line of American soldiers who rushed to seal off the area.

The closing of the newspaper illustrated the quandary Americans faced in trying to strike a balance between their two main goals — encouraging democracy while maintaining stability. But as the days wind down to the June 30 target date for handing sovereignty back to the Iraqi people, security seems increasingly elusive.

On Sunday, the Iraqi public works minister narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the northern city of Mosul, and two foreign workers were shot to death nearby in front of a power plant.

Many Iraqis said closing down a popular newspaper at such a crucial time would not curtail anti-occupation feelings but only inflame them.

"When you repress the repressed, they only get stronger," said Hamid al-Bayati, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent Shiite political party. "Punishing this newspaper will only increase the passion for those who speak out against the Americans."

The American authorities said Al Hawza could reopen in 60 days. The paper's editors, however, said they had been put out of business.

"We have been evicted from our offices, and we have no jobs," Saadoon Mohsen Thamad, a news editor, said as he stared at a large padlock hanging from the front gate. "How are we going to continue?"

Among Iraqi journalists, Al Hawza was known for printing wild rumors, especially anti-American ones. A broadsheet of about eight pages, the paper is considered a mouthpiece for Moktada al-Sadr, a fiery young Shiite cleric and one of the most outspoken critics of the Americans.

The letter ordering the paper closed, signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.

Nathan Newman responds:

Can We Padlock FoxNews?

UPDATE: Constitutional Scholar Jack Balkin explains it all for you:

From the Interim Iraqi Constitution:

Isn't constitutional law fun?

Even the Water Doesn't Work

D.C. Knew Of Lead Problems In 2002
Timing of E-Mails Contradicts Claims

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

Senior D.C. government officials knew that the city's water contained unsafe levels of lead 15 months before the public learned of the problem but failed to flag the issue as a major concern, according to internal documents that contradict the account provided recently by top managers.

Officials at the D.C. Department of Health, who have publicly maintained that they did not know of the lead problem until this year, first discussed the contamination in October 2002 with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, according to e-mails between the two agencies.

But after assisting WASA in drafting a 2002 educational brochure that has since been criticized for glossing over the high lead levels, Health Department officials largely ignored the mounting health threat last year and failed to issue clear instructions to residents about how to reduce their risk of lead poisoning.

Not until last month -- three weeks after a Washington Post article revealed the lead problem to most residents -- did the Health Department issue a health advisory urging at-risk people to drink filtered water and get blood tests.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said he was "deeply disturbed" that his administration had not shared information earlier about the lead threat with him and city residents.

"I always suspected this . . . that somebody in District government knew about this," said Williams, who added that he has ordered a complete review of the Health Department's actions. "People keeping crucial information from the higher-level management and the mayor is completely unacceptable."

Last week, City Administrator Robert C. Bobb notified Health Department Director James A. Buford that he was being removed from his job, in part because Buford failed to respond to letters, sent in December and January, in which WASA asked for help with the lead contamination issue. But interviews and internal documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the communication problems go beyond Buford.

WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson declined to comment about the Health Department for this article. Buford could not be reached. But other D.C. leaders joined the mayor's call for an internal review.

Since the lead problems were disclosed publicly, city and federal leaders have criticized WASA, the Washington Aqueduct and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ensure a safe drinking-water supply and for failing to warn the public about health risks when the problem first arose. Now, the health agency's lack of engagement and pattern of playing down bad news have drawn new ire.

The lack of coordination between WASA and the Health Department has worried many city leaders. WASA, a quasi-independent agency, manages the city's drinking water and sewer systems but has no senior staff members who are experts in public health.

That, Johnson said, is the domain of the Health Department. "I think that in most municipalities you rely on the public health agency of that community to provide that information and react to those kinds of issues," Johnson said.

Johnson contacted the Health Department in fall 2002. Oct. 22 of that year, Robert B. Vowels, an Environmental Health Administration physician in the Health Department, sent an e-mail to several staff members.

WTF? It is beyond me why nothing works in The City Over The River, but this level of incompetence boggles my mind.

A Smile on Your Face

Wish Fulfillment for Woody
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 29, 2004

Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the New York City Police Department "is doing a great job," and added, "I wish I had the money to pay 'em more."

Two days later he was at a press conference giddily explaining how anxious he was to fork over $300 million in city funds to help the New York Jets build a glittering new playground for the rich on the banks of the Hudson River in Manhattan.

I guess it's a matter of priorities. The mayor can't find the money to pay the city's cops or teachers what they deserve, but he can sure come up with the cash for a stadium.

"If you don't have a smile on your face today," said the mayor, with the Jets' billionaire owner Woody Johnson looking on, "you're never going to have one."

He then proceeded to outline a West Side development plan that would include a 75,000-seat stadium for the Jets, complete with a retractable roof and a halo of full-service cocoons (known as luxury boxes) for the very rich and famous.

One of the things that didn't come up during the announcement was the fact that the city can't afford to fund some of its most basic services.

For example, the bathrooms in many of the public schools are a scandal. Toilets are broken and filthy. Ceilings leak. Toilet paper is often nonexistent. The Times's Elissa Gootman wrote in January that youngsters at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn use the toilets down the road at Coney Island Hospital.

A student at a high school in Manhattan, Diola Castillo, said, "I just try to wait till I get home."

You can bet that Woody Johnson's bathrooms will be pristine.

There is an entire range of important city services that, in the mayor's view, New York cannot afford. In his operating expense budget for fiscal 2005, which was sent to the City Council in January, the mayor proposed cuts that would eliminate 2,500 day care slots, take weekend meals away from senior citizens, and reduce funding for infant mortality programs and foster care services by $3 million and $15 million, respectively.

And then there are the libraries, which I think of as a crucial municipal service. Since fiscal 2003, funding cuts for the New York Public Library are closing in on $21.7 million, nearly 20 percent. If the proposed cuts for fiscal 2005 take effect, library services will be curtailed across the board, with some branches remaining dark up to three days a week. That would be the lowest level of library service since the worst days of the fiscal crisis in the 1970's.

Given these conditions, the idea that the city would put any of the public's cash at Woody Johnson's disposal strikes me as beyond crazy. And I'm a Jets fan. When the city's kids are hurting for bathrooms and libraries, welfare for Woody and his green-clad lineup of muscular millionaires should be out of the question.

This wouldn't be good for Mr. Johnson, either. He's already in danger of drowning in money. It would be cruel to pour more money on him. He paid $635 million for the Jets in 2000. No one forced him to do that. He did it because he wanted to and because he could. Now he says he's ready to put up another $800 million for the West Side stadium. But $800 million is not enough. The stadium will cost — hold your breath — $1.4 billion. So he wants the city and the state to make up the difference.

That's the way it works in Bushworld. Basic services get left behind while the government helps the already wealthy.

The Bottom Line

Rice Defends Refusal To Testify
Compromise Sought With 9/11 Commission

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, at the center of a controversy over her refusal to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, yesterday renewed her determination not to give public testimony and said she could not list anything she wished she had done differently in the months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Administration officials were searching for a compromise last night with the commission that would limit the political damage from her refusal to testify. But a defiant Rice gave no hint of that as she defended the Bush administration's counterterrorism performance on CBS's "60 Minutes" -- the same venue used a week earlier by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke to launch his criticism that the Bush administration did too little on terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001, and wound up strengthening al Qaeda by pursuing war in Iraq.

Rice's appearance, and that of three other top Bush officials on the airwaves yesterday, came at the end of a week in which the Bush administration labored to discredit Clarke, who challenged the White House yesterday to release more classified counterterrorism documents.

Rice, the top foreign-policy official in President Bush's White House, brushed aside the notion that the U.S. government should apologize to Sept. 11 victims' families for not stopping the attacks, saying, "It's important that we keep focused on who did this to us." Rice asserted that "we are safer today than we were on September 10," and, asked whether there were any mistakes or misjudgments before the attacks, replied: "I think we did what we knew how to do."

But Rice gave no ground on the administration's decision that she will not appear in public before the panel or testify under oath because Bush officials believe doing so would compromise the constitutional powers of the executive branch. The renewed refusal came despite the panel's unanimous plea for her testimony.

Republican commissioner John F. Lehman, who has written extensively on separation-of-power issues, said that "the White House is making a huge mistake" by blocking Rice's testimony and decried it as "a legalistic approach."

"The White House is being run by a kind of strict construction of interpretation of the powers of the president," he said on ABC's "This Week." "There are plenty of precedents that the White House could use if they wanted to do this."

Two Republican officials, who declined to be identified because they are not supposed to talk to reporters, said White House aides are discussing ways they could compromise with the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, perhaps by agreeing to the declassification of Rice's private testimony. "That would show people that she is cooperating, and make it clear that her testimony is consistent with her public pronouncements," one official said. "That would help our credibility."

.....

Clarke said he voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election but declined to say whether he would support Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumed Democratic nominee, this year. On the Iraq war, Clarke said: Bush's "political advisers sought to capitalize on it, just as his political advisers are seeking to capitalize on 9/11 by the ads that they're running."

Clarke said that by invading Iraq, the Bush administration built support for al Qaeda by inflaming Islamic opinion, diverted resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and spent money that could have been better used to fortify domestic security. While saying he thinks bin Laden will be killed or captured this year, he warned: "We're going to face a second generation of al Qaeda."

In their bid to counter Clarke's allegations, three administration officials gave televised interviews yesterday to argue that they did more on counterterrorism before Sept. 11 than Clinton had done. Powell pointed to Bush taking direct briefings almost every morning from CIA Director George J. Tenet as "something President Clinton had not been doing." Rice said Tenet briefed Bush 46 times on al Qaeda.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on ABC's "This Week," disagreed with Clarke that going to war in Iraq hurt the overall war on terrorism. Asked about charges by Clarke and others that CIA and Army Special Forces units, with key personnel who spoke Arabic, were moved from Afghanistan in early 2002 and sent to help prepare the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "I don't think that is accurate."

The same Special Forces unit, Task Force 21, that was used to search for Saddam Hussein was redeployed a month ago to Afghanistan to support the search for bin Laden.

Rice said that when Bush met with his top advisers on Sept. 15, 2001, "not a single one of the president's principal advisers suggested that he do anything more than go after Afghanistan, and that's what we did." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was at that meeting and did suggest that Iraq should be attacked, as described in detail in Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War."

Rice said the Bush administration's development of a counterterrorism plan before Sept. 11 was brisk.

The Bush administration has been sharply critical of Clinton and his antiterrorism policy for depending on diplomacy and law enforcement and not having military intervention as part of his plan to attack al Qaeda.

But Rice said yesterday that the United States is safer today because "we have an umbrella of intelligence and law enforcement worldwide."

Rice argued that "al Qaeda is not more dangerous today than it was on September 11" but said it is still dangerous. She also said, "The world is a lot safer and the war on terrorism is well-served by the victory in Iraq." When it was noted that there have been more terrorist attacks in the 30 months since Sept. 11 than in the 30 months prior, she replied: "That's the wrong way to look at it."

Are you feeling safer? I'm not.

The Good Life

From the WaPo, this counts as sympathetic coverage. I'll deconstruct it in the morning. If you think you can live the good life around here on the UFCW average wage, you're smoking something other than cigarettes. G'night.

Grocery Workers Hope to Keep the Good Life
Middle Class Could Be Out of Reach Under New Safeway, Giant Contract

By Michael Barbaro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01

Six months after graduating from the District's Mackin High School in 1969, Glennis T. Mitchiner took a part-time job at a Safeway store in Northwest, bagging groceries to help pay his college bills.

Mitchiner realized that his full-time colleagues at Safeway were earning as much as many of the graduates at his college. So he quit school to work full-time at Safeway, a job that provided the middle-class life a college degree had promised. He and his wife, who works at a Virginia software company, each earn about $45,000 a year, own a two-bedroom house, two Toyota sedans and send their daughter to a $3,000-a-year parochial school.

"I realized it from the get-go," Mitchiner said of his job. "This was a good deal."

But what Mitchiner, now 53 and a cashier, views as a good deal, Safeway and unionized grocery stores across the country regard as a financial burden. Tomorrow, 18,000 Washington area workers at Safeway and Giant Food are to vote on a new jointly negotiated four-year contract that is expected to call for lower wages for new workers and reductions in health benefits, which the companies say they need to remain competitive with nonunion retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. If it is rejected, employees may vote to strike, disrupting business at 350 Giant and Safeway stores in the Washington area.

Both Safeway Inc. and the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold NV, which owns Giant Food LLC, have been struggling financially. Safeway lost $170 million in 2003 and $828 million in 2002. Ahold lost $807 million in 2002, the last full year it reported earnings. The company declined to say if Giant was profitable.

In less than a decade, the U.S. grocery industry has undergone wrenching changes. Independent regional chains in Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago have been gobbled up by big national and international companies, such as Safeway and Royal Ahold, which bought Giant Food in 1998. Today, grocery chains face a host of competitors, including Wal-Mart, bulk warehouse stores and gourmet food stores.

Consumers themselves, once loyal to their neighborhood supermarket, now shop around more in search of bargain prices and top quality. Even Mitchiner's wife, Michelle, shops at Wal-Mart. "I can get more for our money," she says, as her husband buries his face in his hands. Although the companies are proposing that new hires take the biggest hit, they are also asking employees like Mitchiner to accept some benefit cuts. "I resent it," he said. "I feel I earned these wages and benefits and I started to live accordingly."

That's the crux of the matter. What does it mean to "live accordingly?" What does it mean to have some stability of wages and benefits in one's life? What does it mean when benefit cuts become a salary cut? What does it mean to "the American way of life" when we can no longer pass on to our children a higher standard of life? I've got two master's degrees and I never made as much as my undegreed mom's retirement benefit.

I did a rather long piece about work and worth earlier. It is time to replay some of it:

I want to address something I read in a long comment thread on [the grocery] strike over at Calpundit a couple of days ago. I suspect that very few readers here would hold ideas similar to this particular commentor, but a question was implied which is worth a further thought over here. One of Kevin's commentors was simply offended by the whole strike, taking the position that these are no skill jobs and that if people were simply willing to improve themselves and work harder, get an education and dig a little deeper, they wouldn't be working in a grocery store. Therefore there is no reason that grocery workers with decades on the job should be making $17 an hour. If they had any gumption, they'd go out and do what it takes to, you know, get a good job.

One of my canniest theology teachers likes to say that theology is "unvoiced operating assumptions," the things we believe about how life works which we rarely interrogate to see if it is borne out in fact. There is a theology behind this labor action, and it provides us a window into the collective subconscious about God, human worth and the relationship of money to both.

The grocery worker average wage here in DC is closer to $11/hr. I'll be happy to supply you with the average apartment rents in this area. You can do the math. Who is entitled to a middle class life? That's the question this strike is asking. Do you really think you don't have a stake in that? Who decides?

That IS the point.

Detante?

via Josh Marshal:

Nader, Kerry to Discuss Defeating Bush

By HARRY R. WEBER

ATLANTA (AP) - Ralph Nader said Sunday he will meet with John Kerry next month to discuss the effort to defeat President Bush in the November election.

While stressing that he is still a competitor in the race, the independent presidential hopeful said he views his candidacy as a "second front against Bush, however small."

Following a speech on the environment at Georgia State University, Nader stepped up his attacks on Bush, describing the Republican incumbent as "a giant corporation residing in the White House camouflaging as a human being."

"George W. Bush's values are corporate values," Nader told reporters. And he said the administration "should spend more time waging peace ... than waging a military conflict."

At the same time, Nader prodded Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to push traditional Democratic values of helping working families. He said the Democrats in general need to be reminded of that.

He did not elaborate on the meeting he plans with the Massachusetts senator and there was no immediate response from the Kerry campaign.

Well, well. It looks like it is going to be another busy week for us liberal newsbloggers.

Finding the Middle Way

Here's a story that pulls all the pieces together. It has religion, politics, sex and money all mixed together:

A Matter Of Church, Conscience And Cash
Episcopal Diocese Pays for Backing First Gay Bishop

By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page C01

Russell Randle and the Rev. John A.M. Guernsey are both Episcopalians who love their church. And both were deeply disturbed when church leaders, including their own bishop, selected the denomination's first openly gay bishop at its general convention last summer.

But the two Northern Virginia residents strongly disagree about what several parishes in their diocese have done in response to that vote. To demonstrate their displeasure at the elevation of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, the parishes have reduced or eliminated their annual financial contribution to the diocese.

The result has been a 19 percent drop in the diocese's income for 2004, causing a severe financial crunch -- and a heated debate among church members over whether it is right to withhold pledge money from the diocese as a protest.

"Just as our bishop and deputies voted their conscience at [last summer's] general convention, our parishioners are following their conscience in their giving," said Guernsey, whose All Saints' Episcopal Church in Woodbridge is sending only $26,432 to the diocese this year, compared with last year's contribution of $117,635.

"If our people were forced to underwrite and support the actions of the general convention by their giving, they would feel forced to leave the church," the rector added. His parish is affiliated with the American Anglican Council, a conservative Episcopal network that believes the Robinson decision violated Scripture.

Randle, a lawyer and active member of Christ Church in Alexandria, sees things differently.

"The bottom line is, if we're a community working together, one has to provide the basic support to keep working together," said the Arlington resident, who was a lay delegate to the general convention and voted against Robinson's elevation. "The things that unite us are a lot more important than the things that divide."

Randle lamented that the drop in diocesan revenue, which funds everything from salaries to youth ministry to overseas missions, is "limiting our ability to plant new churches." This is especially important in Northern Virginia, he said, where some Hispanic immigrant communities include many Episcopalians.
....
Unlike many other Episcopal dioceses, which impose quotas on individual parishes, Virginia has a voluntary system in which each parish decides what percentage of its income to give the diocese.

In 2002, the average contribution was 6.65 percent of parish income, compared with about 15 percent 40 years ago, Kerr said.

The Washington diocese, which covers the District and the Maryland suburbs, is a bit more assertive. "We ask for 10 percent of what's basically normal operating revenue," said spokesman Jim Naughton, who added, "There is no penalty for giving less or giving nothing at all."

Christ Church in Accokeek is the only parish that gives no money to the Washington diocese, a decision that predated the Robinson vote, Naughton said.

Washington Bishop John Bryson Chane also voted to affirm Robinson as bishop. But that has not affected the diocese's finances, Naughton noted. "Many parishes increased their giving to the diocese this year," he said, adding that the entire amount is "up a couple of percentage points."

The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia is the largest in the Episcopal Church. Like the rest of the state, it is somewhat more conservative than the church in general. Just across the river, the Diocese of DC and Maryland is one of the most liberal. On a parish-by-parish basis, a number of churches offer gay marriage ceremonies. My colleague Le Pretre Noir, one of the great religious liberals in the blogworld, pastors a couple of congregations in the most conservative part of a liberal diocese and comments frequently on the cognitive dissonance he has to work with.

This story plays out the tensions present in Catholicism and the mainline Protestant denominations today, both in the US and around the world. As church membership falls in the US, it is growing in the third world, but all of the missionary faiths rely on first world money to support their growing but impoverished congregations in the southern hemisphere. Those mission churches are more conservative and traditional and oppose heatedly the mainstreaming of GLBT people into the life of their faiths.

The Anglican communion has always had a genius for finding the middle way to maintain its unity. Ordination of gay and lesbian ministers and consecration of homosexual bishops is going to test this faith's ability to play to its center.

Among the Home Crowd

via Democratic Veteran:

Rockefeller sounds off on Iraq

By Paul J. Nyden
STAFF WRITER

"If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. “I have admitted that my vote was wrong.”

The key Senate vote authorizing a war against Iraq came Oct. 11, 2003. It passed 77 to 23. The opponents included Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., an outspoken opponent of President Bush’s war plans. (The House of Representatives voted to pass a similar resolution, 296 to 133.)

“The decision got made before there was a whole bunch of intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “I think the intelligence was shaped. And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.

“You had a president who we now know was determined to go to war. He was going to be a war president,” Rockefeller said during an interview with editors at The Charleston Gazette on Friday.

“We had this feeling we could be welcomed as liberators. Americans don’t know history, geography, ethnicity,” Rockefeller said. “The administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don’t know anything about the Middle East.”

Rockefeller also said he is disturbed at the failure to involve the United Nations in creating a new government and finding peace in Iraq.

“He [Bush] has been stiffing the United Nations,” the senator said. “He doesn’t believe in the United Nations. He doesn’t understand the United Nations.”

The political atmosphere in Washington, D.C., changed dramatically after Bush took office, said Rockefeller, who has served in the Senate since 1985. “Republicans fell totally in line since Bush came into office. They have a loyalty I have never seen before.

“They are true believers. It started with [Rep.] Newt Gingrich [R-Ga.] in 1994. Nothing gets in their way. Facts don’t get in their way.

“And three chairmen of major [Senate] committees were told by Dick Cheney not to investigate anything in the administration.”

Many of the senator’s feelings were strengthened during his five-day trip with four other senators to Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations last week.

In Iraq, the senators visited a team of researchers investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction. “They have three million pieces of paper,” Rockefeller said. “But it is a sham. There is nothing to point to any weapons of any kind.”

Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the influence of terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing. “But only about five percent of the insurgents in Iraq are coming across the borders into the country. Most of them are homegrown.”

Domestic problems will continue to grow, Rockefeller believes, since Bush administration tax cuts could put the nation in a deficit for the next 50 years.

Tax cuts are hurting all federal social, educational and medical programs. The only agencies currently getting significantly increased funding today are military, homeland security and intelligence operations.

Rockefeller said he was particularly outraged by recent revelations that Bush administration leaders failed to provide Congress and the public with honest estimates of the costs of prescription drug benefits in the Medicare program.

When Bush signed the new bill late last year, he said costs for prescription drugs would be $400 billion over the next 10 years. Then, in late January, Bush admitted those costs actually would be $534 billion.

“Bush withheld the real costs of Medicare. That is absolutely unheard of,” Rockefeller said. “There will be an investigation of that.”

Rockefeller had high praise for Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief who served for 30 years under three Republican presidents and one Democratic president.

So, this is the way the story is playing beyond the Beltway. That's good to know.

Labor News

I listened to W's Saturday radio address yesterday with growing outrage. The economy is in trouble and all he can do is talk about home ownership rates, which are something that the presidency has little to do with. Widespread unemployment, the rate of which is masked by BLS statistics, artificially low interest rates and easy credit, combined with a bubble in both real estate and equity markets, have handed us a dangerous economy.

Kevin Drum has a lengthy discussion about the housing bubble today. What he doesn't talk about is that, with average wages actually falling, these prices are unsustainable. The foreclosure rate, nationally, is the highest it has been since the Reagan recession.

Feeling the SQUEEZE?

If money's tight, don't wait until a foreclosure posting to tell your lender you're in trouble

By Teresa McUsic

Special to the Star-Telegram

A record 1,610 houses in Tarrant, Denton and Collin counties are scheduled to be sold next month in foreclosure -- a number unseen since the 1980s

"It's a devastating problem; since 1997, foreclosures in the city have doubled. In February alone, more than 1,000 properties were listed for sale." Philly Daily News

I'll be paying special attention to the economy this week, because I'm hoping Bush gets hung out to dry on it very soon. But there is another reason that I'm focusing on money matters this week: on Tuesday, Local 400 of the United Food and Commercial workers will be voting to either ratify a new contract or to go on strike. The Local represents 40,000 workers in a huge geographical area from Eastern Tennessee to the Maryland shore. The contracts with the two largest grocery employers in the area, Safeway and Giant, expire at midnight Tuesday. The Union is prepared for and expecting a strike.

On Wednesday, I will begin participating in a group blog dedicated to job actions, labor and organizing. Marc Brazeau, Nathan Newman, Max Sawicky, Jordan Barab and Carter Wright will be my partners in this endeavor. As we get closer to the launch, I'll post a permanent link over on the sidebar. I'm looking forward to bringing you stories from the picket lines, information on how to decode what you hear and see in the press and some of the history of the labor movement in this country.

Bump will continue to bring you the mega-narratives in politics, culture and religion in our times. I look forward to this new venture with such well-informed and credentialed partners.

Wave of the Future

A Town's Future Is Leaving the Country
The 1,500 residents of Clintwood learn the meaning of outsourcing the hard way.

By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

The disappearance of Travelocity will send more young people like Rose to such cities as Knoxville, Tenn., and Roanoke, Va., further eroding the fabric of the community. "We're becoming more and more Third World here," said Bill Deel, a retired English teacher. "The best and the brightest leave."

The joke among the town's citizens is that the only secure jobs are at the new state prison, because they're not going to be shipping the convicts to India anytime soon. There are several new lockups around the county, which a lot of people have mixed feelings about.

"It's not quite as bad as being a nuclear waste dump site," said John Clay Stanley, director of the Dickenson County Chamber of Commerce. "But we're the dumpsite for human misery."

Even with the Travelocity jobs, Dickenson County was in a precarious position. With a population of 16,000 and falling, the county leads Virginia in the wrong statistics. Per-capita income here is half the state average, but the suicide rate is 66% higher. Unemployment is in the double digits.

Like most community officials, Stanley refuses to be pessimistic. But the abruptness of the Travelocity announcement was unnerving.

"A few weeks ago, I was watching a TV program showing how customer-service people in India were being trained to speak with a Southern accent," Stanley said. "I didn't realize I was seeing our annihilation."

Travelocity says it is only doing what its competitors have already done. Sykes Enterprises, which runs centers for Fortune 500 clients, is also cutting back sharply in the region. It shut one center in eastern Kentucky in January and has slated the second for extinction next month. Those jobs are going overseas too.

At the heart of offshoring is the question of what a company owes its workers and its community. It's a topic with particular resonance in Appalachia, where the coal companies once owned everything and the miners had to fight for basic human rights.

Fifteen years ago, the primary employer in Dickenson County was Pittston Coal. Like Travelocity, it was losing money. So Pittston cut benefits for retired miners and their widows. The miners responded by walking out. Hundreds were arrested for civil disobedience. Violence flared as the strikers punctured tires on coal trucks. The strike lasted nearly a year, the bitterness far longer.

Two years ago, Pittston sold its holdings. Mining is still a big business here, but ownership is fragmented.
....
Local development officials were so happy to land Travelocity that they loaned the company $250,000 for employee training. They also rounded up $1.6 million in government funding to build a day-care center. The goal: keeping the employees — and therefore Travelocity — happy.

A few years later, the company's promises are remembered with weariness and the money with regret. Travelocity didn't turn out to be so different after all. But the techniques used by workers against the mining companies no longer apply.

"The situation with Pittston was physical," said Will Mullins, 22, a Travelocity operations manager. "We could block the roads and block the trucks, and there was no way they could get the coal out. But there's no way to block the Internet. If we tried to do a strike, they'd just ignore us."

Travelocity, like other companies, is doing what it takes to survive, he added. "They'd cut our throats if it meant the stock price would go up a quarter." The company, a division of Sabre Holdings in Southlake, Texas, was an early leader in the Web travel business, but in the last two years its market share has been falling against No. 1-ranked Expedia and the up-and-coming Orbitz. Trying to remedy that situation, Travelocity has launched an $80-million ad campaign featuring a gnome that roams the world.

Wal-Mart World

A Lesson From Wal-Mart

By Peter J. Solomon

To meet the Wal-Mart challenge, consolidation is an imperative for both competitors and suppliers. Size can provide retailers with the product offerings and price flexibility to help keep customers from migrating to Wal-Mart. It can also allow suppliers to drive their manufacturing and logistics costs down and give them more countervailing negotiating power.

The size of Wal-Mart relative to its competitors and suppliers is so vast that the principal strategic question for every American retailer and consumer goods manufacturer is: "What's my relationship to Wal-Mart?" After a firm's management answers this question, it can decide how to answer other strategic questions. For many companies, that will mean getting to a size not attainable by internal growth, which will inevitably lead them to consolidation.

There is no reason to believe that the Wal-Mart economic juggernaut -- with $250 billion of sales (larger than the next five retailers combined) and $240 billion of market equity -- will slow down. The FTC needs to update its historical, now largely anachronistic definition of "markets" to reflect more accurately Wal-Mart's dominant position and allow others to join forces to compete.

If the FTC acts too aggressively against future mergers, there ultimately will be fewer competitors, not more, and weaker competition, not stronger. Eventually, Wal-Mart's everyday low prices may not need to be so low.

The need to change its definition of "markets" to account for Wal-Mart should have been apparent to the FTC in 1997, when it blocked the proposed merger between Staples and Office Depot (on whose board of directors I have served for 14 years). The FTC ruled that the two "category killer" superstores made up their own "relative market" despite the fact that at the time Wal-Mart alone probably sold more disposable paper office products than Staples, Office Depot and Office Max combined. Seven years later, the FTC still has not broadened its criteria in the face of the radically altered marketplace.

The last dominant retailer to have such influence was Sears, Roebuck and Co. in the late 1920s, when its explosive growth ignited a wave of consolidation in the retail business. Locally based department stores merged to create Federated Department Stores, Allied Stores and Associated Dry Goods and emerged as powerful competitors.

Wal-Mart's success is stimulating countervailing forces. In evaluating the inevitable flood of mergers to come, regulators should avoid unwittingly handicapping the emerging competition.

I think this is about 180 degrees wrong. Solomon is an investment banker and fails to see markets as individual choices. If we had half-way decent labor laws in place and a health care system that actually worked, most of these abuses would be illegal. The idea that creating ever more Wal-Marts will somehow solve the problem of crummy workplaces is fantastic. I guess he thinks ever more of us should be living in boxes and courting a case of TB.

They're Ba-ack

About 3,000 kinds of cicadas populate the globe, and most live conventional lives of a few years' duration. The eastern half of the United States is home to a unique set of species, called periodical cicadas, whose members spend 13 or 17 years underground before suddenly emerging into a frenzied and noisy adulthood.

Periodicals are the glamour girls and boys of the cicada world. And we are about to greet them again.

A few inches below the surface of the soil, in about 15 states and the District, billions of cicadas that were spawned in the spring of 1987 are ready to leave their subterranean homes and taste life in the open air.

In a few weeks, probably in early to mid-May, the cicada nymphs will crawl out of the ground, shed their skins and unfurl their wings. The males will out-roar lawn mowers in their search for a mate. The females will lay their eggs in the branches of trees. Then, beginning in mid-June, the adults will all die.

Prepare to welcome Brood X (that's 10), as a federal bureaucrat named this batch of 17-year cicadas. Periodical cicadas last appeared in the Washington area in 1996, when Brood II came topside. That emergence, while sparser overall, affected Virginia more heavily than will X, which will largely sidestep the Old Dominion.

The good news is that these insects are almost entirely harmless -- they don't bite or sting, although they can startle. They may make a few outdoor weddings even more unforgettable than brides and grooms might hope.

The rest of the news is that they are pretty hard to miss. There is of course the noise. But there is also their charm.

Elizabeth Kraft discovered that after a few days, she was enchanted with the bugs. "It was really creepy, but it's also amazing. It's an amazing encounter with nature."

"You're only going to see them three or four times in your life," says John Zyla, an amateur naturalist in Ridge, in southern St. Mary's County, who plans to track this year's appearance of Brood X. "I feel fortunate to drive to a place where they're calling."

I'm less enthusiastic. The noise is intense. During the last "emergence" it kept me awake at night, it sounds like the sound track to a science fiction movie blasting outside your windows.

They do enormous damage to tree limbs as they lay their eggs in the bark of the smallest branches. And they are everywhere. This is an encounter with nature you don't get to skip.

Wierd Weather

Rare hurricane stirs South Atlantic
Storm could make landfall in Brazil late Saturday or early Sunday

Saturday, March 27, 2004 Posted: 3:59 PM EST (2059 GMT)

The storm swirls off the coast of Brazil in this satellite image taken Saturday at 10 a.m. ET.

(CNN) -- A rare South Atlantic hurricane about 110 miles off the coast of southeastern Brazil on Saturday afternoon was expected to make landfall Saturday night or Sunday, a U.S. government meteorologist said.

The report marked the first time since 1966, when satellite tracking began, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded a hurricane-strength storm in the South Atlantic Ocean, said Jack Beven, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.

"Some of the outer cloud bands are just reaching the coast," Beven said.

He described the Category 1 storm, which was packing 85 mph winds, as moving southwesterly toward the coast at about 9 mph and predicted it would not gain strength.

Tropical storm-strength winds extended less than 100 miles from the eye.

"The whole thing is only about 200 miles across, at best," Beven said. "Size-wise, it's a very small system."

No one on shore was reporting significant storms, he said.

Remember that story a couple of weeks back about the effects of Global warming, a scary Pentagon study?

Faithful Liberal

For those liberals who complain that the religious left isn't heard in politics and public policy:

BISHOP MAKES A FAITH-BASED CHALLENGE TO GEORGE W BUSH

(New York, March 19 2004) - President George W. Bush has made his Christian faith and "compassionate conservatism" central to his presidency and campaign for re-election. But just how "Christian" are the assumptions underlying current US domestic and foreign policy?

In a book to be published in June by Continuum, retired Atlanta Bishop Bennett Sims provides a penetrating critique of the religious and political assumptions of the Bush presidency. He sets out contrasting versions of Christianity, both of which may be drawn from the Hebrew-Christian scriptures.

"Why Bush Must Go - a Bishop's Faith-based Challenge" gives a succinct and compelling alternative to the Bush vision of Christian leadership.

Bishop Sims juxtaposes the violent, confrontational concept of power presented by George W. Bush with the enduring power of compassion, justice, and nonviolence exemplified by the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. He rejects the fierce Fundamentalism that expects an imminent and violent end to history and celebrates the movement of prophetic power from the shadows of history to the foreground of political action.

As the presidential campaign gathers momentum this summer, Bishop Sims is the ideal source for answers to questions that will be debated across the nation.

About the author
The Right Rev. Bennett J. Sims is retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (1972-83), and Founding President of the Institute for Servant Leadership at Emory University (1988-99). A seminary professor before becoming a bishop, he returned to teaching, at Candler School of Theology, after his retirement. He is the author of three books: "Invitation to Hope," "Purple Ink: Theology and Social Ethics," and "Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium." >From 1943 to 1946 Sims served in the U.S. Navy as a line officer on destroyers.

Praise for "Why Bush Must Go":

"This is a timely and courageous book. It should provoke much thought, prayer and discussion. Read it." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Bishop Sims believes in a politically committed spirituality. His message should be read and discussed in every church in the land at this critical time in the nation's history." - The Rev. William Sloan Coffin

"This is a passionate and persuasive book. Bennett Sims has woven together his career as an Episcopal theologian and bishop with his ethical and political concerns as an informed citizen of the United States. He examines issues underneath the political propaganda of the spin-doctors and presents a vision of what the country can be which judges what it is becoming. This book will not be popular in the present White House, but it will ring true with millions of Americans and people around the world will cheer that someone inside the USA sees what they see so clearly." - Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of A New Christianity for a Better World

"Like the minor prophets before him, Bennett Sims has written a small book that packs a major wallop. His mix of religion and politics is as fresh as it is bold, but his critique of power goes well beyond reproof. Having witnessed the worst that people can do, Sims remains an apostle of hope. His practical vision of a peaceable planet is so compelling that only the terminally hard of heart can fail to respond." - Barbara Brown Taylor, author of When God Is Silent

Waste, Fraud and, Especially, Abuse

Federal auditors on the trail of wasteful spending in Iraq

By Seth Borenstein

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Uncle Sam's "cost detectives" are following the billions of taxpayers' dollars the Bush administration is spending to rebuild Iraq, and that makes some people nervous.

Federal auditors are on the trail of wasteful spending and padded bills. They work in the offices of the politically connected defense contractors they're investigating. What they've dug up so far is big news. Who they are remains mostly a secret.

They've found that Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, has charged $67.3 million for soldiers' meals that were never served, billed Uncle Sam $2.64 per gallon for gas in oil-rich Iraq and had cost estimates that were inflated by $700 million at one point. They faulted contractor Science Applications International Corp. for billing the government for flying a Hummer and a pickup into Iraq on a chartered jet.

And the Defense Contract Audit Agency is just getting started.

"You just gotta understand auditors. Once we get a taste of something, we start digging," said Rich Buhre, a recently retired regional agency director. "You peel the onion (of finances) enough ... it's very difficult to try to hide that stuff" from the auditors.

What makes a good auditor is "the junkyard dog mentality," Buhre said. "It's like, you ever get an itch and something just doesn't feel right?"

The agency's job is to be a consultant to the Pentagon and more than two dozen other federal agencies on the arcane language of contracts, to see whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.

It's the most un-Washington of the federal agencies. It shuns attention, gets bipartisan praise in Congress and adheres to strict ethics rules that rotate auditors every five years so they don't get close to the companies they investigate.

What really separates it from the rest of the feds is that it saves taxpayers money instead of just spending it.

Last year, it spent $406 million, but helped the government save $2.2 billion. In the past three years, it found that contractors had inflated the prices they charged the government by more than $88 million.

"They're the last line of defense for taxpayers," said Keith Ashdown, the vice president of the liberal fiscal watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The key to the agency is that it's independent from the rest of the Defense Department bureaucracy and from political and business pressure, said former acting agency director Fred Newton. He added: "You got to be independent about pursuing it and not having a contractor make you back off."

That's what the agency is doing with Iraqi spending. Its work triggered a Pentagon inspector general's report March 18 that found serious problems with 24 early contracts in Iraq. The agency has issued 187 reports on Iraqi contracts in all.

All of which has something to do with this:

U.S. contract goofs rob Iraqi forces of vital gear

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Senior American commanders in Iraq are publicly complaining that delays in delivering radios, body armor and other equipment have hobbled their ability to build the Iraqi security force that eventually is supposed to replace U.S. troops here.

New members of the Iraqi security force celebrate their graduation Thursday in Baghdad.

The lag in supplying the equipment, because of a contract dispute, perhaps even contributed to deaths among Iraqi recruits, say U.S. commanders, whose private complaints through the chain of command have broken into public debate in recent days.

A spokesman for the company that was awarded the original contract said much of the equipment was "sitting on the docks" waiting to be shipped to Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, praised the Iraqi forces helping his troops in western Iraq, which includes the dangerous regions around Fallujah and the Syrian border. But he said the work had faltered for lack of combat gear for the Iraqis.

"Not only are the security forces bravely leading the fight against terrorists, they are, in some cases, insisting on doing it alone," Swannack said. "They want to defeat these enemies of a new and free Iraq. If we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along."

The U.S. military, too, has suffered shortages of some equipment, such as newer bulletproof vests and armored Humvees. But the equipment for America's troops and for the Iraqis comes through different contract processes.

The first batch of equipment for the Iraqis - rifles, uniforms, body armor, radios and other gear - had been paid for and was to have been delivered under a $327 million contract to Nour USA Ltd. of Vienna, Va. But the Pentagon canceled that deal this month after competing firms protested that Army procurement officers had botched the contract with sloppy language and incomplete paperwork.

"We messed up," said an Army official with 28 years of experience in contracting.

The Army is rushing to seek new bids but that could take two to three months.

"Part of it is just the magnitude of how much was needed - thousands of police cars, hundreds of thousands of uniforms," said Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the Army's deputy director of operations. "It was just a lot harder to get stuff in than we anticipated."

A spokesman for Nour USA said that the company had protested the Army's cancellation of the contract and that much of the equipment to have been supplied was ready to ship, sitting in warehouses in the United States and eastern Europe.

The list of reconstruction contracts either delayed or being investigated is growing because of what watchdog agencies say is an ad hoc and underregulated selection process. Analysts caution that it will invite more abuse if the United States transfers power to an Iraqi government without a strong oversight agency.

Not About AIDS Patients

Plan to Fight AIDS Overseas Is Foundering
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: March 28, 2004

Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS and 14 months after President Bush promised $15 billion for AIDS treatment in poor countries, shortages of money and battles over patents have kept antiretroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them.

Progress in distributing the drugs, which have sharply cut the death rate in the United States and other Western countries, has been excruciatingly slow despite steep drops in their prices.

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As a result, only about 300,000 people in the world's poorest nations are getting the drugs, out of six million who need them, according to the World Health Organization.

Experts, advocacy groups and health officials agree that the delays, compounded by inadequate medical facilities and training in very poor countries, are likely to persist unless spending is stepped up sharply.

Early this month, Stephen Lewis, the special United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, conceded that the W.H.O.'s ambitious plan to have three million people in treatment by 2005 — announced on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day — was already collapsing from a lack of money. Donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are now about $1.6 billion a year, barely 20 percent of what Secretary General Kofi Annan said was needed when he created the fund in 2001.

Saying that global contributions come to a tiny fraction of what is being spent on military operations and building civilian institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Lewis added that if the W.H.O. program failed, "there are no excuses left, no rationalizations to hide behind, no murky slanders to justify indifference — there will only be the mass graves of the betrayed."

While Mr. Bush promised in his 2003 State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over five years on AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, his budget requests have fallen far short of that goal. For the most recent donation to the Global Fund, he requested only $200 million, although Congress authorized $550 million.

Nor have Europe and Asia been as generous as the fund had hoped.

Dr. Richard G. A. Feachem, a Briton who is the fund's executive director, put a brave face on the situation, describing current donations as "a steep upward flight path to our cruising altitude, which we anticipate to be $8 billion." To get there in the fund's first two years would be "inconceivable," he added. He is lobbying Congress for $1.2 billion for 2005.

At the same time, few people in poor countries have been able to get lower-priced generic antiretroviral drugs. While the generic drugs have been approved by the W.H.O., endorsed by the World Bank and used in several African countries, the Bush administration has so far paid only for medicines that are still under patent and cost much more.

Yet another give-away program for Big Pharma.

While the Bushies play politics with AIDS, here are the latest statistics from UNAIDS:

"The global HIV/AIDS epidemic killed more than 3 million people in 2003, and an estimated 5 million acquired the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) bringing to 40 million the number of people living with the virus around the world."

- AIDS Epidemic Update 2003

The public health community is tearing its hair out trying to get the press's attention about this global epidemic, which will devastate entire societies and economies in addition to the plain human suffering it will cause.

Rummy Broke It

Personnel Crisis Looming, Army Spouses Say
As Soldiers and Their Families Tire of Extended Deployments, Reenlistment May Fall, Survey Shows

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A01

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. -- Patty B. Morgan's husband was fighting in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and she was caring for two children by herself. Their lease was expiring and they had committed to buying a house across town, so she was going through with the move anyway.

One hot morning last July, as she was about to drive boxes to the new place, she walked outside, infant car seat in hand, and opened the garage door -- to find that her green Jeep had been stolen.

A few days later, she was told that her husband wouldn't be home by Labor Day, as she had expected, but would serve in Iraq six months more, for a total of a year.

"It was a hell of a week," Morgan said in her throaty voice.

Morgan's experience is part of a significant change in Army life brought about by the war on terrorism: The extended, or repeated, deployments that characterize the post-9/11 Army have intensified the burdens traditionally borne by military families. And most of the spouses who have remained behind are wondering how long the Army can keep it up.

This change is reflected in a recent poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, and in dozens of supplemental interviews. The poll, the first nongovernmental survey of military spouses conducted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, included more than 1,000 spouses living on or near the 10 heaviest-deploying Army bases.

While most of them said they have coped well, three-quarters said they believed that the Army may hit a personnel crisis as soldiers and their families tire of the pace and leave for civilian lives.

Lt. Gen. Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief, said in an interview that overall, The Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll results seemed to reflect those of the service's internal surveys.

The findings come at a time when the Army is providing soldiers' families with unprecedented levels of support. Over the past 30 years, beginning with the end of conscription after the Vietnam War, the service became smaller, more professional -- and more married. By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the military was caught flat-footed by the growing need to support soldiers' families during a major deployment.

Well, we've been predicting this since day one of Bump. Here's a link to the poll results. Younger spouses married to more recent enlistees are having the hardest time, which is not much of a surprise.

Tech Trouble

My email has been down since about 10 EST last night. Of course tech support at the ISP doesn't keep weekend hours, so I don't know what the problem is or how long it will take to fix. Leave email for me in the comments below.

See No Evil

How Good Intelligence Falls on Deaf Ears
By DAVID KAHN

Published: March 27, 2004

Two centuries ago, Carl von Clausewitz concluded that "most intelligence is false." A century later, the chief of the German general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, added a psychological explanation for this: "The higher commander generally makes himself a picture of friend and foe, in the painting of which personal wishes provide the main elements. If incoming reports appear to correspond with this picture, they are laid by with satisfaction. If they contradict it, they are discarded as entirely false."

Of course, the response is not limited to the realm of politics and statecraft. People believe what they want to believe. Edna St. Vincent Millay asked her reader to "Pity me that the heart is slow to learn/What the swift mind beholds at every turn." A little boy begged of Shoeless Joe Jackson, on hearing that he had betrayed a World Series for money, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Intelligence cannot discover everything or foresee all. Such expectations exceed human capacity. People ask, "Why didn't we intercept their communications?" Perhaps we did. But even if we had, they would probably not have revealed anything like, "Tomorrow we fly into the World Trade Center" but only something like "Tomorrow is the day!" The best we can do is prepare as much as possible. After Pearl Harbor, the commanders there, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Gen. Walter C. Short, complained that they did not have all the intelligence needed to alert them to the attack. Regardless of whether this was true, there was no excuse for them not to be ready.

Intelligence will always be incomplete; it will often run counter to what people want it to say. Leaders, however, are paid to overcome these obstacles. They can only lead when they deal with reality — and then take steps to help us plan for the worst.

As we now know, they did have the intelligence. They just didn't listen to it.

Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming
By PETER R. NEUMAN

The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda really consisted of only two items, neither of which had anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam. First, the administration increased its efforts to bring about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the prime source of instability in a region of great strategic importance.

The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China. Missile defense — this time against attack by China and North Korea — was put back on the table. Even the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is an indication of the administration's mindset — intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks considered the most likely future challenger of American power.

Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

Table Pounding

Trust Clarke: He's right about Bush
More than two years after the worst terrorist attack in history, the President still does not understand the threat we confront, say security experts IVO DAALDER and JAMES LINDSAY

Why are administration officials pounding the table so hard? Because confirmation of Mr. Clarke's basic accusations comes from none other than George W. Bush himself.

Take the charge that the Mr. Bush did not make fighting al-Qaeda a priority before Sept. 11. In late 2001, Mr. Bush told the journalist Bob Woodward that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after Sept. 11. I was not on point." Mr. Bush knew Osama bin Laden was a menace. "But I didn't feel the sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Or take Mr. Clarke's charge that Mr. Bush immediately sought to link the attacks in New York and Washington to Iraq. According to the notes of national-security meetings that the White House gave Mr. Woodward so he could write his book, Bush at War, the President ended an early debate over how to respond to Sept. 11 by saying, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now." At a later meeting, he linked Saddam Hussein to the attacks: "He was probably behind this in the end."

Those admissions highlight a broader, more troubling point that Mr. Clarke's accusations raise, which is that Mr. Bush does not understand the threat we confront. For Mr. Bush and his advisers it is not al-Qaeda that is the real danger so much as the states that supposedly support it. Thus, a Defence Department spokesman, responding to Mr. Clarke's claim that Mr. Wolfowitz did not take the al-Qaeda terrorist threat seriously, said Mr. Wolfowitz did see al-Qaeda "as a major threat to U.S. security, the more so because of the state support it received from the Taliban and because of its possible links to Iraq."

The assumption driving Mr. Bush's war on terrorism is that the United States can win by targeting rogue states and the tyrants who rule them. The war in Afghanistan was about ousting the Taliban and denying al-Qaeda a sanctuary; the Iraq war was about ousting Saddam.

That view of the terrorist threat is deeply flawed, quite apart from the dubious claims about ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Al-Qaeda is a transnational network of terrorists, less like a state than like a non-governmental organization or multinational corporation with multiple independent franchises. It thrives on an Islamist ideology, and extends its presence to the far reaches of the globe -- not just in rogue and failed states, but within the West as well. Its terrorists can strike -- whether in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid or New York and Washington -- without the direct support of states. That is what makes it so frightening.

Mr. Clarke's charges have stung the Bush administration not just because of the stature of the accuser, but because at their core, they say that more than two years after the worst terrorist attack in history, the President and his advisers still don't get what happened.

That is the true, and alarming, message of this week's debate.

Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay are co-authors of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, which won the 2003 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations.

Think about this. At issue is not just 9/11, at issue is NOW. Very little, beyond airline safety, has been done to change the threat profile of this country. The ports are not safer. The railways are not safer. The power plants are not safer, nor are the chemical plants. The bridges and highways are not safer, and a tanker truck fire in Connecticut yesterday took out a hunk of the major east coast throughway. The money that it would take to fix this now is in Mesopotamia.

This is the message of Richard Clarke's book. We are in greater danger NOW because Bush took us into Iraq. NOW.

Unpacified Iraq

Iraqi cleric: 9/11 was a 'miracle from God'
Five Iraqis killed in Fallujah

Friday, March 26, 2004 Posted: 4:22 PM EST (2122 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- An influential Shiite cleric in Iraq called Israel's assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas a "dirty crime against Islam" and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks "a miracle from God."

Moqtada al-Sadr delivered a charged sermon at Friday prayers at a mosque near the holy city of Najaf, blasting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas.

On Monday, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at the wheelchair-bound Yassin as he left a Gaza City mosque. Yassin and seven others were killed in the attack on the leader of what Israel, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group.

Al-Sadr Friday called Sharon the "biggest terrorist of all.

" ... He has committed this dirty crime and killed one of the greatest of Islamic mujahedeen," al-Sadr told hundreds of worshippers at the Kufa mosque. "This was once again a dirty crime against Islam."

He accused the United States of complicity in Yassin's killing and said Iraqis should react to the assassination "in the way that satisfies God."

Al-Sadr led the worshippers in chants: "No, no Israel! No, no to the Jews! No, no America! No, no to terrorism!"

Al-Sadr, who also has a powerful base in a poor Baghdad neighborhood, railed against the United States' occupation of Iraq.

"I seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God," he said. "They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner -- and the proof of this is the fall of the American Twin Towers."

He then referred to the September 11 attacks as "a miracle from God.

This is real bad news, Al-Sadr is enormously influential among the Shi'a, particularly the poor ones whose lives have been made enormously worse by our mishandled occupation. He has a private militia and the will to use it.

Marine and 11 Iraqis Die During Fighting in Sunni Triangle
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: March 26, 2004

FALLUJA, Iraq, March 26 - At least 12 people, including one American marine, were killed in a series of gunbattles today, as guerrilla violence swept the Sunni-dominated area north and west of the Iraqi capital.

Among the Iraqis killed was a cameraman for ABC News, who was shot by American soldiers, an eyewitness said, when he stepped into the middle of a skirmish with Iraqi guerrillas.

American military officials provided no information on the ABC camerman or any other Iraqi casualties. They said that in addition to the one marine killed in the fighting here today, ``several'' others had been wounded. The death of the marine comes a day after Iraqi guerrillas attacked an American convoy here with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, leaving one marine dead and two wounded.

Seven other Iraqis - three suspected insurgents and four Iraqi paramilitary troops - were killed during a large-scale attack on a suspected guerrilla hideout in Tikrit. American military officials said they took 21 prisoners in that raid.

The combat today was the most dramatic measure of the violence that has continued unabated throughout the Sunni heartland in recent months. In both the level of sophistication and ease of maneuver displayed by the insurgents, the fighting has appeared to raise new doubts about the claims of American military officers that that they were close to defeating the insurgency led by members of Saddam Hussein's fallen regime and were dealing with a smaller number of foreign-led Islamic terrorists.

The fierce street fighting in Fallujah demonstrated anew that this city, 35 miles west of Baghdad and in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, the epicenter of anti-American resistance, was far from pacified and that there were large areas of the city where the Americans could enter only at their peril.
....
The atmosphere was very tense in the city, and hospital officials at the city's main hospital waved away journalists, warning this reporter that there was a very good chance that he would be shot and killed if he went inside.

After the firefights, which were said to have taken place in the Askari neighborhood of the city, the Marines sealed off the main highway to Baghdad and moved in tanks and armored cars.

This evening dozens of marines could still be seen fanning out on foot through the neighborhood. They were walking house to house but they were not searching any houses.

Last month, more than 30 insurgents shot their way into a Falluja police station,
freed dozens of prisoners and killed 15 police officers.

Foreign Press Review

Running scared

The Bush administration fears voters will believe Richard Clarke's allegations, writes Philip James

Friday March 26, 2004

The swiftness and ferocity of the Bush White House's attack on Richard Clarke tells you two things: his story may be largely true, and the Bush administration is terrified that the American people will believe it.

The central allegation - that Mr Bush was so obsessed with going after Saddam Hussein that he openly challenged his counter-terrorism adviser to find a link between September 11 and Iraq the day after the attacks took place - is serious.

It threatens the fundamental platform of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign: that you are safer with them than you are with the Democrats.

The White House did not let a single news cycle go by before questioning that the alleged encounter between the president and Clarke had ever taken place, assigning dark motives to a man who has served four presidents, three of them Republicans.

But you don't have to be Bob Woodward to check Clarke's story out. There were other witnesses to this meeting, one of whom spoke to me.

"The conversation absolutely took place. I was there, but you can't name me," the witness said. "I was one of several people present. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the president had Iraq on his mind, first and foremost."

This former national security council official was too terrified to go on the record - he knows how vengeful this administration can be.

He remembers the late night phone call former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill received just before he published The Price of Loyalty, his account of how the Bush White House set its sights on Iraq from day one. He was about to discover the price of disloyalty to this administration.

It was Donald Rumsfeld on the line, a man more used to authorising deadly force on the grandest scale, gently advising him that it might not be in his best interests to go public.

When O'Neill ignored him, he instantly became the target of an investigation by his former department, which claimed that he had revealed state secrets.

Damning testimony on Bush's tactics

Richard Clarke came across as calm, credible — and courageous — in his testimony Wednesday.

The government's former top counterterrorism adviser began with an expression of contrition before the bipartisan commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, directing his comments to relatives of the victims: "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed."

His comparison of the Clinton and Bush administrations' approaches to terrorism was dramatic and damning. The Clinton White House, he said, had "no higher priority" than combating terrorism — while the Bush White House made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue" before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Not surprisingly, several commission members tried to challenge Clarke's motives. John Lehman, a former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan who now is chair of J.F. Lehman & Co., questioned whether Clarke was "an active partisan trying to shove out a book."

Clarke never flinched. He pointed out that the last time he had to declare party loyalty was 2000 — when he requested a Republican ballot in the Virginia primary. He noted that he had served in the White House under Reagan and both Bushes. He addressed head-on the notion that he was aligned with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry.

"Let's just lay that one to bed," he testified. "I'm not working for the Kerry campaign." While he co-teaches a class with a long-time friend and professional associate who works for Kerry, Clarke stated unequivocally that he would not work for a Kerry administration.

Clarke forcefully countered suggestions that his criticisms of Bush contradict his closed-door testimony to the commission as well as his public statements during his White House tenure.

"In the 15 hours of (closed-door) testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," he said. "And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq ... the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Those words were followed by a long silence, punctuating their power. Clarke has raised unsettling questions about this administration's approach to terrorism, before and after Sept. 11. These questions will not go away.

White House attempts to discredit this public servant have been aggressive to the point of unseemliness. Clarke proved Wednesday that he is fully capable of defending his honour.

A Stronger UN

U.N. Urged to Probe U.S. Role in Haiti
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 26, 2004

Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (AP) -- Caribbean leaders said the U.N. General Assembly should investigate Jean-Bertrand Aristide's claims that the United States staged a coup in Haiti and forced the ouster of the country's first democratically elected president.

The 15-nation Caribbean Community also said it was considering rejecting the U.S.-backed government of Haiti.

At the first day of a two-day summit Thursday, Caribbean leaders said they were focusing on whether to recognize a government that praises the rebels who helped oust Aristide.

Jamaican officials said Aristide will take permanent asylum in South Africa, but not until it holds general elections next month. Aristide has been in temporary exile in Jamaica since March 15, despite protests from U.S. and Haitian officials.

Caribbean leaders are ``still upset and uncomfortable'' about Aristide's departure, and made that clear to U.N. special envoy Reginald Dumas when he listened to their debate, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas told The Associated Press.

``We are prepared to discuss the possibility of identifying exactly what were the circumstances,'' Douglas said. ``We are taking this matter to the U.N. General Assembly for clarification.''

"And the U.N. must mean something. Remember Rwanda, or Kosovo. The U.N. didn't do its job. And we hope tomorrow the U.N. will do its job. If not, all of us need to step back and try to figure out how to make the U.N. work better as we head into the 21st century."

George W. Bush
Press conference in the Azores
March 16, 2003

(hat tip Billmon)

Brutality Brutalizes the Brutalizer

In Army Survey, Troops in Iraq Report Low Morale

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A18

The survey was part of a study initiated by the Army last summer after a number of suicides provoked concern about the mental well-being of soldiers in Iraq. The report faulted the Army for how it handled mental health problems, saying some counselors felt inadequately trained and citing problems in distribution of antidepressant medication and sleeping pills.

But perhaps the most surprising findings were the grim conclusions about troop morale, which indicate that Iraq is taking a toll that goes beyond casualty figures.

The Pentagon has been intensely worried that more frequent and longer combat tours will prompt more soldiers to get out of the Army rather than reenlist, especially if it means a second stint in Iraq or Afghanistan. Army insiders say it is likely that brigades from three divisions that served in Iraq over the past year -- the 101st Airborne, the 3rd Infantry and the 4th Infantry -- are likely to be sent back in 2005.

The Pentagon data on morale also appear to give official confirmation to a more informal survey conducted last summer by Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. That survey found about half of troops who filled out questionnaires described their unit's morale as low and their training as insufficient, and said they did not plan to reenlist.

Col. Virgil Patterson, who oversaw the Army survey, said he was "somewhat surprised" by the findings on troop morale. He noted that when the survey was taken, soldiers were still feeling the effects of a brutally hot Iraqi summer, and that since then troops have better living conditions and are better able to communicate with their families.

"It was a pretty miserable set of circumstances at the time," he said. "We speculate that all of those contributed to the factor of low morale."

Patterson said he could not place the numbers in historical context because similar surveys have not been conducted before. "This is the first time we've ever gone into an active combat theater and asked soldiers how they are doing, so we have no comparative data," he said. The study, conducted from late August through early October 2003, surveyed 756 Army soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait, focusing on units that had engaged in combat.

Reaction to the Army's survey was mixed among several experts.

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a Vietnam War veteran, said, "It's not particularly surprising, especially given the frustrating nature of the combat they're facing now, with patrols and bombs going off."

But a senior Army commander who spoke on the condition of anonymity expressed alarm.

"I'd be extremely worried by these numbers," said the officer, who specializes in morale issues. Having more than half the soldiers surveyed say they are unhappy should "set off alarm bells," the officer said.

Jonathan Shay, a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, called it "a painful report to read." Shay, who wrote two books on cohesion and leadership problems in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, said the report shows morale and cohesion were "seriously low" among troops in Iraq.

Think this might have something to do with it?

WASHINGTON – To former military police Master Sgt. Lisa Girman and two of her fellow soldiers, May 12 was just "another night in the desert" restraining unruly Iraqi war prisoners. But in January, the three Pennsylvania MPs were discharged from the military for kicking and punching Iraqis, including one allegedly linked to the ambush of the Jessica Lynch convoy. [Editor's note: In the original version, Girman's name was misspelled.]

In a similar case, a Marine guard testified in February that beating uncooperative Iraqi detainees was common. In all, eight Marines have been charged for mistreating detainees, one of whom died in custody.

Now, the US military has charged six more American soldiers with assault, indecent acts, cruelty, and maltreatment in connection with the alleged abuse of as many as 19 detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

From detainee abuse to the excessive use of force and disputed killings of civilians, the Iraq conflict is producing its share of legal and ethical lapses by US service members, despite strenuous efforts by US commanders to avoid them.

The breaches involve only a tiny fraction of the more than 150,000-strong US occupation force, which military ethicists and human rights groups have given generally good marks for their comportment in Iraq. Still, such violations could cause disproportionate damage to the US military's image among Iraqis.

"The forces of gravity that drag you down to the level of your enemy are very powerful," says Albert Pierce, director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at the US Naval Academy. "Sometimes they are inherent in conflict, sometimes they are part of an inherent strategy by the enemy," he says, adding that US commanders are making an "extraordinary effort" to resist such forces.

Nixon Was More Efficient

We keep the WaPo's Al Kamen around to remind us of the painfully obvious but overlooked:

And now former anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke is beating up on the administration, and the Bush folks are acting as if they just heard last weekend that he had a book coming out. Which is just about true, although the book was physically in the White House months ago.

Clarke, bound by the usual pre-publication review agreement, shipped it to the National Security Council on Nov. 4 for a review that lasted at least a couple of months, the White House said.

Not once, apparently, did the NSC reviewers mention to the communications or political people that they had an election bomb on their hands.

Buzz is that the NSC types apparently felt it would have been inappropriate to do so. What? Once again the Bush White House stubbornly refuses to use the levers of power for political purposes? So maybe there is some legal, moral or ethical constraint. This is Washington, for crying out loud.

Had the political people gotten their hands on the book, they might have rushed the vetting so the book could have come out in December. (This in turn would have strengthened the argument that Clarke put it out now only for sales and political purposes.) Or they could have tried an extended rope-a-dope to delay publication until after the election. (Risky with a wily bureaucrat like Clarke, but . . .)

At the very least, they could have improved NSC deputy chief Stephen Hadley's performance Sunday on "60 Minutes" or the impression they are scrambling in defense. And how about a good, old-fashioned Washington hatchet job on Clarke? With more time, they could have done a thorough check for tax problems, various vices, latent thespianism and so forth.

What good is an Enemies List if you don't know how to work it?

Speak Truth To Power At Your Own Risk

White House Wages A War on Clarke
Bush Aides Move to Head Off Damage

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 26, 2004; Page A01

James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, said he had been stunned by the ferocity of the White House campaign but said Clarke "is raising fundamental questions about the credibility of the president and his staff in regard to what they did to keep America safe."

"They are vulnerable, which is why they are attacking so hard," Thurber said. "You have to go back to Vietnam or Watergate to get the same feel about the structure of argument coming out of the White House against Clarke's statements. They've had multiple people rebutting him, with information that is incomplete and selective at best."

White House communications director Dan Bartlett said officials had to take Clarke seriously because "at face value, based on his résumé and experience, you would think this guy is credible.

"Particularly because of how egregious the accusations are, you couldn't let them stand," he said.

In their effort to undermine Clarke, Bush's aides departed from some of their most cherished practices. They invited reporters into West Wing offices where they rarely tread, for on-the-record interviews with top officials. They released an e-mail from Clarke to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that they contend is at odds with the account Clarke gave during his testimony to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They said he was disgruntled because his application to be deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security had been rejected.

An official also read reporters an e-mail that Rice had sent Clarke chastising him for skipping several of her morning staff meetings.

Perhaps most surprising, aides who routinely spar over such distinctions as "White House official" and "senior administration official" granted Fox News permission to unmask Clarke as the anonymous briefer in an August 2002 White House conference call that highlighted the administration's efforts in the war on terrorism. The administration's allies say Clarke's statements that day conflict with allegations in his book.

In contrast to his assertions that the Bush administration did not consider terrorism an urgent problem, Clarke told reporters in that briefing that before the attacks, Bush's aides had developed "a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda." He said the administration also approved a fivefold increase in CIA funding for covert action to pursue al Qaeda.

Clarke said Wednesday that as an administration official delivering the background briefing, he focused on positive developments but left out the administration's failings.

Officials from both parties said it would be at least a couple of days before it is clear whether the offensive succeeded in eroding Clarke's credibility or whether the public, and especially independent voters, would wind up viewing him as a courageous whistle-blower.

Joe Lockhart, a press secretary in the Clinton administration, said he believes the White House is going to pay a price for focusing more on Clarke as a person than on the substance of his contentions. "This was classic political triage," he said. "You do what you think you need to do to get through the day. At the end of the day you feel pretty good about yourself, but you may have created a bigger problem for yourself down the road."

Ex-Aide's Book Corners Market in Capital Buzz
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

Published: March 26, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 25 — On the first day, the hottest new book in town sold out in an hour at Politics and Prose and sales clerks turned away dozens of disappointed buyers. On the second day, the store called three national book wholesalers, which announced they did not have a single copy left.

That was when Barbara Meade knew that Richard A. Clarke, the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," was the genuine article, an unexpected literary phenomenon whose account of counterterrorism failures within the Bush administration has been flying off the shelves this week.

"It's reached a point now where if you're going to be in the loop in Washington you probably have to say you've read the book," Ms. Meade, co-owner of Politics and Prose, said, adding that she believed she now has enough copies to last through the weekend.

In Washington, Mr. Clarke's book is not just the talk of the town, it is practically the only conversation in town, having — in just four days — hijacked the news agenda and placing him in the ranks of other best-selling Washington authors like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. On Amazon.com, it is ranked first, outselling even "The South Beach Diet." And some booksellers around the country are struggling to keep up with demand for the book, which has gone into its fifth printing since it went on sale on Monday.

Mr. Clarke, the Bush administration's former counterterrorism chief, says officials failed to heed warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks and then neglected the threat of Al Qaeda as they turned their attention to Saddam Hussein.

In this city, those incendiary charges are dominating political chatter at breakfast tables, dinner tables and even on the basketball court, where David Sirota, spokesman for the Center for American Progress, discussed it last night after shooting hoops with Congressional workers and former presidential campaign advisers at the Sidwell Friends School.

"It's all that people are talking about," said Jim Jordan, the Democratic strategist, who said he was planning to buy his own copy on Thursday.

There are also signs that the book's appeal is extending beyond the insular world of Washington in a week in which Mr. Clarke's story was splashed across the front pages of national newspapers and featured on televised news broadcasts as he testified on Wednesday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Writers writing for Readers

Read this first. I have a very different story to tell, but it starts like this. The guy should be on your daily reads, this is bookmark material if you prize good writing.

Brave New World

The prolific Stirling Newberry of The Blogging of the President: 2004 conducted an interview with economist Angry Bear last week. This being Blogovia, the interview was conducted by IM. I may never get used to this. Clink on the BOP link to see the interchange, in which Stirling and AB bemoan the loss of hard data when conducting policy conversations on economic policies, which now seem to be shaped by focus group, the Photoshop of politics. AB's remarks on methodology are helpful in understanding the information drought we currently live in. I'm just going to quote Stirling's conclusion, however, as I find it resonating with me:

What you have then, in the end, is a revolt of the technocrats. The people who, under normal circumstances, deploy formidable intelligence and skill in doing the vast analytic and number crunching work that our society runs on, but does not often appreciate. That they have come out of the wood work is, in itself, a story which should not be understated or ignored. The “defection of the elites” is a crucial stage in the collapse of institutions, and those that rouse this group of people – trained to find, sort and organize details, by habit and turn of mind consistent and reasonable, and tenacious once the facts have convinced them of the importance of a task – do so at their own risk.

And that is why, some day somewhere, there will be an official who wonders why, "why oh why" as DeLong might say – they ever decided to bait the bear.

Then I remembered reading the following by Harold Mayerson in yesterday's WaPo:

Step back a minute and look at who has left this administration or blown the whistle on it, and why. Clarke enumerates a half-dozen counterterrorism staffers, three of whom were with him in the Situation Room on Sept. 11, who left because they felt the White House was placing too much emphasis on the enemy who didn't attack us, Iraq, and far too little on the enemy who did.

But that only begins the list. There's Paul O'Neill, whose recent memoir recounts his ongoing and unavailing battle to get the president to take the skyrocketing deficit seriously. There's Christie Todd Whitman, who appears in O'Neill's memoir recalling her own unsuccessful struggles to get the White House to acknowledge the scientific data on environmental problems. There's Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who told Congress that it would take hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to adequately secure postwar Iraq. There's Richard Foster, the Medicare accountant, who was forbidden by his superiors from giving Congress an accurate assessment of the cost of the administration's new program. All but Foster are now gone, and Foster's sole insurance policy is that Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress were burnt by his muzzling.

In the Bush administration, you're an empiricist at your own peril. Plainly, this has placed any number of conscientious civil servants -- from Foster, who totaled the costs on Medicare, to Clarke, who charted the al Qaeda leads before Sept. 11 -- at risk. In a White House where ideology trumps information time and again, you run the numbers at your own risk. Nothing so attests to the fundamental radicalism of this administration as the disaffection of professionals such as Foster and Clarke, each of whom had served presidents of both parties.

The revolt of the professionals poses a huge problem for the Bush presidency precisely because it is not coming from its ideological antagonists. Clarke concludes his book making a qualified case for establishing a security sub-agency within the FBI that would be much like Britain's MI5 -- a suggestion clearly not on the ACLU's wish list. O'Neill wants a return to traditional Republican budget-balancing. The common indictment that these critics are leveling at the administration is that it is impervious to facts. That's a more devastating election year charge than anything John Kerry could come up with.

Then, this morning, I finally get a chance to, er, "open" The Hill and find our old friend Joshua Micah Marshall--and I'm assuming all of these folks are operating independently--:

Terror aides strangely keep turning on Bush

By Josh Marshall

It’s hard to remember another president who has suffered more abuse and betrayal from the government’s career civil service than George W. Bush. Again and again, it seems, the president hires some seemingly seasoned career counterterrorism hand, only to find out later that he’s actually a Democratic plant, a partisan stooge or just a plain fool.

We already know the story of that notorious turncoat, retired Ambassador Joe Wilson, and his wife, CIA clandestine operative Valerie Plame (whom Rep. Jack Kingston [R-Ga.] pegged as a “glorified secretary”). The CIA foolishly entrusted Wilson with a fact-finding mission to the African nation of Niger to find out whether Saddam Hussein was buying “yellowcake” uranium there for his allegedly reconstituted nuclear weapons program. After getting this plum assignment, Wilson turned on the president with all manner of unfounded accusations.

Now we have Richard Clarke, whom we’re now told was either a liar (Paul Wolfowitz), a fraud out to sell a bunch of books (Scott McClellan), an out-of-the-loop rube (Dick Cheney), or just a moron who couldn’t get the job done (National Security Council [NSC] spokesman Jim Wilkinson and just about everyone else on the White House payroll).

Clarke, of course, worked for the last four presidents (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II) in a series of national-security and counterterrorism roles. Condi Rice kept him on as counterterrorism czar at the NSC when the Bush administration took over from Clinton. And then later, after Sept. 11, the White House appointed him to a less central, but still critical, post as top NSC aide on cyberterrorism and critical infrastructure.

Clearly the White House thought he was top-flight, but now it seems he was just another mix of backstabber and boob of the Joe Wilson variety - a hapless egomaniac or, as columnist John Podhoretz called him yesterday in the New York Post, a “a self-regarding buffoon.”

Ya wonder why they leave?

The Contrarian

The perfect storm that's about to hit

Rising oil prices and a weak dollar could shatter the global economy

Jeremy Rifkin
Wednesday March 24, 2004
The Guardian

The average nationwide price of a gallon of gasoline in America reached a record high of $1.77 this month. The steady spike in prices has left analysts wondering if this is a harbinger of even more dramatic increases as motorists head into the spring and summer months. Get ready for what might become the economy's version of the perfect storm later this summer. The devastation could quickly spread to the UK and the rest of the world, with dire consequences for the global economy.

The first hint of what might be in store came last month when Opec announced its decision to withdraw 1m barrels of crude oil a day from the market. Opec is worried about the weakening value of the dollar: it has lost one-third of its value in just under two years. Since Opec sells oil for dollars, the oil-producing countries are losing precious revenue as the value of the dollar continues to erode. And because oil-producing countries then turn around and purchase much of their goods and services from the EU and must pay in euros, their purchasing power continues to deteriorate. (The euro is currently valued at $1.23.)

How will the weaker dollar affect oil prices? Philip K Verleger, the dean of US oil market analysts and a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics, suggests that "oil-exporting countries may decide to adjust their price band to reflect the falling value of the dollar". If the dollar continues to slide, he warns, we could see oil prices rising from the current $38.18 a barrel to a record high of $40 by midsummer.

There are other dark clouds on the horizon. US crude oil inventories are at the lowest point since the mid 70s, and the retail gasoline market is operating with little reserve margin as we move into the summer months, where more travel will increase demand. The dwindling oil reserves are made worse by the White House decision to replenish the strategic petroleum reserve, further reducing the amount of gasoline available.

Verleger says gasoline could climb as high as $3.50 a gallon before levelling off at $2 by the autumn. How high prices eventually soar could depend on still other factors, including potential oil disruptions in Venezuela and the Middle East. There is also the prospect that one or two major refineries might fail during peak demand this summer - not that unusual when increased consumer pressure forces refineries to produce at peak capacity without taking the time for proper maintenance.

Say Bye-Bye to Cheap Oil
Surplus capacity is history. The jolts will start with $3 gas pump prices.
By Paul Roberts

March 25, 2004

For the tens of millions of American motorists patiently waiting for gas prices to come back to Earth, the news from the oil markets is not encouraging.

For the last year, government forecasters have reassured us that the unusually high oil prices we've seen since 2002 — around $30 a barrel — were temporary: As soon as global markets recovered from the mess in Iraq, oil prices would drop and gasoline prices would eventually follow.

Yet nearly 12 months after "victory" in Iraq, oil prices are at an eye-popping $38 a barrel, or about $15 above the two-decade average, and some forecasters are now offering a far less sanguine prognosis: Not only will oil stay high through 2005, but the days of cheap crude are history. These aren't exactly glad tidings for a global economy designed to run on low-priced oil, nor for a White House that gambled it could deliver low oil prices with a mix of diplomatic muscle and market liberalization.

What happened? In simplest terms, what we're seeing are the final months of a 25-year oil boom. That boom was sparked by the oil shocks of the 1970s, when sky-high prices touched off a feeding frenzy among oil producers. Eager to cash in on the good prices, oil companies and oil-rich states drilled thousands of new wells, built massive pipelines, developed fantastic exploration and production technologies and generally expanded their capacity to find and pump oil.

If these predictions come true--and there is every reason to believe they will--it is easy to forsee some of the follow-on effects to the economy. The first will be in the airline industry, still fragile in the wake of the recession and 9/11. SUV sales will take a hit, and it is SUV sales which has been propping up those "rosy" economic numbers, with interest rates staying low. But cheap loans aren't going to be all that attractive in the face of $3.50 a gallon gas.

And about those cheap loans:

Businesses Urged to Plan For Higher Interest Rates
Fed Bank Chiefs Raise Issue in Speeches

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 25, 2004; Page E04

With the U.S. economic recovery gaining steam, businesses should start planning for the day when the Federal Reserve will have to start raising short-term interest rates from their current low levels, Jack Guynn, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, warned yesterday.

Businesses should not assume "in their long-term plans that this extraordinary period will continue indefinitely," Guynn said, according to the text of a speech he delivered in Johnson City, Tenn.

Several Fed officials, including Chairman Alan Greenspan, have noted in recent speeches that they do not plan to leave their target for a key overnight interest rate, the Federal funds rate, at a 46-year low of 1 percent forever. But they also have repeatedly stressed that they can be "patient" in deciding when to start raising rates because inflation is so low, businesses have ample unused production capacity and hiring remains sluggish.

Guynn, however, went further than others have publicly in warning businesses about the potential dangers of low interest rates, which can encourage speculative investments or temporary booms in certain pockets of the economy. Some Fed critics have said rock-bottom rates have already pumped up the prices of houses, stocks, bonds and other assets to possibly unsustainable levels.

Widgets, not People

Does anyone besides me notice a troubling pattern here?

U.S. sent medically unfit soldiers to Iraq, Pentagon acknowledges

By David Goldstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - To meet the demand for troops in Iraq, the military has been deploying some National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers who aren't fit for combat.

More than a dozen members of the Guard and reserves told Knight Ridder they were shipped off to battle with little attention paid to their medical histories.

Those histories included ailments such as asthma, diabetes, recent surgery and hearing loss. Once in Iraq, the soldiers faced severe conditions that aggravated their medical problems, and the medical care available to them was limited.

David Lloyd, a 44-year-old mechanic with the Tennessee National Guard, died of a heart attack in Iraq last August. His wife, Pamela Lloyd, said her husband didn't know he'd had a problem, but his autopsy showed three blockages in his coronary arteries.

"He should have never been deployed," she said. "He was supposed to have been given a thorough physical. He had none. The only thing he had was the shots."

"They funneled us through the medical part: boom, boom, boom," said Michael Scott, an Iowa National Guardsman who had a herniated disc. "They let it be known they weren't real interested in hearing about stuff. `No, you're fine right now.'"

A memo from the European Regional Medical Command in Germany, where many injured soldiers were sent, criticized the pre-deployment medical screening and said soldiers who were unfit for Iraq were having to be sent home. Deploying them was a risk to their health and an added cost for the military, it said.

The memo contained the concerns of Col. Holly Doyne, a physician based there at the time. Doyne has been deployed to Kuwait and couldn't be reached for this article. Another Army medical officer, who didn't want his name used, confirmed that Doyne's memo was distributed to various stateside medical officials and commanders.

Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official, acknowledged that some medically unqualified troops have been sent to Iraq but said "the percentages are extremely small." He said the Pentagon was taking steps to improve medical screening.

How many soldiers are unfit is unclear. Each soldier who spoke with Knight Ridder said he or she knew of others who - like themselves - were sent to Iraq despite health problems ranging from allergies requiring refrigerated medications to heart disease.

Several also said many soldiers weren't given physicals but only were asked a few cursory questions about their health by the medical screeners.

Veterans Protest Reduced Medical Exams for Returning Soldiers

BY BRUCE ALPERT
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON -- The Army is scaling back the medical exams offered to soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, discouraging routine blood tests, electrocardiograms and X-rays, according to a Pentagon memo.

The directive from Brig. Gen. Richard Ursone, an Army assistant surgeon general, is drawing criticism from some veterans organizations. Rather than scaling back on medical exams, these critics say, the Pentagon ought to be making them mandatory and more comprehensive to enable earlier diagnosis of the kinds of medical problems faced by veterans of the first Gulf War 13 years ago.

In a Jan. 20 memorandum to regional medical commands, Ursone said: "Performance of routine screening laboratory, radiologic and electrocardiographic tests in this setting is extremely low yield and is discouraged."

Even if giving those tests is "supported by evidence based medicine," Ursone said in his memo, they "may be deferred if the soldier is without symptoms and the laboratory tests will delay release from active duty." The directive applies to soldiers leaving active duty from all Army units.

Pentagon public information officers, when asked about the memo, could not say whether the new medical exam policies are being implemented for the other military services.

Mike Duggan, American Legion deputy director for national security, said the veterans group views the Army decision as a step backward.

"Our position has been and continues to be that soldiers, active or reservists, deserve to have a complete physical when they leave the service," Duggan said.

The military currently requires only that soldiers answer a health questionnaire both prior to and after deployment overseas, with an actual medical exam being optional.

"You leave it up to them and they are, quite understandably, in a hurry to get out," Duggan said. "But getting a complete exam can be so important in terms of diagnosing any medical problems, including some that might not have active symptoms."

Jack Trowbridge, deputy commander for administration at Bayne-Jones Army Community Hospital at Fort Polk, La., said that while the post-deployment physicals have been scaled back since Jan. 20, the military is still able to assess if there are any medical problems demanding immediate follow-up.

"We make sure they are fit to go back home," Trowbridge said.

Uncurious, Disengaged

A grateful reader thanks Salon for the Washington Bureau and its chief, Sidney Blumenthal:

The controversy raging around Clarke's book -- and his testimony before the 9/11 commission that Bush ignored warnings about terrorism that might have prevented the attacks -- revolves around his singularly unimpeachable credibility. In response, the Bush administration has launched a full-scale offensive against him: impugning his personal motives, claiming he is a disappointed job-hunter, that he is publicity mad, a political partisan (Clarke, in fact, voted for Republican Sen. John McCain for president in the Republican primaries in 2000) -- as well as ignorant, irrelevant and a liar.

Rice now claims that "we were at battle stations." But Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward in "Bush at War" saying that before 9/11, "I was not on point ... I didn't feel that sense of urgency." Cheney alleges that Clarke was "out of the loop." But if he was, then the administration was either running a rogue operation or doing nothing, as Clarke testifies. Was the Bush administration engaged in an undercover, off-the-boards operation apart from the president's designated special assistant? Cheney's charge leads to absurdity.

(thanks, Susan)

A Uniter, Not a Divider

Visit by Bush to snarl roads, spur protests

By Scott S. Greenberger and Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, 3/25/2004

President Bush will swoop into Boston for a quick fund-raiser this afternoon that could net his campaign $1 million and also draw several thousand protesters, force the closure of a school, and disrupt traffic near the Park Plaza Hotel.

Tracey Ganiatsos, a spokeswoman for the Boston Transportation Department, said the US Secret Service told the city it intends to close several streets near the hotel "for a good portion of the day," but the streets involved will not be disclosed publicly for security reasons. Special parking restrictions will also be in effect.

The president's visit unexpectedly canceled classes for 1,425 children at the Boston Renaissance Charter School, a K-8 institution on Stuart Street a block away from the hotel. The Boston Public Schools system, which provides about 30 buses to transport Renaissance students, said it could not guarantee timely pick-up of students at dismissal time, said Dudley Blodget, chief operating officer of the Renaissance School's foundation. The school also feared that the 300 parents who pick up their children would not be able to reach the school.

"It's a sad situation that you have to close off school because of a fund-raising event," said Roger F. Harris, Renaissance headmaster.

Jonathan Palumbo, spokesman for the Boston Public Schools, said his transportation director only found out about the visit yesterday. The school department has few schools in the area, and they will not be directly affected, Palumbo said, although school officials anticipate delays at dismissal time.

The Bush campaign has invited about 500 people to the late afternoon event, all of whom are being asked to contribute $2,000, the individual maximum for the 2004 election cycle. The president will deliver a speech, but in order to hold down costs there will be no food or entertainment.

The Boston Fire Department's a cappella group will not be part of the program, however. The mayor's office did not feel it was appropriate for uniformed officers to perform at a political function, spokesman for the mayor Seth Gitell said. The Fire Department was unable to be reached for comment.

To hell with the plebs, there are dollars to be harvested.

Image Issues

I'm having a problem. I want to blog MoDo's column because she actually scores some decent points. She also makes an ass out of herself a couple of times and asks her readers to play along, which just makes me nuts. So here is what I'm going to do: I'll blog her piece, including the part where she insults her source and us, if you will mount a campaign to have the Times hire me to replace her. I can toss up as fetching a photo as she can. I'm actually blonde and leggy and can go thigh-bone to thigh-bone with Ann Coulter. I promise not to have disappointing love affairs with Hollywood types. I will, in fact, make you proud of me by producing, on the Times Op-Ed page, high quality work which doesn't insult its audience, its subjects or the author. You know my work. This is up to you. Oh, and unlike the Anthrax, I have a body to go with those legs, and a mind that sits on top of it. My appeal is more New York Review of Books than New York Post. Lawyers fear me. Need I say more?

Here's Dowd, with the journalistic Serious Paper Mistakes in bold:

Truth as a Weapon
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 25, 2004

WASHINGTON

As the White House was sliming Richard Clarke, the 9/11 families were stroking him.

Several relatives of victims surrounded the ex-counterterrorism chief after his testimony yesterday and reached out to pat him. After being condescended to, stonewalled, led on and put off by the White House, they were glad to hear somebody say: "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you."

"Mr. Clarke is the first person who has apologized to the families and held himself accountable," said the lovely Kristen Breitweiser of New Jersey, whose husband died in the south tower. "I am enormously grateful for that." She and other widows left the hearing room to protest Condoleezza Rice's lame no-show.

If only Sandy Berger had told the incoming Bush officials that Al Qaeda was no big deal, they might have gotten alarmed about it. They were determined to disdain all things Clinton, including what they considered his overemphasis on terrorism.

Dick Cheney, Rummy et al. were on amber alert, "preserved in amber," as Mr. Clarke put it, obsessing on old G.O.P. issues that had been hot when they were last in power, like a menacing Saddam and a Star Wars missile shield to protect America from the awesome might of the Evil Empire.

Terrorism wasn't really their cup of tea anyhow.

As Mr. Clarke writes, the ascension of Al Qaeda and the devolution of Iraq were topics that called for nuance: "Bush and his inner circle had no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already knew the answers, it was received wisdom."

The Bush crew was thinking big, and Osama seemed puny to them.

Donald Rumsfeld told the 9/11 panel that there had been no point retaliating for the Cole bombing in October 2000, "four months after the fact," because that might have sent a signal of weakness.

So it was too late to whack Osama four months later, but not too late to re-whack Saddam 12 years later?

As he admitted to the commission on Tuesday, the defense secretary didn't like the idea of going after Osama in Afghanistan because "it didn't have a lot of targets." You just ended up bombing rocks instead of palaces. "Afghanistan was something like 8,000 miles from the United States. . . . You can pound the rubble in an Al Qaeda training camp 15 times and not do much damage; they can put tents right back up."

So, not showy and not convenient? Crummy excuses, Rummy.

Paul Wolfowitz was completely uninterested in Al Qaeda unless he could use it as a rationale to invade Iraq as part of his grandiose dream to remake the Middle East in his image. (And John Ashcroft was just too busy covering up immodest statues and trying to cut counterterrorism funds.)

In the Clarke book, Mr. Wolfowitz fidgets as Mr. Clarke urges that armed Predators target Osama at a meeting in April 2001. "Well," Wolfie whines, "I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden."

Besides confirming what we already knew — that national security in this White House has been as ideologically driven as the domestic agenda — the Clarke book and the commission hearings are most chilling in describing how clueless the agencies charged with sorting through clues were under Clinton and Bush.

Reprising the scene in the White House on 9/11, Mr. Clarke says Dale Watson, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, called him. "We got the passenger manifests from the airlines," Mr. Watson said. "We recognize some names, Dick. They're Al Qaeda."

Mr. Clarke recalled: "I was stunned, not that the attack was Al Qaeda but that there were Al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that F.B.I. knew were Al Qaeda." Mr. Watson told Mr. Clarke that "C.I.A. forgot to tell us about them."

Mr. Clarke's argument that the Bush team's misguided adventurism in Iraq has actually spawned more terrorism and diverted resources has panicked the Bushies, who are running as heroic terror warriors.

It's always gross to see a White House stoop to smearing the character of someone seen as a threat. It was sickening when the Clinton White House smeared Monica Lewinsky, and it's sickening now.

Maureen, girlfriend, it appears to me that you missed that part of the lecture where neither a journalist or a columnist stakes their credibility on the way a story subject looks, attractiveness or lack there-of isn't the basis for a judgement. Ms. Breitweiser has a whole lot of reasons for credibility, the least of them that she is "lovely," which is condemnation with faint praise in the pretty derby. She faints all over Dick Clarke, and that somehow enhances his message? Or hers?

It was sickening when you bought the party line and smeared Al Gore's wardrobe, and Wes Clarke's, girlfriend. You seem a little hung up on appearances. You participated in the wardrobe and hairstyle deconstruction of Hillary, and you've got the ovaries to talk about the little Monica slam the Clintonmachine attempted, which was pathetic and ignored while you fueled the Gore slam down? Mo, your credibility with the marginal left, which is what it seems you want to keep marginal, is on thin ice. Referring to female subjects of your pieces is off the table for Novak and Saffire and it isn't any more attractive when you do it.

I suggest therapy for your image issues, and a better editor. You don't need botox, you need to understand why you hate your readers so much.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Oregon county bans all marriage

Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Posted: 9:14 AM EST (1414 GMT)

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) -- In a new twist in the battle over same-sex marriage roiling the United States, a county in Oregon has banned all marriages -- gay and heterosexual -- until the state decides who can and who cannot wed.

The last marriage licenses were handed out in Benton County at 4 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. EST) Tuesday. As of Wednesday, officials in the county of 79,000 people will begin telling couples applying for licenses to go elsewhere until the gay marriage debate is settled.

"It may seem odd," Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters in a telephone interview, but "we need to treat everyone in our county equally."

State Attorney General Hardy Myers said in a statement that he was "very pleased" with Benton County's decision. "It is my sincere hope that the legal process will provide clarity for each of Oregon's counties."

The three County commissioners had originally decided to start handing out gay marriage licenses this week but on Monday reversed that decision amid a growing firestorm of lawsuits across the country, and decided instead to put a temporary halt to all marriages.

Rebekah Kassell, a spokeswoman for Basic Rights Oregon, a pro-gay marriage group, told Reuters; "It is certainly a different way for county commissioners to respect their constitutional obligation to apply the law equally to everyone.

"We appreciate that they are willing to say they are not going to participate in discrimination."

Tim Nashif, the spokesman for the Defense of Marriage Coalition, said; "Oregon not only has the only county in the nation issuing illegal (same-sex) marriage licenses, we probably have the only county in the nation refusing to issue marriage licenses at all."

thanks to See Why? A long, hard blog and pogge.

Clarke Hearing

I haven't seen a hearing like that since Watergate. There'll be roundups all over the web in minutes but I want to make two points.

Bob Kerrey made the point that Fox News violated the confidentiality standards of journalism, the very one that Bob Novak is hiding behind right now on his Valerie Plame Wilson leak, when it leaked the transcript of Richard Clarke's press backgrounder of August, 2002. For a "news" organization to do this is one of the grossest, most partisan violations of ordinary jounalistic integrity I have ever seen.

The other point is that, in a day of partisan questioning, Clarke never cracked or slipped or mis-spoke in spite of numerous attempts to slip him up. In that regard, when Clark directly attacked the veracity of Condi Rice's statements to the press, he did not have to use the word "lie." He just left his complete contradiction of what she alleged sitting there for the observer to draw their own conclusions. It was devastating, and there were several moments like that throughout the hearing where Clarke just put out the facts, un-spun, and let them sit in a silent hearing room. Silent, because the interlocutor was left speechless.

What effect will this have? To early to tell, but for anyone who was paying attention it was a stinging indictment of Bush anti-terrorism policies (or lack thereof). He hit everybody hard, including Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller. Condi looks like a freelance crook and her refusal to testify in public is looking very bad.

Any of you who have the guts, check Freep and bring back what you hear. I wonder what Tacitus will have to say. I may even stop in at Indepundit myself this afternoon.

I have an appointment this evening and can't be sure I'll get another post up this afternoon, so this is an OPEN THREAD to talk about Clarke's testimony.

UPDATE:
Here are the first takeWaPo and NYT stories. I'll put up a link to the transcript when it is available.

MORE:Even the lapdog CNN is playing this story pretty rough:

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Richard Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, gave a damning indictment of the Bush administration's pre-9/11 strategy in the war on terror Wednesday.

Clarke has come under sharp criticism from the White House which has aggressively rejected his accusations. One Republican commission member, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, suggested Clarke was trying to sell his new book.

Condi is in "slime and defend" mode, her first rejoinder is to attack Clarke in person, rather than rebut the substance.

Big Lies and Big Liars

Bush and Clinton Aides Grilled by Panel
By PHILIP SHENON and ERIC SCHMITT

...under an agreement with the White House last year, one member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was allowed to read through a full library of the briefings, and two other commissioners were allowed a partial review.

Ms. Gorelick said at the hearing Tuesday that information in the documents "would set your hair on fire, and not just George Tenet's hair on fire," referring to the director of central intelligence.

Though barred under secrecy regulations from discussing much of what was in the reports, she said that there had been "an extraordinary spike" of intelligence warning about Qaeda attacks in the Daily Brief during 2001 and that "it plateaued at a spike level for months."

Ms. Gorelick's comments came as the commission released a staff report finding that Mr. Rumsfeld did not order the preparation of any new military plans against Al Qaeda or its Taliban sponsors during the seven months between his arrival at the Pentagon and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report said that despite the intelligence alerts throughout the year, there was an impression among specialists at the Pentagon that Mr. Rumsfeld and his new team were "not especially interested in the counterterrorism agenda."

A separate staff report on the government's diplomatic response to the terrorist threat found that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and her deputies rebuffed a proposal by aides in early 2001 that the administration step up its support for anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

The report said that Ms. Rice had instead spent more than seven months trying to formulate policies to deal with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, policies that were still not in place by Sept. 11 and, White House aides said, might have taken as long as three years to implement.

Conason in Salon:

JC: Why did they keep you on, if they were so uninterested in what you were focused on? And then why did they downgrade your position?

I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

Empire In Fact

Expansion of military bases overseas fuels suspicions of U.S. motives

BY MICHAEL KILIAN

Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has dramatically expanded its military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia, building a vast network of bases designed to counter what military officials call an "arc of instability."

U.S. military installations in the region extend from Turkey to near the Chinese border, and from former Soviet republics in the north to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The facilities surround Iran; are situated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and are close to Syria and Lebanon. Several were created to address the confrontation with Iraq, and continue to support operations there.

"No one could have anticipated in the summer of 2001 that the United States would be basing forces at Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, or conducting a major military operation in Afghanistan," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress last year.

Experts fear the ubiquity of U.S. forces may fuel belief in radical Islamic claims that America is bent on controlling the oil and politics of the Islamic world. A poll that the nonpartisan Pew Research Center conducted in Muslim nations in the region found significant portions of their populations believed just that.

Experts believe the threat implicit in a nearby American military presence - especially after the Iraq invasion - could inflame Islamic nations such as Iran.

"The first thing to recognize is that other countries will view this in different ways than we do," said Marcus Corbin, senior analyst for the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "They will view this sometimes as an aggressive, hostile encirclement. Iran is probably the best example. It is almost literally surrounded. A huge chunk of its borders are with countries where the U.S. has vastly increased its presence or become a close ally.

"The point is to realize how threatening this is to other people," he added. "This is hard to do, because we don't necessarily think of ourselves as a crusading people invading other countries willy-nilly."

Tom Engelhart presented an essay on military hegemony, military bases and the footprint of empire by Chalmers Johnson in January.

In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has been proposing -- this is usually called "repositioning" -- many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil air base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an "operating base," though it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles -- that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.

Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls our new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe -- Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia -- Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa -- Morocco, Tunisia, and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed by our country and France); and in West Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

If you are unfamiliar with the US military's base structure, Johnson's essay is an eye opener. Between military members, dependents, contractors and civilian employes, more than a half-million people are flung across the planet in American bases, which have an economy all of their own. The Airlift Command constitutes a private ailine which services this economy.

Over the last couple of decades, Johnson's work has been to document the de facto empire of military hegemony that has been spread out across the world. This essay for The Nation Institute is part of the cautionary tale he has gathered in his latest book, The Sorrow of Empire. The size of the military-industrial economy now threatens our economic health. In a week when we have learned that the Medicare trust fund is in trouble, after learning that the administration lied about the cost of the "benefit" increases (mostly benefiting Big Pharma, medical insureres and corporations) and budget deficits as far as the eye can see, Johnson's warnings come none too soon.

Goo'bye, Bob

In the larger scheme of the geopolitics of life and death we read about daily, this isn't an important story. But if you, like me, grew up with NPR, this is a shock. I've been waking up every weekday with the sound of this voice for 25 years. I'll have to work some sources today to get the back story on this one. It sounds like insiders saw this one coming. I'll have to look at the last two ratings books, too.

NPR Yanks Top-Rated Show Host
'Morning Edition' Ousts Bob Edwards

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A01

Bob Edwards, who for 25 years has been the signature voice of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," is being removed from the show by NPR managers, effective April 30. "Morning Edition" is the No. 1 morning show on radio, with almost 13 million listeners.

"I would have loved to have stayed with 'Morning Edition,' " said Edwards, 56. "But it's not my candy store."

An NPR announcement that he would become a senior correspondent for NPR News was premature, he said yesterday.

NPR executive vice president Ken Stern called the change part of a "natural evolution" that "had to do with the changing needs of our listeners." It was "a programming decision about the right sound," said Stern, who expressed confidence that Edwards would remain with the network.

The sound of "Morning Edition" has been inseparable from Edwards's rich baritone since the show was launched in 1979. And "Morning Edition," in turn, has played a huge role in NPR's success and that of its member stations.

"The audience doubled for NPR overall in the last 10 years," Edwards said. "Who else can say that?" Noting "Morning Edition's" top ranking in the morning, he added: "Stern, Imus, all those people are in our wake."

The Big Boy

Fred Kaplan (whom I generally find credible) on Richard Clarke at Slate:

I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

As I said earlier down in the comments, Clarke is one of the rare real heavies that are so talented that they survive changing administrations. The guy has to be a genius to survive where he did. A genius of both substance and knowing how to work the market in the West Wing. That doesn't mean that he wasn't an a**hole, but that whatever his character flaws, his brilliance outshone it. The culture of Washington is extremely unforgiving, so when a guy like this hangs around, it is because he adds value to whatever he touches, you can't just push yourself, you have to give the powers something for themselves. There aren't a hundred people a year who can survive that. By the way, in this town arrogance isn't a failing, it's a survival skill.

If Wishes Were Horses

Like all of the rest of you, I'm looking forward to reading Richard Clarke's book. I had the 9/11 Commission hearing on C-Span all day today and I'm very interested in his testimony tomorrow. We sure as hell didn't learn anything we didn't already know today, tomorrow may be different.

I've put up an Amazon wish list link up there on the right, right under my email address--actually, Mel Goux put it up, and she tells me the link is wonky and doesn't work all the time. If you can't get it to work, try a screen refresh and click again. I haven't had any problem, but that's what I've been told. Anyway, the Clarke book is on the list, along with a bunch of other things, some of them necessities I can't afford, some of them things that would be quality of life enhancements. I haven't had any new clothes or shoes in six years that weren't gifts. Just sayin'.

Tim Dunlop is reading and blogging Against All Enemies at Road to Surfdom if you want to test drive it before you buy.

If you want to point out books that would be interesting to discuss together--like Chalmers Johnson's Sorrows of Empire which I mentioned earlier this month--feel free to email or use a comments box. Movable Type has an option for me to receive an email with your comments, so I receive every comment you make and read every one. I can reply to you by email, or in comments, or both and I have done all these things. It's relatively easy to get my attention.

TChris, subblogging at TalkLeft has an interesting post up about anti-Bush books which seem to be all the rage this year. Interesting...

Phase Three

Iraqi Cleric Intensifies Opposition to Interim Constitution
Ayatollah Sistani Sends Letter to U.N. Threatening Boycott of Meetings

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 22, 2004; 3:27 PM

BAGHDAD, March 22 -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric intensified his opposition to the country's interim constitution in a letter released Monday, threatening to boycott meetings with U.N. envoys who are expected to help chart the transition from American occupation if the constitution is endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.

The threat by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani marked another dramatic assertion of the reclusive, 73-year-old cleric's authority in the attempts to fashion a political arrangement after the U.S. administration of Iraq ends on June 30. While Sistani has already made clear his objections to the interim constitution, the letter was forceful in questioning its legitimacy, demanding that it be amended and warning of the consequences of not revising a document praised by its supporters as the most liberal in the Arab world.
....
The document calls for nationwide elections to be held by the end of January 2005 to choose a 275-member transitional assembly. That body will serve as a legislature, draft a permanent constitution and choose a president and two deputy presidents. By unanimous decision, the three-member executive will then choose a prime minister and cabinet to run the government.

At the time, Shiite members of the Governing Council said Sistani objected to two key provisions in the constitution: a clause that gave Kurds effective veto power over a permanent constitution and another that allows either of the deputy presidents -- likely a Kurd and a Sunni Arab -- to reject decisions of a Shiite president. While most groups in Iraq contest the precise figures, Shiites are believed to number about 60 percent of the population, with Sunni Arabs and Kurds the largest minorities.

In the letter released Monday, Sistani specifically mentioned only his objection to the three-member executive. He said it "lays the foundation for sectarianism in a future political system." Supporters of the arrangement have contended that the veto power of the deputy presidents was the most decisive way to protect the interests of minority Sunnis and Kurds. But it clearly curbs the authority of a Shiite president, and Sistani said he believed it would create deadlock that could only be broken by foreign intervention.

Iraqi leaders have said they will ask the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution legitimizing the handover of authority on June 30. Sistani said in the letter that he feared U.S. officials would seek to include the constitution in such a resolution. If it was endorsed in any way, Sistani said, he would boycott meetings with U.N. envoys due to arrive in Iraq soon. They are expected to help craft an interim authority that will take over from the U.S. administration in June and stay in power until the elections in January.

"We warn that any such step will be unacceptable to the majority of Iraqis and will have dangerous consequences," he said.

Juan Cole's informed comment on this situation yesterday:

"That a calm and cautious figure like Sistani is talking about the potential of the interim constitution's approval of loose federalism to destabilize or even break up Iraq alarms me no end".

Fourth Generation Warfare strategist William Lind remarks:

What are the implications of Phase III for America’s attempts to create a stable, democratic Iraq? It is safe to say that they are not favorable. First, it means that the task of re-creating a real, functioning Iraqi state – not just a “government” of Quislings living under American protection in the Green Zone – has gotten more difficult. Fourth Generation war represents a quantum move away from the state, compared to Phase II, where the Baathists were fighting to re-create a state under their domination. The fractioning process will continue and accelerate, creating more and more resistance groups, each with its own agenda. The defeat of one means nothing in terms of the defeat of others. There is no center to strike at, no hinge that collapses the enemy as a whole, and no way to operationalize the conflict. We are forced into a war of attrition against an enemy who outnumbers us and is far better able to take casualties and still continue the fight.

We will also find that we have no enemy we can talk to and nothing to talk about. Since we – but not our enemies – seek closure, that is a great disadvantage. Ending a war, unless it is a war of pure annihilation, means talking to the enemy and reaching some kind of mutually acceptable settlement. When the enemy is not one but a large and growing number of independent elements, talking is pointless because any agreement only ends the war with a single faction. When the enemy’s motivation is not politics but religion, there is also nothing to talk about, unless it is our conversion to Islam. Putting these two together, the result is war without end – or, realistically, an American withdrawal that will also be an American defeat.

Pass the Popcorn

Interview: Richard Clarke

Julian Borger in Washington talks to former White House insider Richard Clarke about US's vulnerability to al-Qaida before the September 11 attack.

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday March 23, 2004
The Guardian

JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true?

RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it.

JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue?

RC: Its not true. I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level - the principal's committee - to review the plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them.

JB: In the plan developed under the Clinton administration, was the potential use of ground forces included?

RC: That option was included in the plan, and the Clinton people had never rejected it. Yes it was there. But when they finally did the ground invasion they kind of botched it, because all they did initially was send special forces with the northern alliance. They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after.

JB: So were there any principals meetings about al-Qaida in all this time?

RC: It didn't come up in the principal's meetings. Between April and July only four of the 30 or 35 deputy principal meetings touched on al-Qaida. But three of those were mainly about US-Pakistan relations, or US-Afghan relations or South Asian policy, and al-Qaida was just one of the points. One of the meetings looked at the overall plan. It was the July one. April was an initial discussion of terrorism policy writ large and at that meeting I said we had to talk about al-Qaida. And because it was terrorism policy writ large [Paul] Wolfowitz said we have to talk about Iraqi terrorism and I said that's interesting because there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States. There hasn't been any for 8 years. And he said something derisive about how I shouldn't believe the CIA and FBI, that they've been wrong. And I said if you know more than I know tell me what it is, because I've been doing this for 8 years and I don't know about any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. When I said let's start talking about Bin Laden, he said Bin Laden couldn't possibly have attacked the World Trade Centre in '93. One little terrorist group like that couldn't possibly have staged that operation. It must have been Iraq.

JB: So what were all the principal's meetings about then?

RC: There were a lot of meetings on 'Star Wars'. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China.

JB: And after the February meeting any more on Iraq?

RC: Yes there were many more, it was central. The buzz in national security staff administration wanted to go after Iraq.

JB: Do you think they came into office with that as a plan?

RC: If you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush's pre-election foreign policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington. They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do this reshaping of the middle east and they used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to test their theories.

JB: Do you think President Bush was already on board when he came to office.

RC: I think he was. He got his international education from the Vulcans group the previous year. They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz. They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been persuaded. He certainly wasn't hearing any contrary view during this education process.

JB: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference?

RC: Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.

JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks?

RC: I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance.

JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance?

RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it.

JB: Condoleezza Rice argued today that when President Bush was asking you to find evidence linking September 11 to Iraq, he was simply showing due diligence, asking you to explore the options.

RC: That's very funny. There are two ways of asking. There's: 'check every possibility - don't assume its al-Qaida look at everybody'. That's due diligence. Then there's the: 'I want you to find every shred of evidence that it was Iraq and Saddam' - and said in a very emphatic and intimidating way, and the other people who were with me got the same impression as I did. This was not due diligence. This was: 'come back with a memo that says it was an Iraqi attack'.

JB: And when you didn't find any evidence, the memo was bounced back?

RC: Yes

JB: Stephen Hadley [deputy national security advisor] said he bounced it back saying just update this?

RC: Well as soon as he got it he said update it, even though it was very current. Hadley's a good lawyer, he knows how to cover his ass. He not going to write: 'I don't like the answer'. But when your memo is immediately bounced and its got very current information and its bounced back to you and you're told to do over, its pretty clear what the implication is.

JB What do you think drove these people on Iraq?

RC: Some are ideologues - they have a superpower vision of us reshaping the Middle East. Changing the historical balance. Condi Rice has this phrase: 'We needed to change the middle east so terrorists would not fly aircrafts into buildings'.

JB: Do you believe they felt they had to finish what Bush's father started?

RC: That's a big part of it. For Wolfowitz and Cheney feels some guilt for having stopped the war, a couple of days early, not that we should have marched on Baghdad but at least we should have gone after the Republican Guard.

JB: Do you believe there were also political motives.

RC: You have to bifurcate the White House team between the national security types and the political types. For the political types like Karl Rove this has been a godsend. They ran on the war in the congressional elections two years ago. They're running on the war now. They're painting this election as a vote on terrorism, a vote against Osama Bin Laden. And they're succeeding to a certain extent because 70 per cent of American people last year thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But the political benefit clearly a secondary benefit.

JB: Do you believe the administration believed the intelligence on Iraqi WMD?

RC: We all believed Saddam had WMD. What I kept saying was: So what?. They said he could give it to terrorists. But I said he's not that stupid. If he gave WMD to terrorists he would lose power. The question was: Is there an imminent threat or had we contained him? And I thought we had successfully contained him. I didn't see it as a first-tier issue.

JB: Did the Pentagon and the office of special plans play an important role in the processing of intelligence?

RC: Certainly. The people in Rumsfeld's office and in Wolfowitz's operation cherry-picked intelligence to select the intelligence to support their views. They never did the due diligence on the intelligence that professional intelligence analysts are trained to do. [The OSP] would go through the intelligence reports including the ones that the CIA was throwing out. They stitched it together they would send it out, send it over to Cheney. All the stuff that a professional would have thrown out. As soon as 9/11 happened people like Rumsfeld saw it was opportunity. During that first week after September 11, the decision was made. It was confirmed by president We should do Afghanistan first. But the resources necessary to do a good job in Afghanistan were withheld. There was not enough to go in fast, to go in enough to secure the country. Troops were held back. There were 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan

JB: The White House is suggesting that this is sour grapes from a Clinton holdover, scoring political points.

RC: I was a Bush [senior] holdover. I'm not a registered Demcrat. I don't want a job in the Kerry admin. What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions.

JB: What conclusions did you draw about President Bush's leadership style.

RC: He doesn't like to read a lot - not terribly interested in analysis. He is very interested in getting to the bottom line. Once he's done he puts a lot of strength behind pushing it, but there's not a lot of analysis before the decision.

JB: Do you think Britain had much influence in the run-up to the war?

RC: They would have done it without Britain. I don't think it made a lot of difference. I think the British were able to help Colin Powell to persuade them to go to the UN. It did go to the UN for a period of time, and it may have helped a little. It may also have forced president to issue a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time. There hasn't been a lot of follow through, and I don't think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us. I think Blair tried to influence the decision making and thought he could do better inside, but his influence was small.

JB: What was Cheney's role in all this.

RC: Quite enormous. Huge. Very quietly and behind the scenes he sat in all the national security meetings chaired by Condi Rice, and no vice president had done that before. He would listen and then give his thoughts. But he bought the compromise that it was al-Qaida first, Iraq second.

Truth or Consequences, Again

First to last, Iraq was clearly Bush's No. 1 priority

The director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew S. Natsios, told the Chronicle last week that most of Afghanistan was still in the control of local war lords. The southeastern quadrant of the country, he said, remains in the hands of the Taliban, a subtribe allied to al-Qaida.

Fighting between Pakistani troops and al-Qaida suspects demonstrates that the loose-knit band of terrorists is dug in and even flourishing along the Afghan border.

Administration officials, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, still make the case that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, giving many Americans the false impression that Saddam had a hand in 9/11, justifying the invasion of Iraq.

The administration makes a plausible case that a democratic Iraq eventually will change the dynamic in the entire Middle East. Perhaps it will, but not any time soon. Successful elections cannot be held in Iraq until insurgents and imported terrorists have been pacified, yet the level of violence is, if anything, increasing. Almost every day, more U.S. troops and civilians and uncounted Iraqis are killed or wounded.

Soon after the administration announced its program to promote democracy throughout the Arab world, Secretary of State Colin Powell last week assured Arab nations that the United States would not force its democratic aims on friendly despots such as those in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a principal source of support for Islamic militancy and the font of al-Qaida.

If the war on terror were so important, why did the Bush administration at first resist creation of a Department of Homeland Security?

Instead of focusing on al-Qaida, the White House repeatedly tasked the CIA to hunt for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, weapons that have not been found and might not have existed at the time of the invasion. The Pentagon was so dissatisfied with the CIA's performance it created its own intelligence unit, which allowed itself to be deceived by Iraqi exiles.

The war on terror requires unusually close cooperation between all of the world's civilized nations. However, the invasion of Iraq estranged the United States from some of its principal allies and forfeited precious good will toward the United States throughout the world.

The question that remains is not whether Clarke's allegations are accurate in every detail. His is only one side of the debate. The overriding question is whether the United States' war on terror has benefited in some measurable way from the war in Iraq. So far, the answer is no.

This is unnecessarily tick-tocky. The issue at hand is whether or not Clarke's allegations are correct, not whether there are two sides to debate. If he is correct, then he provides all of the ammunition necessary for an impeachment. The documentary history is all available.

From the Center

Phil Carter at Intel Dump, hardly a lefty, has a pretty devastating take-down of David Frum's NRO piece on Richard Clarke's book.

Frum: Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush admininstration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole. The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world. Instead, his way of presenting his concerns seems to have had the perverse effect of making the terrorist issue look small and secondary - of deflating rather than underscoring its importance.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt - for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? - or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate - and it's the wrong side.

Carter: What's Mr. Frum saying? Is he saying that Mr. Clarke's allegations were right, but that he just wasn't articulate enough to sell his agenda to the President? Is Mr. Frum, who was part of the White House political apparatus, saying that Mr. Clarke's real failures were political -- not factual? Did the Bush Administration really ignore a national security threat because one of its advisors couldn't find a way to sell the problem politically? If true, this statement by Mr. Frum is a damning indictment of the entire White House and National Security Council, and it indicates a near-total breakdown of the national security process. The idea behind the NSC staff, intelligence community, Joint Chiefs, and all the other systems in the national security process is to professionalize the decisions of the President in this area -- not to politicize them. Now comes Mr. Frum, saying essentially that the White House ignored its in-house expert on terrorism because he couldn't package it well enough. That's a really disturbing relevation -- especially because it comes from one of the President's own.

Politics at Your MD

New Warning Urged On Antidepressants
Alert Would Address Suicidal Tendencies

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 2004; Page A03

The Food and Drug Administration urged drugmakers yesterday to put new warning labels on popular antidepressant medications, including Paxil, Zoloft and Luvox, alerting doctors and consumers to watch for suicidal tendencies, hostility and agitation in patients taking the drugs.

The agency's action focuses on 10 antidepressant drugs in all and follows a warning by the British government last year advising physicians not to prescribe most widely used antidepressants to children. Last month, families of American adolescents who killed themselves while taking the medications implored the FDA to take comparable steps, and an expert advisory committee urged greater vigilance in the use of the medications in children with depression.

The agency said it does not know whether the medications -- which include several drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs -- are responsible for reported side effects such as inner restlessness, agitation and suicidal thoughts in some people. Officials said they are drawing greater attention to known cautionary information while a team of outside researchers completes a comprehensive analysis of the possible risks.

Patients taking the drugs who experience behavioral side effects should contact their physicians, said Russell Katz, director of neuropharmacological drug products at the FDA. If the symptoms are new or severe, he added, doctors should consider lowering the dose or stopping the drug.

Yesterday's move by the agency calls for warning-label changes for adults as well as children, and for patients who are depressed as well as those who use the drugs for unrelated problems.

"The advice applies across the board whether the drugs are used for any indication -- psychiatric or not," Katz said.

Critics of the medications called yesterday's move a victory and demanded that the FDA go further. Although Prozac is the only one of this class of drugs that has been specifically approved to treat depression in children, doctors are writing tens of thousands of prescriptions for many of the others, based on their clinical judgment that the drugs are safe and effective.

But the NYT says:

The agency's decision to issue such a broad warning was a surprise. Top F.D.A. officials have long insisted that their decisions are driven only by clear-cut evidence from well-run clinical trials. But in a conference call with reporters yesterday, agency officials said that no studies had shown a convincing link between drug therapy and suicide. Suicide is such a rare side effect that studies on the subject have been difficult to interpret, the regulators said.

Still, the agency issued the advisory anyway.

"It warns physicians that patients' depression may become worse," said Dr. Russell Katz, the agency's chief of neurological drugs, "that they may develop suicidal thinking or behavior after the initiation of treatment."

A series of secret studies, which were conducted by drug companies and became public last year, seemed to show that depressed children and teenagers given antidepressants were more likely to become suicidal than those given placebos. The studies also showed that most antidepressants were not effective in treating depression in children and teenagers. Those studies are still under review at the agency.

What is going on here?

Since everything the Bush appointees do is political, view this through a political lens. This is a dumb ruling, a pathetic attempt to shield drugmakers from liability in the event of suicide. It is unsurprising to learn that depressed people are at greater risk than non-depressed people.

The new generation of anti-depressants, Prozac and its children, do help a lot of people, but don't work for everyone. Their efficacy in children and adolescents has not been established, although they are widely prescribed.

Are they overprescribed? Show me a drug that isn't. This isn't science, it's politics.

Good and Evil

Lifting the Shroud

On "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed "war president," had "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." After a few hours of shocked silence, the character assassination began. He "may have had a grudge to bear since he probably wanted a more prominent position," declared Dick Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was "out of the loop." (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the administration's top official on counterterrorism.) It's "more about politics and a book promotion than about policy," Scott McClellan said.

Of course, Bush officials have to attack Mr. Clarke's character because there is plenty of independent evidence confirming the thrust of his charges.

Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority — it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals" — just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds.

Did the administration neglect counterterrorism even after 9/11? After 9/11 the F.B.I. requested $1.5 billion for counterterrorism operations, but the White House slashed this by two-thirds. (Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has been attacking John Kerry because he once voted for a small cut in intelligence funds.)

Oh, and the next time terrorists launch an attack on American soil, they will find their task made much easier by the administration's strange reluctance, even after 9/11, to protect potential targets. In November 2001 a bipartisan delegation urged the president to spend about $10 billion on top-security priorities like ports and nuclear sites. But Mr. Bush flatly refused.

Finally, did some top officials really want to respond to 9/11 not by going after Al Qaeda, but by attacking Iraq? Of course they did. "From the very first moments after Sept. 11," Kenneth Pollack told "Frontline," "there was a group of people, both inside and outside the administration, who believed that the war on terrorism . . . should target Iraq first." Mr. Clarke simply adds more detail.

Still, the administration would like you to think that Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for the money. Given the assumption by most political pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the Bush administration's penchant for punishing its critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge personal risk.

So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just wanted the public to know the truth.

I'll bet he spent the last day wishing he hadn't written it, unless he is a lot thicker skinned than I. I spent the last day watching the roll out and wondering what kind of human could survive the fire the Bushies leveled on this man. What they are doing to him is so vile that it roils my stomach.

These are vile people, doing vile things. It is long past time that we are rid of them.

Thanks

We are heading into a new cycle which is going to include recipes, I'm having a serious food jones these days. Eddie and I appreciate all you've done, but we are still a thousand dollars away from the work he needs. If you can hit the tip jar, thank you. If you are like me and have to pay it forward, thanks for your prayers.

The Baghdad Blogs

The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy is Back to Baghdad and blogging it live. The portrait he paints is of a security situation which has deteriorated markedly from his last tour.

I returned to Baghdad last Monday night, six weeks after my last rotation here as a Monitor correspondent. To get here, I left Amman, probably later than I should have, with a Jordanian driver at the helm of a white GMC truck – the land-boat of choice for the runs to and from Baghdad. A delayed flight had gotten us started from Amman later than I wanted, but I comforted myself that the heavily traveled western road into Baghdad hadn’t suffered from any attacks in recent months. At least none that I had heard about.

About 10 minutes outside of Baghdad, around midnight, we and the other GMC driving with us (under the logic that there’s safety in numbers) are brought to a screeching halt by a US military roadblock: Two humvees parked in the middle of the desert highway surrounded by wary troops. The lead driver immediately jumps out of his car and begins to shout and flail his arms. I don’t speak Arabic, but I could tell the driver was frustrated. Roads are inexplicably and unpredictably shut here often, and nerves are always frayed. I’m certainly not immune.

"Read the rest" isn't something you hear me say very often, but Dan's blog is going to be a terrific resource for us in days to come. War zones are "up is down" places, danger comes in strange guises, and I've read enough enough of Murphy's coverage to think he is going to be a reliable voice, within the constraints placed on any one journo: it's one perspective, one set of experiences, and as Blogoviads know, that's not enough. Chris Allbritton of Back to Iraq hopes to be back to Iraq by the end of the month, blogging live from the theater.

And here is Salam Pax in the Guardian today, blogging the Iraqi blogosphere:

Do you know how many Iraqi bloggers have joined the Blogosphere after the war? come on ... try a guess ...

Bookmarks
My personal regular Iraqi blog reads are Baghdad Burning and Healing Iraq. and since I am either too lazy or too busy (depends how you look at it), it is good we have them to tell us about the recent attacks in Baghdad and Basra - Zeyad who writes Healing Iraq is a dentist working in Basra.

All of these are my regular bookmarks. You might want to add them to yours.

The Yes Man

Misoverestimated
Yes, the hard-liners have outflanked and humiliated Colin Powell.
But don't feel sorry for him. He has no one to blame but himself.
By Michael Steinberger
Issue Date: 4.1.04

Powell's tenure at Foggy Bottom has not been completely devoid of successes. He negotiated a peaceful, face-saving resolution to the crisis with China over a downed American spy plane in April 2001. He played a key role in back-channel discussions that led to Libya's recent decision to give up its nuclear ambitions and cooperate in the fight against terrorism. He was also instrumental in persuading Bush to dispatch U.S. Marines to Liberia last summer and to earmark more money for Africa's AIDS crisis. And he has proven to be an enormously popular figure within the State Department, giving the embattled institution a much-needed morale boost (by, among other things, surrounding himself with career diplomats rather than political appointees).

But measured against the expectations that greeted his appointment, these are puny achievements. What most troubles people who know Powell is the passivity with which he has endured the many setbacks and slights. For instance, there is no evidence that he protested the decision to put the Pentagon in charge of administering postwar Iraq; no evidence, either, that he tried to intervene when Warrick was barred from going to Baghdad, or that he spoke up when the Pentagon began blocking other State Department appointees to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have repeatedly muscled in on Powell's turf, Bolton has repeatedly subverted his authority. But if Powell has voiced any displeasure to the president, or even to Rice, it is the best-kept secret in Washington. "I don't think he's fighting, and I can't understand why," says one high-ranking official from the first Bush administration.

Actually, there is an explanation for Powell's inaction, and it has little to do with his uniformed past. True, he is a military man, accustomed to falling in line; as Caspar Weinberger once put it, "Colin is essentially a good soldier. He does his duty and carries out orders." Habits formed over a lifetime are hard to break, and Powell's natural inclination is to swallow his differences and salute. Yet it's the fact that those differences are never strongly held that mainly accounts for Powell's inaction. He has opinions but few, if any, real convictions, and there's no ground he won't cede in the interest of expediency and ambition. Says Richard Kohn, "He's a man with no core of ideology, vision, or principle other than to serve the United States."

The only times in his career that Powell put up a fight were over gays in the military and over Bosnia. He fought on those because they fed exactly into what has been his one true cause: protecting his beloved Army, from both potential Vietnams and from wooly-eyed civilians generally. But even then, the real story was not so much what he did as what he didn't do. These were cases in which he feared the country's civilian leadership was once again screwing things up for the Army, yet he didn't resign in protest -- even as he urged others to do just that. For Powell, even the Powell doctrine proved expendable. The Bush administration has turned the doctrine on its head in Iraq -- by waging preemptive war, by using less than overwhelming force, and by placing U.S. troops in a hostile environment with neither a plausible postwar plan nor an exit strategy. That Powell was complicit in this effort says pretty much all there is to say about his attachment to principle.

And over at The Black Commentator:

Powell is personally culpable in the kidnapping of President Aristide. Is it any wonder that TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson calls Colin Powell “the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime.”

Assassination Policy

Show of strength before Gaza pullout

By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent

The assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin was probably designed to show that an Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza as the first stage of a strategy of "disengagement" is motivated by design not weakness.
....

The war against Hamas also has a long way to go.

Decadence

Liberal Oasis's Bill Scher goes dead tree with an Op-Ed in the Strib yesterday:

This month, CIA Director George Tenet warned the Senate that the Al-Qaida ideology was gaining ground: "The steady spread of Usama bin Ladin's anti-US sentiment though the wider Sunni extremist movement... ensures that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future[,] with or without al-Qaida in the picture."

Therein lies the tough nut: We have to do more than defeat a group of people, we have to defeat an idea. That's tricky business, but you surely can't defeat an idea unless you understand what that idea is.

Tenet's testimony leaves the impression that he thinks Al-Qaida's interest in attacking the United States is an end to itself. And Bush, of course, never spent any time educating the voters on what is driving them. He simply told us they "hate freedom" and left it at that.

But it's not that simple. As terror expert Jason Burke explained in the book "Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror," the attacks are not an end, but a means. They are propaganda tools to "radicalize and mobilize those Muslims who have shunned [Bin Laden's] call to action [by] proving that there is a cosmic battle between good and evil underway and that Islam ... is in peril." In turn, Bin Laden believes the world's Muslim's will "rise up," earn "the blessing of God [and] cast off the shackles that have been laid upon them by what he sees as centuries of 'humiliation and contempt.' "

If that's the case, then it's easy to see how a war with Iraq could be counterproductive to the war on terror. If Bin Laden wanted a "cosmic battle," he got what he wanted. Tenet's analysis that Bin Laden's message is spreading beyond his immediate organization bolsters that notion.

It appears that Europe wants to get out of this trap. Recently, both the German chancellor and the European Union foreign policy chief spoke of addressing "root causes" of terror in addition to combating the "symptoms."

That's the sort of liberal talk that American conservatives deride as "decadence." But if Europe concludes that Bush made a strategic error with Iraq and tries a new strategy, that's not "decadence," that's pragmatism. And if radical Islamic terror continues to display strength, Bush supporters may increasingly worry that come November, American voters will be pragmatic too.

Danger

POSTCARD FROM BAGHDAD
STREET CRIME
by Jon Lee Anderson
Issue of 2004-03-29
Posted 2004-03-22

The blast from the bomb that blew up the Mount Lebanon Hotel in Baghdad in mid-March knocked me out of my chair and sent my coffee flying out of its cup. A few seconds later, there was a burst from what sounded like a Kalashnikov. Gunfire has become routine in Baghdad, and there are explosions almost every day, but this was the biggest blast I had heard since Saddam’s palaces and municipal buildings were being attacked by the United States, exactly a year ago. I am staying in the same hotel, the Palestine, I stayed in then, with its views of the Tigris and, on the other side of the river, the big Presidential complex, which is now occupied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, in what is called the Green Zone. (Everything outside its reinforced walls—in other words, the rest of Iraq—is referred to as the Red Zone.) A great gray plume of smoke was billowing into the night sky, and I went up to the roof to get a better view. Several other hotel guests were already there: Iraqis, Koreans, Italians, Spaniards, a number of Americans, a couple of South Africans. During the past year, hundreds of foreigners—journalists, entrepreneurs, the paramilitary representatives of private security firms—have made their way to Iraq. One entire floor of the Palestine is occupied by employees of Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. When the elevator stops on their floor and the doors open, Nepalese Gurkha guards with snub-nosed submachine guns are standing in the hallway to check out who’s getting off.

Baghdad is a much more dangerous place than it was a year ago. A few days before the Mount Lebanon explosion, someone set off a bomb in front of a perfume shop in the same neighborhood—Al-Karrada, a predominantly Shiite section of the city. The target of the attack, who died, was the brotherin-law of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Jaafari’s brother-in-law was not involved in politics, but he was presumably easier to get to than Jaafari, and killing him may have been worth it just to get a message across.

The fall of Saddam has improved the lives of many Iraqis, especially professionals such as doctors, engineers, and teachers, whose salaries have significantly increased. And the streets are clogged with traffic, which wasn’t true before the war. A great many Iraqis took advantage of the temporary suspension of import duties at the border with Jordan and bought cheap secondhand cars. The Internet, which was strictly controlled under Saddam, is available everywhere, as are a wide variety of computers, domestic appliances, and cell phones. These life-style improvements notwithstanding, very few people venture out on the streets after dark, and almost no one I know dares drive after ten-thirty. This is because of the staggering increase in the number of rapes, murders, armed robberies, carjackings, and kidnappings. Saddam emptied the country’s prisons a few months before the war, and perhaps a hundred thousand criminals returned to the streets. Young girls are now walked to and from school by their fathers or brothers, for fear they might be snatched. Women generally dress much more modestly than they did before, wearing either baggy black abayas or helmet-like hijab head scarves.

It is not only the wealthy who are targeted for robbery and extortion. As in countries like Colombia and Mexico, wives and children of schoolteachers and mechanics are kidnapped along with politicians and rich businessmen. A couple of months ago, the twelve-year-old son of an Iraqi friend of mine, a driver who lives in a working-class neighborhood, was kidnapped one morning while walking to school. My friend had recently bought a nice secondhand car, which he was very proud of and loved to show off. That was probably his big mistake. The kidnappers demanded fifty thousand dollars in ransom. He bargained them down to six thousand dollars, sold his new car, and paid up. Several hours later, the boy was released a few blocks from his home. Since then, my friend has not let his son out of the house, even to go to school.

Everyone is on edge here, but foreigners are the main targets of assassination. A few days ago, a German and a Dutch engineer were murdered on the road between Baghdad and Karbala at about the time a journalist friend of mine was driving along the same route. He was travelling with a security detail that was supposed to keep suspicious cars away, but suddenly he realized that a black BMW—the car of choice for assassins in Iraq—had pulled up alongside him. The BMW raced past and then doubled back. As it went by a second time, my friend saw several men inside, staring at him intently. Assassins usually rake the driver’s side of a car with bullets on their second or third pass, causing a crash. My friend’s driver took evasive measures and escaped down a side road.

This is not an abstraction for me. I have a friend, an American, who will be back in Baghdad in a couple of weeks. More peaceful, more free my a**.

Beyond Tick-Tock

Corrente notices that the Grey Lady hides the story. WaPo fronts it.

Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response
President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.

Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room.

"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this."

"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

I thought that Leslie Stahl paid too much attention to tick-tock journalism, but Clarke was strong and the critique is pretty devestating. We'll see where it goes; if it puts W on the defensive, it would be about time, and about facts. Facts are stubborn things, and the press doesn't care for them very much. The press prefers conflict, and will try to make this story be about dueling quotes.

There were a bunch of stories on NPR last week about declining circulation in the daily papers. It hasn't occured to them yet to consider that the way they cover stories might be a problem for a public which picks up the local rag first thing in the morning looking for facts rather than the familiar journalistic yada. Over there on the right is a live link to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Josh seems stuck on those stubborn facts.

UPDATE: via Billmon, the 60 Minutes transcript, courtesy of Sadly, No. I'm listening to the gaggle and the "slime and defend" has already started.

Do The Right Thing

Terry Mattingly and Douglas LeBlanc are GetReligion, a blog which fact-checks religion stories in the secular press. In today's post, Terry does an excellent job of laying out the facts and context around the story of the Methodist minister, Rev. Karen Dammann, which I posted this morning (as well as critiquing the Allen Cooperman/WaPo story I posted):

Meanwhile, the verdict is now in. A jury of 13 pastors found the Rev. Karen Dammann innocent of violating her church's teachings against homosexual conduct by clergy. In effect, the jury found the United Methodist Church itself guilty of having an unclear law, or at least one that can be considered unclear by those who oppose the teachings contained therein. The Seattle Times reported:

Actually, these flocks and their shepherds appear to have a lot in common.

What Terry points out is that this issue heightens the progressive/traditionalist splits in all the denominations in this country, as well as causing considerable friction between their shrinking first world populations and their growing second and third world ones. This issue has a lot of history: it has come up every year at the quadrennial conferences of the UMC, PCUSA and PECUSA for more than thirty years. When the consecration of openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson came up last year, I like the stand taken by DC's Bishop. He said, "We've been fighting with this for 30 years. It is time to do the right thing."

Bad Science, Bad Education

The failures of abstinence-only

By Naomi Ninneman, 3/21/2004

Abstinence-only education has been in the news recently. In his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed doubling federal funding for it. But many people are surprised when they find out what the "only" in "abstinence-only" really means.

It means, under the federal regulations governing these programs, that educators are prohibited from telling students that condoms can prevent pregnancy and HIV/AIDS.

They cannot discuss the facts even when talking to sexually active teens who are at high risk of contracting HIV. According to these guidelines, condoms and other forms of contraception can only be discussed to emphasize their failure rates. Some programs, for example, provide students with two lists: one of diseases they can get when having unprotected sex and another of diseases they can get when using a condom. The lists are the same. Both include HIV, but the fact that condoms are roughly 96 percent effective in preventing the spread of this disease is nowhere to be found.

This marks a radical departure from traditional sex education, which focuses on a comprehensive approach to preventing teen pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases. It also makes abstinence-only programs dangerous.

Perhaps that is why, despite the backing of President Bush, recent polls show that only 15 percent of Americans favor the abstinence-only approach. But do the programs work?

It's not easy to answer that question definitively, since no effort has been made at the federal level to rigorously evaluate their effectiveness. The Department of Health and Human Services hired Mathematica Policy Research Inc. in the late 1990s to complete a federal assessment but directed researchers to evaluate only 11 handpicked programs, instead of a random sample of the hundreds of federally funded programs. Further, Mathematica's soon-to-be-released interim report will not evaluate any of the programs for behavioral change. In other words, it won't tell us whether these programs are leading kids to have less sex or more sex, or whether that is affecting rates of pregnancy and infection.

Meanwhile, studies that looked at behavioral change have produced results that are hardly reassuring.

In Minnesota, for example, a recent study of the state's abstinence-only program, Education Now and Babies Later, found that sexual activity among participating students doubled between 2001 and 2002 and that the number who said they would probably have sex during high school nearly doubled, as well.

In 2001, researchers at Columbia University found that, although a limited number of students who signed so-called "virginity pledges" delayed sexual activity for more than a year, they were also one-third less likely to use protection when they did have sex -- a massive failure from a public health perspective. This year, the same researchers found that students who signed the pledges contracted sexually transmitted diseases at roughly the same rate as students who did not.

In the public health community, this raises serious concerns about why the federal government is spending millions of dollars on programs that have not been proven effective. It is even more disturbing, given the research findings on comprehensive sex education programs. Numerous rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated that these programs help teens delay sexual activity, use contraceptives when they do become sexually active, and reduce their number of partners.

Because it's not about facts, it is about ideological purity. Chris Mooney is tracking Bushco's bad science. I really find this infuriating--this is denying a decent education in human sexuality to kids who need it.

Our Man in Islamabad, II

CNN ends up with “much egg on its face”

By Khalid Hasan

The excitement began because of an interview President Pervez Musharraf had granted to visiting CNN anchor, Aaron Brown. The President told him in answer to a question about the military operation in progress in South Waziristan that the resistance being offered by the besieged militants suggested that they might be defending a “high-value target” who had “very likely” been surrounded. He said the fierce resistance being experienced led him to believe that it was a senior al-Qaeda leader. “Who, I don’t know,” he added.

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, said he could not confirm that Ayman al-Zawahiri was the leader who had been surrounded. “We don’t know,” he said. “No one from Pakistan government has given this name.” An American counterterrorism official said in Washington, “They believe they have cornered a high-value target, but no one can be certain at this point.”

However, CNN, taking its cue from the President’s carefully-worded remarks, “ran with the bit in its mouth and kept running until late into the night,” as the New York-based journalist put it. The principal reason CNN went over the top with the al-Zawahiri story was the presence of its anchor Aaron Brown in Pakistan, who had actually arrived to cover US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit. It is the practice at American television networks that if one of their high-profile stars arrives in a country, they consider that arrival by itself newsworthy and deserving of extensive coverage. Top news anchors like Aaron Brown are expected to file a major story wherever they go. Therefore, when President Musharraf told the American TV news anchor what he told him about the South Waziristan operation, CNN decided that it had a world exclusive and it night be the first to report the biggest story since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

CNN has actually ended up with a lot of egg on its face and shown the immaturity and lack of professionalism of its news managers. On Friday morning, its top news executives decided that the al-Zawahiri story had to be downgraded. Other networks showed more maturity than exhibited by CNN. They took due note of the story but did not go over the top as CNN had.

Age of Unseriousness

While American first responders go unfunded by the unserious Bush administration, we aren't the only ones betrayed by our government:

Official: UK would fail to cope with major terror attack
By Geoffrey Lean, Paul Lashmar and Sophie Goodchild

21 March 2004

Britain could not cope with a terrorist bombing on the scale of this month's atrocity in Madrid, the country's top emergency planners have admitted. It would be even less able to deal with the aftermath of the chemical, biological or nuclear attack predicted by ministers and the security services.

Resources for emergency planning have declined in real terms since the destruction of the World Trade Center, according to those in charge. They say their staff lack vital equipment and training, that the Government keeps its plans secret from them and that the public has not been given enough information on how to react to an incident.

Patrick Cunningham, the leader of Britain's 500 emergency planners, called the situation "unbelievable", and described the country as gripped by "a culture of complacency". Iain Hoult, their chairman in southern England, added: "We are very, very badly prepared."

Prevention of a terrorist attack has also been overshadowed by another embarrassment for the Government. Britain's security services face censure for allowing a key suspect in the investigation into the Madrid bombings to disappear. Mohammed al-Garbuzi ­ believed to have been in close contact with Jamal Zougam, who is being held by the Spanish police in connection with the attacks that killed 202 people ­ fled his London home on Wednesday night, despite being well-known to MI5.

These developments came on a day when people in more than 300 cities across the world marched in protest at the occupation of Iraq. The numbers marching in London and many other places were substantially down on the pre-war protests of a year ago, but the number of places across the globe where protesters took to the streets was up on 2003.

Many will have been concerned about the increased risk of terrorist attack. They are not alone. This week representatives of Britain's local authorities are to meet the Government to demand more resources before the country is caught unawares by terrorists. The Local Government Association will tell the Cabinet Office and the Deputy Prime Minister's Office that funds for emergency planning must be increased after being frozen since before 11 September 2001.

The money provided for planning has remained at £19m a year since April 2001, a decline in real terms. No increase is expected next year, and under the Civil Contingencies Bill, now before Parliament, even this amount will no longer be guaranteed: emergency planners will have to compete with other local authority priorities for funds.

Your Rights

Judge Rules on Abortion Records

Associated Press
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page A09

NEW YORK, March 20 -- A New York hospital has been ordered to turn over abortion records to the Justice Department, which is seeking them for its legal battle over the Partial-Birth Abortion Act.

A Manhattan federal judge, Richard Casey, ruled Thursday that New York-Presbyterian Hospital must comply with the Justice Department's request.

Judges in other jurisdictions, including Chicago and San Francisco, have refused in recent weeks to order abortion records released from hospitals there.

But a federal judge last week ordered the University of Michigan Health System to turn over its records for possible inclusion in the case.

Legal observers say that because of the divergent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court may ultimately have to rule on the issue.

Casey said the records are not covered by federal privacy laws because information identifying the women who received the late-term abortions could be deleted. New York-Presbyterian Hospital said it was considering an appeal.

Here's the brand new law which this violates.

The Greatest of These

Methodist Jury Acquits Gay Pastor

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page A01

After a three-day trial, a jury of fellow ministers acquitted an Ellensburg, Wash., pastor of violating United Methodist Church law by living openly as a lesbian, saying the church has not clearly declared homosexuality to be incompatible with Christian teaching.

Yesterday's verdict is a milestone for liberals in the church who want to reverse its ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals" in the clergy, and it is a defeat for conservatives seeking to hold the line against the gay rights movement in the church and in secular society.

If the Rev. Karen Dammann had been convicted, she could have lost her job as pastor of the 200-member First United Methodist Church in rural Ellensburg and been permanently removed from the ministry.

Methodists on both sides of the issue predicted that the decision would reverberate through the 8.3 million-member denomination, much as the consecration of a gay bishop has embroiled the Episcopal Church in a debate between the authority of scriptural passages that condemn homosexuality and the desire to be an inclusive, tolerant religious community.

The not-guilty verdict "will be shocking to most United Methodists, because there is no question about what the Reverend Dammann is doing," said the Rev. James V. Heidinger, president of Good News, a conservative renewal movement in the church. "It was assumed by most of us that we were just going through due process to make sure her rights were protected, but that she obviously was in violation of church law."

Dammann had tested the Methodist Church's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gays in the clergy by writing a Feb. 14, 2001, letter to her bishop saying she was "living in a partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship."

Dammann, 47, and her partner, Meredith Savage, 44, a wetlands biologist, have lived together for eight years and were married this month in Portland, Ore., after county officials there began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. They are rearing a 5-year-old son who was borne by Savage and legally adopted by Dammann.

The three-day trial in a church social hall in Bothell, Wash., followed the same pattern as a civil trial, with witnesses questioned by a prosecutor and a defense counsel. But both were ministers, not lawyers, and the proceeding was overseen by a retired bishop who sat by a single candle, representing the presence of the holy spirit.

Under church rules, a conviction requires at least nine votes, or two-thirds of the 13 jurors. Eleven jurors voted not guilty, and two were undecided.

In a written statement, the jury said it reached its decision "after many hours of painful and prayerful deliberation and listening for and to the word of God." Although it found Dammann to be a "self-avowed practicing homosexual," the jury said it did not have "clear and convincing evidence" that she was guilty of the charge of "practices declared by the United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings."

This is one battle, not the war, in the Methodist church and all of the others. It sure is nice to have some good news to report. I'll have more later, after I've had time to digest the ruling.

Counter-terrorism

Juan Cole has rather a lot to say this morning as we all fortify our tinfoil hats for Richard Clarke's appearance on 60 Minutes this evening:

As a comment on Clarke's experience. In fall of 2002 I taught my course on wars in the Middle East here at the University of Michigan. And I told the class that on September 12, Wolfowitz wanted to bomb Iraq in retaliation. The class laughed. I mean they burst out into giggles. I was taken aback. I was just telling the story as we knew it then. I hadn't been going for a laugh. Out of the mouth of babes . . .

Love the One You're With

Eddie is really sick. He has dental abcesses and needs about $1200 of vet work right now. Can you help?

He stands next to me like a little soldier and I can't help. Can you? This is humiliating for me. My cat is sick and I can't fix it.

--M

Our Man in Islamabad

While CNN was whipping up the mobs on Friday with "breaking news" all over the place and cancelling their scheduled program to follow the snipe hunt/Afghan branch ("Might be Ayman al-Zawahiri!!!!!!!!"), I was listening to Blitzer bluster even louder than usual--had to be on all afternoon, poor baby--and reading this:

But interviews with top Afghan and US intelligence officials reveal a number of reasons the US has failed so far to catch Mr. bin Laden and his coterie of fighters. The difficulties, which cannot be easily overcome, are numerous:

• Few of America's local spies trust the US military or US intelligence agents, who by one account rotate in and out within three months.

• Most of America's human intelligence comes from local interpreters, many of whom have their own personal scores to settle, and have a history of giving false information.

• American technological advantages in satellite imagery and phone intercepts are almost useless in a country with few phones to monitor.

"Without human intelligence, this operation will be meaningless," says a senior Afghan intelligence officer, who requests anonymity. "Instead of catching Osama, the Americans will only create more opposition for themselves."

Most Afghans want the Americans to stay and rebuild the country, this Afghan intelligence officer adds, noting that Afghans regularly provide American intelligence agents and soldiers with tip-offs of Taliban movements. But individual American agents don't spend enough time in Afghanistan to know who is telling them the truth.

"American intelligence agencies change their staff every three months," he says. "How is it possible for a foreigner to come to Kandahar or Khost, to understand the society or the psychology, to know a man's tribal relations, his past behavior, his personal motives, whether he is honest or if he is telling a lie? It is not possible in three months."

Poor intelligence has led to mistakes.

In December 2001, a tip from the warlord, Badshah Khan Zadran, sent American AC-130 gunships and Navy fighters to attack a convoy of vehicles full of Afghan tribal elders on their way to show allegiance to the post-Taliban government; 65 civilians were reportedly killed.

In July 2002, at least 48 people were killed and 117 wounded when US warplanes attacked a wedding party in the town of Deh Rawud in central Afghanistan. The US military said a gunship had come under fire in the area.

More recently, on Dec. 6, 2003, US forces admitted mistakenly killing nine children when they bombed the home of a suspected Taliban commander near the town of Ghazni. The attack, prompted by "extensive intelligence" was precise, but the target left the location an hour before.

"I believe as long as you use local, infamous warlords, you'll always have problems," says Ali Ahmed Jalali, the Afghan interior minister, who maintains an extensive intelligence service. "Some of these warlords wanted to ensure mistakes were made, to keep the war going. There are cases where misinformation has been fed into the system."

So I'm reading this and listening to the Wolfster huff and puff, and I'm thinking, "This is a created media event to cover up the fact that "war week" as campaign event isen't working out so well." The fact of the matter was that if the Pakistani ISI was chasing Al Qaeda, they'd hardly have a clue about who it is. Pervez Musharraf remains in power only because they allow it, they are at least as sympathetic to AQ as they are to him, and it is unlikely the tribal chiefs in the area are going to be any more cooperative with them than with the US.

Our man Pervez put on a little show for Colin Powell, who had been in Islamabad the previous day to elevate Pakistan to "major ally" status, so he gets a show--a politically helpful one--in exchange for certifying Pak as a recipient for major arms shipments. How we will explain this to our friends the Indians is not certain, but it is clear that we don't have much of a diplomatic posture with regard to this explosive sittuation. Sort of like our lack of posture with Korea. It's worth noting that all of these potentially explosive situations have a nuclear triangle warning on them, unlike Iraq. In other words, the most dangerous proliferation situations are getting the least attention.

In short, the actual interests of the country with regard to security are nowhere in sight. Our "war" president has a very limited attention span, limited interest, limited intelligence. Listening to his speeches this week has been an exercise in Yogic self-control of breathing and pulse rate. His little subject-verb sentences with a Manichaen adjective thrown in here and there--the epic battle of good and evil--will probably drive me mad before we get anywhere near the election, and I don't have all that far to go after three and a half years of up-is-downism.

News from the Front

Jcecil3 is a theoblogger who usually confines himself to progressive Catholic topics. This past week he posted a disturbing conversation with a servicemember who had returned from Iraq. I reproduce it here:

I ran into someone I know in the military who served in the war in Iraq. Because I support the troops, even if I question Bush, I was keeping my anti-war sentiments to myself, and I don't think this guy and I ever talked politics before.

This is an "unofficial report" from one person's perspective, so I make no claim to know how much is really true. All I can say is that I have no reason to doubt my source.

While this doesn't rise much above the standards of heresay, given the paucity of good reporting in the traditional media, first hand accounts may be the only way we can build a mosaic that represents reality.

Year 2 of ....

Newsday opines the obvious:

Year 2 in Iraq may be worse
The terror attacks come from those who have a lot to lose from a free nation; they intend to drive the West away before a government can take hold.

The American people are justifiably concerned about how long the violence will last and how many young U.S. soldiers will be killed or wounded in Iraq. Partly that is the result of the administration selling the public on its belief a year ago that stabilizing Iraq would be a relatively easy task. The Bush administration certainly did nothing to prepare domestic public opinion for the long, hard road that nation-building requires, especially in a country with the brutal ethnic tensions of Iraq.

The administration of President George W. Bush made the task all the more difficult by arrogantly pursuing the Iraq mission by itself, without making any genuine attempt to build a broad international coalition, as the first Bush administration did in 1991. This White House attitude was: We are going to do this whether you like it or not; join us. But that also reflected the Pentagon's view that the post-war period wouldn't be all that difficult so why bother to build a coalition: Better to be free to act alone.

The next year in Iraq will be as difficult as the last year. More difficult. Car bombings, hotel bombings, sniper fire and ambushes will not abate. The United States wants to hand back sovereignty to the Iraqi people this summer, even as the Iraqis - the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds and all the other factions there - work to construct an interim government, write a constitution and then elect a government.

The terrorist goal is to weaken Western morale and force the United States out of Iraq well before any new form of government can take hold. That is what the bombing in Spain was all about. That is what the bombings of hotels in Iraq were all about.

Stained Blue Dress

The New York Times rediscovers The Clenis.

Clinton Aides Plan to Tell Panel of Warning Bush Team on Qaeda
By PHILIP SHENON

Published: March 20, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 19 — Senior Clinton administration officials called to testify next week before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say they are prepared to detail how they repeatedly warned their Bush administration counterparts in late 2000 that Al Qaeda posed the worst security threat facing the nation — and how the new administration was slow to act.

They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.

One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.

At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.

"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser.

The sworn testimony from the high-ranking Clinton administration officials — including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser — is scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

They are expected to testify along with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who will answer for the Bush administration, as well as George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence in both administrations.

While Clinton officials have offered similar accounts in the past, a new public review of how they warned Mr. Bush's aides about the need to deal quickly with the Qaeda threat could prove awkward to the White House, especially in the midst of a presidential campaign. But given the witnesses' prominence in the Clinton administration, supporters of Mr. Bush may see political motives in the testimony of some of them.

....
In his testimony, Mr. Clarke is also expected to discuss what he believed to be the Bush administration's determination to punish Saddam Hussein for the Sept. 11 attacks even though there was no evidence to tie the Iraqi president to Al Qaeda.

The issue is addressed in a new book by Mr. Clarke, and in an interview to promote the book on "60 Minutes" on CBS-TV scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Clarke said that the White House considered bombing Iraq in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, even when it became clear that Al Qaeda was responsible.

"I think they wanted to believe there was a connection, but the C.I.A. was sitting there, the F.B.I. was sitting there, saying, `We've looked at this issue for years — for years, we've looked, and there's just no connection,' " Mr. Clarke said. He recalled telling Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that "there are a lot of good targets in a lot of places, but Iraq had nothing to do" with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The White House has insisted that it acted aggressively throughout 2001 on the warnings to deal with the threat from Qaeda terrorists, and that there was an exhaustive staff review throughout the spring and summer, with a proposal ready for President Bush in early September to step up the government's efforts to destroy the terrorist network.

The Clinton administration witnesses may face difficult questions at the hearings about why they did not do more to deal with Qaeda immediately after the Cole attack and the discovery the previous winter that Qaeda terrorists had come close to coordinated attacks timed to the Dec. 31, 1999, festivities for the new millennium.

"There was no contemplation of any military action after the millennium plots, and there should have been," said Bob Kerrey, a Democratic member of the commission and a former senator from Nebraska.

"The Cole is even worse, because that was an attack on a military target," he said. "It was military against military. It was an Islamic army against our Navy. Just because you don't have a nation-state as your adversary doesn't mean you should not consider a declaration of war."

No, not enough was done on Clinton's watch. But the facts already in the public record indicate that the Bushies completely lost interest in AQ to focus on Saddam from day 1. Notice that Shenon doesn't mention that, which is pretty central to Clarke's book.

Stupid Pet Tricks

Irish eyes won't smile when Bush pays visit
Jimmy Breslin

March 18, 2004

Bush goes to Dublin to speak at a meeting of European nations. The size of Ireland makes any corner of the country easy to reach by protesters. The Bush government has been discussing places for safe meetings in the empty west of Ireland. The people around Bush feel any unfriendly crowd is a frontal assault that requires the 10th Mountain Division to defend. The Bush people think that the west of Ireland will be friendly. They are that out of touch with Ireland. The people will go anywhere to protest against Bush and his war. A corner of Mayo, or Grafton Street in Dublin, are equally good. The mails in my office and house have been filled with notices of war protest marches coming up in New York. The murmur of New York runs all over the world.

The Irish Herald newspaper printed that Bush will have 700 people with him, and the American security people have asked for immunity for anybody who shoots and kills a protester. This could be a standard request, but it looks like hell to see it in print in Ireland.

Bush revels in crowds from these low IQ states who have at best an eight-grade reading level. All through long dark years of poverty, Ireland never gave upon the most stringent, classic education. And the country now might be the best read people on earth. This is American ignorance at its highest: Bush and Kerry in a he said, he said confrontation about Kerry's statement that a foreign leader likes him more than Bush. Bush said, in a classic statement, that nobody running for president should make a claim if he can't back it up with facts. Bush said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and talked of mushroom clouds. If he can back it up, the world could end.

The Irish can be expected to rail against cheap lies and this could cause Bush to be embarrassed in front of the world.

The Bushistas tried the same on their trip to London last year. The request for immunity didn't play well then, and won't play well in Ireland.

Here's a thought experiment for you: imagine Vladimir Putin or Aleksandr Krwasawniewski making a state visit to the US and making the same demand. Does that get you in touch with the level of arrogance?

Everyday Theology

Teresa Nielsen Hayden indulges in some ecclesiastical history and theology on an AP story:

Holy Trinity, Batman!

So just remember, kids: when you hear someone talking about “traditional Christianity,” this is what they mean.

Ding Dong the Bells are Gonna Chime

Enlightenment to the North!

via pogge:

Gay couples win right to marry in Quebec
Last Updated Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:05:15

MONTREAL - Same-sex couples in Quebec celebrated Friday as the province's top court ruled that they have the right to marry.

The Quebec Court of Appeal's decision matches similar rulings from Ontario and British Columbia.

"This is wonderful," said Michael Hendricks, one of two men at the centre of the legal case. He and longtime partner René Leboeuf sought the right to get married.

"The floodgates seem to be open and it looks like Canada is going to become the first North American country that has equal marriage," Hendricks told a news conference.

Hendricks and Leboeuf hope to wed at the Montreal courthouse next month. They've been together for 31 years.

A lower court ruled in the couple's favour in 2002, but the decision was challenged by some religious groups. On Friday, Quebec's Court of Appeal upheld the original ruling, saying the traditional definition of marriage is discriminatory and unjustified.

In 2002, the Quebec Superior Court ruled that restricting marriage to a union between a man and a woman was unjustified under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Prime Minister Paul Martin has vowed to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriages, but he's waiting for the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify the constitutionality of gay marriage.

Canada seems to be decades ahead of us on a whole lot of scores. My congratulations to our northern cousins.

UPDATE:via Talkleft we learn that Oliver Willis believes the culture war is over and the right lost:

First off, the fifties were never as puritanical as Ozzie & Harriet. The "greatest generation" enjoyed more than their fair share of vice, from late nights out on the town to explicit stag flicks at the moose lodge. The free-love sixties didn't just appear out of the vapor, but were just the ongoing evolution of an American trend. We are by nature puritanical; it is in the DNA of this country from the first settlers who arrived, living on in the guise of our modern cultural scolds (Bill Bennett, Dr. Laura, and Joe Lieberman). It isn't that explicit sex and dirty talk has forced itself on an unreceptive populace, but that a sort of cultural libertarianism has become the norm in America. The extremists at both ends of the spectrum - including those who would restrict what you want to see, and those who think you should see what you don't want to - have been increasingly marginalized.

It isn't that sex-based media force-feeds us. We actively seek it out. This is a classic case of people telling the media up front the politically correct answer, but when they get behind the safety of their homes it is a whole new story. Billions of internet searches went hunting for Paris Hilton's x-rated video, or Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction". One of the reasons why right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch is shelling out billions of dollars for the DirecTV satellite network is that they generate cash like crazy from pay-per-view porn. It isn't just New York and LA buying this stuff and searching for it on Google. Red America loves it too, they just don't talk about it as much. Old Rupert wants Jenna Jameson on HIS bottom line.

Bait and Switch

Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis

By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01

A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.

Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.

Much of the focus on prewar expectations vs. postwar reality has been on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But while that was the central justification for the war in Iraq, the administration also made a wide range of claims about the ease of the invasion and the benefits that would result. Though comparisons between expectations and results are complex, it appears that the administration, based on limited human intelligence and conversations with a small corps of Iraqi exiles, was overly optimistic.

White House officials, who did not respond to requests for information for this report, acknowledge that the financial costs have been greater than expected but say they are pleased with the progress toward democracy, security and prosperity in Iraq.

Bush, who will deliver a speech today outlining the successes of the past year, gave a taste of his themes in an address in Kentucky yesterday to troops just back from Iraq. "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man," Bush said. "Today, Iraq has a new interim law that guarantees basic rights for all: freedom of religion, the right to cast a secret ballot and equality under the law." Iraqis, he said, are "building a country that is strong and free, and America is proud to stand with them."

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."

That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.

The transcript of that interview has been pulled from the USAID Web site, the agency said, "to reflect current statements and testimony on Iraq reconstruction." The earlier $1.7 billion figure was "the best estimate available at the time, based on very limited information about the conditions inside of Iraq."

I don't think additional commentary is necessary.

What They Don't Tell You

Iraqi Reporters Rebuff Powell, Leave News Conference
Fri Mar 19, 2004 07:50 AM ET

By Luke Baker

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi journalists walked out of a Baghdad news conference given by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday in protest at lack of security and the killing of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. troops.

"We declare our boycott of the conference because of the martyrs," Najim al-Rubaie of Iraq's Distor newspaper said in a statement read at the start of the news conference as Powell and Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer looked on.

"We declare our condemnation of the incident which led to the killing of the two journalists...who were killed at the hands of the American forces."

More than 30 Iraqi journalists then stood up and walked out.

Employees of Dubai-based satellite television channel Al Arabiya say U.S. soldiers opened fire on a car carrying an Arabiya crew on Thursday evening after another car ran through a checkpoint. Cameraman Ali Abdelaziz was killed and correspondent Ali al-Khatib died in hospital on Friday morning.

After the walkout, Powell said he respected the right of the journalists to express their feelings.

"It is something that would never have happened at an earlier time in the history of Iraq, certainly not in the last 30 years," he said.

Powell said he regretted the loss of life of the journalists, and all loss of life in Iraq.

"But let's be clear who is responsible for this," he said. "Those individuals left over from the old regime do not want to see the Iraqi people live in peace. They do not want to see democracy take root."

Powell said he did not have the full details of the Arabiya incident but he was certain that troops would not have deliberately killed journalists. He said that sometimes in the confusion after a guerrilla attack, "mistakes happen, tragedies occur."

Iraqi journalists demanded an investigation into the incident.

"We walked out because we need them to ensure that we are safe under the occupation and yet they have done nothing," Ahmed al-Samraee, an Iraqi producer with the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite channel, said after the walkout.

"I saw these people killed. They were shot dead on purpose," he said.

Didn't hear about this on CNN.

Up is Down

Mark at The Cautious Man reminds us of the words of Bruce Springsteen:

"The question of whether we were misled in the war with Iraq is neither a liberal or conservative question or Democratic or Republican question. It's an American question. And protecting the democracy we ask our sons and daughters to die for is our responsibility and it's our trust. And demanding accountability is our job as citizens. That's the American way so that truth will out."

Krugman this morning:

"But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it. "

One Year Out

Juan Cole's Welcome to the Quagmire

The Kurds had blocked an American attempt to bring in 12,000 Turkish troops to fight the insurgents in the Sunni Arab areas, ensuring that U.S. soldiers remained on the front line in Fallujah and Ramadi. The U.S. was weak in the north and relied heavily on the Kurdish militias, or peshmergas. Were the majority Shiites to grow weary of Coalition Provisional Authority rule and begin an uprising of their own, the Americans in Baghdad came to recognize, the entire country could fall into chaos.

If acceptable compromises cannot be reached among the major players, the country could easily fall into chaos. All the leading factions, including the Kurds and the more militant Shiites, have large, well-armed militias at their beck and call. The low-grade guerrilla insurgency of the Sunni Arabs also is likely to continue for some time. It may not, however, be the most challenging issue Iraqis face as they attempt to hammer out a new destiny -- a destiny not imposed on them by the will of the Bush administration.

The Rich are Different from You and Me

Je Refuse!
Justice Scalia's letter to the American people.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Updated Thursday, March 18, 2004, at 1:18 PM PT

In response to the shriller-than-ever calls for his recusal in the Dick Cheney case, Justice Antonin Scalia has lobbed this astonishing 21-page memorandum back at the public. Apparently channeling the late Justice Harry Blackmun, Scalia's memo is a deeply felt, pained, and virtually unprecedented plea to the American people.

And before you get lost in his sea of detail, rebuttal, and historical example, it's worth considering what this missive really represents: This is the Supreme Court talking back to us—actually responding to two months of op-eds and cartoons and petitions. This memorandum is a shaky, echoey voice emerging from behind the wizard of Oz's curtain.

The issue is whether Scalia should recuse himself from hearing an upcoming case about the composition of Cheney's energy task force. Calls for Scalia's recusal were prompted by media revelations that weeks after the high court agreed to hear the case, Scalia hitched a ride with the vice president on Air Force Two, joining him for several days at a duck-hunting camp in Louisiana. The legal test of whether a Supreme Court justice should recuse himself asks, unhelpfully, that judges step aside when their "impartiality might reasonably questioned." And since January, editorialists and cartoonists have been engaged in a unilateral war on the justice—telling him, almost daily, that his integrity is in question; that it looks bad, very bad, when one of nine justices fraternizes with a named party to a case before him. The final straw here may have been Letterman's Top 10 list from Tuesday night: "Top 10 Signs Your Supreme Court Justice Is on the Take." No. 1? "Already declared Bush the winner of the November election."
Article

When the Sierra Club filed its rather audacious motion formally seeking Scalia's recusal, the court quickly signaled that this was still Scalia's decision to make and his alone. Scalia has now made the decision—one usually made quietly and without explanation—in a strange public document.

He offers loads of deathly detail on the trip itself: He's been attending this camp for five years, and his host, Wallace Carline, is not an energy-industry executive but rather runs a company providing services and equipment to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. The trip had been planned months before the court agreed to hear the case. He insists this was "not an intimate setting" and that the hunters slept in rooms of two or three people (although Cheney bunked alone). Trudging about in marshes and boats, bunk beds and communal dinners. Sounds wretched. He adds that he never hunted in the same blind as Cheney and that nothing was said between them about the case.

Scalia then makes his most important substantive argument—one made earlier this week by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: There's no one to fill in when a Supreme Court justice steps aside, and the effects of frequent recusals, and the resulting 4-4 ties in the courts and on the law, are devastating. He cites a 1993 Statement of Recusal Policy (handily "available in the Clerk of Court's case file") to emphasize the harms of these non-decisions: "[E]ven one unnecessary recusal impairs the functioning of the Court."

Scalia says his personal friendship with Cheney might be an issue were Cheney's "personal fortune or personal freedom" at stake. But in this case, involving only Cheney's official actions, there is no cause for stepping down. We take a brief historical detour into the land of friendships between justices and presidents. ("Justice Stone tossed around a medicine ball with members of the Hoover administration.") And, in by far the strangest section of the memorandum, there is a discussion of whether Cheney's personal integrity and reputation are on the line in this case:

Puh-leaze. I responded to a question by a brie-chardonnay-New-Yawk-liberal over at Kos in comments (who asked "What's a duck blind?"), "A duck blind is a spider hole out of the sight of the ducks where you sit and swear and drink likker and scratch with your buddies while waiting for the ducks to land so you can shoot at them. It's like an ice fishing house, but warmer and wetter."

So Cheney wasn't sharing a blind with Scalia. At the end of a day of hunting or fishing, you go back to camp, in this case apparently a pretty luxurious lodge, and hang out with the boys, sit and swear and drink likker and scratch and tell lies about what you did all day. Cheney had a private room? Big deal.

What Mr. Justice Scalia--and Cheney, by implication--are saying is that wealth and power hang out together, always have, always will. What are you all getting shrill about?

Well, we are getting shrill about an energy policy that screwed California, made some Bush/Cheney friends enormously wealthy while crashing the futures of a lot of us little people (Enron, etc.), have given us the highest gas prices (adjusted for inflation) in 30 years and we are just supposed to sit here and not do anything when your dinner conversations turn to screwing us? Mr. Justice, can I catch a ride on Air Force 2 on a "space available" basis? Just asking. The email address is on the site. I have friends I'd like to visit in Florida, and I hear you are going to be there a lot in the next few months.

Meteor Blades has a particularly scathing analysis this evening, as livid as I am at the arrogance. Oh, by the way, Scalia authored the baseline judgement on when to recuse (thanks MB) and is violating his own standard, as published.

Embarrassing these people isn't enough. They have to be impeached in the court of public opinion. Spread the word. The Internet is our power.

A Better World

Dear Bumpers,

This morning I received an email from Bump reader Cory Smith, Legislative Counsel to the organization Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which is the name under which I was familiar with them.) HRF is taking the point in the asylum case of
Rodi Alvarado, a Guatamalan woman seeking asylum in the US to escape her horrifyingly abusive husband. This will be a test case for other women who can substantiate abuse as a reason for asylum. The paperwork, briefs and so forth have all been filled and AG Ashcroft is getting ready to issue the ruling. Having done some work in abuse and immigration myself, I know how important HRF's efforts in this area: read the stories in the NYT article I linked to above.

Cory is asking for our help. He writes:

#1-It would be very helpful if you asked your readers to visit our
action alert and urge Ashcroft to grant Rodi Alvarado asylum. It would
be great if they would also share on list-servs, with friends, and
colleagues. It is very important that Ashcroft knows that there are
people all across the nation that care about this issue. I know for a
fact it was extremely influential at DHS.

I believe we are very close to winning on this issue. This has been a
four part battle: prevent Ashcroft from issuing bad new regs in Feb
2003, getting him to reverse himself and allow Rodi's counsel to rebrief
on the case Nov 2003, influencing DHS to file a brief saying grant Rodi
asylum Feb 2004, and now Ashcroft.

Cory suggests emailing the Action Alert URL to your circle of friends and aquaintances, your church or temple (and your Meetup?) along with the link to the NYT story. Can we blog a better world? Isn't that the point?

This will cost you nothing but a few moments of your time, and offers us the chance to do a great deal of good for the least among us. How often do we get to do that?

If you want to support the work of HRF, there's a donation button on their site, but what they are asking for right now is our keyboards.

Cory, hope this helps. And thank you, Bumpers

--Melanie

More Peaceful, More Free

Bush Hails Returning Troops on Eve of Iraq Anniversary
By DAVID STOUT

Published: March 18, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 18 — A year after he sent soldiers to war, President Bush told thousands of veterans of the Iraq campaign today that their valor and sacrifice had made the Middle East, and the world, safer..

BAQUBAH, IRAQ, March 18--Insurgents launched more deadly attacks in Iraq Thursday in advance of the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of the country, leaving at least eight Iraqi civilians dead in several incidents and eight U.S. soldiers wounded in a mortar attack in the restive city of Fallujah.

Near Baqubah, a machine-gun toting man opened fire on a small bus carrying employees of a U.S. funded radio and TV station, killing three and injuring at least 10.

A hotel in the southern city of Basra, which is under British control, was hit by a car bomb that claimed three civilians, according to early reports from wire services.

There were also reports of several explosions in central Baghdad this evening. It was not immediately clear what caused those blasts or if injuries occurred.

Today's violence follows a bomb blast on Wednesday night outside a Baghdad hotel, which U.S. officials say killed 7 people.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's deputy director of operations in Baghdad, said seven Army troops and one Marine were wounded when attackers fired mortars at their rooftop position while the soldiers were guarding a meeting between U.S. military officials and local administrators in Fallujah, a city 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been a hotbed of insurgent activity. Kimmitt said none of the soldiers' wounds were life threatening.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 18 — A bomb exploded today outside a hotel in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and guerrillas and American forces exchanged fire west of Baghdad, continuing the violence that has marked the first anniversary this week of the Iraqi war.

In a separate incident, three employees of an American-funded television station were shot dead at Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, Reuters reported..

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide bomber blew up a car Thursday near a hotel in the southern city of Basra as a British military patrol passed by, killing three bystanders -- the latest in a series of attacks just before the anniversary of the start of the war.

Meanwhile, several explosions were heard in Baghdad Thursday night, and sirens wailed briefly in the area housing the U.S.-led coalition headquarters. There were no reports of casualties.

``There was an attack. We are investigating it,'' a U.S. military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity..

17-03-2004,13 :02
Four people, including three children, were killed in three rocket strikes on the capital of Baghdad Tuesday night, a US army officer said.

One of the rockets burst on a street where prayer-goers were leaving a Shiite mosque, killing a60 -year-old-man and injuring five others, medical and US military sources said.

Meanwhile, American and Iraqi military forces launched a massive operation in Baghdad to "weed out insurgents" and capture "illegal weapons" on Wednesday with troops, helicopters and armored vehicles raiding suspected "rebel hideouts".

The operation launched Wednesday is termed "Iron Promise" and is expected to involve thousands of US troops from the Fort Hood, Texas-based1 st Cavalry Division, which has recently arrived in Iraq, and the outgoing Germany-based1 st Armored Division. Scores of Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers are also involved. (Albawaba.com) .

Iraqis rue U.S. presence, tally instability, danger, hopelessness

By Ken Dilanian

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least one very good thing has happened to the Saad family since the war changed their country forever last year. Thanks to the American policy of raising government salaries, their household income has increased by tenfold.

For that reason alone, one might think the couple - Alla Saad is an Agriculture Ministry engineer and his wife, Iyman Mohammed, is a high school physics teacher - would be pleased with the way things have turned out. But that's not the case.

"Now I will list the bad things," said Saad as he entertained two visiting Americans in his living room and served them cans of Pepsi. "There is no stability, there is no security, there is no clear future. Along with a feeling of humiliation."

One year after American forces invaded Iraq and overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Saads' fears and complaints are one way to understand why many Iraqis haven't embraced the American-led occupation.

A recent poll found 70 percent of Iraqis said their lives are better than they were before. But that optimism often is leavened by what many feel is the unsettled nature of their lives.

"I don't think democracy can work here," said Mohammed, 41, a bright-eyed woman wearing a colorful headscarf. "Iraqis think democracy means anarchy, disorganization, everyone doing whatever he likes. This is not democracy."

The Saads and their children - Hameed, 14, Mustafa, 12 and Ula, 7 - live in a two-bedroom brick house in Ghazaliah, a suburb northwest of Baghdad. He's a Shiite who bears shrapnel scars from his days as a tank commander in the Iran-Iraq war; she's a Sunni who clearly enjoys the newfound right to speak her mind.

To understand their disillusionment, Mohammed said, consider that in the last month, 20 children have been kidnapped for ransom from the school where she teaches. This isn't a new story: Kidnapping is a growth industry in postwar Iraq. Most victims never report the crime to police - they simply pay anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000, depending on their means.

And then there are the explosions. A few months ago, Hameed was cut in the head by flying glass when a police station near his school was bombed. A few days ago, bombers struck a Shiite mosque near their younger children's school, forcing the school to close for a week while the windows are replaced.

Polls show most Iraqis believe crime has declined since the chaotic months after the war. But they still cite a lack of security as their top concern. Rapes, robberies, carjackings and murders remain epidemic.

So, too, does a widespread feeling of lawlessness that can be almost as corrosive as the quiet terror once sown by Saddam's secret police.

"Even at the school, we can't control the students," Mohammed said. "We fear that the student or one of his family may attack us if we fail him."

Teachers aren't alone - factory bosses say they can't fire workers; hospital directors say they can't control their maintenance staffs; police are sometimes afraid to investigate serious crimes.

Many Iraqis blame the United States for setting anarchy in motion, as they see it, by disbanding the Iraqi military and by failing to stop the widespread looting in the days after Saddam's regime fell.

"It's not only the occupation," Mohammed said. "We lost security, a normal life."
....
Electricity is still sporadic; they and their neighbors have pooled money to rent a huge generator that keeps power on most of the day. Like almost every Iraqi, they are incredulous that the coalition hasn't been able to fix Iraq's electrical system in a year.

The local sewage pumps are broken, so foul water pools in the streets around their home.

In their living room is a computer, a gift from a relative. Sometimes they access the Internet through a prepaid card purchased from a local provider, which puts them among the 3 percent of Iraqis who regularly surf the Web, according to polls.

They are better informed than most Iraqis. Asked about the new temporary constitution and its Western-style bill of rights, Saad said he's most concerned about the language saying that Islam should be just one source for legislation, rather than "the primary source." Saad thinks it should have been the latter.

They are ambivalent about the presence of U.S. troops. Mohammed says she thinks U.S. troops are needed to keep the country from slipping further into anarchy and sectarian violence, but Saad says attacks against U.S. troops are justifiable.

"The invasion will not end without resistance," he said

Rumsfeld Hedges on June 30 Iraqi Sovereignty Date

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday he could not be sure that a June 30 date would be met for ending the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and handing sovereignty over to Iraq.

"Everybody, including the Iraqi Governing Council, has set that date as a target," he said in a radio interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation at the Pentagon.

"And do I think it will happen? It has a chance of happening, yes. Will it happen for sure? Who knows? I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow," Rumsfeld added.

A Smiler

I was reading someone's diary over at Kos this morning and it sort of set up the mood I've been in since I fed the cats their breakfast: all the news is lousy, and I'm not feeling so good myself.

Well, I stopped in at Prof. DeLong's place for my daily Econ 101 and found this. Enjoy. I am delighted to have discovered the Fafblog.

Democrats: Doomed by Foreigners

With that roster of foreign Bush supporters, it's hard to imagine who could even be hypothetically left over to hope for a Kerry victory - other than, of course, the French, German, Russian, Belgian, current Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese governments, along with the entire Mideast, none of whom count, for reasons which the Medium Lobster does not need to explain to ones as presumably enlightened as all of you. Were I Karl Rove, I would make sure to keep reminding all of America that John Kerry says he'll get along better with our foreign allies than George Bush does - it'll only make the President's sterling reputation as a beloved and competent world leader shine that much brighter.
¶ posted by Medium Lobster

Box Score

Mysterious Fax Adds to Intrigue Over the Medicare Bill's Cost
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR

Published: March 18, 2004

Ms. Bjorklund had been pressing Mr. Foster for his numbers since June. When he refused, telling her he could be fired, she said, she confronted his boss, Thomas A. Scully, then the Medicare administrator. "If Rick Foster gives that to you," Ms. Bjorklund remembered Mr. Scully telling her, "I'll fire him so fast his head will spin." Mr. Scully denies making such threats.

These conversations among three government employees — an obscure Congressional aide, a little-known actuary and a high-level official — remained secret until now, and Ms. Bjorklund still does not know who sent the fax. But Mr. Foster went public last week, and details of his struggle for independence within the Bush administration are now emerging, raising questions about whether the White House intentionally withheld crucial data from lawmakers.

The administration says Democrats, whose Medicare proposals would have cost nearly $1 trillion, are exploiting the controversy for political gain at the expense of the elderly. But some Republicans are openly questioning the White House, and the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said he saw a "growing scandal over the Medicare drug bill."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and a leading critic of the Medicare bill, put the issue in stark, Watergate-era terms, saying, "What did the president know; when did he know it?"

Those questions have not been answered. But interviews with federal officials, including Mr. Foster and Mr. Scully, make clear that the actuary's numbers were circulating within the administration, and possibly on Capitol Hill, throughout the second half of last year, as Congress voted on the prescription drug bill, first in June and again in November.

Add this investigation to these (via The Stakeholder):

DeLay’s PAC investigation.

DeLay’s “Celebrations for Children” scam.

Memogate.

House and Senate Intelligence Investigations.

Valerie Plame.

The forged Niger-uranium documents.

Nick Smith bribery case.

And then there is the Iraq war intelligence panel, which has no subpoena power, questionable loyalties and has yet to meet.

Flippity-Flop

Bush's war exercise: the backpedal

BY RUSS BAKER
Russ Baker is a journalist and essayist who writes frequently about politics.

March 17, 2004

Backpedaling has become a Bush administration hallmark. In December, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz declared that bids on 26 prime contracts for Iraq were open only to countries that supported hostilities. But, on Feb. 11, the administration, with troop casualties mounting and the presidential election looming, announced that all countries could bid on $6 billion of Iraq contracts. "It's not necessarily a change in policy because this is how we normally do contracting," a Pentagon official said, in the Orwellian newspeak typical of this administration. "So there is no shift in policy here."

Last month, Iraqi security forces, which we were assured were well-equipped to take over local security, suddenly weren't. Following a bloody raid on the police station in Fallujah, in which 23 Iraqi policemen were killed and many dangerous prisoners released, American officials began admitting that locals would not be ready to take over by the July 1 target date. Nevertheless, U.S. forces continue to pull back, leaving Iraqi forces to go out on increasingly hazardous patrols.

Have you been wondering about those heartfelt expressions of gratitude that our invasion was supposed to trigger from liberated Iraqis? On Feb. 20, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised PBS' Jim Lehrer that our troops would be met with adulation.

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan - the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaida would not let them do." Yet on Sept. 25, when quizzed by a reporter about these statements, Rumsfeld responded with a total disclaimer: "Never said that. . . . Never did. . . . I never said anything like that because I never knew what would happen and I knew I didn't know."

They didn't know what might happen from this dangerous gambit, and they knew they didn't know. Yet Bush, faced with a stinker of an economic situation, is seeking re-election today based largely on his stewardship of security matters. It is a sign of the depraved state of statesmanship in our republic that he can do so with some confidence in his chances.

Today's Progress Report documents the backpedal of a backpedal:

REVERSAL OF A REVERSAL: Last month, the President signed and endorsed a report which claimed outsourcing was positive for America. Facing public criticism, the White House tried to back away from the position, with the President staging economic events and saying "we need to act to make sure there are more jobs at home." The Administration's re-endorsement of outsourcing this week through Powell and the President's Export Council was a reversal of this earlier reversal.

When you don't stand for anything other than self-interest, I guess it really doesn't matter what you say.

Truth or Consequences

MoDo:

The president and vice president seem incapable of admitting any error, especially that their experienced foreign policy team did not see through Saddam's tricks. As Hans Blix told a reporter, Saddam had put up a "Beware of Dog" sign, so he didn't bother with the dog. How can they recalibrate the game plan when they won't concede that they called the wrong game plan to start?

When he challenged Mr. Kerry to put up or shut up on his claim of support from foreign leaders, Mr. Bush said, "If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you've got to back it up with facts."

If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidency, you've got to back it up with facts, too.

March 17, 2003

The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

It is beyond irony that George W. Bush thinks he can call anyone on the "facts". Here is Congressman Henry Waxman's searchable database of administration lies on Iraq.

12 Cents for Better Government

Democrats Meetup which was non-existant in DC three months ago, has expanded to three Meetups this month. I'll be with the Hawk and Dove Meetup. Care to join me?

I'll have links up tomorrow for the Kerry campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (which has the good sense to link to Bump, they are interested in your input) and the Democratic National and Congressional Committee blogs. The latter is particularly interesting. They combine investigations and snark in a particularly attractive way.

We aren't going to lay down this year. And we aren't going to continue to let Bush define the terms of this campaign. We is a very big little word.

John Kerry is not a perfect candidate. There isn't any such thing, and I imagine the Rovians in the Bush shop wince on a daily basis. This year, we are going to count like we never have before. We can now move campaigns, and we are going to help.

You can find the donation links at Atrios and Kos, and I know you read them everyday, so go and do what you can. This site lives on donations and can't afford to put up the donation links to others just yet. Without you, this service would fall silent.

Go Bump up the donations you can. We can take this country back. Let's prove it. Add 12 cents to make it a Bump donation.

Hackery

Bush's War Against Wonks
Why the president's policies are falling apart.

By Bruce Reed

As we begin an election year, the paint-by-numbers politics of this White House is wearing thin. The administration threw over conservatives last fall to get a prescription drug bill because elderly voters are crucial in Florida. The result: The bill turns out to cost $134 billion more than the White House told Congress, angry right-wingers have forced Bush to cut other popular programs like Even Start, and even though the drug benefit doesn't take effect until 2006, polls show the bill is already unpopular among seniors.

When hacks rule, policies often drool--and come back to hurt hacks' cause. Bush's proposal to grant temporary legal status to guest workers is another Rove rifle-shot at Hispanics. Unfortunately, Hispanics quickly figured out that the proposal wouldn't actually lead to citizenship, because the White House had bowed to political pressure from another quarter, the far right. Now most Hispanics don't like the idea and the right wing hates it. That manned mission to Mars, which the White House hoped would lift Bush's appeal for a second term, bombed so badly that the President couldn't even find time to mention it in the State of the Union.

Wonk if you love the issues

The American people are a lot smarter than either the hacks or the wonks give them credit for. For all the talk in both parties about the urgent need to win one constituency or another, most Americans apply the same political yardstick: They vote for what works. There aren't enough hacks, even in Washington, to sell a policy that doesn't.

Hacks and wonks still need each other. In the end, the best leaders are those who can surround themselves with the best advice from both quarters, and synthesize it to find the wisest, straightest course the nation can sustain. As O'Neill puts it, what holds a good administration together is that the president's advisers like "the way the president thinks."

The secret of Bill Clinton's success was that he was the biggest wonk ever to hold the presidency, with political gifts that no hack could equal. He said he would cut the deficit and boost the economy, and he did. He said he would put more cops on the street to lower the crime rate, and he did. He said he would end welfare as we know it in a way that wouldn't hurt those in the system, and he did. (The Census Bureau recently reported that poverty among single mothers had fallen by a stunning one-third from 1993 to 2001, a turnaround The Washington Post credited mainly to the work requirements and child support provisions of Clinton's 1996 welfare reform law.) Clinton was his own best policy adviser, by far, yet he also would have been the greatest political consultant in the history of the world's second oldest profession.

Presidents don't have to be super wonks, and George W. Bush certainly never promised to be one. Long before he expressed any interest in the presidency, he was known as a consummate political hack. He worked on several of his father's campaigns, including as an enforcer in the failed 1992 bid, and even now finds himself dealing with charges that he may have skipped some National Guard duty to work on a Senate campaign.

In the end, Bush's undoing may be that he has planted his flag so firmly on one side of the wonk-hack divide. Sooner or later, the fate of every White House comes down to the way the president thinks.

The problem is that this White House hackery effects the whole world:

U.S. Allies on Iraq Fear They're Targets

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA
Associated Press Writer

March 16, 2004, 10:43 PM EST

WARSAW, Poland -- From Poland to Australia, countries with troops in Iraq fear they could be the next terrorist target as signs increase that Islamic extremists were behind last week's carnage in Spain.

Take Poland, once isolated behind the Iron Curtain and now a key U.S. ally in Iraq: Security officials here acknowledge they have virtually no experience dealing with terrorism, and leaders are warning citizens to wake up to the threat.

Most nations contributing to the Iraq mission say they will remain in the peacekeeping force despite the Madrid bombings, which killed 201 people Thursday.

But Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that he would withdraw Spain's 1,300 peacekeepers by June 30 unless the United Nations takes over in Iraq.

Honduras, which also was scheduled to end its mission at that time, said Tuesday it plans to bring home its 370 troops and would extend "only if the United Nations asks."

Australia has an election later this year. Opposition Labour party is leading in the early polls; Aznar's PP party may not be the only US-friendly party that loses an election this year.

Liberal PBS?

PBS Gets Picky
A Reporter Disses Halliburton, and Newshour Producers Decide His 15 Minutes of Airtime Are Up
March 17 - 23, 2004

In a recent Nation cover story, Christian Parenti described hanging out with insurgents in Iraq. That got the attention of producers on News- Hour With Jim Lehrer, and on March 2, Parenti said something live that knocked Lehrer off his chair.

Parenti, author of an upcoming book on occupied Iraq, was being interviewed by NewsHour's Ray Suarez. He and Middle East history professor Juan Cole were analyzing the recent suicide bombings in Iraq and various groups that might have been involved. Then something went terribly wrong: Parenti suggested that Halliburton and Bechtel have failed to provide "meaningful reconstruction" and that the U.S. occupation might actually be contributing to the instability in Iraq. Lehrer apparently went ballistic.

Michael Mosettig, senior producer for foreign affairs and defense at NewsHour, told me, "This was not reportage, this was giving his opinion, and that's not why we brought him on." The next day, according to Parenti, Dan Sagalyn, NewsHour's deputy senior producer for foreign affairs and defense, called to inform him that top people were upset, that his comments had lacked "balance," and that Lehrer was planning to run an Editor's Note acknowledging the mistake. It seems they had violated one of Lehrer's internal "rules of journalism," which mandates that producers "carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories" and label it as such.

When I called Sagalyn, he confirmed that he had called Parenti that day, adding, "I said it was too bad what happened happened, and that I would have liked to have him on again . . . but because of this it would be very hard."

On March 4, Lehrer returned at the end of the show and read the following statement: "For those who were watching two nights ago, a discussion about Iraq ended up not being as balanced as is our standard practice. While unintentional, it was indeed our mistake and we regret it."

The Editor's Note surprised Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. "We think Christian Parenti's reporting has been thorough and reliable," she told me. "This is a journalist who spent a great deal of time on the ground in Iraq." According to vanden Heuvel, Parenti's comments about the failure of meaningful reconstruction were based on his reporting and firsthand observation. Parenti called the Editor's Note "excessive to the point of being ridiculous."

It's not the first time Halliburton has surfaced on NewsHour. Talking heads often discuss the embattled contractor, though usually in a left-right format like the one featuring Mark Shields and David Brooks. (Typical Shields comment: "Halliburton . . . has become a laugh line on the late-night monologues. That's not going to go away." Typical Brooks comment: "It does look bad but . . . it's not as bad as it looks.")

As for Halliburton, the company denies wrongdoing. But since shortly after New Year's, it has been reimbursing the U.S. government millions for alleged overcharges, and last month the Pentagon launched a criminal investigation of allegations of fraud by a Halliburton subsidiary. Mosettig said the March 4 Editor's Note was Lehrer's doing. "As far as I know we got no external complaints," he told me. "Maybe we got two or three e-mails from ordinary citizens after the show ran."

Executive producer Lester Crystal reiterated that the show aims for balanced coverage. "We have no quarrel with what Parenti said," he said. "We felt we made a mistake in not trying to get a response."

From the CPA Weekly Report:

The seven-day average (February 14-20) of peak electricity production was 4,199 MW, a decrease of 1.4 percent over the previous week. On February 15, peak production hit a high point of 4,324 MW.

As of February 20, 686 MW (21 generators) of generating capacity was on forced (unplanned) outage, and 961 MW (18 generators) was on scheduled outage. As of February 20, nine (400 kV) transmission lines and seven (132 kV) lines were out of service.

So, Parenti tells the truth and gets booted from the Newshour? What liberal media?

Medicare Mess

Medicare’s costs surging
Lobbying spending up sharply in 2003
By Michael S. Gerber and Bob Cusack

As Congress scrambled last year to pass a Medicare prescription-drug bill, consumer giant AARP and the pharmaceutical industry spent heavily to influence the controversial measure.

AARP spent $20.9 million last year on lobbying activities, while the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent about $16 million, according to lobbying records released last week.

While both groups lobbied on a variety of issues in 2003, their top priority was passage of a Medicare drug bill.

In the last half of 2003 — when momentum for the bill increased — AARP spent $16.38 million. PhRMA allocated its resources more evenly last year, spending $8.48 million from January to June and $7.56 million from July to December.

PhRMA worked with a number of lobbying firms in 2003, including the C2 Group, Clark & Weinstock, Alexander Strategy Group, Capitol Hill Strategies and Bergner Bockorny Casagnetti Hawkins & Brain.

PhRMA last year spent more than it ever has on lobbying. In 2002, the group spent $14.3 million, its highest previous total.

AARP’s increase from 2002 to 2003 was even greater. In 2002, the consumer group allocated $5 million for lobbying, almost $16 million less than in 2003.

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which are members of PhRMA, were busy lobbying last year as well. Pfizer’s lobbying tab for 2003 was $3.7 million, while GSK’s was $5 million.

AARP recently has taken out advertisements in newspapers, including in The Hill, calling on drug companies “to do their part” to lower the price of prescription drugs.

Fat lot of good all that lobbying did:

Trust fund faces earlier insolvency
By Bob Cusack

A new government report to be released to Congress next week will show that the long-term outlook for Medicare is extremely bleak and that the program is heading for insolvency earlier than previously forecast.

The annual Medicare trustees report will attract a lot of attention from lawmakers because it will be the first long-range cost projection for Medicare since the prescription-drug bill was signed into law.

Last year, the trustees estimated the Medicare trust fund would go bankrupt in 2026. This year, the insolvency date will be moved up by a couple of years. The estimate has little to do with the new drug benefit, which is not financed out of the trust fund.

One of the numbers that is expected to rattle Capitol Hill next week is the trustees’ projection of how much the drug benefit will cost over 75 years. That number remains under wraps, but Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a conservative who rallied against the Medicare bill, says analysts told him last year that the measure would cost $7 trillion over 75 years. Others say it could be even higher.

The Medicare trustees will be basing their numbers on the Bush administration’s projection that the bill will cost $535 billion over 10 years, considerably more than the Congressional Budget Office projection of $395 billion.

Controversy over the gap between the administration number and that of the CBO was stoked last week when an actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services alleged he was ordered to conceal his cost projection from Congress.

Probe Starts in Medicare Drug Cost Estimates

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 2004; Page A01

The Department of Health and Human Services inspector general is launching an inquiry into whether Bush administration officials committed any wrongdoing last year by withholding from Congress internal analyses showing that Medicare prescription drug legislation the White House supported would cost significantly more than lawmakers believed.

President Bush's top health adviser, HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, said yesterday that he had asked the department's investigative arm to examine the failure to disclose such cost estimates and alleged threats made to the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs that he risked being fired if he sent lawmakers that information.

"There seems to be a cloud over the department because of this," Thompson said. He predicted the agency would be exonerated. But he also lashed out at a recently departed top assistant, blaming the episode on Thomas A. Scully, who ran the Medicare program for three years and was a key administration negotiator on changes to the program that narrowly passed Congress in November.

The internal inquiry into the handling of the cost estimates is part of a broad damage-control strategy HHS officials have begun mounting to defuse accusations that the administration has put politics above accuracy on an issue that Bush has cited in his reelection campaign as a prime domestic achievement.

Thompson and his lieutenants also sought yesterday to tamp down Democrats' complaints that a video the administration recently sent to television stations about the new Medicare prescription drug benefit is misleading.

The GOP had anticipated that the law's passage would give them a potent political victory. Instead, it has produced a partisan, election-year battle and polls indicating that older Americans covered by Medicare are largely unconvinced that the changes will help them.

The controversy escalated late last week when the Medicare program's longtime actuary, Richard S. Foster, said Scully had threatened to fire him in June if he answered lawmakers' requests for data about the fiscal implications of the Medicare bill. The administration did not disclose until January that its calculations suggested the law would cost $534 billion over the next decade, compared with the Congressional Budget Office's prediction of $395 billion. Foster said that as early as last spring, his analyses consistently had shown the bills would cost $500 billion to $600 billion.

Yesterday, Thompson said he had seen little of the cost estimates Foster was preparing at the time. Thompson said he had been aware of one prediction by Foster that an expansion of the role of private health plans would prove more expensive unless Congress accepted Bush's proposal to use a competitive bidding system in each region of the country; Thompson said he promptly relayed that information to lawmakers working on the bill.

FUBAR.

Wearin'o' the Green

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Not surprisingly, his own experience in captivity left Patrick with a virulent hatred of the institution of slavery, and he would later become the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against it.

In fact, there are clear instances of him saying warm and appreciative things about women. O'Donoughue adds, "It is clear that the man who wrote the Confession and "Coroticus" is deeply and sensitively open to women and womanhood....But he does not take refuge in either 'the pretentious asceticism, nor yet in that neurotic fear of and contempt for the feminine' that has entered so deeply into the attitudes and structures of the Christian Church....In this respect he is a complete man."

Alone in the World

Top of the morning, from Josh Marshall:

Kerry is right, foreign leaders want Bush beaten

American elections aren’t about the views of foreigners. They’re about the views of Americans. If most people around the globe think the American president is reckless, untrustworthy or simply dangerous, that may be something American voters want to take into account in making their judgments. But that’s a more subtle point — and there are better ways to address it than the one Kerry chose.

But McClellan’s claim that Kerry is lying just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Yes, Kerry’s remark was ill-advised. But one of the main reasons that it was a bad idea to say this is that it’s so obviously true.

Indeed, up until the White House glommed onto this recent line of attack, the administration’s contempt for the views of foreigners has been something it had been proud of and boasted of often. Remember the president’s cocky boasts about not needing anybody’s “permission” to launch the Iraq war?

Just consider a few facts.

The record of foreign elections over the last two and a half years is telling. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a foreign leader who has supported Bush in any high-profile way and then survived a national election. True, it’s hard to find many examples beside Jose Maria Aznar. But that’s because it’s hard to find any foreign heads of state who have been supporters of the president.

More revealing is how many foreign heads of state and candidates for national office from traditional American allies have successfully played the anti-Bush card in their election campaigns.

The clearest examples are President Roh Moo-hyun, who won election two years ago in South Korea as the first South Korean presidential candidate to openly question the U.S.-ROK security alliance, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who pulled out a razor-thin victory in his 2002 re-election campaign by campaigning against Bush’s Iraq policy.

Washington has tended to view Schroeder’s gambit as cynical and craven, particularly for the leader of a country that has been so closely allied to the United States for half a century. But there’s seldom a shortage of craven or cynical politicians in the world. For understanding America’s current standing in the world, the key point is not so much that Schroeder was or wasn’t craven as that his tactic was successful.

Nor is it much of a surprise.

As Fareed Zakaria — hardly a lefty or a Bush-hater — noted a year ago, the president’s policies have “alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.”

For anyone who follows foreign policy even remotely closely, it has to be close to a given that the overwhelming majority of foreign heads of state and foreigners in general hope that Bush will be heading back to Crawford next January.

The president’s deep unpopularity among foreigners and foreign governments is a fact that either campaign could probably use to its advantage. But the fact itself can’t be denied.

Opinion of U.S. Abroad Is Falling, Survey Finds
Majorities Doubt War in Iraq Is Quelling Terrorism

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 2004; Page A22

A year after the invasion of Iraq, anti-American views have hardened in Europe and in Muslim countries, where lopsided majorities oppose President Bush and are suspicious of U.S. motives, according to a new nine-country opinion poll.

The survey, the largest of its kind, found slipping support for the U.S. war on terrorism in Europe and negative views of the United States in all foreign countries polled except Britain. Big majorities said that the United States does not consider other countries' interests and that Europe should develop more diplomatic and military independence.

Majorities in seven of the eight foreign countries said the war in Iraq hurt or had no effect on the war on terrorism, and only in the United States did a majority believe that the ouster of Saddam Hussein will make the Middle East more democratic.

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center, which conducted the survey, said the image of the United States in the world has never polled lower. "This poll says to me the discontent with America is a long-term problem that U.S. leaders have to confront," said poll director Andrew Kohut. "We've never seen ratings as low as this for America." The Pew poll is three years old, and Kohut has been conducting similar surveys in Europe for two decades.

Behind the Scenes

UN? We don't need no stinkin' UN.

Bush warms to new UN resolution on Iraq

Julian Borger in Washington, Patrick Wintour and Giles Tremlett
Wednesday March 17, 2004
The Guardian

The White House was scrambling yesterday to keep its military coalition together after the Madrid bombings, with an offer to support a new UN mandate for keeping foreign troops in Iraq.

"It's essential that we remain side-by-side with the Iraqi people," George Bush said. "Al-Qaida understands the stakes. Al-Qaida wants us out of Iraq because al-Qaida wants to use Iraq as an example of defeating freedom and democracy."

His appeal for unity came after the incoming Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, pledged to pull his country's troops out of Iraq this summer if UN backing is not forthcoming.

The Bush administration signalled that it was warming to the idea of a new resolution.

"We believe the United Nations has a vital role to play going forward," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said, adding that a new resolution "is something that certainly would be looked at".

Even before the result of last weekend's Spanish elections, Britain had been canvassing diplomatic opinion for a new resolution to secure UN support for the transitional law due to come into force on June 30, when sovereignty is transferred from the Coalition Provisional Authority to a new Iraqi assembly.

"The prospect of a new UN resolution is something that we would strongly support and are working towards," the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, said yesterday. "I hope that we can engage the new Spanish government in discussion about what kind of UN resolution they require."

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said Spain "will be as committed as the whole European Union to ensuring as calm ... a transition from the Saddam years to a representative government as is possible and to accepting their continuing responsibilities."

Previous UN resolutions have given a form of sanction to the presence of the troops, even though they have stated that such forces are not subject to UN military or political authority.

Britain, the US and the other coalition military forces have long said they will not quit the country after June 30, and would be seeking some form of renewed UN cover for the continued coalition presence.

Hmmm. Nothing in the WaPo, nothing in the NYT.

And the press, even the Guardian, fails to critique Bush tying Iraq to Al Qaeda. This is getting tiresome.

Gadflyer

Only in the blog world do we plug the competition. The Gadflyer is out of the box with some really strong work. Kudos to the editors.

Getting Tough with the Press
Release the Hounds!

by Sean Aday, Senior Editor
3.16.04

During the Democratic debate in New York a few weeks ago, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times scrunched her eyes into their beadiest, "take me seriously, dammit!" glare and demanded of John Kerry, "Are you a liberal?"

When the first syllables out of Kerry's mouth weren't a sobbing confession, Bumiller cut him off and barked, "ARE YOU A LIBERAL?!?"

Given the tone of the inquisition, Kerry should have responded, "Have you no decency, ma'am?"

The answer would have been no, as demonstrated by Bumiller's follow up: "Really quick, is God on America's side?"

And hey, do it in a soundbite, will ya?

Let's be clear: This isn't watchdog journalism, it's not guard dog journalism, it's Chihuahua journalism, nipping relentlessly at ankle-level trivialities instead of going for the jugular.

Sadly, this is typical of contemporary political reporting, which long ago ceased to perform its two most important tasks: serving as the eyes and ears for a busy audience, and giving people the information they need to make informed decisions at election time.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Although these problems are endemic to journalism, they are not systemic. They can be fixed, and the cure lies in journalism itself, in a return to the basics of good reporting and writing taught in every introductory college newswriting class.

Bravo! Punkin' the hacks. Nice break-out, Gadflyer. Calling Bumiller out needed to be done years ago.

Bookmark it here and give them lots of feedback, and knock a nickle in the cup. They are off to a strong start, let's help them stay there.

Three Little Paragraphs

This is as succinct a summary of the argument against Iraq as you will find. John Kerry needs to be reading it to the media every day.

Mayhem in Madrid
By Ivan Eland

For the Bush administration, the bombing in Spain, the repudiation of a government closely allied in the war and the possibility of a Spanish troop withdrawal add to the heap of bad tidings coming out of Iraq at a time when reporters will be doing stories on the first anniversary of the war (coming up March 19). First, last week at a congressional hearing, George Tenet, the CIA’s director, admitted that he had corrected misstatements by Vice President Cheney on Iraq and would have to do so again. Second, recently an Iraqi interim constitution was signed but is probably not worth the paper it’s written on because intense disagreements were papered over and many major issues were left unaddressed. Third, the most powerful Iraqi, Shiite cleric Ayatollah al Sistani, continues to insist on democracy while the Bush administration figures out how to “democratize” Iraq without getting an outcome it may not like. Fourth, American casualties continue unabated as six U.S. soldiers were killed last weekend with ever more sophisticated roadside bombs. Fifth, anti-war protests are resuming—this time with the participation of relatives of soldiers killed during the quagmire.

When the principal original justification for fighting a war proves to be empty—in the Iraq case, the absence of weapons of mass destruction—deceased soldiers’ kin start to question whether their loved ones may have died in vain. Such questions, however, don’t trouble the Bush administration’s chairborne architects of the war. When asked by CNN’s Late Edition whether the war was worth the lives of the 564 U.S. troops killed to date, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld opined, “Oh, my goodness, yes. There's just no question ... 25 million people in Iraq are free.”

The Bush administration has been very cavalier about spending other peoples’ (Americans’ and now their allies’) money and lives on George and Don’s Big Iraqi Adventure. But the natives in America and Spain may be getting restless.

Get The Lead Out

D.C. Lead Issue Was Debated for Months
Regional EPA Office Decided No Federal Action Was Needed

By Carol D. Leonnig and D'Vera Cohn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 16, 2004; Page A01

Federal authorities responsible for ensuring the safety of Washington's water knew about the toxic levels of lead and the likely solution more than a year ago but took no action, according to records and interviews.

On Nov. 21, 2002, a staff member in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional office in Philadelphia told his supervisors in writing that "fast action" might be needed to solve the lead contamination problem in the water.

The alarm, sounded by an EPA liaison to the District, was based on test results received a few months earlier that confirmed unsafe amounts of lead in the District's tap water. On Nov. 26, the EPA staffer also e-mailed the D.C Department of Health about the public health risk, according to a copy of the correspondence, but there are no indications that local officials followed up.

EPA officials exchanged memos on the lead problem over the next few months and ultimately decided they would revisit the issue with the Washington Aqueduct, which supplies the water and is owned by the Army Corps of Engineers. According to an EPA briefing paper written in January 2003, regulators discussed the costs associated with controlling lead leaching and objections raised by the Corps of Engineers and the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.

Regional officials at the EPA also determined that WASA, which distributes the water, was properly informing the public and complying with all regulations. No federal action was needed, according to the briefing paper.

The contamination detected in 2002 appeared to prove what consultants had been warning since 1994: that the treatment used by the Washington Aqueduct was making the water corrosive and could be detrimental in a city with a large number of lead pipes. But the EPA's Region III office in Philadelphia, which oversees the District's water supply, consistently deferred to WASA and the aqueduct on treating the water and handling the problem.

"We were dealing with it as a compliance issue," acknowledged Jonathan Capacasa, director of water quality for EPA Region III. "In hindsight, we missed some opportunities . . . to engage earlier."

City Administrator Robert C. Bobb, who was hired last year, said it is "unacceptable" that the D.C. Health Department appeared to receive a notice in 2002 and did not act to alert the mayor and the public.

"We should have pulled people in and find out what does this mean for the residents of the District of Columbia," he said. "If I had known this, everybody who had a hand in this issue would have been around my conference table within a matter of days."

Local officials and experts on lead say the EPA's decisions have had broad consequences. More than 1 million residents relied on a water supply that for at least two years showed unsafe levels of lead.

This story has been frosting me since it broke last month. The lead levels in some DC homes are thousands of times the federal ceiling, and this has been going on for years. The Bush administration really does treat the District like a plantation. My city is on a separate system and the city just released their test results last week, we are okay, but some of the neighboring suburbs are not. Heads should role as a result of this.

EU Scene

Bush Urges Dutch Leader Not to Follow Spaniards Out of Iraq
By DAVID STOUT

Published: March 16, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 16 — With the prime minister of the Netherlands beside him, President Bush said today that it was essential that Dutch troops remain in Iraq, both to ensure peace there and to press the campaign against terrorism.

Asked what he would say to Dutch people who want their nation's soldiers out of Iraq, Mr. Bush replied, "I would ask them to think about the Iraqi citizens who don't want people to withdraw because they want to be free," adding, "It's essential that we remain side by side with the Iraqi people as they begin the process of self-government."

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende was cautious in his remarks, about troop commitments and other issues, as he and Mr. Bush spoke to reporters in the Oval Office.

"It is important that the world society, the international community stands shoulder to shoulder and shows its solidarity to fight against these terrible attacks," the prime minister said in an apparent allusion to last week's deadly bombings in Madrid.

Mr. Bush, after being asked specifically if he had convinced the Dutch leader to leave his country's troops in Iraq, replied indirectly. "The prime minister will make the appropriate decision," he said. "It's his decision to make. We both agree that a free Iraq is essential to a peaceful world."

The Netherlands said earlier that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq at midyear, when the United States is to transfer sovereignty to a new Iraqi government that is to begin running the country. Mr. Balkenende emphasized today that he and President Bush had not discussed what happens after mid-year.

"That is the responsibility of the Dutch government and the Dutch Parliament, and we'll talk about it," the prime minister said. Opinion polls have indicated that many people in the Netherlands want the troops withdrawn.

W doesn't seem to get it that these kinds of decisions are going to be driven by domestic politics. The Europeans are very clear on the fact that Iraq has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and I'm certain that Blakenende learned the lesson of Spain.

The Europeans are also looking to create a unified, continent-wide response to the threat:

EU calls emergency terror talks

The bomb attacks have prompted concern throughout Europe.
European states have called emergency security meetings as suspicion mounts that Islamic militants were involved in the devastating bomb attacks in Madrid.

Intelligence officials are to go to the Spanish capital to discuss improving co-operation, while EU ministers will hold talks on Friday.

Security issues also look set to dominate a routine EU summit next week.

The new meetings were announced as the US said it believed the al-Qaeda network was involved in the attacks.

A US Homeland Security Department official, Asa Hutchinson, said there were many unanswered questions about the closeness of the Madrid bombers and the al-Qaeda network - but he was satisfied there was an al-Qaeda connection.

A friend just back from Munich reports huge delays on the trains and subways as systems of greater scrutiny are put into place.

The Bush Reversal

The Bushes' new world disorder

By James Carroll, 3/16/2004

In America, the new order of things is defined mainly by the sour taste of moral hangover, how the emotional intensity of the 9/11 trauma -- anguished but pure -- dissolved into a feeling of being trapped in a cage of our own making. As the carnage in Madrid makes clear, the threats in the world are real and dangerous to handle, but one US initiative after another has escalated rather than diffused such threats. Instead of replacing chaos with new order, our nation's responses inflict new wounds that increase the chaos. We strike at those whom we perceive as aiming to do us harm but without actually defending ourselves. And most unsettling of all, in our attempt to get the bad people to stop threatening us, we have begun to imitate them.

The most important revelation of the Iraq war has been of the Bush administration's blatant contempt for fact. Whether defined as "lying" or not, the clear manipulation of intelligence ahead of last year's invasion has been completely exposed. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" has been transformed. Where once it evoked the grave danger of a repeat of the 9/11 trauma, now it evokes an apparently calculated American fear. The government laid out explicit evidence defining a threat that required the launching of preventive war, and the US media trumpeted that evidence without hesitation. The result, since there were no weapons of mass destruction, as the government and a pliant press had ample reason to know, was an institutionalized deceit maintained to this day. At the United Nations, the United States misled the world. In speech after speech, President Bush misled Congress and the nation. And note that the word "misled" means both to have falsified and to have failed in leadership. To mislead, as the tautological George Bush might put it, is to mislead.

The repetition of falsehoods tied to the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq has eroded the American capacity, if not to tell the difference between what is true and what is a lie, then to think the difference matters much. The administration distorted fact ahead of the invasion, when the American people could not refute what had not happened yet. And the administration distorts fact now, when the American people do not remember clearly what we were told a year ago. That Bush retains the confidence of a sizable proportion of the electorate suggests that Americans don't particularly worry anymore about truth as a guiding principle of their government.

In that lies the irony. The Bush dynasty has in fact initiated a new order of things. The United States of America has become its own opposite, a nation of triumphant freedom that claims the right to restrain the freedom of others; a nation of a structured balance of power that destroys the balance of power abroad; a nation of creative enterprise that exports a smothering banality; and above all, a nation of forcefully direct expression that disrespects the truth. Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war for the United States is clear. We have defeated ourselves.

Carrol is taking a leave of absence from the Globe to work on a TV documentary based on his terrific book on the history of Christian anti-semitism, Constantine's Sword. I'll miss his clear voice in the BoGlo, but look forward to the television program.

Bushing the Neocons

Juan Cole on the Spanish election:

Here's my rough rendering of Aznar's full statement, which Fox Cable News will not read out in its entirety

No, it is a defeat only for the Bush administration and the Neoconservative philosophy of Perpetual War. They hold that the US, the UK and Turkey are the only permanent allies and shifting coalitions "of the willing" are put together for particular wars, depending on who can be cajoled, bribed or bamboozled into joining up. This system of US-led shifting coalitions removes all restraint on US militarism. If you have permanent allies, like Germany and France, you might have to pay attention to them. If all you have is a shifting coalition, you can do what you please when you please. Multilateralists are like a set of married couples who are old friends; the Neocons' unilateral superpower is like Hugh Hefner, surrounded by a constantly changing bevy of hand-picked "girlfriends."

Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, the Spaniards didn't vote with AQ, they voted against the Bush policy of distraction.

The Image-maker

Dr. Krugman enters the room:

My most immediate priority," Spain's new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, declared yesterday, "will be to fight terrorism." But he and the voters who gave his party a stunning upset victory last Sunday don't believe the war in Iraq is part of that fight. And the Spanish public was also outraged by what it perceived as the Aznar government's attempt to spin last week's terrorist attack for political purposes.

The Bush administration, which baffled the world when it used an attack by Islamic fundamentalists to justify the overthrow of a brutal but secular regime, and which has been utterly ruthless in its political exploitation of 9/11, must be very, very afraid.

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality. The truth is that Mr. Bush, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of an unrelated war, has shown consistent reluctance to focus on the terrorists who actually attacked America, or their backers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

This reluctance dates back to Mr. Bush's first months in office. Why, after all, has his inner circle tried so hard to prevent a serious investigation of what happened on 9/11? There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, terrorism could no longer be ignored, and the military conducted a successful campaign against Al Qaeda's Taliban hosts. But the failure to commit sufficient U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. After that, the administration appeared to lose interest in Al Qaeda; by the summer of 2002, bin Laden's name had disappeared from Mr. Bush's speeches. It was all Saddam, all the time.

This wasn't just a rhetorical switch; crucial resources were pulled off the hunt for Al Qaeda, which had attacked America, to prepare for the overthrow of Saddam, who hadn't. If you want confirmation that this seriously impeded the fight against terror, just look at reports about the all-out effort to capture Osama that started, finally, just a few days ago. Why didn't this happen last year, or the year before? According to The New York Times, last year many of the needed forces were tied up in Iraq.

It's now clear that by shifting his focus to Iraq, Mr. Bush did Al Qaeda a huge favor. The terrorists and their Taliban allies were given time to regroup; the resurgent Taliban once again control almost a third of Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda has regained the ability to carry out large-scale atrocities.

But Mr. Bush's lapses in the struggle against terrorism extend beyond his decision to give Al Qaeda a breather. His administration has also run interference for Saudi Arabia — the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, and the main financier of Islamic extremism — and Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has actively engaged in nuclear proliferation.

Some of the administration's actions have been so strange that those who reported them were initially accused of being nutty conspiracy theorists. For example, what are we to make of the post-9/11 Saudi airlift? Just days after the attack, at a time when private air travel was banned, the administration gave special clearance to flights that gathered up Saudi nationals, including a number of members of the bin Laden family, who were in the U.S. at the time. These Saudis were then allowed to leave the country, after at best cursory interviews with the F.B.I.

And the administration is still covering up for Pakistan, whose government recently made the absurd claim that large-scale shipments of nuclear technology and material to rogue states — including North Korea, according to a new C.I.A. report — were the work of one man, who was promptly pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf. Mr. Bush has allowed this farce to go unquestioned.

So when the Bush campaign boasts of the president's record in fighting terrorism and accuses John Kerry of being weak on the issue, when Republican congressmen suggest that a vote for Mr. Kerry is a vote for Osama, remember this: the administration's actual record is one of indulgence toward regimes that are strongly implicated in terrorism, and of focusing on actual terrorist threats only when forced to by events.

Ride to the Sound of the Guns

The Bump benefactress, Melanie Goux, has a new project. She and a group of committed volunteers have taken the energy of the Dean effort in Georgia and refocused it into a new organization, Georgia for Democracy. They've organized themselves into a 501(c)4 non-profit. Go take a look. This is an experiment to watch for all of us. This is what we all need to be doing.

As Paul Waldman says in today's launch of The Gadflyer, a "tough, progressive" ezine:

Laying the foundation for future victories will require money, energy, thought and patience. But if they want to help make our nation a truer reflection of the noble ideals on which it was founded, progressives will have to strap on the chain mail, jump on their horses, and ride into battle. If they do it right, the first years of the 21st century may be remembered as the end of the age of the wimpy liberal – and the beginning of the age of the progressive warrior.

Melanie Goux, warrior princess. You goux, girl.

Our Blue Jewel

A new, occasional feature of Bump: you. I've gotten some lovely writing from a number of you in email. With your permission, I'm going to publish it once in a while on the front page.

What follows is an essay submitted by regular commentor SME in Seattle. We were having a little email conversation when she announced to me that it was a beautiful day in the Northwest and she was going hiking. I asked her to tell me about it and this beautiful essay resulted:

The Northern Cascades stretching from Mt. Baker to Mt. Rainier are a
series of old and young peaks, all volcanic due to the subduction of the
Juan de Fuca plate under the North America plate. This is one of the most
geologically active places on the planet. My friend Jo and I took our sons
to Boy Scout camp for the day (Boy Scouts, another essay) and we headed up
to a place nearby where an ancient peak had erupted.

Our initial path was not the best climb and as we were strategically designing the most efficient route to the east side, we realized that we had just enough time to get back down the trail to meet our sons as they finished up their own adventures. The way down was a bit stressful on my fifty year old knees, but good boots and a walking stick are worth their weight in gold. My only injury of the day was a blackberry thorn in one of my palms, easly removed. All in all, a good day to be alive on planet earth, blue jewel that she is.

Blindness

Paul Woodward of The War In Context offers some biting commentary on American isolationism and exceptionalism:

Look at today's editorial pages in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Not a single lead editorial on the result of Spain's general election! Peter Popham and Tim Gaynor write in Britain's The Independent that, "The sudden loss of power for Spain's ruling Popular Party, which joined Tony Blair in steadfastly supporting George Bush's "war on terror", is nothing short of a political earthquake." Whether, as The Independent suggests, this has sent shockwaves through the British and American administrations, it seems clear it did not create a jolt strong enough to wake up America.

Now, with a Spanish government committed to withdrawing its troops from Iraq, the feeble coalition that George Bush rallied for the purpose of eradicating international terrorism is irrevocably fractured -- at least that is if America insists on maintaining its role as an overbearing leader. The Bush administration's other closest allies, Britain and Italy, are fully aware that they are now al Qaeda's prime targets in what is proving to be a successful strategy of dividing America from its allies. America stands at a crossroads where historical propensities will likely drive it into a position of proud isolation, yet practical imperatives ought to steer it towards real dialogue and partnership. The Bush administration has thus far only had a liking for partners it thinks it can control, but at a time when "united we stand" should stop being an appeal for sycophantic support it is hard to envisage that this country or its leaders can muster the humility that would actually deliver strength through a common cause in which America's interests are no longer placed above those of the world. America better wake up before it's too late!

Priestly Absolution

Bob Dreyfuss spanks Dana Priest:

So what's up with Dana Priest at The Washington Post? Her unbelievable whitewash of Dougie Feith's intelligence shop at the Pentagon still has me reeling.

So, even though the committees are still taking testimony from members of the cabal, the pro-Feith leakers Priest talked to say (1) that Feith's crew didn't collect any intelligence; and (2) even if they did, it didn't matter, since nothing they did "shaped the case. . . for war."

Reign in Spain

Max Sawicky has the best round up of the Global War on Terror and Spanish election-parsings:

MaxSpeak sees it this way. We've spent upwards of $200 billion on a new program called Iraq, and we're not done by a long shot. We jumped the defense budget up about $150 billion annually in less than five years. Meanwhile we allocate about $40-50 billion a year to Homeland Security (much of it not new money, but pre-2001 functions reclassified). Imagine if that $200 billion plus the "not done" part was focused on the terrorists, then tell me who is crippling the war on terror.

That is the most miserable of the Bush Administration's miserable failures. Military strength notwithstanding, it is losing its favorite war out of political ineptitude. Why? Because it is trying to appease Americans who still haven't figured out how the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam.

The Plan

This week, the Iraq war becomes the Bush campaign. From Dan Froomkin at the WaPo:

"The White House will mark this Friday's first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a week-long media blitz arguing that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was essential to combating global terrorism and making the United States safer.

Already, Ken Guggenheim of the Associated Press reports on the first salvo of war week: The administration "blanketed the Sunday network news shows with its top military and diplomatic officials, who stressed the danger posed by Saddam and highlighted progress in rebuilding Iraq."

1. Saddam posed no danger.

2. We are completely effing up the rebuilding, if said rebuilding is supposed to be about actually fixing things rather than a revenue shift to Haliburton.

3. This is a campaign built on failure. That sounds like a winner.

Basic Bookkeeping

An Insult to Our Soldiers
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 15, 2004

Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, is chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform. He tells a story about Sgt. Daniel Romero of the Colorado Army National Guard, who was sent to fight in Afghanistan.

In a letter dated March 23, 2002, Sergeant Romero asked a fellow sergeant: "Are they really fixing pay issues [or] are they putting them off until we return? If they are waiting, then what happens to those who (God forbid) don't make it back?"

As Mr. Davis said at a hearing this past January, "Sergeant Romero was killed in action in Afghanistan in April 2002." The congressman added, "I would really like to hear today that his family isn't wasting their time and energy fixing errors in his pay."

As we mobilize troops from around the country and send them off to fight and possibly die in that crucible of terror known as combat, is it too much to ask that they be paid in a timely way?

Researchers from the General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, studied the payroll processes of six Army National Guard units that were called up to active duty. What they found wasn't pretty.

There were significant pay problems in all six units. A report released last November said, "Some soldiers did not receive payments for up to six months after mobilization and others still had not received certain payments by the conclusion of our audit work."

This is exactly the kind of thing that servicemen and women, especially those dealing with the heightened anxiety of life in a war zone, do not need. Maj. Kenneth Chavez of the Colorado National Guard told a Congressional committee of the problems faced by the unit he commanded:

"All 62 soldiers encountered pay problems. . . . During extremely limited phone contact, soldiers called home only to find families in chaos because of the inability to pay bills due to erroneous military pay."

These problems are not limited to the National Guard. But one of the reasons the Guard has been especially hard hit is that, in the words of another congressman, Christopher Shays, its payroll system is "old and leaky and antiquated," designed for an era when the members of the Guard were seen as little more than weekend warriors.

That system has been unable to cope with widespread call-ups to extended periods of active duty and deployment to places in which personnel qualify for a variety of special pay and allowances, particularly in combat zones.

The G.A.O. report said, "Four Virginia Special Forces soldiers who were injured in Afghanistan and unable to resume their civilian jobs experienced problems in receiving entitled active duty pay and related health care."

The country is asking for extraordinary — in some cases, supreme — sacrifices from the military, and then failing to meet its own responsibility to provide such basic necessities as pay and health care.

Horseshft. Having been a payroll clerk who made the transition from paper to computer, all I can say is that once the transition is made, all I, the clerk, have to do is change the amount and the payroll will be generated. The amount of work this takes for a unit the size of, say, a military division, would be less than a day.

Can we please, please, please get better reporters?

Who's On First

via Suburban Guerrilla:

House of Bush, House of Saud

March 15, 2004 | On March 12, 2000, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, met with Muslim leaders at a local mosque in Tampa, Fla. Among them was Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian who was an associate professor of engineering at the University of South Florida. George and Laura Bush had their photo taken with him at the Florida Strawberry Festival. Laura Bush made a point of complimenting Al-Arian's wife, Nahla, on her traditional head scarf and asked to meet the family. Nahla told the candidate, "The Muslim people support you." Bush met their lanky son, Abdullah Al-Arian, and, in a typically winning gesture, even nicknamed him "Big Dude." In return, Big Dude's father, Sami Al-Arian, vowed to campaign for Bush -- and he soon made good on his promise in mosques all over Florida.

But Al-Arian had unusual credentials for a Bush campaigner. Since 1995, as the founder and chairman of the board of World and Islam Enterprise (WISE), a Muslim think tank, Al-Arian had been under investigation by the FBI for his associations with Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terrorist group. Al-Arian brought in Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the No. 2 leader in Islamic Jihad, to be the director of WISE. A strong advocate of suicide bombings against Israel, Shallah was allegedly responsible for killing scores of Israelis in such attacks.

Al-Arian also bought to Tampa as a guest speaker for WISE none other than Hassan Turabi, the powerful Islamic ruler of Sudan who had welcomed Osama bin Laden and helped nurture al-Qaida in the early 1990s.

Al-Arian has repeatedly denied that he had any links to Islamic terrorism. But terrorism experts have a different view. "Anybody who brings in Hassan Turabi is supporting terrorists," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's former top counterterrorist official, now retired and working as a security consultant.
Nor were those Al-Arian's only ties to terrorists. According to "American Jihad" by Steven Emerson, in May 1998 a WISE board member named Tarik Hamdi personally traveled to Afghanistan to deliver a satellite telephone and battery to Osama bin Laden. In addition, Newsweek reported that Al-Arian had ties to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Among his claims to fame, the magazine said, Al-Arian had "made many phone calls to two New York-area Arabs who figured in the World Trade Center bombing investigation."

There were also Al-Arian's own statements. In 1998, he appeared as a guest speaker before the American Muslim Council. According to conservative author Kenneth Timmerman, Al-Arian referred to Jews as "monkeys and pigs" and added, "Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution! Revolution! Until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!"

That speech was part of a dossier compiled on Al-Arian by federal agents who have had him under surveillance for many years because of suspected ties to terrorist organizations. In a videotape in that file, Al-Arian was more explicit. When he appeared at a fund-raising event, Timmerman says, he "begged for $500 to kill a Jew."

Finally -- a fact that Bush could not have known at the time -- Al-Arian would be arrested in Florida in February 2003 on dozens of charges, among them conspiracy to finance terrorist attacks that killed more than 100 people, including two Americans. The indictment alleged that "he directed the audit of all moneys and property of the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] throughout the world and was the leader of the PIJ in the United States." The charges refer to the Islamic Jihad as "a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in acts of violence including murder, extortion, money laundering, fraud, and misuse of visas, and operated worldwide including in the Middle District of Florida." Al-Arian is still facing prosecution.

Astonishingly enough, the fact that dangerous militant Islamists like Al-Arian were campaigning for Bush went almost entirely unnoticed. Noting the absence of criticism from Democrats, Bush speechwriter David Frum later wrote, "There is one way that we Republicans are very lucky -- we face political opponents too crippled by political correctness to make an issue of these kinds of security lapses."

"in their pocketsess, precious, in their pocketsess,s,s"

In the Circle of Love

Kathleen, Fr. Bo's wife, weighs in on Gibson's "Passion:"

Before I say anything specific about the movie I want to put us all in mind of the local context which Preachy and I live in. Religion here on the mountaintop is taken pretty seriously. There are a plethora of literalist, quasi- and fully fundamentalist, pseudo- christian sects hidden around every corner of this place. Fundamentalism of the fanatic variety here seems to be the operative mode. Not to mention Republican. In fact, the entire progressive complement of our county attended this movie just last night (Preachy and me and a couple of our friends). One of the local Baptist offshoots even set up booths in the theatre to help "explain" this movie to the rest of us heathen as we staggered out, shell-shocked, from the darkness.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... it ain’t gonna happen.

Kathleen has a Board exam in her chosen field in a couple of days. Go send her some love.

Regime Change

Spanish government admits defeat

Spain's ruling Popular Party has admitted an unexpected defeat in the country's general election with almost all the votes counted.

The Socialists won 43% of the vote while the centre-right Popular Party has garnered 38%, reports say.

The poll has been clouded by claims that al-Qaeda carried out the Madrid bomb attacks that killed 200 people.

Officials say 63% of the electorate turned out to vote in the poll which ends eight years of conservative rule.

Analysts said people had turned out in bigger numbers than predicted in order to defy the bombers who carried out last Thursday's attacks.

Investigation

Investigations continue into who was behind the bombings.

Initially, the government was adamant the Basque separatist organisation Eta was responsible for the bombings, but now it has been forced to admit that al-Qaeda has become the top suspect.

This comes after a videotaped claim of responsibility by a man identifying himself as al-Qaeda's military spokesman in Europe.

A BBC correspondent in Madrid says criticism of the way government ministers handled the initial investigation into the attacks may have lost them the election.

Will Tony Blair be next?

Guilty Pleasures

via Political Wire

Bush Site Unplugs Poster Tool

By Chris Ulbrich

The Bush-Cheney presidential campaign disabled features of a tool on its website Thursday that pranksters were using to mock the Republican presidential ticket.

The tool originally let users generate a full-size campaign poster in PDF format, customized with a short slogan of their choice. But Bush critics began using the site to place their own snarky political messages above a Bush-Cheney '04 logo and a disclaimer stating that the poster was paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.

The campaign changed the tool Thursday so that users could no longer enter their own messages, but only select from a pull-down list of states and coalition groups. The campaign didn't respond to requests for comment.

The poster tool has been up and running since December, but Ana Marie Cox, editor of the Washington political gossip blog Wonkette, turned it into a weapon of mass satire this week when she devoted several posts to the inner workings of the device she dubbed the "Sloganator."

At Cox's request, close to 200 Wonkette readers sent in slogans which they had slipped through the system. Among them: "Run for your lives," "They sure smell like old people," and the Orwellian, "A boot stomping on a human face forever."

Cox also published lists of words the tool was allowing and, perhaps more tellingly, those it was not. Not surprisingly, it rejected the usual four-letter words and sexual lingo, but it also banned more innocuous terms like "stupid," "evil," "terrorists" and "Iraq."

Chuck DeFeo, the electronic campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney campaign, declined to say how the campaign was filtering user input. "We are taking significant precautions to prevent the use of offensive materials on the GeorgeWBush.com website," he said.

But despite the campaign's efforts, several Wonkette readers reported that the generator was occasionally routing slogans to the wrong users. One reported entering a sexually outrageous slogan and getting back a poster reading "Sportsmen for Bush-Cheney 2004," raising the possibility that somewhere in America a bewildered GOP duck hunter was wondering what on earth was going on with his party.

DeFeo said he was not aware that any slogans were being misrouted, but said that the more obscene slogans were indicative of a certain tone in the discourse of some Bush-Cheney opponents.
....
Cox, who counts herself neither a Bush nor a Kerry supporter, admitted that it would be a trivial matter to mock up the same posters in Photoshop. The attraction, she said, was somewhat childish.

"If someone made up a bunch of posters and did them on Photoshop no one would care. It's the juvenile glee of having the campaign be the ones to do it," she said. "But just because it's juvenile doesn't mean it's wrong and doesn't mean that it's not an expression of some kind of legitimate political grievance and opinion."

She read from a recent submission: "'Five hundred dead soldiers support Bush-Cheney '04.' See? Substantive political debate. That is an incredibly powerful political message. It may not be a discussion, but posters rarely are."

A roundup of Wonkette's antics here. It did help pass the time late in the week.

The Militarized Economy

How Bush has made us less safe:

Calls to beef up the U.S. military are smacking up against an unpleasant reality: What the United States spends on defense, roughly $400 billion, it now, in effect, borrows.

This year the federal government will borrow about $477 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Cumulatively, the Treasury Department puts the official national debt at $7.1 trillion, 45 percent of which is held by foreigners. With future unfinanced commitments and liabilities, that brings total U.S. debt to about $30 trillion, or $100,000 for every American, David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general, notes in a new report.

Rising anti-U.S. sentiment

Relying on foreign banks and individuals as lenders is itself a strategic problem, Isabel Sawhill, associate director of the White House budget office in the Clinton administration, said in an interview.

"They have been willing to lend because they've had confidence in our economy," said Sawhill, now director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. But that confidence could be lost with another devastating terrorist attack.

Other security threats, meanwhile, have hardly diminished.

In Iraq, a U.N. team in February found "a growing fragmentation of the political class" amid "growing disillusionment and anger" that could fuel "civil strife and violence."

Elsewhere in the Middle East, public opinion has swung solidly against the United States, Navy Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Intelligence Committee. Support for the U.S. war on terrorism ranges from 56 percent in Kuwait, he said, to 2 percent among Jordanians and Palestinians. Pro-American sentiment in Saudi Arabia dropped from 63 percent in May 2000 to 11 percent in October 2003.

"Increasing anti-U.S. sentiment provides sustenance for radical political Islam," Jacoby said. Regimes that still support the United States, he said, could be toppled with "the assassination of a few key leaders."

Just as worrying is an "arc of instability" that runs from Central America through Africa and on into Asia. Here, most of the population is below age 25, and governments cannot provide jobs, education or clean water.

"Radical ideologies tend to grow in such an environment," Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, has noted.

The Bushies are trashing the economy while they ruin the military. Lovely. I wonder how many decades it will take to undo the damage they managed to inflict in fewer than four years.

A Force that Gives us Meaning

Reading David Byron's strong dissents in the Comments below, combined with the cognitive dissonance of listening to Tim Russert's dishonest interviews of Condi and Ho Ho this morning coughed up something I'd forgotten about. In the run-up to the Iraq war, I read Chris Hedge's War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In it, he deconstructs the myths and national narratives which allow war to be possible. Like David, I am not a pacifist, although I want to live in a world where pacifism is possible.

Here is an excerpt of an interview Hedge's gave to TomPaine.com after the publication of his book.

TomPaine.com: For people who haven’t read your reports in The New York Times, or don’t know what actually goes behind the reporting that’s gone into them, where have you been that has brought you on this course to write about this topic?

So most people, not necessarily because they’re bad people in any way, but most people find it emotionally far more convenient, but also far more pleasurable just to go along. The problem is, under poor leadership, or wandering into a war where we shouldn’t be, we can find ourselves in heaps of trouble.

Stenography

U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law
By SAM DILLON

Published: March 14, 2004

Education Secretary Rod Paige says the Bush administration is working to soften the impact of important provisions of its centerpiece school improvement law that local educators and state lawmakers have attacked as arbitrary and unfair.

Tomorrow, the Education Department will announce policies relaxing a requirement that says teachers must have a degree or otherwise certify themselves in every subject they teach, Dr. Paige said in an interview on Friday. Officials are also preparing to offer new flexibility on regulations governing required participation rates on standardized tests, he said.

Those changes would follow the recent relaxation of regulations governing the testing of special education students and those who speak limited English. They appear devised to defuse an outcry against the law, known as No Child Left Behind, in thousands of local districts, especially in Western states where powerful Republican lawmakers have called the law unworkable for tiny rural schools.

Legislatures in Utah, Virginia and a dozen other states, many controlled by Republicans, are up in arms about what they see as the law's intrusion on states' rights. They have approved resolutions in recent weeks protesting or challenging the law.

Dillon's story misses the point. The most onerous and odious provision of NCLB are additional tests added on top of existing state standards. At issue are the financial burdens the law places on states and local districts.

This is another horseshft piece of regulation that does nothing to address the real problem in our public education system: the unequal resources forced on local districts by relying on the property tax for funding each district.

Barn Raising

How come this is a New York Times front page story: Newcomers Provide Fuel for Bush Money Machine instead of this:$10 Million in Ten Days Online?

Kerry has raised more money so far this month than C+ Augustus, money needed now as the air war heats up, but the size of the Bush bundle still has the press fascinated. They are setting themselves up to be surprised when their inevitable Bubble Boy gets dumped. The story line the front pages are still following is Bush's inevitablity. I guess we have to change the story for them.

Occam's Razor

US revealed to be secretly funding opponents of Chavez
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

13 March 2004

Washington has been channelling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the political opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - including those who briefly overthrew the democratically elected leader in a coup two years ago.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that, in 2002, America paid more than a million dollars to those political groups in what it claims is an ongoing effort to build democracy and "strengthen political parties". Mr Chavez has seized on the information, telling Washington to "get its hands off Venezuela".

The revelation about America's funding of Mr Chavez's opponents comes as the president is facing a possible recall referendum and has been rocked by a series of violent street demonstrations in which at least eight people have died. His opponents, who include politicians, some labour leaders, media executives and former managers at the state oil company, are trying to collect sufficient signatures to force a national vote. The documents reveal that one of the group's organising the collection of signatures - Sumate - received $53,400 (£30,000) from the US last September.

Jeremy Bigwood, a Washington-based freelance journalist who obtained the documents, yesterday told The Independent: "This repeats a pattern started in Nicaragua in the election of 1990 when [the US] spent $20 per voter to get rid of [the Sandinista President Daniel] Ortega. It's done in the name of democracy but it's rather hypocritical. Venezuela does have a democratically elected President who won the popular vote which is not the case with the US."

The funding has been made by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) a non-profit agency financed entirely by Congress. It distributes $40m (£22m) a year to various groups in what it says is an effort to strengthen democracy.

But critics of the NED say the organisation routinely meddles in other countries' affairs to support groups that believe in free enterprise, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any form. In recent years, the NED has channelled funds to the political opponents of the recently ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the same time that Washington was blocking loans to his government.

"It the sort of stuff that used to be done by the CIA," said Mr Bigwood. "I am not particularly interested in Mr Chavez - I am interested in what Washington is doing." In Venezuela, the NED channelled the money to three of its four main operational "wings": the international arms of the Republican and Democratic parties - the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs respectively - and the foreign policy wing of the AFL-CIO union, the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity.

Is this the kind of country we want to be? Or, to ask the question another way for a different kind of audience, is this the way we want to spend our time, talent and treasure? Our money and blood?

This is a bully culture, a "with us or against us" eighth grade idea. I'd like to think that we've grown up a little, but maybe we are just the biggest eighth grader on the block. The "nuke 'em back to the stone age" response to 9/11 was a bully's response. I heard Zbig Brzinsky on BookTV (it's worth a cable bill to get this) call this "manicheanism." I didn't know Zbig was so theologically savvy, but he is right. The Manichean heresy is one which divides the world into the forces of darkness and the forces of light, both ordained by a theological position. The early Christians condemned it as heresy in the third and fourth centuries.

Islamic extremist isn't going to be solved with bunker buster bombs. Fourth Generation Warfare isn't resolved by military means, it is a political and economic tool, and Bush is being gamed by it. Kerry's solution isn't much better, this is neither a policing problem or a military problem. It's an economic, cultural, human rights and development problem, and has to be addressed on those grounds. If Afghanistan had something to export besides opium....well, we could meet them on the subject of trade. I have no idea what Afghanistan could be good at exporting, if it were given a chance.

But we don't choose to meet them, we treat them as a subject population, and that is the problem. Manicheans see the world in master/serf terms, rather than meeting it as a world of shared interests. The Mayberry Machiavellis are really bad at classical Machiavellianism. When you are lying to rule, Niccolo says that you keep it hidden a whole lot better than 1600 Penn is doing.

"Off with their heads!" screamed the Red Queen. I have no idea what The Fuzzy Little Caterpiller says about it.

Second Thoughts

The Year of Living Dangerously
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Published: March 14, 2004

A year ago, I was a reluctant yet convinced supporter of the war in Iraq. A year later, the weapons of mass destruction haven't turned up, Iraqis are being blown up on their way to the mosque, democracy is postponed till next year and my friends are all asking me if I have second thoughts. Who wouldn't have?

My second thoughts begin with the debate last year. We thought we were arguing about Iraq, but what might be best for 25 million Iraqis didn't figure very much in the argument. As usual we were talking about ourselves: what America is and how to use its frightening power in the world. The debate turned into a contest of ideologies masquerading as histories. Conservative Republicans gave us America the liberator, while the liberal left gave us America the devious, propping up villainous leaders and toppling democratically elected ones. Neither history was false: the Marshall Plan did show that America could get something right, while the overthrow of President Allende in Chile and support for death squads in Latin America showed that America could do serious wrong. Either way, however, the precedents and the ideologies were irrelevant, for Iraq was Iraq. And, it turned out, nobody actually knew very much about Iraq.

A year later, Iraq is no longer a pretext or an abstraction. It is a place where Americans are dying and Iraqis, too, in ever greater numbers. What makes these deaths especially haunting is that no one can honestly say -- at least not yet -- whether they will be redeemed by the emergence of a free Iraq or squandered by a descent into civil war.
....
Now that we are there, our problem is no longer hope and illusion but despair and disillusion. The press coverage from Baghdad is so gloomy that it's hard to remember that a dictator is gone, oil is pumping again and the proposed interim constitution contains strong human rights guarantees. We seem not even to recognize freedom when we see it: Shiites by the hundreds of thousands walking barefoot to celebrate in the holy city of Karbala, Iraqis turning up at town meetings and trying out democracy for the first time, newspapers and free media sprouting everywhere, daily demonstrations in the streets. If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history. And why should we suppose that freedom will be anything other than messy, chaotic, even frightening? Why should we be surprised that Iraqis are using their freedom to tell us to go home? Wouldn't we do just the same?

Freedom alone, of course, is not enough. Whether freedom turns into long-term constitutional order depends on whether a vicious resistance that does not hesitate to pit Muslim against Muslim, Iraqi against Iraqi, can drive an administration, fearful about its re-election, into drawing down U.S. forces. If the United States falters now, civil war is entirely possible. If it falters, it will betray everyone who has died for something better.

Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice.

This is moral clarity. Bush's failure in Iraq, if it becomes that, is a crime against humanity. In the upcoming election, we have to stand in for the Iraqi people. They have as much or more at stake as we do, and they don't get a vote.

UPDATE: I put this story up for discussion. There was a principled case to be made for humanitarian intervention in Iraq. I never thought it was a good case, but Ignatief makes it about as well as anyone.

Before the war, I had the same conversations with my friends who favored regime change. There was one question they could never answer: what is it worth to you?

How many lives, American and Iraqi, are you willing to spend? How much money is it worth? Do the Iraqis have anything to say about this, the ones on the ground, not the wealthy exiles in London?

To those who taunt, if you'd had your way, Saddam would still be in power today, I reply, yup. And 700 coalition troops and 10,000 Iraqi civilians would still be alive, Saddam's regime would be hemmed in by UN inspections and toothless to harm his own people. Where were you, interlocutor, when Saddam brutally put down the Shi'a insurrection the first Bush encouraged and didn't support after Gulf War I?

No Peace, No Justice

Dover to D.C. Procession: March 14-15

Mourn the Dead, Heal the Wounded, End the War

While President Bush was delivering his infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo op last May 1, the post-invasion death toll was already climbing. Since then, the numbers of dead and injured have become such an embarrassment to the Administration and to many in the media that they are relegated to news "briefs" - impersonal, faceless statistics of this roadside explosion, that helicopter downing, this ambush or that suicide bombing.

Go to the following website for links to information, schedule, and directions.

http://www.peacepledge.org/resist/update3142004.shtm

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Baptist Peace Fellowship

Buddhist Peace Fellowship

Catholic Peace Fellowship

Episcopal Peace Fellowship

Jewish Peace Fellowship

Lutheran Peace Fellowship

Muslim Peace Fellowship

Orthodox Peace Fellowship

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March 20, 2004 International Mobilization for Peace and Justice

Lazy Journalism

Senate Approves Budget Intended to Curb Deficit
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Published: March 13, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 12 — The Senate voted early Friday morning to approve a $2.4 trillion budget resolution for next year that could imperil President Bush's drive to make all his tax cuts permanent while it tries to shrink the federal deficit faster than the White House proposes.

The vote came hours after budget deliberations broke down in the House following a rebellion by Republicans who demanded that party leaders take tougher actions to control spending. Taken together, the moves reflected apprehension among some Republicans that the deficit is gaining new currency as an election-year issue.

"The budget issue is a very critical issue, and frankly, a defining issue for many members of Congress," Representative Jeb Hensarling, a freshman Texas Republican who has emerged as a leader in efforts by conservatives to rein in what they consider unsustainable spending growth, said in an interview this week. He added: "I didn't come to Congress to grow government."

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

DIGGING THE HOLE DEEPER:
The Senate Budget Committee Plan Substantially Increases Deficits
By Richard Kogan, Joel Friedman, David Kamin

The Senate budget plan would raise projected deficits above the CBO baseline levels[1] by significant amounts in each of the next five years — and by a total of $213 billion over the five-year period.

Click on the link to see the graphics. File this under "why oh why can't we have a better press corps?"

One Year Later

Riverbend reports on Iraqis' reaction to the "Transitional Law" document signed by the Interim Governing Council last week. She concludes, hauntingly, on the difference a year makes:

These last few days have brought back memories of the same dates, last year. What were we doing in early March? We were preparing for the war… digging wells, taping up windows, stocking up on candles, matches, kerosene, rice, flour, bandages, and medicine… and what are we doing now? Using them.

Pay Your Minder

Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought
Justice Dept., FBI Want Consumers To Pay the Cost

By Dan Eggen and Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 13, 2004; Page A01

The Justice Department wants to significantly expand the government's ability to monitor online traffic, proposing that providers of high-speed Internet service should be forced to grant easier access for FBI wiretaps and other electronic surveillance, according to documents and government officials.

A petition filed this week with the Federal Communications Commission also suggests that consumers should be required to foot the bill.

Law enforcement agencies have been increasingly concerned that fast-growing telephone service over the Internet could be a way for terrorists and criminals to evade surveillance. But the petition also moves beyond Internet telephony, leading several technology experts and privacy advocates yesterday to warn that many types of online communication, including instant messages and visits to Web sites, could be covered.

The proposal by the Justice Department, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration could require extensive retooling of existing broadband networks and could impose significant costs, the experts said. Privacy advocates also argue that there are not enough safeguards to prevent the government from intercepting data from innocent users.

Justice Department lawyers argue in a 75-page FCC petition that Internet broadband and online telephone providers should be treated the same as traditional telephone companies, which are required by law to provide access for wiretaps and other monitoring of voice communications. The law enforcement agencies complain that many providers do not comply with existing wiretap rules and that rapidly changing technology is limiting the government's ability to track terrorists and other threats.

They are asking the FCC to curtail its usual review process to rapidly implement the proposed changes. The FBI views the petition as narrowly crafted and aimed only at making sure that terrorist and criminal suspects are not able to evade monitoring because of the type of telephone communications they use, according to a federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance is an invaluable and necessary tool for federal, state and local law enforcement in their fight against criminals, terrorists, and spies," the petition said, adding that "the importance and the urgency of this task cannot be overstated" because "electronic surveillance is being compromised today."

But privacy and technology experts said the proposal is overly broad and raises serious privacy and business concerns. James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a public interest group, said the FBI is attempting to dictate how the Internet should be engineered to permit whatever level of surveillance law enforcement deems necessary.

"The breadth of what they are asking for is a little breathtaking," Dempsey said. "The question is, how deeply should the government be able to control the design of the Internet? . . . If you want to bring the economy to a halt, put the FBI in charge of deploying new Internet and communications services."

Of course, to be against this peeping-Tomism is to side with Bin Laden. The same FCC that wants to turn the airwaves over to the corporate masters wants to help the FBI monitor you.

This is what W means by a safer and more peaceful world--a government that monitors your PC usage and demands that you pay for your own monitoring. If that is the kind of safety and peace you want, vote Republican in November.

Which William Gibson novel is it that we are living in?

Powdermilk Bisquits

Minnesota Zen master

Born in the Midwest to a fundamentalist Christian family which frowned on entertainment, Garrison Keillor's main ambition was to write. But he first worked as a radio presenter and went on to make his mark by broadcasting comic tales of a fictional small town, Lake Wobegon. His quirky stories and novels, with some echoes of autobiography, are now bestsellers, writes Nicholas Wroe

Saturday March 6, 2004
The Guardian

Garrison Keillor: mainstay of the American satiric opposition

Just before Christmas last year, Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau and Al Franken met for dinner at a New York hotel. Despite the absence of Michael Moore, this informal meeting of friends was in effect the high command of the American satiric opposition in session. Trudeau's treatment of the Bush administration in his Doonesbury cartoon strip is well known to Guardian readers and the thesis behind Franken's best selling book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), needs little further explanation. However, to many people in the UK, Keillor would not be naturally bracketed in this category. He is more generally seen as a rather folksy and avuncular figure whose tales of life in his fictional Minnesota home town, Lake Wobegon, have provided a soothingly wry view of life in small-town America. That description of him still applies, but particularly in the US Keillor has also built himself a reputation as a consistently astringent critic of the Right.

"But when I talk about politics it is in a very light-handed and in-passing way," his reassuringly rich-timbred voice slowly deadpans in his apartment the next day. "Republicans might be heathens and out to destroy all that we hold dear, but that doesn't mean we need to take them seriously. Or be bitter or vituperative just because they are swine. I think one can still have friends who are Republicans."

The three men were meeting after a live New York broadcast of Keillor's long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which for two thirds of its season goes on the road, the other third coming from Minnesota Public Radio in St Paul. Among the usual combination of sketches, poems, live music and, of course, Keillor's monologue with news from Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men all good looking and all children are above average", Franken had played Henry Kissinger in a sketch, and Keillor had woven in a running joke about Republicans. Keillor started the show 30 years ago after a visit to the legendary Nashville country music radio programme Grand Ole Opry.

The novelist and critic Jane Smiley, who has written extensively about life in the Midwest, says that from the beginning Keillor "seemed to set himself up in a sort of loving opposition to Midwestern values. He'd hold up these values for amusement and you had the feeling that while he was aware of their virtues, he didn't precisely share them." Franken says that while Keillor "is clearly a Democrat, he is not overtly political on the show. But his politics have become more salient in recent years and the tone of his gentle jibes does tweak his targets in a way that may sometimes be more effective than the type of humour I use, which is to go straight at them."

Keillor explains: "I am culturally quite conservative and being a writer is the purest form of entrepreneurship there is. And I am a Christian and had a fundamentalist upbringing and Republicans assume all fundamentalists are on their side. So I am a sort of conservative Democrat and the Republicans do find that odd." A review in the conservative journal, National Review, typifies the Right's frustration. It complains about his "moralising about the moralists" and categorises him as "a horrid left-liberal scold, dripping with contempt for nearly everything Middle American, who has grown rich and famous off ridiculing his fellow Minnesotans for the benefit of smirking elites everywhere".

Keillor and I go back a long ways. As he moved on from one public radio job to the next, there I was I time when I was hired to fill the vacancy. We both started at the University of Minnesota's public station. Unlike me, I think Garrison got his degree.

He went through a period in the late '80s into the '90s when he thought, once again, that he was going to make his living as a writer, changed wives several times, moved to Denmark with one of them, set himself up for a while in New York to be the anti-New Yorker writer on the staff of that magazine, left Prairie Home in the less-than-capable hands of Noah Adams for a number of years, and told the Twin Cities he hated them as he slammed the door on the way out. He returned chastened to Prairie Home, the only place where he ever really fit in.

On the night before Thanksgiving, the brother and his wife took me to see an unusual performance: Garrison as soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It wasn't a Prairie Home show. I don't really know how to describe it, it wasn't like anything we'd ever seen before. He sang, he told stories with symphonic accompaniment, read poems to Mendelssohn's Midsummernight's Dream suite and led the audience in a sing-along of old songs and hymns. I had tears in my eyes as I turned my head to see my hard-nosed brother singing Amazing Grace with his eyes closed.

Garrison is re-inventing the narrative in a new form. If you live in a city where you get to catch this show, don't miss it. The rest of the time you can catch Garrison, at the top of his form these days, on Prairie Home. If you've never heard it, or don't live in the States, check here to find your local NPR affiliate which carries the show, or listen to the webcasts. The man is our modern H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain in one. If you want to learn what literary mockery of the Bushes looks and sounds like, this is the place to go.

When I moved to Washington in 1985, I fell into deep homesickness for Minnesota, as this place is virtually the anti-Minnesota. I spent my second summer here working on the Hill, taking my lunch with the red-hot* street vendors near the Supreme Court, and eating my doggie lunch lounging on the West Lawn with a bun in one hand and one of Garrison's books in the other while the squirrels gathered round looking for a handout. That way, I could keep the laughter and the tears to myself. The squirrels don't blab.

*Red-hots are a spicy hot dog, native to DC. I firmly believe that mustard and pickle relish were invented to make damn near anything edible.

Teach Your Children Well

Survey: Young more in tune with campaign

By Will Lester, Associated Press Writer, 3/12/2004

WASHINGTON -- Young adults are paying more attention to the 2004 presidential campaign than they did four years ago, according to an ongoing survey that monitors voter interest.

Polling done by the Vanishing Voter Project in the week before the March 2 Super Tuesday primaries found that nearly half of adults between the ages of 18 and 30 said they had read, seen or heard an election news story within the past day. In 2000, just over a third said that was the case.

Compared with 2000, young adults were also more likely to say they had talked about the campaign -- by 39 percent to 29 percent -- and were more likely to say they had been thinking about the campaign -- by 43 percent to 26 percent four years ago.

"I think the war is the main driver," said Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "When you look at the history of young people's involvement, when there is a war, they tend to take more interest and get more involved."

Patterson, who runs the Vanishing Voter project, said young adults have been about evenly divided between the parties. In a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, they were closely divided between President Bush and Democrat John Kerry. Young voters were about evenly split between Bush and Democrat Al Gore in 2000, according to exit polls.

The turnout in 2000 for those 18-24 was 32.3 percent of people of voting age, compared to 54.7 percent for all voters, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. That turnout rate has fallen steadily over the last four decades.

It's a tiny little squib of an AP story, and the reporter misses the reason why young people are more engaged this election cycle: the blogosphere. This is where the Deniacs discovered each other and it is where they are getting there political information from the blogs.

CNN has discovered us however. Blitzer just had a report on political blogs, and says that more than half of the political blogs lean left. We're the talk radio of the future.

Public Service Announcement

Regular Bump commentor pogge has a terrific post up on his/her blog today, Peace, Order and Good Government. The blogger is an IT specialist and has put up a list of links to sites that offer downloadable virus protection and firewalls, many of them free. If you do not have current virus protection, go there now. You should also have a firewall to keep other people's prying eyes off of your system. This is doubly important if you are using broadband. And, pogge reminds us, if you are using IE or Netscape, those browsers are eminently hackable. Best still: upgrade your browser to Mozilla. pogge gives you the links and instructions.

This is also your one-stop shop for Canadian politics with a liberal slant.

Debunking

The Kerry Campaign has a new blog, DBunker, to put up the facts distorted by the Bush campaign. I find this enormously heartening, with the Dems understanding that every trick in the book is going to be thrown at them by the unscrupulous movement conservative surrogates of the Bush clique. A sample:

George Bush's Credibility Problem: The Truth Behind His New Attack Ad

George W. Bush likes to talk about tax cuts. But the truth is since George W. Bush took office, families have been taxed far more than ever before –they are paying higher college tuition higher health care costs, and higher prices for gasoline – and they are receiving lower incomes. They are also paying more in state, local, and property taxes.

I think you are going to want to bookmark this one.

Inside the Beltway

Al Kamen's Friday "In the Loop" column is a tonic to the Friday news dump offered by the White House. Al has some delicious dish today.

Her name's on the public affairs director's office door at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. She has an office e-mail address and a telephone number. But, as of yesterday, there was still no sign at the agency of Judith Czelusniak, the "mystery woman," who was most recently senior vice president for corporate relations at Tyco International.

Tyco's former chief, L. Dennis Kozlowski, and another former top official are on trial on charges they looted $600 million from the company. Loop fans may recall that it's come out at the trial that several people, including Kozlowski girlfriends, received some fine special perks.

Czelusniak, a veteran PR type, got some excellent perks as part of her compensation package, including an $18,500-a-month apartment in New York, $800 per month in parking and a Florida apartment at $4,815 a month, according to court documents.

She wasn't a girlfriend or a witness at the trial, which may have prompted the New York Post to call her the "mystery woman."

And the mystery continues. Last week FDIC Chairman Donald E. Powell, asked by a reporter about Czelusniak's arrival, said, "We're not going to comment on that."

It seems the FDIC is still mulling the situation, though it won't say what the problem is. At the same time, Czelusniak, who's not even in town these days, has got to be wondering whether a government job, even one paying as much as a couple hundred grand, is worth it, given the welcoming fusillades from unnamed FDIC detractors about her Tyco ties even before she showed up.

Al also notes that, if power is to be turned over to the Iraqis by June 30, an ambassador needs to be nominated tout suite in order to get through the vetting and confirmation process on time. Al speculates on some of the names.

The Religious Conversation

Bush Assures Evangelicals of His Commitment to Amendment on Marriage
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: March 12, 2004

COLORADO SPRINGS, March 11 — In a speech expressing his solidarity with the National Association of Evangelicals at its annual convention here, President Bush on Thursday forcefully restated his call for passage of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to enthusiastic rounds of applause.

Mr. Bush, speaking via teleconference displayed on three giant screens in the mammoth New Life Church, gave a hearty endorsement to the association, which boasts a membership including 45,000 congregations, with 30 million members.

Mr. Bush said it was founded "with the highest of callings, to proclaim the word of God." He added, "You are doing God's work with conviction and kindness and on behalf of our country I thank you."

Interrupted by applause several times, he later said, "I will defend the sanctity of marriage against activist courts and local officials who want to redefine marriage. The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society."

Mr. Bush gave his speech hours before the California Supreme Court ordered San Francisco to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and before the Massachusetts legislature gave preliminary approval to compromise measures that could ban gay marriage while allowing civil unions.

Several prominent evangelical Protestants in Washington have told the White House that backing the constitutional amendment is vital to getting evangelical voters to turn out on Election Day. And the convention organizers were aware of their clout. A slogan on the back of the convention program reads: "What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do For America? Anything We Want."

As a Catholic and a religious liberal, this gives me the chills. This president and his backers believe they have the right and the ability to legislate sanctity. The last time I checked, the sacraments were the business of the churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, drumming circles and prayer groups. Catholics say marriage is a sacrament, most Protestants, including these Evangelicals, do not.

Gay marriage is not about sanctity. It is about civil rights. The religious bodies can sort it out later.

Speaking of religious liberalism, my The Right Christians Meetup didn't make. Have you joined? If you haven't, why not? It's time we take the religious conversation of this country back from the Christian Right, and this is a great way to start.

Confederation of Dunces

Bush administration ordered Medicare plan cost estimates withheld

By Tony Pugh

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.

When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.

Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina, one of the 13 Republicans, said she was "very upset" when she learned of the higher estimate.

"I think a lot of people probably would have reconsidered (voting for the bill) because we said that $400 billion was our top of the line," Myrick said.

Five months before the November House vote, the government's chief Medicare actuary had estimated that a similar plan the Senate was considering would cost $551 billion over 10 years. Two months after Congress approved the new benefit, White House Budget Director Joshua Bolten disclosed that he expected it to cost $534 billion.

Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which produced the $551 billion estimate, told colleagues last June that he would be fired if he revealed numbers relating to the higher estimate to lawmakers.

"This whole episode which has now gone on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish," Foster wrote in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before the first congressional vote on the drug bill. "I'm perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons."

Brad DeLong has been running a long, fact-check series of posts decrying the lousy economic reporting in the press, calling it "Why, oh why" can't we have a better press corps?" I'll go him one up. Why, oh why, can't we have a better government?

I have the DC traffic department pursuing me for a speeding ticket when they can't produce either an officer or a traffic camera with evidence, and Bush can get away without being impeached? Something is wrong here.

The Greatest of These

Fr. Bojangles, a liberal Episcopal priest, has a moving and thoughtful reflection on gay marriage on his blog today. He's taking a long look at the injunction in Genesis to "be fruitful and multiply," and how the meaning of that adminition grows and changes in 3,500 years of human tradition, sexual morality and relationships:

Over time, and with lots of practice, we got used to the admonitions and grew this creation to a place where it is now out of balance. But we’re still holding on to the old traditions and using any departure from those traditions as an opportunity to blast a sinful culture. We’re pretty good at that. In a time when relationship has become more important than reproduction, we fail to see that the only thing that makes a relationship between and man and a woman different is their ability to reproduce. Because of really outdated societal preferences, we can’t see beyond that and any relationship that doesn’t have a reproductive quality about it repulses us.

I think God would see that as fruitfulness, too.

I very much like his argument that there is more than one kind of fruitfulness, afterall, the Christian scriptures contain an enumeration of the fruits of the spirit: Faith, Hope, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Self Control (Gal. 5:22-3). In my experience, those fruits can be made manifest in any life and in any marriage, regardless of sexual orientation.

NPD and the Boy Emperor

Josh Marshall has been running an analysis on the Bush campaign themes from his stump speeches and TV ads. Josh's conclusion: Bush is running on "it's not my fault."

Diagnostic criteria for 301.81 Narcissistic Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Dueling Central Bankers

Greenspan: Employment Will Begin to Grow
19 minutes ago

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve (news - web sites) Chairman Alan Greenspan (news - web sites) said Thursday that "employment will begin to increase more quickly before long," and that erecting protective trade barriers was not the answer to the nation's current worries about the loss of jobs to foreign competition.

Wading into the hot-button political issues of job losses and Social Security (news - web sites), Greenspan said that erecting protectionist barriers was not the answer to foreign competition and that Congress would at some point have to address the problem of the pending retirement of 77 million baby boomers. He repeated his warning that Congress will have to trim future Social Security benefits.

Greenspan, in response to a question from Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (news - web sites), D-Ohio, said that the government cannot afford to meet all the promises in Social Security and Medicare that have been made to future retirees.

"We do not have enough in real resources to meet the promises that have already been made. We will not be able to fully meet the benefits to the next generation, the baby boomers that are retiring," Greenspan said.

"We have to construct a pattern that the benefits we do promise will be delivered rather than have these people retire in very large numbers and find out that they were betrayed by government," Greenspan said.

Greenspan's comments about the need to trim retirement benefits provoked a firestorm of criticism when he made them last month, with critics charging that Greenspan was urging benefit cuts at the same time that he was urging that President Bush (news - web sites)'s tax cuts be made permanent.

But not all central bankers are quite so sanguine:

German Bank Warns of Economy Risks

Thu Mar 11, 9:21 AM ET

BERLIN - Germany's budding economic recovery risks being undermined by weak consumer spending and the strong euro, the country's central bank chief said Thursday.

"The downward risks to the German economy are presently greater than the upward risks," said Bundesbank president Ernst Welteke, who is also a member of the European Central Bank's policymaking council.

Welteke, speaking to foreign reporters in Berlin, cited foreign exchange rates and persisting weak consumption as risks to Europe's largest economy. But he said he expects "the trend for higher growth to continue" this year, after the German economy shrank by 0.1 percent last year.

"Overall, Europe will profit from the global economic development," Welteke said.

The European Central Bank took a similar view Thursday, saying it expects economic growth in the 12 countries using the euro to pick up as the year progresses.

In its latest monthly report, the bank renewed its pledge to preserve the euro's purchasing power, hinting it is not prepared to cut interest rates in the near future. The ECB left its main rate unchanged last week at 2 percent.

Welteke is reflecting a far more realistic view of the underlying fundamentals than his American counterpart. The reality is that we have a 50-50 chance of slipping back into a full-bore recession and the danger of deflation.

Military Goes Blue State

Military Families vs. the War
Organized Opposition Is Small, but Some See It as Historic

By Paula Span
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 2004; Page A01

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- On the night last month he learned that his son had died in Iraq, Richard Dvorin couldn't sleep. He lay in bed, "thinking and thinking and thinking," got up at 4 a.m., made a pot of coffee. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to the president.

When the invasion of Iraq began, Dvorin -- a 61-year-old Air Force veteran and a retired cop -- thought the commander in chief deserved his support. "I believed we were destroying part of the axis of evil," he says. "I truly believed that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and wouldn't hesitate to use them."

By the time Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin was sent to Iraq last September, however, his father was having doubts. And now that Seth had been killed, at 24, by an "improvised explosive device" south of Baghdad, doubt had turned to anger.

"Where are all the weapons of Mass Destruction?" Richard Dvorin demanded in his letter. "Where are the stockpiles of Chemical and Biological weapons?" His son's life, he wrote, "has been snuffed out in a meaningless war."

His is not the only military family to think so. In suburban Cleveland a few days later, the Rev. Tandy Sloan tuned in to the "Meet the Press" interview with President Bush and felt "disgust." His 19-year-old son, Army Pvt. Brandon Sloan, was killed when his convoy was ambushed last March. "A human being can make mistakes," the Rev. Sloan says of the president. "But if you intentionally mislead people, that's another thing."

In Fullerton, Calif., paralegal student Kimberly Huff, whose Army reservist husband recently returned from Iraq, makes a similar point with a wardrobe of homemade protest T-shirts that say things like "Support Our Troops, Impeach Bush."

The number of military families that oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom, though never measured, is probably small. But a nascent antiwar movement has begun to find a toehold among parents, spouses and other relatives of active-duty, reserve and National Guard troops.

A group called Military Families Speak Out -- which will figure prominently in marches and vigils at Dover Air Force Base, Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the White House next week -- says more than 1,000 families have signed up online and notes that new members join daily. Other outspoken family members -- Dvorin, for example -- have never heard of the group but, for a variety of reasons, share its founders' conviction that the war is a "reckless military misadventure."

Most frequently cited, when military families explain their antiwar sentiments, is the absence to date of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "They'd have these inspections and they'd find nothing," says Jenifer Moss, 29, of Lawton, Okla. Her husband, Army Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, died in November when a missile downed his Chinook helicopter, leaving her with three children and the belief that "he was sent out there on a pretense."

They are also angry at the Bush administration's insistence that its policies arenonetheless justified. Cherice Johnson's husband, Navy Corpsman Michael Vann Johnson Jr., was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade last March. "I'd love to say I back [the president] 100 percent, but I can't," she says, weeping during a telephone interview. "How many more people are going to die because he can't say, 'I'm sorry, I made a terrible mistake'?"

In interviews, families complained about the continued unrest in Iraq; worried about whether their service members had adequate equipment and supplies; feared post-traumatic stress syndrome. One mother who lost a son in Afghanistan last March took deep offense at the launch of a subsequent war when, she feels, the first remains uncompleted.

And, of course, they all watch the casualties mount, to 553 deaths and nearly 3,200 wounded, the Pentagon says.

Bush alienating some military voters who helped him win in 2000

By William Douglas

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - When the Bush campaign asked James McKinnon to co-chair its veterans steering committee in New Hampshire - a job he held in 2000 - the 56-year-old Vietnam veteran respectfully, but firmly, said no.

"I basically told them I was disappointed in his support of veterans," said McKinnon, who served two tours in Vietnam with the Coast Guard. "He's killing the active-duty military. ... Look at the reserves call-ups for Iraq, the hardships. The National Guard - the state militia - is being used improperly. I took the president at his word on Iraq, and now you can't find a single report to back up or substantiate weapons of mass destruction."

President Bush is seeking re-election as a "war president" whose decisive leadership steered the military to victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as guerrilla warfare drags on in both countries, casualties mount and the Army is stretched ever thinner, many voters in or affiliated with the military are no longer saluting the commander in chief.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or evidence that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, lengthy deployments of active-duty soldiers and reservists and proposed cuts in veterans' benefits and perks to military families are threatening to erode Bush's once-strong support among military voters.

In the 2000 presidential election, absentee military ballots from overseas helped deliver the narrow margin of victory that sent Bush into the White House. So even a small defection of current and retired military people and their dependents could spell trouble for Bush in 2004.

It's Still the Economy

Remember that "jobs czar" position that W announced he was creating last Labor Day--six months ago?

Bush Administration Puts off Announcement on Manufacturing Post

By Martin Crutsinger
The Associated Press
Published: Mar 10, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration on Wednesday abruptly postponed the announcement that a Nebraska businessman was its choice for a new post to help the country's beleaguered manufacturing sector.

The postponement came after Democrat John Kerry had derided the job as "too little, too late" for the industry and his presidential campaign noted that the expected nominee had set up a manufacturing operation in China.

A Commerce Department news conference to introduce President Bush's choice on Thursday was scrubbed, according to a news release from Secretary Don Evans' office, because of scheduling conflicts. It was not clear when the appointment would be announced.

While the administration did not publicly identify the nominee, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said in a statement that it was Tony Raimondo, chairman and chief executive officer of Behlen Manufacturing Co., based in Columbus, Neb.

Behlen is a medium-sized manufacturing company with four plants in the United States. It employs more than 1,000 workers. A company spokesman said Raimondo was out of the office on a weeklong business trip to China and was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Raimondo, who serves on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers, has talked openly about his decision to set up a joint-operation with a Chinese company to run a factory in China, saying he needed to do it to compete more effectively for business in that market.

Kerry, in a statement from his campaign, said the decision to fill the new job of assistant secretary for manufacturing was "the last gasp of air from a failed administration" that has presided over the loss of more than 2.5 million manufacturing jobs.

"Mr. President, putting another bureaucrat in the Department of Commerce isn't going to get people back to work," Kerry said. "This is like the quarterback losing late in the fourth quarter promising he can turn the game around by hiring a new water boy."

Hey, Lou Dobbs! Maybe you want to interview this guy. You can put him on with Jim Glassman.

DOBBS: Thank you.

DOBBS: No, look in the camera, tell those 15 [million] people out there who can't find a job right now...

UPDATE:

Dobbs/Glassman rematch tonight at 6PM Eastern on CNN.

Roman Shades

Senate Raises Bar to Enact New Tax Cuts; Rebuff to Bush
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Published: March 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 10 — The Senate dealt a surprising election-year rebuke on Wednesday to the White House goal of new tax cuts as it narrowly backed a new rule to require at least 60 votes to approve any tax cuts in the next five years.

Four Republican senators — Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine — joined Democrats in the 51-to-48 vote.

Mr. Bush has called on Congress to make permanent his tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the decade. Republicans in Congress had already sidestepped action on his request this year, in an election campaign in which voters are concerned about the $478 billion budget deficit.

But under the amendment approved on Wednesday night, any tax cuts — or spending increases — in the next five years will require 60 votes for approval in the Senate, unless supporters are able to find spending cuts or other tax increases to make up for the money that would be lost, said Senator Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who sponsored the amendment.

First, though, the Senate would have to approve the budget resolution that is being debated. Then, Mr. Feingold said, his provision would have to be accepted at the conference committee, where House and Senate budget writers try to reconcile differences in their proposals. The Senate is expected to vote on its $2.4 trillion budget resolution by the end of the week. The House Budget Committee is scheduled to consider its proposal on Thursday.

"The taxpayers of this country are desperate," Mr. Feingold said, "and I think people are going to find out that the taxpayers are frustrated and that they are figuring out that the deficit is completely out of control."

His amendment, he added, helps put Congress on the "long hard road to balancing the budget."

This is the Senate making a statement. There are so many procedural hurdles to jump before this can be made permanent that thinking of it as window dressing in the larger tax cuts/deficits roadshow is appropriate.

Off the Radar

Smart post by Agonist editor Nick:

Are the Taliban Really “Gone”?

By Mark Sedra
[Mark Sedra is a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion. He recently returned from Afghanistan, where he spent two months assessing the needs of the Afghan security sector on behalf of the UN and the Afghan government. He writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org)]

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

“America's got the watches, but the Taliban has the time” (BBC, January 16, 2004). This telling statement, attributed to a Taliban spokesperson in early 2004, illustrates a fundamental truth about the present situation in Afghanistan: The longer it takes to consolidate the peace and deliver a peace dividend to the beleaguered population, the greater the likelihood that antigovernment spoiler groups, whether they are the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami, or al Qaeda, will be able to unravel the nascent state-building process. The Taliban are acutely aware that sustained donor interest and military support will not last forever; donor fatigue, shifting budgetary priorities, and waning donor attention are inevitable. With the world's eyes firmly fixed on Baghdad--not Kabul--maintaining high levels of donor support for Afghanistan is an arduous task. An historic window of opportunity exists to stabilize and reconstruct this war-torn country, but with each passing day that window closes ever more slightly. Once that window is closed, there is no guarantee that a similar opportunity will arise again, for the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups will be waiting to take advantage.

Undoubtedly, the above-mentioned assessment would be considered alarmist by many actors close to the state-building process, particularly members of President Hamid Karzai's inner circle and the U.S. Pentagon. It was Karzai who declared at a February 26, 2004 joint news conference, with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the occasion of his one-day visit to Kabul, that the Taliban were defeated and “as a movement [it] does not exist any more.” “They are gone,” he said, attributing continuing violence to “common criminals,” as opposed to politically driven insurgents (AP, February 26, 2004). These were the boldest public statements made by President Karzai about the Taliban since he took office. Similarly dismissive of the group's capabilities, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld stated: “I'm not seeing any indication the Taliban pose any military threat to Afghanistan.” Only a week earlier, one of Rumsfeld's top aides at the Pentagon, U.S. Undersecretary of Defence Dov S. Zakheim, contemptuously spoke of the “cowardly” nature of Taliban operations (AFP, February 22, 2004).

Such proclamations would normally arouse feelings of unbridled relief and joy among most Afghans and internationals working in Afghanistan--that is, if they did not contrast so sharply with recent events on the ground. More than 550 people have been killed over the past six months, making it the most violent period in the two years that have elapsed since the fall of the Taliban regime. Within twelve days, between February 14 and February 26, 2004, nine Afghan aid workers and one U.S. soldier were killed in separate incidents across the country. Perhaps what is most alarming about this recent spate of attacks are the tactics that have been employed. Since December 28, 2003, there have been four suicide attacks in Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of eight people--six Afghan intelligence agents and two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) peacekeeping soldiers. The evidence does not support the notion of an overwhelmed and defeated enemy.

In a January 2004 interview, Lieutenant General David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, explained that since the Taliban “couldn't come out in large numbers against coalition military forces” it was no longer a major threat (AFP, February 22, 2004). If the U.S. military formulates threat assessments on the basis of an adversary's ability and willingness to fight conventional battles in large military formations, then the Taliban are indeed a spent force. However, if there is one thing that September 11 and the ensuing war on terror has shown, it is that measuring security threats on the basis of conventional criteria, such as troop numbers and weapons technology, is outdated. Groups with nothing more than explosives and belief can be as dangerous as an entire conventional army; while their acts are certainly criminal, to dismiss or disparage the threat they pose is a grave miscalculation.

Far from marking the defeat of the Taliban, recent events have signaled a new phase in the antigovernment insurgency. One must only examine the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to gauge the potential physical and psychological impact of suicide attacks. There is no established history of martyrdom operations in Afghanistan, but just as counter-terrorism tactics and strategies have assumed a transnational character, shared by states around the globe, so, too, have those of terrorist and insurgent groups. Further suicide attacks, which are unpredictable and virtually impossible to prevent, could deliver a severe blow to the state-building process. In the aftermath of the December 28 th suicide blast, a Taliban spokesperson proclaimed that sixty more suicide bombers were in Kabul awaiting orders to strike. With the UN still reeling from the devastating attack on its headquarters in Baghdad and the shooting death of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) worker in Ghazni Province in November 2003, a major attack on the UN could trigger a pullout of the organization's international staff. “Countries that are committed to supporting Afghanistan cannot kid themselves and cannot go on expecting us to work in unacceptable security conditions,” Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN envoy to Afghanistan, stated on December 3, 2003 (USA Today, January 22, 2004). If the UN were to withdraw, this would leave a void in the reconstruction process that would be difficult to fill.

President Karzai is correct in claiming that the Taliban movement in its previous form no longer exists. It has evolved into a decentralized guerilla group that portrays itself as a vehicle for Pashtun nationalism. The group is concentrated primarily in the southeast and operates in small, disparate units. In response to early setbacks in their military operations against coalition forces, the Taliban have adopted a new approach, shifting the locus of their attacks from military targets to “soft targets,” such as aid workers, government employees, and civilians. The new strategy has borne fruit, as the UN and major international organizations, including the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), have scaled back their operations in the south, depriving approximately one-third of the population of much-needed development assistance. This perpetuates a destructive cycle by which Pashtuns, disillusioned by the failure of the Karzai government to fulfill its promises of greater security and economic opportunity, are driven to support extremists.

Sigh. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history....

We've got barely 10k NATO troops in Afghanistan. The Soviets had 100K and the warlords and incipient Taliban threw them out. This will not end well.

Wrong Man for the Job

Air Force's Roche Withdraws From Army Nomination

By Andrea Shalal-Esa
Reuters
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; 3:29 PM

Air Force Secretary James Roche, whose nomination to head the Army ran aground in Congress over an Air Force Academy sex scandal and a $27.6 billion deal with Boeing Co., asked the White House Wednesday to withdraw his name from consideration.

"Given the range of issues before the Senate in a busy legislative year, I accept that my nomination is unlikely to be considered this year," Roche said in a statement. "In the interest of the Department of Defense, I decided it was best that I withdraw from further consideration."

Roche said he would remain in his job as the top civilian in the Air Force.

Defense sources said they expected President Bush to nominate Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee, a longtime Senate aide with strong support in Congress, to head the Army.

The Senate Armed Services Committee had refused to act on Roche's nomination until the Pentagon's inspector general finished investigating both matters and the administration released Roche's e-mail and other documents on an Air Force plan to buy 100 Boeing 767s as refueling tankers.

What the WaPo doesn't tell you is that the Boeing deal was a lease, not purchase, which would have cost $6 billion dollars more than buying the jets outright. I don't know how anybody could have taken this guy seriously after that rape debacle at the Air Force Academy.

Pandering for Tourism

Crackdown overrode liberty: security chief

By Mark Baker
Asia Editor
Singapore
March 10, 2004

America's top anti-terrorism official has conceded the country courted an international backlash by failing to temper its security push with respect for privacy and civil liberties.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday that some of the tough measures imposed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks - including racially-based checks on foreign visitors to the US - had been unfair.

"America knows we cannot seek a double standard and America knows we get what we give. And so we must and will always be careful to respect people's privacy, civil liberties and reputations," Mr Ridge said here at the start of a regional tour.

"To suggest there is a trade-off between security and individual freedoms - that we must discard one protection for the other - is a false choice. You do not defend liberty to forsake it."

He said immigration controls, imposed soon after the attacks in New York and Washington, had focused on particular ethnic and religious groups and been rightly condemned as racial profiling.

"When you design systems that are targeted to one group or another, you justifiably can anticipate a reaction that you are profiling and that it is discriminatory," Mr Ridge said during an address to Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.

"That was the first reaction to 9/11. In order for us to continue to be the kind of country we want to be we needed to design a system... where nationality was not the element that drove any kind of screening.

"We needed a process that could be universally applied - regardless of where you came from, regardless of your ethnicity, regardless of your religious background - when you came to the United States there was one system that applied to everybody."

Does anyone besides me see the irony of Ridge making this speech in Singapore, one of the most restrictive societies in the industrialized world? Funny, I don't hear him apologizing to Americans for pat-down searches of grannies.

Ursine Outlook

Atrios quoted the first part of this article, but left out the truly horrifying part:

Consumer spending has remained strong, in spite of a general lack of consumer confidence, mainly because of the cash flow from tax rebates and mortgage refinancing. Unless the Bank of Japan buys $200 billion of T-bonds next month and drives long term interest rates down so far that everybody can refinance again, this is not going to continue. February, which showed strong chain store sales Thursday and is likely to show strong retail sales next week, was an exceptionally strong month for tax refunds, caused by the decline in withholding tax rates in the middle of 2003, and was also a very strong month for bonuses, which on Wall Street were up by 25 percent.

However, March and April, when late-filed tax returns are received by the Treasury, will be nothing like as strong, because the rise in the stock market in 2003 produced a high volume of capital gains tax liabilities. These will provide the Treasury with the first positive revenue surprise since 2001, but will on balance negate the payments of tax refunds due to consumers -- in general, of course, refund tax returns get filed before tax returns with a balance due. Thus, unless the economy finds a new driver from here on, consumer spending will cease to be the backbone of the economy as it has been for the last 3 years.

At this point, with both tax cuts and monetary laxity about played out as stimuli to the economy, the central contradiction in the economic picture will begin to take effect. The United States, far from being the economic dynamo that its admirers like to paint, has been living hugely beyond its means since 1995, and now faces severe problems of budget deficit, balance of payments deficit and capital overhang.

Capital overhang sounds arcane but isn't; it is the syndrome, first diagnosed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, which occurs when a country has through a stock market or real estate boom over-indulged in capital investment, and faces a prolonged period of low returns, over-capacity and low investment in new facilities. It occurred in the United States in 1929, in Japan in 1990 and in the U.S. in 2000. The Greenspan/Bush policies of throwing money and tax cuts at the problem have certainly mitigated its immediate effects, as did Japan's low interest rates and budget deficits in the 1990s, but in the long run the price of depressed capital markets, low returns and low investment must be paid. By now, there is over-investment in housing as well as in capital equipment, and a correspondingly greater drag on the economy to be faced.

Expect the economic figures that appear over the next few months to produce primarily negative surprises, as Wall Street analysts fail to realize the depressing reality of today's economy. Judging by its performance Friday, the stock market will largely ignore these negative surprises, maybe for some months to come. Probably by the summer, however, the truth will dawn that the tax cuts and monetary stimulus have failed to cause a true recovery, and that even the Bank of Japan cannot bail out the U.S. economy forever.

When this realization dawns, you can expect optimism to turn to panic, and Charlie Brown to turn on Lucy and pound her into the playing field!

Author Martin Hutchinson is a deliberate bear, trying to counter all the happy talk financial analysis pushed by the newsletters, the TV pundits and the securities firms. That said, this tracks with the analysis I'm reading from the PhD economists. Instead of tax cuts, the administration should be incentivizing saving, slowly and gradually raising interest rates and cutting the budget deficit.

Paired for Life

Gay GOP Group Challenges Bush on Marriage
Log Cabin Republicans to Air TV Ad in D.C., 7 States

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; Page A06

In a dramatic break with President Bush, a prominent group of gay Republicans that supported him four years ago is launching a $1 million advertising campaign today attacking the administration for trying to ban same-sex marriage.

The ad, by the Log Cabin Republicans, uses grainy footage of Vice President Cheney saying during the 2000 campaign that the matter should be left to the states.

Bush's decision to endorse a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage was "the line in the sand" for the 27-year-old group, which has never run a campaign ad, said Executive Director Patrick Guerriero. He said he had warned the White House as Bush edged toward supporting an amendment that "despite our historic loyalty to the party and the president, we would be forced to speak out if gay and lesbian families were going to be used as wedge issues in swing states."

The group's move, which shatters the fragile alliance between the president and his strongest backers in the gay community, could undermine efforts to renew the "compassionate conservative" appeal he used four years ago.

The ad shows Cheney in the 2000 vice presidential debate saying of gay marriage: "People should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. . . . That matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area."

The on-screen tag line says: "We Agree. Don't Amend the Constitution."

Poll Finds Growing Support for Gay Civil Unions

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; Page A06

Public support appears to be growing for legalizing civil unions for same-sex couples, as well as for allowing states to make their own laws regulating gay marriage, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

About half the country -- 51 percent -- favors allowing gay couples to form civil unions with the same basic legal rights as married couples, up 6 percentage points in less than a month. A slightly larger majority also rejected amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriages in favor of allowing states to make their own laws, an increase of 8 percentage points in recent weeks.

But it's too early to draw firm conclusions from these results. Polling on gay marriage has been particularly volatile. Support for giving states the right to decide on who can get married stood at 58 percent in January, dipped to 45 percent in February and now stands at 53 percent in the latest Post-ABC News poll.

The survey comes as the controversy over same-sex unions continues to build across the nation. In California, Oregon, New York and New Jersey, local officials have issued marriage licenses in the past month to gay couples. President Bush has said he supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, casting the issue into the middle of the 2004 presidential campaign.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans polled oppose same-sex marriage, up 4 percentage points from last month.

Still, the survey suggests that Bush's endorsement of a constitutional ban is far from popular. Overall, 52 percent said they disapprove of the way Bush is handling the issue of same-sex marriage, while 44 percent approve. And when asked which candidate would better handle the issue, the public was divided evenly between Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

I and others got a little squeamish when this issue surfaced as part of the presidential election, thinking that it was the wrong time to push the issue. However, the mere fact that it has hit the radar screen now means that it is starting to move the court of public opinion. That's heartening. There are churches and synagogues who have been performing weddings for gay men and lesbians for years. Those clergy will be absolutely delighted to be able to sign the marriage certificate as well as publicly bless the union. This is a net negative for Bush.

The New New Thing

Democrats Forming Parallel Campaign
Interest Groups Draw GOP Fire

By Dan Balz and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; Page A01

Led by veterans of presidential and congressional campaigns, a coalition of Democratic Party interest groups, armed with millions of dollars in soft money, is rapidly constructing an unprecedented political operation designed to supplement the activities of Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign in the effort to defeat President Bush.

The newest visible sign of the coalition's activities will be seen beginning today, when a $5 million advertising campaign begins in 17 battleground states. But behind the scenes, Democratic operatives are moving to set up coordinated national and state-by-state operations that amount to the equivalent of a full presidential campaign, minus the candidate.

The Democratic groups have created five organizations to oversee facets of the campaign: paid advertising; voter identification and turnout; communications, polling, research and rapid response; fundraising; and the coordination of the operations of more than two dozen liberal organizations.

This parallel Democratic campaign, already under legal challenge, grows out of changes in campaign finance laws. Those changes prohibit the national party committees from raising and spending soft money -- large, unregulated contributions -- on behalf of their presidential candidates. The Democrats have taken the expertise they developed in past campaigns and applied it to the new, separate operation. By law, coalition members cannot coordinate with the campaign of Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic candidate.

"Our sense was we needed to have a message up on the air that tells the truth about the Bush record and defends the Democratic position on the issues," said Ellen Malcolm, president of Emily's List and a driving force behind the coordinated effort. "There is no question that Bush has $100 million and Kerry is down to zero. It's very important that there are alternative voices out there talking about the Bush record."

Most of these new organizations have been established as "527s," shorthand for the provision of the tax law that covers their activities. The 527s are controversial because they accept soft money from corporations and unions, which critics say represents an evasion of the ban on large, unregulated contributions in the new campaign finance law known as the McCain-Feingold Act, and because they operate under less stringent disclosure regulations.

The real news here is this: the Democrats have finally awakened from nearly three decades of slumber. While a disciplined Christian hard right was busy taking over the Republican party, the Democrats dozed. The past three years of neo-con radicalism have finally jolted our party awake. I don't know that I've ever seen so much energy and unity out of our side of the political spectrum. Will it be enough to take back the White House and make inroads in Congress? That's tea leaf reading and I'm not good at it, but Kos made an interesting point yesterday:

The Democratic Party is no longer 75 or 100 employees in Washington DC. We are all now adjunct DNCers (whether you like it or not!). When we fact-check Bush, develop new avenues of critique, bring attention to some lonely article in Bismarck, Montpelier, or Dallas (again, see post below), and spread the word about the latest GOP lies and/or outrages, we are helping the party do what it can't do on its own -- reclaim the nation from the ravages of the GOP wingnuts.

Trippi and the Dean campaign were a symbol, not the accomplishment, of what is actually going on: we are already the alternative, decentralized campaign. And we are going to make this election year a brand new thing.

Bottom Line

Prices could fall, but only by pennies

By Frank Green
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 9, 2004

Gas prices in San Diego County climbed to record levels over the weekend, with a gallon of unleaded regular costing an average of slightly more than $2.22.

That was a fraction of a penny over the all-time high set last St. Patrick's Day, according to a survey of more than 400 stations by the Utility Consumers' Action Network.

Nationwide, fuel rates jumped during the last week by 2.1 cents, to an average of $1.74 a gallon, the government said yesterday.

Still, there were relative bargains to be had locally for comparative shoppers, UCAN found. Some area motorists have been able to shave dollars off their gas bills by patronizing some independent dealers selling fuel for 20 cents or more off the average price.

Two Mohsen's outlets in Oceanside, for instance, recently had gas priced at $1.98 a gallon – apparently the cheapest in the local market – while a Westmart in Carlsbad, a Regent in El Cajon, and Exxon and Kwik Stop stations in Escondido were selling fuel at $1.99, the UCAN survey found.

UCAN said the highest price for fuel in the county – $2.64 – was at a 76 in Kearny Mesa.

Analysts said declining wholesale prices to independents in the state should ease street rates within the next week or two, but only by pennies – although some said supplies could be pinched even more when Shell permanently closes a refinery in Bakersfield in September.

The cost break in the next couple of weeks "is not going to be huge," said Carol Thorp, a spokeswoman at the Automobile Club of Southern California.

This is the consumer's perfect storm: unemployment at historic levels, gas prices through the roof. One would think the economy might have a role to play in this election.

This page has said before that a president should not get all the blame for a recession or all the credit for a recovery. Business cycles are a fact of life in market capitalism, and the federal government is not all-powerful in an $11 trillion economy.

But neither is the president powerless. For more than two years, a range of nonpartisan economists have recommended a variety of tools to stimulate the economy quickly, and for more than two years the Bush administration has mostly ignored them. One tool would be an extension of unemployment insurance for the thousands of jobless workers who are exhausting their benefits every month. Not only is extended aid humane, it gets spent quickly, increasing demand. The White House resisted the latest effort to extend benefits last month, as did a majority of Republican members of the U.S. Senate - including Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, although Coleman says he would consider an extension in the future.

A second tool would be fiscal relief to the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures says the 50-state budget crisis is waning, but that governors still face a collective deficit of $35 billion in the coming fiscal year, which means there will be more layoffs in state capitals across the nation. The huge tax bill passed last spring included $20 billion for the states, but only because Congress insisted, and the latest Bush budget includes no such relief.

White House officials continue to defend the president's favored solution -- tax cuts. But as of February the economy had produced only one-eighth of the jobs that the White House promised when it sold Congress a new round of tax cuts last spring. And all of the new jobs produced in February were government jobs. Private-sector employment grew not at all.

Economists can't fully explain the long jobs drought, and most of them expect the job market to turn the corner any day. But that is small consolation to the thousands of workers who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, who have dropped out of the job market, who have endured the weakest wage growth in nearly 20 years -- and who expected a more prompt and effective response from Washington.

It is on that signal failure, the refusal to extend unemployment, that the army of the unemployed will vote this fall. There are someplace between 8 and 11 million of us, which is more than sufficient to turn a close election.

Appalachian Spring

CIA director disputes Cheney assertions on Iraq

By Jonathan S. Landay

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet on Tuesday rejected recent assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq cooperated with the al-Qaida terrorist network and that the administration had proof of an illicit Iraqi biological warfare program.

Tenet's comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee are likely to fuel friction between the White House and intelligence agencies over the failure so far to find any of the banned weapons stockpiles that President Bush, in justifying his case for war, charged Saddam Hussein with concealing.

Tenet at first appeared to defend the administration, saying that he didn't believe the White House misrepresented intelligence provided by the CIA.

The administration's statements, he said, reflected a prewar intelligence consensus that Saddam had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear bombs.

But under sharp questioning by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Tenet reversed himself, saying there had been instances when he had warned administration officials that they were misstating the threat posed by Iraq.

"I'm not going to sit here and tell you what my interaction was ... and what I did and didn't do, except that you have to have confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," Tenet said. "I don't stand up publicly and do it."

Tenet admitted to Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's senior Democrat, that he had told Cheney that the vice president was wrong in saying that two truck trailers recovered in Iraq were "conclusive evidence" that Saddam had a biological weapons program.

Cheney made the assertion in a Jan. 22 interview with National Public Radio.

I've been waiting for this story all day. I watched the hearing on C-Span, Tenet was subtle in the face of withering questioning. He didn't give Bushco the finger, he's got other ways of taking care of his people that can hurt a whole lot more than an upraised middle digit. If you are familiar with the backstory, you know that Tenet is basically accusing Office of Special Plans operative Douglas Feith of lying. Feith's name came up frequently during the hearing. The transcript isn't available yet, so what we have are the news stories.

Contrast his testimony with that of the virulantly ideological Wolfowitz, mentioned here yesterday. Tenet looked like grace under pressure, and Teddy Kennedy treated him like the devil incarnate. Kennedy in full cry mode can intimidate the Praetorian Guard. It was an impressive performance for both men, but it was essentially kabuki, symbolism of larger forces playing themselves out between the parties, the branches and the Washington press corps. Only Jon Landay seems to have noticed the tension in this balance of powers.

The kabuki is the public face of the larger dance of power. You won't hear about it in the NYT or the WaPo.

Pessimism

Experts Say U.S. Must 'Stay the Course' in Iraq
By REUTERS

Published: March 9, 2004

Filed at 5:07 p.m. ET

The task force of prominent foreign policy experts, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, urged that U.S. troops not be withdrawn from Iraqi cities until fledgling Iraqi security forces are better able to handle the responsibility.

The group, headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and former senior State Department official Thomas Pickering, also said the challenge of rehabilitating Iraq's oil industry has not been confronted, with accountability and financial controls deemed insufficient.

``The planned transfer of sovereignty (from U.S. occupation authorities to Iraqis) on June 30, reports of U.S. troop reductions in Iraqi cities and uncertainty about long-term funding have all raised questions about the U.S. commitment to sustain long-term engagement in Iraq,'' Schlesinger told a news conference.

Reporting the results of the task force's study, he cited concerns that ``we may not stay the course'' and will instead withdraw prematurely after ousting Saddam Hussein from power.

During the current U.S. election campaign season, President Bush and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry must reaffirm a determination to sustain a ``robust commitment to security and reconstruction (in Iraq)...for at least the next several years.''

He said the task force decided that the two candidates and U.S. Congressional leaders should ``declare that (U.S. and allied) coalition forces will continue to provide essential security until the Iraqi security forces can do so on their own.''

The experts found progress had been made in restoring Iraq's prewar oil capacity by raising production toward 2.5 million barrels per day but ``the situation remains fragile and facilities remain vulnerable to attack.''

With the phase-out of the U.S.-run civilian authority on July 1, the United States must move quickly to staff a new embassy in Baghdad, Pickering stressed.

I spoke with a contact in Baghdad earlier today: the situation is not improving and has deteriorated over the winter. The electricity situation is particularly bad. There was a report in the press last week crowing about all the improvement in petroleum pumped and hours of electricity. I didn't repeat the story because I was pretty sure it was DoD propaganda, and that is, in fact, the case.

I was pessimistic about US chances of accomplishing anything good for the Iraqi people and opposed the war. My worst predictions appear to be coming true. God help those poor people, since we don't seem to be able to.

Sources and Leaks

via Romanesko:

Washington Confidential
The Washington Post declares war on anonymice.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, March 8, 2004, at 4:41 PM PT

The Washington Post recodified the rules of engagement for its reporters last month, spelling out for newsroom employees the newspaper's policy on the use of confidential sources. The memo, promptly leaked to and posted by Romenesko, was supplemented yesterday (March 7, 2004) by a piece addressed to Post readers by Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. titled "The Guidelines We Use To Report the News."

The principles laid down in Downie's piece—which restates the Post's preference that reporters put sources "on the record" whenever possible, encourages his reporters to object to "background briefings," and directs editors and reporters to give readers as much information about confidential sources as they can—should be lauded by everybody who reads newspapers and observed by everybody who works for them. As Downie writes, the Post's goal is to "publish stories that are accurate and complete" in this era of "Internet-borne rumors, talk-show speculation and sophisticated spinning by newsmakers who want to influence how the news is reported while hiding their responsibility for doing so." In other words, Downie wants to smush a bunch of anonymice!

Yet his new diktat arrives at a peculiar time for Post reporters covering the leak-staunching Bush administration. As Ken Auletta reported in the Jan. 19, 2004, New Yorker, the current White House is the most secretive and disciplined of any in memory. President Bush holds fewer press conferences than the average president. When he does meet the press, he works hard to say nothing; his staff tends not to return reporters' phone calls, and if they do, they don't stray from the White House's official script. Mark Halperin of ABC News tells Auletta that Bush advisers regard the press as a "special interest, rather than as guardians of the public interest," a view that essentially gives them permission to "manipulate us forever and set the press schedule, access, and agenda that he wants."

Downie's reformulated policy would seem to spell disaster for his White House reporters, who hustle madly on this competitive beat to expose the inner workings of government. If Downie reduces the Post's reliance on background briefings and confidential sources, the White House will be all too happy to retail its confidential wares, such as they are, to other newspapers and news outlets. One obvious venue would be the Post's primary competitor, the New York Times. But the Times revised its sourcing rules last month (also posted on Romenesko) in a document that makes many of the same noises as the Post's about when, where, and how to use confidential sources. On the assumption that the Post and Times hold tough against the manipulative purveyors of confidential tidbits, surely the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, or the networks will dive for whatever swill the confidential sources are serving. Realistically, how long would the Post and the Times hold out?

The piece points out that some of the best coverage on Iraq and the missing WMDs has come from Knight Ridder using "blue-collar" sources and by WSJ, using multiple sources. The tendency to print leaked stores escalated during the Clinton years, with the Clintonites using leaks to test possible policy initiatives and political moves. It's gone through the roof in the Bush years, as getting anybody on the record for anything is almost impossible, and the deeper stories of administration mis-deeds have to come from leakers and whitleblowers. Watch the WaPo and the NYT carefully in coming weeks to see how their coverage is changed by these dictats.

Scare Tactics

Crossing the threshold
While we’re all fretting over the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is after much bigger game
BY HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE AND CARL TAKEI

Forget the hue and cry raised over the Patriot Act has distracted most of us from the Bush administration’s far more dangerous assault on another class of liberties, which might be called "threshold rights." After all, the Patriot Act can be rolled back if the people decide that the government has overreached or the emergency has receded, and some provisions of the act have automatic expiration dates. But threshold rights - fair elections, open and publicly accountable government, judicial review of executive action, the right of the accused to a public jury trial, separation of powers among the three branches of government, and the rights to free expression and free association - are structural, and therefore changes to them are more enduring.

Threshold rights enable civil society to know what government is doing and to rein in abuses. Think of it this way: temporary restrictions on some forms of privacy enable the government to know what you are doing, which is troubling enough. Threshold rights enable you to know what the government is doing, and that’s why they form the core of democratic society. The degree to which a society protects threshold rights speaks to whether it is free and open, and whether self-correction can occur without violence. If the press is free, the electorate has open elections, and the courts are performing their sworn duty, even a president who tries to assume the powers of an emperor can be dealt with.

Attacks on threshold rights supposedly justified by the "war on terrorism" are particularly menacing because this war has no foreseeable end, and the dangers are indisputably real. Nor will the war be contained geographically; as Ashcroft warned the House Judiciary Committee in June 2003, he now considers the streets of the nation to be "a war zone." On Ashcroft’s domestic battlefield, threshold liberties are indeed under grave attack, and none with more alarming success, at least thus far, than the right to judicial oversight of the executive branch, specifically the writ of habeas corpus - the oldest and most fundamental right of free citizens in the Anglo-American legal tradition.

THE WRIT OF habeas corpus (Latin for "you have the body") compels the executive branch to produce a prisoner and disclose the legal basis for his or her detention, so the court may decide whether that detention is constitutional. This procedure, which stems from the English Magna Carta of 1215, lies at the very heart of constitutional government, consisting of separated powers guided by the rule of law. Without habeas corpus, there is nothing to prevent the executive from locking a person up without charge or lawful justification, never to be heard from again. Known appropriately in English history as the "Great Writ," habeas corpus is the brilliant light that protects Americans from the gulag. In a world where many governments have the power "to lock them up and throw away the key," habeas requires the judiciary to keep a spare key. In fact, the check habeas provides on executive detention powers doesn’t stop with the courts: the US Constitution grants power to suspend the writ only to Congress, and even then only in the event of "rebellion or invasion."

The government’s assault on habeas corpus began six days after September 11, when Attorney General Ashcroft circulated draft legislation - what would soon become the Patriot Act - that included provisions for suspending the writ. As reported in Steven Brill’s book After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, Republican Wisconsin representative James Sensenbrenner, chair of the House Judiciary +, made it clear to the attorney general that habeas suspension was a "nonstarter" and that he wanted it out of the bill. The provision quietly evaporated from subsequent drafts, but Ashcroft has since pursued alternate means of circumventing habeas protections.

Some of the most fundamental changes are gaining ground through a strategy best described this way: start with the right test cases, keep the judiciary from interceding, and keep the press from learning too much by, for example, refusing to release the names of foreign prisoners and keeping case dockets under seal. If these changes remain below the radar of Congress and the people, and if they are left unchecked by our courts, it will be exceedingly difficult for fundamental liberty to recover even when the current crisis has passed.

Once threshold rights are stripped away, the only thing that stands between any of us and arbitrary imprisonment is the good will of the president, the attorney general, and the secretary of defense. Even if one trusts the judgment of the current occupants of these offices, to leave such power in their hands (and those of their successors) would violate the clear intent of the drafters of the Constitution. As Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote: "The historic phrase ‘a government of laws and not of men’ epitomized the distinguishing character of our political society.... [F]rom their own experience and their deep reading in history, the Founders knew that Law alone saves a society from being rent by internecine strife or ruled by mere brute power, however disguised."

This is serious and important but not without precedent. Reagan's Justice Department tried it, too. I was working for Morton Helprin (father of The Note's Mark, there's an apple that fell far from the tree), then the Director of the ACLU's Washington lobby shop. Reagan introduced an Omnibus Drug Bill in 1986 which tried to restrict habeus corpus, overturn posse commitatus and a bunch of other stuff. It took a full court press by liberal organizations to get the most odious parts of the bill deleted. If you remember those days, Reagan turned the War on Drugs into the Global War on Terrorism of the day, and hyped up as a threat to the republic on par with today's Al Qaeda and tried to scare people into giving up their civil rights.

The posse commitatus stuff is already happening, too: (it's WSJ and I don't subscribe, so this summery is via The Agonist

WSJ(3/9)Is Military Creeping Into Domestic Law Enforcement?

Several recent incidents involving the military have raised concern among student and civil-rights groups. One was a visit last month by an Army intelligence agent to an official at the University of Texas law school in Austin. The agent demanded a videotape of a recent academic conference at the school so that he could identify what he described as "three Middle Eastern men" who had made "suspicious" remarks to Army lawyers at the seminar, according to the official, Susana Aleman, the dean of student affairs.

As Sean-Paul says at the end of his entry: This is bad. Very bad.

The Crater Opens

Bush, House GOP at odds
Fissure revealed as tempers flare over Wolfowitz briefing
By Jonathan E. Kaplan

Tensions between the Bush administration and House Republican leaders flared last week when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz angered them by arguing that reducing President Bush’s proposed defense spending would be an unpatriotic slap at the military.

Wolfowitz’s forceful presentation was yet another symptom of an increasingly strained relationship between the Bush administration and GOP Congress.

Recent friction has arisen over such issues as immigration, the commission charged with investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, gay marriage, the pending veto-threatened transportation bill and a host of other budgetary issues.On those issues and others, the current congressional mood is to push back against what insiders describe as the White House’s heavy-handed tactics and demands for action simply because “the president wants it” or “the president believes it.”

Bickering over spending and budgetary needs between two branches of government, which have different incentives and even constitutional responsibilities, is not unusual, even between an administration and Congress controlled by the same party.

Some scholars note that it was not an accident that the Founding Fathers put the Congress in Article I of the Constitution, enumerating its various powers and duties, before getting around to the presidency and the executive branch in Article II.
“Congress and White House, there’s room for … or space there,” said Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), chairwoman of the House GOP Conference, who attended last week’s GOP leadership meeting. “It’s just the nature of government. We’re separate branches. It’d be a lot easier if we could agree on everything. It does not work that way.”

At the Wednesday meeting, Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-Iowa) and Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) voiced their displeasure with the tone of Wolfowitz’s corporate-like slide-show presentation.

A Pentagon adviser familiar with the meeting said that Wolfowitz was only guilty of attempting to make an aggressive push for Bush’s defense spending priorities. His presentation, some of his GOP listeners felt, would have been better directed toward Democratic ears. He stressed that there would be real costs to national security if large parts of the Bush blueprint were to be cast aside.

Told ya yesterday. When it shows up in The Hill, it's the real deal.

Paper Ballots!

7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots

By Ray F. Herndon and Stuart Pfeifer, Times Staff Writers

Poll workers struggling with a new electronic voting system in last week's election gave thousands of Orange County voters the wrong ballots, according to a Times analysis of election records. In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters.

Wide margins in most races seem likely to spare the county the need for a costly revote. But the problems, which county officials have blamed on insufficient training for poll workers, are a strong indication of the pitfalls facing officials as they try to bring new election technology online statewide.

"The principal of democracy is every vote should count. That's why we need a better election system," said Henry Brady, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and an expert on voting systems.

At polling places where the problem was most apparent because of turnouts exceeding 100%, an estimated 1,500 voters cast the wrong ballots, according to the Times' analysis of official county election data. Tallies at an additional 55 polling places with turnouts more than double the county average of 37% suggest at least 5,500 voters had their ballots tabulated for the wrong precincts.

Problems occurred in races throughout the county — including five out of six congressional races, four of five state Senate contests, and five of the nine Assembly races that are decided in whole, or in part, by Orange County voters.

Election officials acknowledged that poll workers provided some voters incorrect access codes that caused them to vote in the wrong legislative districts but said there was no evidence yet that any result was in jeopardy.

The real threats to the republic this year are the economy and voting fraud.

Palaces in Sand

U.S. Rushes to Prepare Embassy in Iraq

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 9, 2004; Page A20

The Bush administration is scrambling behind the scenes to finalize plans for a new Baghdad embassy that will require as many as 4,000 staff but, because of security fears, will remain headquartered in Saddam Hussein's former palace in the U.S.-protected Green Zone after the occupation ends, U.S. officials said.

The sheer magnitude of the embassy -- which will house the U.S. military command and administer an aid program more than three times as large as foreign assistance allocated to the rest of the world -- has taxed State Department and Pentagon planners who have been commuting between Baghdad and Washington in recent weeks, State Department officials familiar with the effort said.

"It's an overwhelming assignment, but it's now the number one job of everyone at State to get this done. Nothing is more important than getting this right," said a senior State Department official involved in Iraq policy.

The embassy will be the largest ever run by any country. Washington hopes to have it up and running by June 1, a month ahead of the June 30 deadline for turning over power to a caretaker Iraqi government. The goal is to prevent the chaos of a large personnel turnover at the last minute, the officials added. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority will retain its authority until the formal handover of authority.

The embassy symbolizes the transfer of responsibility for the U.S. presence in the capital from the Pentagon to the State Department after the occupation ends, U.S. officials said.

The Pentagon and the State Department have shared in the planning in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the divisions that left the United States with poor prewar planning to run Iraq after Hussein's government was toppled, U.S. officials said. Frank Ricciardone, an Arabic speaker who is the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, was brought home earlier this year to head the State Department transition team. Retired Gen. Claude "Mick" Kicklighter from Pentagon policy planning heads the Pentagon team.

I guess this is the Bush jobs program.

The Custom Look

via Suburban Guerrilla

I don't know which RNC surrogate organization is airing those ads which take a swipe at John Kerry's haircuts (a $75 haircut in Washington is just the going rate and no big deal, unless you are willing to put your locks into the hands of the OJT set at The Hair Cuttery) and his $250 shirts, but this was a dumb idea, Karl. Oxxford Clothes is where Bush gets his suits made:

President George W. Bush steps into the spotlight looking like a man fresh off the pages of GQ magazine. His black cashmere overcoat delicately drapes his shoulders, the blue stripe tie radiates against his white shirt and the suit perfectly fits his fit form. What a contrast after seeing Bush's hokey business and Western attire on the campaign trail. The 10-gallon hats and cowboy boots caused many fashion watchers to shake in their boots. But Bush's past style lapses are forgivable because, since his inauguration he's been wearing some of the best tailored garments --Oxxford suits.

The Chicago-based Oxxford Clothes is the gentlemen's club for the well-dressed. In the summer issue of Forbes' FYI magazine, Oxxford was appointed the best suit to own in the list of "50 of America's Best." The article touted the fact that the suits are still made by hand entirely in Chicago and that pattern pieces are individually cut from one piece of fabric.

The 85-year-old company with 350 employees has had its workrooms in the same location, near the University of Illinois at Chicago, since the late 1930s. It advertises in Town and Country magazine, the Robb Report and other exclusive publications.

The suits are sold in such stores as Bameys New York, Saks Fifth A venue, Louis of Boston and Neiman Marcus. Oxxford does not distribute outside the United States, but is working to establish distribution in Canada and the United Kingdom by 2002.

Oxxford has dressed some of the most powerful and famous men in the world, in addition to the current president, his father and former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Lyndon B. Johnson, mob boss Al Capone, Cary Grant and Edward, the Duke of Windsor. Hollywood stars Nicolas Cage in "The Family Man" and Jeff Bridges in "The Contender" were costumed in Oxxford suits.

When brothers Louis and Jacob Weinberg founded the company in 1916, they were determined to make the best suit. They used the finest fabrics and designed only simple, timeless shapes. This guiding principle ensures Oxxford continues to create top-notch garments for a price --$2,000 to $14,000 --that loyal customers are willing to pay. Oxxford produced 25,000 handmade garments and had $30 million in sales last year, according to Roger Parfitt, the company's chief operating officer.

Hardly off-the-rack at Brooks Brothers. How far did your tax cut go at Burlington Coat Factory or Today's Man?

America's Hollow Years

The brains

He masterminded George Bush's transformation from boozing brat to national leader, and has been called the most powerful adviser in the White House. Now Karl Rove is in charge of the $150m campaign to re-elect Bush. Who is the man the president calls his 'boy genius'? By Julian Borger

Tuesday March 9, 2004
The Guardian

In the autumn election season of 1970, a cherubic, bespectacled teenager turned up at the Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer in Illinois. No one paid the newcomer much attention when he arrived, or when he left soon afterwards. Nor did anyone in the office make the connection between the mystery volunteer and 1,000 invitations on campaign stationery that began circulating in Chicago's red-light district and soup kitchens, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" for all-comers at Dixon's headquarters.

As political dirty tricks go, it was minor league. Hundreds of the city's heavy drinkers and homeless turned up at a smart Dixon reception looking for free booze. Dixon was embarrassed but the plot failed to stop his momentum: he was elected state treasurer and went on to become a senator. But the teenager who stole his letterheads, Karl Rove, has gone even further.

Over the past week, Rove, now aged 53, has been in his White House office overseeing George Bush's $150m re-election strategy. The Bush camp was content to keep its powder dry while the Democrats were selecting their candidate, but now that John Kerry has been officially chosen, Republican campaigning proper has begun.

Steering it, and constantly at Bush's shoulder, is the president's "political adviser", Rove. The nerdy political brawler with only a secondary school education is now the man the president likes to call his "boy genius" - a testament to Rove's role in orchestrating Bush's rise from a feckless, hard-drinking politician's brat to Texas governor to president in barely a decade. And unlike other electoral svengalis who have gone before him, Rove has carried his power intact from the campaign bus to the White House.

"I think it's an enormous position of power, and it's hard to overstate. I think he's unique in the modern presidency," says Lou Dubose, a Texan journalist and Rove biographer. Rove's office is tight-lipped about the extent of his duties, but the few un-vetted memoirs to have escaped from this highly disciplined administration have all portrayed him as the single most powerful figure in it, with the (possible) exceptions of the president and vice-president.

"Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office," John DiIulio, a former presidential adviser, wrote in a notoriously frank email to a journalist from Esquire magazine, after resigning in 2001. "Little happens on any issue without Karl's OK, and often he supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out."

Earlier this year, for instance, Paul O'Neill, Bush's former treasury secretary, gave an account of a pivotal cabinet meeting in late 2002 to discuss a second round of deep tax cuts, at which the president apparently had second thoughts about focusing so much of the benefits on the wealthy. "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?" Bush asks, according to O'Neill's account. Rove brings the president back in line, urging him to "stick to principle". Rove won the day, and O'Neill was forced out of the cabinet.

By his own account, Rove's sights are set even further into the future than Bush's re-election. He has spoken about strategic shifts of power that happen every so often in American history. The precedent he often refers to was set over a century ago by William McKinley, another Republican with brilliant advisers, who narrowly defeated a populist Democrat (William Jennings Bryan) in 1896 and established a Republican hegemony that lasted more than three decades.

The Republicans now control the presidency, the senate, and the house of representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the supreme court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more red-blooded Republicanism.

To achieve that, Rove has to win the November elections for the Republicans. They have all the advantages of incumbency, but there is disillusion in the air over unemployment and the Iraq war, and a newly united Democratic party behind Kerry is making inroads in the polls. On the other hand, the Republicans have Rove, to whom no other campaign strategist comes close.

The Guardian, more than a little obssessed with booting Bush, dedicates the entire frontpage to election 2004 this morning. While I, like the rest of the American left, eagerly await the launch of the new Guardian weekly for North American customers, todays paper is, as they say, "a bit much." For North American and Oceanian readers, this is an interesting tour of the UK left mind contemplating our election. To say that the Brit left is ABB would be an understatement.

In this piece Rove is cast as Svengali. Given the mistakes of this White House, from Iraq to the 9/11 Commission, I think it is time to say that Karl Rove might be fine for the Bush league, but he isn't ready for the world stage. Looking back over the last four years and contrasting those with the political instincts of the Big Dog, what I notice is that Clinton actually governed. Why should we give Bushco another four years when all they've done for the last four is run for office? At some point in the process of governing, you actually have to have some policies. Politics alone is pretty hollow stuff. Call this administration "America's Hollow Years."

Advancing the Ball

Plugging Leaks
More details emerge on the Plame investigation, as Karl Rove's testimony is revealed for the first time.
By Murray S. Waas

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Juicy. This advances the ball a bit from last Friday's Newsday story on the subpeona's of the Air Force One phone logs. I've seen speculation on the discouraged left blogosphere that nothing will come of this investigation. I beg to differ. Career spooks just do not let this happen to one of their own. Joe Wilson himself is a bulldog of a man who isn't past showboating. As Josh Marshall and I have noted, with all the scandal investigations underway, Bush may simply self-destruct this spring. Couldn't happen to a better guy.

UPDATE:

Calpundit, the newly puissant Washington Monthly blogger, put up the same story, and I found this by the ever perspicacious grytpype in Kevin's comments:

I think the Special Counsel may be working on the theory that there was a conspiracy in the Adminstration to discredit Wilson by any means necessary. One of those means was to leak the name of his wife and her affiliation with the CIA -- and this means might have been agreed upon and discussed by the members of the conspiracy beforehand.

Pass. The. Fricking. Popcorn.

A Turn in the Weather

via BeatBushBlog

Study says Europe hit 500-year heat mark
19,000 died in summer of 2003

By Paul Recer
Associated Press
Published March 5, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Last year's deadly summer in Europe probably was the hottest on the continent in at least five centuries, according to researchers who analyzed old records, soil cores and other evidence. More than 19,000 people died.

Researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland collected and analyzed temperature data from all over Europe, including such climate measures as tree rings from 1500. They found that the climate generally has been warming and last summer was the most torrid of all.

"When you consider Europe as a whole, it was by far the hottest," said Jurg Luterbacher, a climatologist and the first author of a study appearing this week in the journal Science.

Luterbacher said the study showed that European winters also are warmer now. The average winter and annual temperatures during the three decades from 1973 to 2002 were the warmest of the half-millennium, he said.

Some studies have linked rising average temperatures in North America and elsewhere to global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but Luterbacher said his team did not attempt to make such a connection.

"We don't make any analysis of the human influence," he said. "We don't attempt to determine the cause. We only report what we find."

Other climatologists, however, say the new study agrees with models that have predicted a steady rise in global temperature as the result of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and other sources.

Stephen Schneider, a climate expert at Stanford University and a prominent proponent of the evidence that global warming is caused by man, said the Luterbacher paper is consistent with what climate modelers have been predicting for 20 years.

"The data is starting to line up showing that those projections were correct," Schneider said. "We warned the world that this was likely to happen because we believed the theory but couldn't actually prove it was happening. Now the data is coming in."

Here's a link to the BBC Climate Change page. This link takes you to the National Science Foundations Global Climate Change research page. They have links to many more sites.

Weather changes related to global warming are already well underway in North America. Learn more by following the links.

Bugman Bugs Out

DeLay to offer own Hill agenda

By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

On Wednesday, Mr. DeLay will take the extraordinary step of introducing his own set of legislative and policy goals, for this year and beyond. He said that while he was still working on the specifics, his proposed initiatives "will cover three basic issues: security, prosperity and family."

"We're trying to get people excited about being Republicans again," the Texan said.

One goal, he said, will be to re-establish what he sees as the rightful role of religion in public places, so that Christian, Jewish or Muslim symbols could not be barred from holiday displays in front of town halls.

Mr. DeLay said he will call for a doubling of the nation's economic output within 10 to 15 years, a goal which he says can only be met by cutting taxes, reining in government spending and reducing regulation.

"What Tom's doing is pretty refreshing," said Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana Republican. "The White House normally sets the agenda."

Mr. DeLay, first elected to the House 20 years ago, was a favorite of conservatives until he began taking flak for pushing some presidential initiatives that were anathema to many grass-roots Republicans, such as Medicare prescription-drug legislation.

"Tom's practice has been to defer to the president in his first term," said Mr. Pence. "And that's really been reflected in the leadership's policy in Congress."

As I said months ago, if W's fortunes turned south, Congressional Repubs would begin looking to put a lot of blue sky between themselves and the White House. Bush has angered his base with the big-ticket Medicare bill, the immigration amnesty proposal and the deficits as far as the eye can see. The Congressional Rs, particularly traditional conservatives like DeLay, have a base of their own they need to satisfying and are cutting themselves loose.

Things to notice: DeLay announced this publicly to the Moonie Times, which has been pretty critical of Bush, for the same reasons the traditional conservatives are. He could have done this quietly, but he chose not too. Once he announced it to the House R caucus, word would have leaked out, but this is a shot over the White House bow.

thanks to Bad Attitudes for the catch.

Poll in Context

Here is a conclusion of a fascinating article on the Bushes and Florida politics from the new New Yorker.

THE CUBAN STRATEGY
by WILLIAM FINNEGAN
Can Jeb Bush deliver the Florida vote in November?
Issue of 2004-03-15
Posted 2004-03-08

“Florida politics is deli style,” a national Republican operative who has often worked in the state said. “You have so many different groups—the Cubans, of course, but also seniors, Jews, all the other Hispanics, blacks, white veterans up in the Panhandle. The trick to winning Florida is to protect your blocs while slicing some votes off the other guy’s blocs. This year, for instance, W. could get significant Jewish votes if he handles the Mideast right.” John Kerry, conversely, could do well among the Panhandle veterans, who have voted Republican (while remaining registered Democrats) in recent years. “Obviously, the Cuban vote is critical to winning Florida,” the operative went on. “And the fact that W. might be weaker among core Cuban voters is going to make the state much more difficult.” Nelson Reyneri, a senior Democratic Latino strategist, recently told the Miami Herald, “If we peel off even a small amount of the Cuban-American vote, we win.” Every vote in Florida will count this year.

Karl Rove went to Palm Beach for a fund-raiser in January, and was followed the next day by the President. This was George Bush’s eighteenth visit to Florida since taking office. I went to watch the President at the P.G.A. National Resort, a “planned golf and entertainment community” in Palm Beach Gardens. It was a cocktail reception for “Pioneers,” who raise a hundred thousand dollars for the campaign, and “Rangers,” who raise two hundred thousand. People could also get inside by writing two-thousand-dollar checks at the door. (The event raked in one and a half million dollars during the four hours that Air Force One was on the ground.) Five hundred Republicans were on hand, milling about and eating finger food. Something was wrong, however, and it took me a minute to figure out what it was: there were no Cubans, as far as I could tell. It was strictly an English-speaking crowd—men who looked as if they logged a lot of time on the golf course, women in little white silk skirt suits and large pearls. I had driven only seventy-five miles from Miami, but I was in another country.

Jeb Bush, who is several inches taller than George W., introduced his brother. The President delivered a stump speech, listing his achievements and asserting his determination to win the war on terror: “We will not stop until this danger to civilization is removed.” He spoke for thirty or forty minutes, and toward the end of his remarks I realized that, though he talked in general terms about tyrants, he hadn’t once mentioned Castro, or Cuba, or Latin America. These omissions would have been unthinkable in Miami.

I watched Jeb Bush as his brother spoke. He paid attention, grinned and laughed, even ad-libbed when called upon. But he seemed abstracted. He didn’t seem out of place, exactly. These were, after all, also his people—Republicans, in his state. I had been observing him lately through the prism of one of his constituencies—the Cuban exiles—but he had many others, including some who, no doubt, didn’t care for Cubans at all.

What made him appear abstracted, I decided, was his seriousness, and the need to conceal it in this breezy setting. Jeb has always been the brainiest, most articulate male member of his family—he suffers from none of the dyslogia that afflicts his father and his brother. It is important that Jeb not overshadow George W. on the campaign trail. And it would also certainly be wise to be a relatively fresh face in 2008.

There was, it turned out, at least one Cuban at the Palm Beach Gardens fund-raiser. Mel Martinez, who recently left his post as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—he was the first Cuban-American to serve in the Cabinet—was, after the speeches ended, all over the room. He was busy shaking the hands of potential contributors to his run, which had just been announced, for Florida’s open Senate seat. By most accounts, Martinez himself had only recently learned that he would be running for the Senate. His political hopes had been focussed, rather, on the Florida governor’s job after Jeb moved on. But the White House had apparently taken a hard look at the Florida Senate field and decided that what the November ballot needed, in the Republican column, was a nice, big Cuban-American candidate. Such a candidate would pull a lot of Cubans out to vote, including some who might otherwise stay home. And they would presumably vote Republican for President, too. Mel Martinez liked his Cabinet job, but time was short, and now here he was, on the campaign trail, part of Karl Rove’s Cuban strategy.

This provides some useful context for today's squib in the Knight Ridder Campaign Blog:

Kerry gains support in Florida
Increasingly critical of President Bush on his handling of the economy and the war in Iraq, more Florida voters now say they plan to support Democrat John Kerry than to help reelect the president, according to a new poll.

- Peter Wallsten and Lesley Clark, Miami Herald
posted at # 9:59 AM

Character Flaws

Scalia's talk to antigay group spurs ethics questions

By Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, 3/8/2004

WASHINGTON -- As the Supreme Court was weighing a landmark gay rights case last year, Justice Antonin Scalia gave a keynote dinner speech in Philadelphia for an advocacy group waging a legal battle against gay rights.

Scalia addressed the $150-a-plate dinner hosted by the Urban Family Council two months after hearing oral arguments in a challenge to a Texas law that made sex between gays a crime. A month after the dinner, he sharply dissented from the high court's decision overturning the Texas law.

Some specialists in legal ethics said they saw no problem in Scalia's appearance before the group. But others say he should not have accepted the invitation because it calls into question his impartiality on an issue that looms increasingly large on the nation's legal agenda.

Scalia declined to comment on his appearance before the group.

Scalia's activities outside the court in two other instances -- both involving hunting trips -- have also drawn criticism for suggesting partiality on cases before his court. But the Philadelphia dinner May 20, unlike the other cases, shows him appearing to support partisan advocates on a hotly disputed issue.

The motto for Bushco: Ethics are for other people. However, even Scalia is pushing the envelope here. He recused himself earlier after he took a public position on the "under God" clause of the Pledge of Allegiance. Since he has now taken a public position on Lawrence, there is no way he should be sitting on the case when it reaches the high court.

Limits of Empire

It is axiomatic in the discipline of moral theology that intention matters in determining the morality of any course of action.

The lies that bind White House team to Iraq

ROBERT SCHEER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious.

It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President George W. Bush in justifying his pre-emptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud.

The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again, we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in pre-emptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana.

Let's add in another piece of dirty business: according to our Constitution, only the legislative branch has the right to make war. When Congress gave Bush a pass, it violated morality, good sense and law. The framers were very clear: a president is not a king, and one man alone should never have the power to make war. While it is clear that Bushco's conception of the American presidency is imperial, the Congressional Democrats allowed it. A republic may be a fragile thing, but its death will always come at its own hand.

Invisible Recovery

The Unrecognizable Recovery
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 8, 2004

A number of demographic groups are getting absolutely hammered. A new study by Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, found historic lows in the reported labor force participation of 16- to 19-year-olds. According to the study, "The estimated 36.8 percent employment rate for the nation's teens was the lowest ever recorded since 1948."

A more ominous finding was that over the past three calendar years the number of people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of school increased from 4.8 million to 5.6 million, with males accounting for the bulk of the increase.

The Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project, in a joint analysis of newly released data, reported a disturbing increase in long-term joblessness. Unemployment lasting half a year or longer grew to 22.1 percent of all unemployment in 2003. That was an increase from 18.3 percent in 2002, and the highest rate since 1983.

Among those having a particularly hard time finding work, according to the report, are job seekers with college degrees and people 45 and older.

"The new data," said Sylvia Allegretto, one of the authors of the report, "show us an economy that is just not generating enough high-quality jobs to get highly educated and highly experienced workers back to work."

The nation is in an employment crisis and the end is not in sight. The Bush administration has no plan, other than a continued ludicrous reliance on additional tax cuts. The White House continued to say on Friday that making the president's tax cuts permanent would be an important step toward solving the employment problem.

What is happening in some sectors of the black community is catastrophic. The Community Service Society studied employment conditions among black men in New York City. Using the employment-population ratio, which is the proportion of the working-age population with a job, it found — incredibly — that nearly one of every two black men between the ages of 16 and 64 was not working last year.

While horrific, the unemployment data for black men is not new and Herbert should have been writing about it for years.

What is new: long term unemployment among college-educated, experienced workers. I'm living with this right now. Two masters degrees and only three interviews in the last nine months, and I'm hearing the same thing from others in my age cohort. It's never been easy to be 50 and job-hunting, right now, it is terrifying.

As I wrote yesterday, this is a recovery in name only. The underlying fundamentals are weak.

Poverty in America

Rev. Jim Wallis speaks truth to power:

But in a new national poll, an overwhelming percentage of voters see it another way. A poll commissioned by The Alliance to End Hunger and Call to Renewal was conducted last week by a leading bipartisan polling group. Those polled were asked: "The question of values is sure to be important to many voters this November. As you decide your vote for president of the United States, which of the following would be more important to you: hearing a candidate's position on gay marriage or hearing a candidate's plan for fighting poverty?"

Those polled were a representative sample of likely voters - Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and diverse in racial and faith background. In the poll, an overwhelming majority of voters said that in deciding their vote for president, they would rather hear a candidate's plan for fighting poverty (78 percent) than a candidate's position on gay marriage (15 percent). The polling also showed that even in the midst of budget belt-tightening voters want Congress to strengthen anti-hunger programs. Traveling around the country as I do, I was hopeful about the result of the poll, but I didn't expect that 78% would see poverty as such an important values question.

Apparently, 12 million children still living in poverty is indeed a moral issue for most Americans. And apparently, the pundits are misreading and misrepresenting the people about what the most important moral issues really are. "Hunger and poverty are on the rise in our country and this poll confirms that voters want to hear more from political leaders about real solutions to these serious problems," said Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World and a founding member of the Alliance to End Hunger.

We must show that people of faith are united in believing that 35 million people living in poverty is a moral and religious issue that our political debate must address. We must articulate the moral issues of social justice, or others will define the values questions in much more narrow ways. The poll tells me that people are ready to hear another view. We have to make sure that they do. That is the mission of Sojourners and Call to Renewal this year - to insist that issues of poverty and hunger, war and peace, and the environment are moral issues that politicians running for office and the media covering the campaigns must recognize. Help us. Get involved. Go to http://www.sojo.net and http://www.calltorenewal.org for more information.

*The poll was commissioned by The Alliance to End Hunger and Call to Renewal and conducted by Tom Freedman, Bill Knapp, and Jim McLaughlin. Jim McLaughlin is a leading Republican pollster who works extensively with Republicans in Congress. Tom Freedman is a leading Democratic consultant and worked on the 1996 presidential campaign.

Wallis doesn't have the poll internals up on either of his sites, and they would be interesting to take a look at since the results are quite different from what we hear from the other polling outfits, including Pew, which is not afraid of ethics and morals questions. If this poll is a good reflection of actual voter attitudes, then it is refreshing to discover that poverty hasn't fallen off the public's agenda, even if it has disappeared from the radar screens of both parties.

Oil and Empire

Coup in Haiti
by Amy Wilentz

You will notice in the next few weeks that the Haitian people, who have been featured so prominently in recent weeks--those crowds demonstrating, or those bands of opportunists looting and pillaging, those people cowering as shots ring out or sprawled across a pavement--will fade from the scene, because they have been used to their full extent by the masters of the coup. Now the reconstituted Haitian army in all its machismo will maraud through the slums eradicating pockets of support for the deposed leader. The Marines are there simply to do the sweep-up if they can, and if they dare, given the the rebels' boldness. Now, according to a formulation adopted when Aristide was still in power, the international community will choose a committee, and the committee will select a "council of wise men," and those wise men will select a prime minister. Perhaps such steps will lead toward stability; without a leader, the Haitian people may be more easily convinced to accept the decisions of these committees and panels and unelected officials. But it's hard to imagine the foreign forces setting up a panel of elders while across the street, the new army's troops are burning artwork and shooting passers-by.

The groundwork for this coup was laid during the months when Aristide was first re-establishing his government. When the Clinton Administration reinstated Aristide, it too brought in the Marines, ostensibly for nation-building but also to make sure the reinstalled president didn't get up to any populist shenanigans: Clinton knew he was bringing Aristide back against the will of the Haitian elite, and the US President feared both another coup by the elite against Aristide, and then revenge by Aristide's supporters. So the Marines secured the transition back to Aristide and then remained for about a year and a half, during which time they did not disarm the Haitian army or the remainder of the Duvaliers' feared Tontons Macoutes. It was clear at the time that the Americans wanted to make sure there would be arms floating around that could be used against the Haitian government if need be.

One should be clear about the opposition in Haiti right now: although it includes some very good people, it is largely a group of malcontent career politicians, wealthy businessmen and ambitious power-seekers. It is exactly the kind of "civil society" opposition the United States encouraged and financed when it was attempting to remove Manuel Noriega in Panama. The Haitian opposition, too, was financed and organized during the Aristide years by US-funded groups like USAID's Democracy Enhancement Project and the International Republican Institute, an organization established in 1983 "to advance democracy worldwide." These have played a central and critical role in keeping an unpopular Haitian opposition alive and obstructionist. At every turn, the US-backed opposition tried to bring political life under Aristide to a halt.

It would be nice if Aristide were a saint. It's comfortable to take the side of a saint. But he isn't one. Many people died under his government who shouldn't have, and very few indeed are those who have been brought to justice for those crimes. But he didn't start out to be a brutal dictator: History and events and the international community and his own flawed character conspired against him. He does not deserve to suffer the same fate as Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, who was also nudged out by the United States and replaced by a military-civilian junta.

When push came to shove this time around, the Bush Administration, which paid lip service to the continuation in office of the democratically elected president, refused to send in the Marines until the president was bundled off and safely stowed away in the heart of Africa, under virtual house arrest. It's not surprising, after this long, sad history, that there are people who believe Aristide when he says he was "kidnapped." He was kidnapped, in effect. So was his presidency, and so was Haiti's attempt at democracy.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Chalmers Johnson's new book, The Sorrows of Empire. I'm listening to him on C-Span's Book TV right now. He just said, "No empire ever gave up voluntarily," and this seems to be a good time to be reminded of it. When asked what we should do now, he said, "Look into acquiring a condo in Vancouver."

Given that Haiti is looking more and more like a trial run for Venezuela, one of our premiere sources of oil, if I were Hugo Chavez, I'd be looking for a soft landing.

UPDATE:

From the Buzzflash interview with Johnson:

Our Senate and House are beginning to look about as bleak as the Roman Senate did when it simply gave up power and established a military dictatorship. To remind you, after the military dictatorship of Augustus Caesar, he was followed by Tiberius, who retreated to an island with a covey of small boys to enjoy himself. He was followed then by Caligula, followed then by Claudius, and finally, of course, by Nero. This is not exactly what you'd call good government. These Roman military dictators were among the most repressive figures on earth -- something that is well known to Christians who remember the history of the martyrdoms of the time.

In George Washington's farewell address, he pointed out that the rise of a standing army would ultimately unbalance our government in favor of the imperial presidency. And then, of course, most famously, Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961, in which he used the phrase "military industrial complex."

Smoke and Mirrors

via The Agonist.

Don't take mortgage advice from Alan Greenspan

The Fed boss says homeowners should switch to adjustable-rate loans and save the difference. His record is full of dangerous moments like this when he’s been way, way off.

By Bill Fleckenstein

Last week, Alan Greenspan was a study in contradiction. On Monday, he extolled the virtues of the levered-up homeowner to a credit union conference. The next day, in a speech to the Senate Banking Committee, he was singing a different tune altogether. Fannie Mae (FNM, news, msgs) and Freddie Mac (FRE, news, msgs), the giant providers of mortgage capital, he warned, "are expanding at a pace beyond that consistent with systemic safety," and that "preventative actions are required sooner, rather than later."

For a Federal Reserve chairman who has demonstrated that he couldn't identify reckless behavior if it ran him over, it was rather surprising to hear him chide Fannie and Freddie for their recklessness. (I should state, however, it’s an opinion I tend to share.)

His scolding might better be directed inward. What he advocated last Monday should send cold shivers down the spine of anyone so engaged. I already thought that what was going on in real estate was dangerous, but what he now cites as a good thing is not only dangerous, it will be disastrous -- guaranteed.

All hail, Al's paper trail

Before quoting from the above, I would just note that Greenspan's latest comments reminded me of a speech he gave on March 6, 2000, which I have dubbed "An Ode to Technology." In the speech, he waxed on about the wonders of technology and how it had brought us a new era and all that other stuff. Folks may not remember that date, but it was four days before the Nasdaq Composite (COMPX) hit its all-time high of 5,048.62. Despite the recovery over the past year ago, the composite is still down nearly 60% from the March 2000 peak.

This is not the first time Easy Al has been way off. On March 7, 2000, I wrote a column called “Alan Greenspan: Friend or Foe” that chronicled some of his prior quotes, speeches and the like. It includes his Jan. 7, 1973, utterance (right before the recession that ranks as our worst, at least until we get through the one we're in but haven't completed): "It is very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can be now."

That, coupled with his ode to technology and cluelessness about bubbles (which folks have seen real-time), is a pretty fair indictment.

My read: a grossly politicized Fed Chair is playing into Bush's fantasy economy. I've spent a lot of time reading the econobloggers to try to put the jobs data into some kind of context. Job creation is in the dumper and is going to stay there because of real weakness in the underlying fundamentals of the supposed recovery. The reality is that growth in the GDP has come from: productivity increases, inflation in equity markets, which are once again growing out of all proportion to underlying valuation and astonishing amounts of debt, financed by a soaring home price bubble. This is new debt which is not supported by real underlying value. It will take very little to knock this supposed growth off balance because it isn't real. This is genuinely terrifying.

The Dogs of War

Mr. Kerry concentrated on the military aspects of the situation in Iraq. As president, he said, he would use whatever force was necessary to protect the interests of the United States. But he promised, "I will never send our troops into harm's way without enough firepower and support."

He referred to Congressional testimony this week by the acting secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, that American troops were unprepared for the strength of attacks waged on convoys and soldiers and said that troops deserved "a true commitment to make sure they have the weapons and equipment they need as they put their lives on the line every day."

Mr. Kerry chided the president because some soldiers and their families had resorted to buying their own body armor, and he called for legislation that would have the government reimburse them for these expenses.

"What we face isn't a question of the budget," Mr. Kerry said. "It's a question of priorities and values. This administration has given billions to Halliburton and requested $82 million to protect Iraq's 36 miles of coastline, but they call this basic body armor a nonpriority item."

A soldier back from Iraq discusses the war and the U.S. soldiers fighting that war, the suicides, and much more.
Interview by Daniel Redwood

Q. What else is lacking in terms of training?

The type of training that you need for guerilla warfare. Some units get it and some don’t. Urban training is real tough. You’ve got to pick the enemy out before he picks you out, and you’ve got to know what spot to look for. OJT is not going to work.

Q. What’s OJT?

On-the-job training. It’s not going to work. And that’s what we’re going through now. It’s completely OJT. These guys are learning as we go along.

Q. To what extent do you feel that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have the proper equipment for what they face there?

We were supposed to have bulletproof vests, where we actually put the plates inside our flak jackets. We never got those. The money had been paid for those things, but we never got them. My brother had to send me a flak jacket. There’s all sorts of stuff that we had to buy on our own before we left. The types of canteens you need, water pouches that go on your back.

Q. These were not provided, or not sufficiently?

Right. We were given canteens that you hold on your side, but the kind that hold a lot of water, you need them, too. It can get unbelievably hot over there and you need to drink a lot of water. Also, the pack doesn’t work.

Q. What’s wrong with it?

It’s top-heavy. All the weight sits above head level. It doesn’t work. The weight should be set in the middle of your back, not above your neck. So you had to go out and buy another pack.

Q. Why on earth didn’t someone figure this out beforehand?

The military buys stuff from the cheapest dealer. We had to go out and buy boots. Not that the military boots are that bad, but they’re not the greatest boots in the world for what you’re going to be doing. And when you’re going to spend hours and hours and hours in a pair of boots, you want something that’s comfortable. So you have to go out and buy your own boots. To buy all of these things, of course, assumes that you or your family can afford to buy them, and a lot of recruits come from poor families.

Q. How is the overall morale of the troops in Iraq?

It depends on the day. When somebody dies, it’s really tough. It’s tough on everybody, because everybody knows it could have been them. Some days we have a good time. We’re Americans; we’re always going to find a way to have fun. We tried to play football one time, which is crazy in a war zone.
We’ve also had a lot of visitors come over and entertain us. Those days are great. But you never lose that thought in your mind that, hey, we’ve got to take care of business in a few hours.

Q. What did you think about President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit to Iraq?

I was there when President Bush came to the [Baghdad] airport. The day before, you had to fill out a questionnaire and answer questions, that would determine whether they would allow you in the room with the President.

Q. What was on the questionnaire?

“Do you support the president?”

Q. Really!

Yes.

Q. Members of the military were asked whether they support the president politically?

Yes. And if the answer was not a gung-ho, A-1, 100 percent yes, then you were not allowed into the cafeteria. You were not allowed to eat the Thanksgiving meal that day. You had an MRE.

Fair and Balanced

2004 presidential election offers voters real choice, not an echo

By Steven Thomma

Knight Ridder Newspapers

"The difference couldn't be more stark," said Susan Dunn, a presidential historian and co-author of a new book on George Washington.

Bush, 57, is a plainspoken, backslapping, peanut-butter-and-jelly loving Texan who enjoys watching baseball but prefers the solitude of running for his exercise. He launched a pre-emptive war in Iraq, favors suspending some legal rights for suspected terrorists, presided over soaring federal budget deficits, wants to extend tax cuts, backs free trade as an engine of growth regardless of short-term job losses, wants to partly privatize Social Security and wants a constitutional ban on marriage for gays and lesbians.

Kerry, 60, is sometimes aloof and long-winded, patrician, a French chocolate-eating New Englander who unwinds with the team sport of ice hockey. A Yale University graduate like Bush, Kerry served in combat in Vietnam while Bush served at home in the Texas Air National Guard. Kerry, a liberal, now criticizes the Iraq war he voted to authorize. He'd raise taxes on those who make more than $200,000 a year, expand health care to the uninsured, restrict trade to protect jobs regardless of higher prices for imported goods and leave it to states to ban or allow gay marriage.

The clarity of the choice is all the more striking when compared with the 2000 election. In it, Republican Bush and Democrat Al Gore aimed for the political center, muddling their differences as they vied for swing voters.

What changed to produce today's once-in-a-generation turning point?

As in the 1980 and 1932 elections, the political system experienced a shock.

In 1980, the country was suffering economic stagnation and the humiliation of its embassy personnel held hostage in Iran. Pious Democratic President Jimmy Carter offered a stay-the-course approach and painted Ronald Reagan as a dangerous radical. Reagan offered voters change, along with an easy smile and upbeat manner.

In 1932, the Great Depression was the shock. Republican Herbert Hoover was the stay-the-course candidate and Gov. Franklin Roosevelt of New York was the fresh, silver-tongued alternative. While Roosevelt sounded moderate as a candidate, he had a record as a government activist that he returned to after winning the White House.

In 2004, the country has been attacked and has lost 2.2 million jobs, the worst performance since Hoover's term. Bush's reactions to those shocks coaxed to the forefront a sharply conservative philosophy largely obscured in the 2000 election.

The Knight Ridder news service, particularly its Washington bureau, has been providing the most objective, least spun news on Iraq and the various Bush scandal investigations. With this piece, I think we can also be looking to them for some of the best coverage on the election campaign. It is a pleasure, for a change, to point out the media doing a good job.

Holy Spirit? In the house.

Hi, I'm back from Holy Cross Abbey, after a useful and productive day of meetings with monks and with Lay Cistercians. My spiritual community is in the process of writing and approving its constitutions and statutes--rather like the process of writing a mission statements and bylaws for a secular organization--and it has been a long, complex day and I'm very fried. With the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas days, I've update Bump everyday since our blogday inception, November 15, 2003. The only other day I've missed is the last Lay Cistercian meeting last month when I came home too tired to even try. I spent part of the day trying to explain the Internet blogging strategy to monks. Head, meet stonewall.

For a current events/public policy blogger like myself, any blogday takes about 2-3 hours of reading to identify and process the main news themes for each day befoire the first post is written. I normally start that process around 5AM but I can't do that tonight, it's late in the news cycle, and I'm just about out of gas, but I want to put a question up before I call it a night.

But it was an interesting experience to come home and read, all at once, all of your comments posted during my absence. The website sends me emails each time a comment is posted, so I read them in almost real time on ordinary days. Today I was struck by some themes which emerged when I read them all at once in aggregate.

You are asking for a couple of things which I hear a lot of other people asking for: current issues seen through the eyes of faith and reasons for hope and resources for staying sane, happy and on your game through the current crisis. I can do this, but I'm going to have to re-think how I construct my blogdays. I can do this, I think, and want to use the slower pace and lighter traffic of this weekend to begin the process. Today's meetings were about the minutiae of language and editing, as well as discovering the big, overarching meta-themes and the long drive out and back gave me time to think about this, both as it affects the Lay Cistercians, and how it relates to us here. The upshot is that you are probably going to be getting some theological reflections in this space as I re-tool the way I think about the news for this community. Some of you have asked for blatantly theological material that you can use to counter the stuff that your religious right friends, neighbors and relatives are forwarding by email. I'm thinking about all of this.

Blogs are unlike traditional media in that we have the ability to turn quickly, as the readership tells us what it wants. Since this is a vocation, not a job, a calling, not a profession, it can be whatever you want it to be. Tell me more. Here are the non-negotiables:

I'm a theological and political liberal who wants to find common ground with those on the right in both of those arenas. That won't change, and I assume most of you are in the same camp. We've built this house. I have a window on the way DC works that most of you don't have, and I'm a resource for you in that regard.

Tell me what you want to know, and how you want it told. I'm all blog-ears. You've been fascinating and surprising me since the day this blog went live. I don't expect that to change, but I take the Holy Spirit very, very seriously. She's been in the house since day one.

As the Neilsen Haydens have said, what's interesting about blogs is the comments.

The things you ask me and tell me change me. Take that seriously, too.

Open Thread

Saturday is going to be very busy. I have meetings most of the day. My little group of lay monks have big doings afoot. After tomorrow, I may have more news for you on that score.

In the morning, I have meetings with two of my brothers who live inside the monastery. Having monks for friends is a little different; they can't just drop by for coffee. But we do manage to spend time together; email is the modern monk's scriptorium.

This is an open thread. Discuss what you want and give me something to work with. This is your house, not just mine. Tell us what you are looking for.

The Lexus and the Noodlehead

Outsourcing the Friedman
by Naomi Klein

Thomas Friedman hasn't been this worked up about free trade since the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Back then, he told New York Times readers that the work environment in a Sri Lankan Victoria's Secret factory was so terrific "that, in terms of conditions, I would let my own daughters work" there.

He never did update readers on how the girls enjoyed their stint stitching undergarments, but Friedman has since moved on--now to the joys of call-center work in Bangalore. These jobs, he wrote on February 29, are giving young people "self-confidence, dignity and optimism"--and that's not just good for Indians, but for Americans as well. Why? Because happy workers paid to help US tourists locate the luggage they've lost on Delta flights are less inclined to strap on dynamite and blow up those same planes.

Confused? Friedman explains the connection: "Listening to these Indian young people, I had a déjà vu. Five months ago, I was in Ramallah, on the West Bank, talking to three young Palestinian men, also in their 20's.... They talked of having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all 'suicide bombers in waiting.'" From this he concludes that outsourcing fights terrorism: By moving "low-wage, low-prestige" jobs to "places like India or Pakistan...we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds."

Where to begin with such an argument? India has not been linked to a major international terrorist incident since the Air India bombing in 1985 (the suspected bombers were mostly Indian-born Canadian citizens). Neither is the 81 percent Hindu country an Al Qaeda hotbed; in fact, India has been named by the terrorist network as "an enemy of Islam." But never mind the details. In Friedmanworld, call centers are the front lines of World War III: The Fight for Modernity, bravely keeping brown-skinned young people out of the clutches of Hamas and Al Qaeda.

But are these jobs--many of which demand that workers disguise their nationality, adopt fake Midwestern accents and work all night--actually the self-esteem boosters Friedman claims? Not for Lubna Baloch, a Pakistani woman subcontracted to transcribe medical files dictated by doctors at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. The hospital pays transcribers in the United States 18 cents a line, but Baloch was paid only one-sixth that. Even so, her US employer--a contractor's subcontractor's subcontractor--couldn't manage to make payroll, and Baloch claimed she was owed hundreds of dollars in back wages.

In October, frustrated that her boss wouldn't respond to her e-mails, Baloch contacted UCSF Medical Center and threatened to "expose all the voice files and patient records...on the Internet." She later retracted the threat, explaining, "I feel violated, helpless...the most unluckiest person in this world." So much for "self-confidence, dignity and optimism"--it seems that not all outsourced tech jobs are insurance against acts of desperation.

Tom Friedman was once a pretty good writer. It's been all down hill since The Lexus and the Olive Tree, however. He has his little theory about how people operate and how the world works and prooftexts the evidence to fit his worldview.

The Gray Lady is looking pretty shoddy these days, with Friedman and Brooks gracing the Op Ed pages. It's a pity, when there are so many terrific writers out there in the regional papers. They've got Krugman, they get points for that, but the Brooksian hackery more than cancels it out.

Performance Report

Iraqi Hospitals on Life Support
Babies Dying Because of Shortages of Medicine and Supplies

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The stout woman, covered from head to toe in a black abaya, shuffled into the crowded hospital. She went straight to the emergency room and opened her robe to reveal a tiny baby wrapped in fuzzy blankets. The boy had been born prematurely, and the family was afraid he was going to die.

Uday Abdul Ridha took a quick look and shook his head. The physician put his hands on the woman's shoulders in sympathy, but his words were blunt. "I'm sorry," he said. "We cannot help you. We don't have an incubator, and even if we did, we are short on oxygen. Please try another hospital."

Scenes like this one at the Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad's Iskan neighborhood have become common in Iraq in recent months, as the health care system has been hit by a critical shortage of basic medications and equipment. Babies die of simple infections because they can't get the proper antibiotics. Surgeries are delayed because there is no oxygen. And patients in critical condition are turned away because there isn't enough equipment.

"We are dealing with a crisis," said Abdulwadood Talibi, director general of the State Company for Drugs and Medical Supplies, which is in charge of ordering all goods for the 240 public hospitals and 1,200 health centers in Iraq.

There are shortages of basic items such as cough syrup and also of critical items such as diabetes medications, anti-cancer drugs, intravenous lines, tuberculosis test kits and ventilators, say doctors and nurses at Iskan, the Medical City Center, Yarmouk Hospital and other facilities.

The U.S.-led occupation is preparing to hand over administration of the health care sector to the Iraqi government, perhaps in a few weeks. The Health Ministry will be among the first to have operational independence. Health Minister Khudair Fadhil Abbas said about 90 percent of the hospitals and clinics have been brought back to the same poor conditions as before the war but that the others will take more time to reach even that low level.
....
Doctors, nurses and Iraqi officials said some things have improved since the war -- especially the infrastructure of some hospitals and clinics that have been rebuilt. But in other respects, conditions are worse.

Damaged records, attacks on convoys carrying supplies, looting at central warehouses, inoperable factories and bureaucratic confusion have delayed repairs and the restocking of medicine and equipment. Some Iraqis also say the U.S.-led occupation authority's overhaul of the system for ordering and distributing supplies might have been too ambitious for a country reeling from war.

This is the easy stuff to get right. We aren't really doing anything right. This is the reason I do not fear an "October surprise" appearance of OBL--that would imply competence, and there is nowhere in the Bush administration that I see any kind of competence.

And now Bush wants to extend his incompetence into Haiti and maybe Venezuela. Kinda takes your breath away, doesn't it?

The Real Fight

You heard it here, first.

What Wal-Mart Has Wrought

By Harold Meyerson

Sixty thousand workers across Southern California either struck or were locked out. So many shoppers refused to cross the picket lines that the three chains lost more than $1.5 billion in sales. But late last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets' responsibility for new workers' health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers' health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. In the words of one union (but not UFCW) leader, the contract is "the beginning of the road to the Wal-Martization of the industry."

Like many of his peers, this union chief is livid at the industry, but he is also angry at the UFCW. For months the union treated the strike not as a national battle but as a regional one. The union did not organize community and consumer support groups that could have rallied against the chains; it was very slow to leverage union pension funds to go after the corporations' finances. In short, the union really had no plan to win the strike if the companies held out -- and since their outlets outside Southern California were unaffected, the companies could hold out better than workers subsisting on meager strike benefits.

In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.

Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn't the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation's most proficient organizing unions (there aren't a lot of them) announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries.

UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there: UNITE fought for 17 years before organizing J.P. Stevens, while HERE's successful strike against the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip -- a strike that ran six years, four months and 10 days without a single worker crossing the picket line -- is the stuff of union legend. But UNITE is situated in an industry that will soon move almost entirely offshore, while HERE, a union in an industry that is anchored in every American city, has more opportunities than it has resources. Their merger creates a powerful force for organizing and upgrading the kind of service-sector jobs that otherwise are being ratcheted downward.

Anyone who doubts the ability of these unions to transform dead-end jobs into productive careers should check out the improbable union city of service-sector America: Las Vegas. By organizing almost every Strip hotel, HERE has created an employer-funded training academy where maids and dishwashers can become cooks and servers and wine stewards, and a hotel workforce that makes enough to purchase new homes. The biggest housing boom in the nation today spreads across the Vegas desert and, as in Los Angeles a half-century ago, it is largely the consequence of unionization.

John Kerry walked a supermarket picket line in Santa Monica last week in the waning hours of the strike, pledging to provide the kind of health insurance that the new supermarket workers will sorely need and to change labor law to protect workers' right to organize. The Wal-Mart political action committee, meanwhile, has abruptly become the largest corporate PAC in the nation, funneling 85 percent of its congressional contributions to Republicans. The battle over the Wal-Martization of America has entered the electoral arena -- one more reason why Kerry has a strong hand in November's presidential election.

If you've been looking for additional reasons to boycott Wal-Mart, I think this gives you everything you need to know.

Scandal Round-Up

Josh Marshall's latest column in The Hill is a scandal round-up:

In September 2002, the White House was beginning a major press offensive designed to prove that Iraq had a robust nuclear weapons program. That campaign was meant to culminate in the president’s Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati.

But behind the scenes, a battle royal was shaping up between the White House and the CIA. On Oct. 1, U.S. intelligence agencies released to the White House and Congress a top-secret national intelligence estimate (NIE) that mentioned the Niger reports as well as claims about attempts to purchase uranium in Somalia and Congo.

Despite the NIE, however, the CIA clearly had grave concerns about the accuracy of the Niger story. And there was a wrestling match between the White House and the CIA over whether the president should publicly refer to it in his speech.

The struggle culminated in the two days (Oct. 5 and 6, 2002) before the president traveled to Ohio, when the CIA sent two separate top-secret memos to the president’s staff insisting that the references be removed from the speech. Fearing that even that hadn’t done the trick, CIA Director George Tenet personally telephoned Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley insisting that the references to uranium sales be removed from the speech, as they were.

Though none of this was publicly known at the time, it was clearly in that first week of October 2002 that the White House was most in need of some new evidence on the Niger uranium front. And on Oct. 7, within 48 hours of those memos flying back and forth between the National Security Council (NSC) and the CIA, an Italian businessman was offering those forged documents to a reporter in a bar in Rome.

To call that timing convenient is rather an understatement.

Was the source of those documents (or someone associated with him) privy to a high-level, secret dialogue between the NSC and the CIA? And if so, how and why?

Finally, there’s that pesky matter of the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee staff memos pilfered by Republican Senate staffers. We’ll know more when Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle issues his report. But even most committee Republicans now concede that the pilfering was potentially criminal.

The issue behind the memos is the highly contentious matter of judicial appointments. The strategy for those battles is quarterbacked out of the White House counsel’s office.

If GOP staffers had access to those memos, their contents almost certainly figured into their discussions with members of the counsel’s office, whether the latter knew it or not.

If Memo-gate leads to a criminal referral, that investigation will have to take a hard look at what folks at the counsel’s office knew and when they knew it.

To date, the White House has been able to blunt or delay investigation into these matters with disciplined scandal management and solid control on the hill. But once these investigations get into the hands of career prosecutors they become much more difficult to control. And each could each pop to the surface at what — for the White House — would be the most inconvenient of times.

Fasten your seat belts.

I'm with John Kerry. Terry McAuliffe should get off the AWOL story and get on the number of criminal investigations pointed at the White House. These aren't political investigations, like the ones the Clintons survived. These are criminal investigations, even if the media can't tell the difference.

UPDATE:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blog, The Stakeholder provides a list:

DeLay’s PAC investigation.

DeLay’s “Celebrations for Children” scam.

Memogate.

House and Senate Intelligence Investigations.

Valerie Plame.

The forged Niger-uranium documents.

Road to Ruin

Iraq constitution-signing delayed

Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 9:18 AM EST (1418 GMT)

The Iraqi Governing Council delayed signing the interim constitution to allow a period of mourning for victims of Tuesday's bombings.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's 25-member Governing Council gathered Friday to sign a transitional constitution, a legal framework to guide the war-wracked nation through the early days of sovereignty.

But a potentially serious, last-minute hitch delayed the event, scheduled for 8 a.m. EST, an official said. Several Shiite members of the council expressed reservations and don't want to sign the document until those concerns are worked out, the official said. The official did not say what the reservations were.

The council delayed the signing for two days out of respect for 181 people killed in the suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad and Karbala on Tuesday. (Full story)

Nope. This isn't a window dressing story. NPR is reporting that the Shiites have pulled out. Putting this situation out of the road to civil war is beyond Proconsul Bremer's abilities.

UPDATE:

The objecting Shiites also want the transitional government, which is scheduled to take power June 30 and hold it until an elected government takes over, to be headed by a five-member presidency instead of a single president as currently envisioned by the interim constitution. Under this plan, three of the co-presidents would be Shiites, one would be a Sunni Arab and another a Kurd, council sources said.

The Shiites fear that under the arrangement in the current draft -- a single president with two powerful vice presidents -- the authority of the president, presumably a Shiite, would be diluted by the two vice presidents, a Sunni Arab and a Kurd. The objectors therefore want a five-member co-presidency that would give the Shiites a clear 3-to-2 majority, sources said.

The five who refused to sign the interim document were Ahmed Chalabi, long a moderate ally of the United States; Abdul Aziz Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution; Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa Party; Mowaffak Rubaie, an independent Shiite politician who is close to Sistani; and Mohammad Bahr Uloom, a conservative cleric who is heading the council this month under its rotating presidency.

Chalabi in recent weeks has increasingly allied himself with Sistani, whose objections already have forced the United States to drop a plan for regional caucuses to select a national assembly that would in turn have chosen the transitional government. At this point, it remains unclear how the interim government will be chosen.

The five have been trying to get eight other Shiites on the council to join them, but so far their numbers have not expanded, council sources said.

Instead, they have been holed up in one room of the Governing Council building, and emissaries have been going back and forth between them and the other council members.

U.S. officials believed they had an agreement on the final document at 4:20 a.m. Monday morning, two days after the previous deadline for signing the interim constitution. A signing ceremony was set for Wednesday, but was delayed again because of a mourning period for the victims of a devastating series of suicide bombings of Shiite shrines in Baghdad and Karbala.

3,000 Dead=Bush Ad

So much news today. It's hard to know where to start, so I will arbitrarily start here, since it doesn't seem to need any commentary. Jim Capozzola has gotten moved into his new digs. Go say "welcome home." A fireplace in the bedroom? Grr...

Salon's Geraldine Sealey:

While 9/11 family groups say they'd criticize any candidate who plays politics with the terror attacks, Bush is, still, a special case. It does make a difference that he is the one plastering images of ground zero into a video montage. It's Bush, after all, who has stonewalled the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks. The White House has consistently failed to cooperate with the panel. The White House fought creation of the commission, and caved only under pressure. Bush didn't want to appear before the commission to divulge what he knew before the attacks. His latest offer, rejected as not good enough, was to speak for only an hour, and only to two people, the chairman and co-chairman. The panel just barely won a 60-day extension of its probe, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice won't agree to testify in public.

Bush's failure to cooperate with the commission only stokes the families' anger. Andrew Rice called it hypocrisy. "On the one hand, he wants to use 9/11 for political gain, but he's not even cooperating with the commission. There is pretty extreme bipartisan cooperation for the commission. Rice won't testify, but Sandy Berger [Clinton's national security advisor] will. Clinton and Gore will. We're looking for balance on both sides."

The firefighters, too, have their substantive beefs with Bush. The same president who has used firefighters' images to promote himself has also made cuts in fire-fighting programs that have infuriated the International Association of Fire Fighters. Now the group has passed a resolution calling on the president to pull the ads.

"Since the attacks, Bush has been using images of himself putting his arm around a retired FDNY firefighter on the pile of rubble at ground zero. But for two and a half years he has basically shortchanged firefighters and the safety of our homeland by not providing firefighters the resources needed to do the job that America deserves," said the group's general president, Harold Schaitberger. "The fact is Bush's actions have resulted in fire stations closing in communities around the country. Two-thirds of America's fire departments remain understaffed because Bush is failing to enforce a new law that was passed with bipartisan support in Congress that would put more firefighters in our communities." Schaitberger, it's worth noting, is a John Kerry supporter, and the IAFF endorsed Kerry.

Retired New York firefighter Tom Ryan also feels betrayed by the president. Ryan was off duty on Sept. 11, 2001, but he watched the planes hit the World Trade Center on television at home and was at the scene by 11 a.m. Like so many firefighters, he worked 24 hours at a time for weeks after the attacks. And like so many firefighters and others who spent too much time near ground zero when it was still a burning pile, the heroic work has left him with breathing problems.

Ryan is outraged that Bush and his Environmental Protection Agency said the air was safe at ground zero. "They lied to us," he said. "They told us it wasn't that bad down there. We lost 3,000 that day but thousands and tens of thousands will be affected by the air quality. No one could have protected us from that, but you could also have not lied about it."

That's why it's especially galling for so many to see Bush making 9/11 the centerpiece of his campaign. When they needed him, he wasn't there. Now he needs them, or at least the image of their tragedy, to win. And it's painful.

"It's hard to explain this burning in my pit that goes on," said Ryan, trying to describe how he felt when he saw the use of the firefighters' image in the Bush-Cheney ad. "It's hard to put that into words sometimes. You'd have to be stupid to say this wasn't going to go on. This is probably going to be the ugliest campaign we've ever had in this country. It's going to be coming from both sides, Republican and Democrat, and I guess if you don't have both sides questioning from different angles we'll never get to the truth. It's like going through a divorce: A woman tells her side of the story, a man tells his side of the story and the judge has to decide. We have to be the judges."

Methinks this year's election contest is a little more complex than that. Divorcing Bush might have something to do with 600 dead soldiers. That sort of thing rarely shows up in matrimonial disputes.

UPDATE: NYC resident Steve Gilliard on a New Yorker's reaction to the ads:

For a year, a full year, I couldn't pick up the Daily News without a story of a funeral. For George Bush, who was hiding on Air Force One while people were jumping from the towers in flames, it is revolting to use the dead as a campaign tool. How about Kerry run an ad with the maimed from Iraq?

It is so sad that they don't get it. So sad. Because every time that image appears, it rips the heart out of some family.

Lurking

This is too perfect, and Ahnold opened the door, which will never shut again. If you haven't sampled the novels of Kinky Friedman, you are denying yourself. DO NOT start one after 9 PM, you will be up all night and your bedpartner will ask you to move to another room because the bwa-ha-has coming out of you will keep them awake. And you won't be able to stop turning the pages, the man is both hysterically funny and completely terrifying. I never start a Kinky Friedman book after dark.

Race for Texas governor gets Kinky
B y JON HERSKOVITZ
Reuters News Service

MEDINA, Texas -- Unleash your inner Texan and vote Kinky.

Kinky Friedman, best-selling author, country music singer, humorist, friend of stray dogs and salsa merchant, is running for governor of Texas in 2006 as an independent. Friedman is the man behind the song Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed and author of the book Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned.
Friedman

For all of those wondering why the front man for the country music group The Texas Jewboys wants to run the Lone Star State, Kinky will put down his cigar and say from under his 10-gallon hat: "Why the hell not?"

"I want to fight the wussification of the state of Texas. I want to rise and shine and bring back the glory of Texas," Friedman said. "I am a writer of fiction who tells the truth."

Friedman, whose first name is Richard but is known by Kinky and a few other names that are not publishable, does not have a campaign platform -- mostly out of fear there may be a trapdoor somewhere underneath that will spring open and leave him swinging.

He writes a regular column for Texas Monthly magazine and is the author of 17 novels. His amusingly dark mystery The Prisoner of Vandam Street, comes out this month.

For those interested in the ways and manners of Texas, he wrote The Guide to Texas Etiquette, or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth.

Kinky, 59, is serious about the governor's race. He hopes to campaign as a populist who will use his colorful image while borrowing a page or two from the campaign of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to build a voter base.

"We are taking a page from Howard Dean and a page from Arnold. And now the thing doesn't seem so crazy anymore to a lot of people," he said in an interview.

Kinky, who was born in Chicago and moved to Texas as a child, has a salt-and-pepper mustache, under which sits an ever-present cigar. He has curly hair that is rarely seen because he almost always wears a cowboy hat. He dresses like a cowboy, but he accents his outfits with Hawaiian shirts or a Star of David medallion.

The campaign will be unconventional, irreverent and star-studded. "I just want to be as honest and as open as I can be. I will not kiss babies. I'll kiss their mothers," he said.

The Chron story is not taking this seriously. They are making a stupid error. The guy is seriously bright and has serious money and is a serious celebrity. Whether or not he eventually runs, he's going to frame the conversation. Good for our side.

You Don't Have the Vote if it isn't Counted

A Deafening Silence
by Brian D. Barry

I've always wondered what sound Democracy would make if it died.

Last night, I found out in Santa Clara, California. The sound it makes is a deafening silence, and it sent chills up and down my spine. This sound scared me more than anything I've ever heard in my life.
....
The last step in my voting exercise came after the polls closed. The poll worker opened up the voting machine from the back and removed what looked like a flash card (like what you put into your digital camera). The flash card said "128 MB" on it, which is a large storage capacity. This is like an electronic floppy disk and anyone in possession of it can modify its contents. Why did they choose a medium for storing the votes that can be modified?

When I was done voting, nothing came out of this "Direct Recording Electronic (DRE)" voting machine. But I had completely misunderstood the purpose of this exercise.

The purpose of this voting exercise wasn't to capture my vote.

The purpose of this voting exercise was to demonstrate to me the power that corporations now have to control the entire voting process from the capture of my vote, to recording it, all the way through the counting process. If the voting machine modified or deleted my vote, would anyone notice?

One company now can do it all. They have the Holy Grail. I was impressed but also horrified by this display of power, because unfortunately, that also means we no longer live in a democracy.

If the voting machine had generated a human-readable physical document showing my vote selections that I could visually verify, then hand carry over to the poll worker and hand to them and say, "here is my vote", I could then watch them place this vote document into a sealed and locked box, just like they did last fall when they were still using punched cards.

I'm not interested in a printed receipt to take home with me showing how I voted. This isn't a grocery store. I don't need to be convinced that the voting machine has captured my vote. I already saw my vote selections on screen. What I want to know is that my vote gets counted unmodified.

If the voting machine had captured my voting selections into a physical form that I could then verify and that I also knew, and this is the important part, that I also knew would be used to count my vote and would also be used in a recount if that were required. It's important that the physical output be used in the normal process of counting all the votes, not just used only if there's an audit. If the voting machine had been designed to do that, well then I would say, what a great improvement on voting this was. How much easier it is now to vote.

But that's not what happened. Nothing came out of the machine.

The voting machine sat there silently, without even the soft hum of a fan to remind me that it was a computer.

I was supposed to trust that this voting machine, which is a physical expression of the intent of the Sequoia Voting Systems Corporation to make a profit, was going to take good care of my vote.

Democracy isn't about trust. Democracy is about distrust.

It's ironic that Sequoia's web site quotes Winston Churchill's remark he made in 1947 that "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Democracy didn't just die last night in Santa Clara, California.

It was silently strangled. The noise was deafening.

Was I the only one that heard it?

Bev Harris is the animating spirit, investigator, plaintiff and media spokesperson for Black Box Voting. She needs some help in her campaign to make sure that electronic voting machines are made auditable with a paper output.

Well, I really REALLY need a laptop, because while I was stuck in California without easy access to my computer and modem (and my excellent media list), Diebold got to the press with no rebuttal and put an inaccurate spin on the lawsuit results. As a result, many people were misled as to the status of the suit and the nature of the decision.

They framed the lawsuit as an attempt to stop the election. It was not — it was an attempt to get a temporary restraining order (TRO) to mandate security procedures on March 2. The TRO was just the appetizer. The main course is the lawsuit, which seeks a number of remedies, and will take place after the election. The case is still very much alive. While we are disappointed that Californians may be forced to vote without procedural safeguards, that is a separate issue than the main lawsuit, which seeks to prevent Diebold from breaking the law and engaging in unfair and fraudulent business practices.

Can you help her get a laptop? Her PayPal button is here.

Risk Assessment and Catastrophe

via The Agonist:

Insurer warns of global warming catastrophe
By Thomas Atkins

Geneva(Reuters) - The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion (82 billion pounds) a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Centre attack annually.

"There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said in the report.

"The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe -- or it can avert it."

The report comes as a growing number of policy experts warn that the environment is emerging as the security threat of the 21st century, eclipsing terrorism.

Scientists expect global warming to trigger increasingly frequent and violent storms, heat waves, flooding, tornadoes, and cyclones while other areas slip into cold or drought.

"Sea levels will continue to rise, glaciers retreat and snow cover decline," the insurer wrote.

EXPONENTIAL RISE Losses to insurers from environmental events have risen exponentially over the past 30 years, and are expected to rise even more rapidly still, said Swiss Re climate expert Pamela Heck.

"Scientists tell us that certain extreme events are going to increase in intensity and frequency in the future," Heck told Reuters by telephone. "Climate change is very much in the mind of the insurance industry."

Over the past century, the average global temperature has increased by 0.6 degrees Centigrade, the largest rise for the northern hemisphere in the past 1,000 years, Swiss Re said.

In the short- and medium-term, simply knowing that the planet is warming will allow society to adapt, for example, through infrastructure to cope with more-frequent floods or by instructing farmers to use drought-resistant cereals.

In other cases, governments need to restrict risk-taking, such as approving housing developments in low-lying areas, and improve catastrophe management capabilities.

A couple of weeks ago, the The Observer got their hands on a secret Pentagon report on global warming, and the reaction to it was that it was a little, well hysterical:

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Like all insurers, Swiss Re is in the risk business. Risk assessment is even more critical for re-insurers than for primary insurers because their exposure is typically larger. Swiss Re would have developed their own warning through their own analysts, as insurers are typically conservative and prefer their own data. The fact that these two reports have come out within days of each other is worth paying attention to. Of course, Bush rejects the Kyoto Treaty, even though the US is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases. It's beginning to look as though this is no longer something we can put off into the indefinite future.

American mortgagors and insurers are already bracing for much more active hurricane seasons in the Atlantic. We have not had a cycle like the one predicted since the Atlantic coast became heavily developed. Local losses here for Isabel last September ran into the dozens of billions, and she was a pretty weak storm by the time she got here. Natural disasters are expensive in money as well as lives.

Leadership?

From the pen of The Prince of Darkness himself:

The disaffection is such that over the last two weeks, normally loyal Republicans -- actually including more than a few members of Congress -- are privately talking about political merits in the election of Sen. Kerry. Their reasoning goes like this: There is no way Democrats can win the House or Senate even if Bush loses. If Bush is re-elected, Democrats are likely to win both the House and Senate in a 2006 mid-term rebound. If Kerry wins, Republicans will be able to bounce back with congressional gains in 2006.

To voice such heretical thoughts suggests that Republicans on Capitol Hill are more interested in maintaining the fruits of majority status first won in 1994 rather than in governing the country. A few thoughtful GOP lawmakers ponder the record of the first time in 40 years that the party has controlled both the executive and legislative branches, and conclude that record is deeply disappointing.

But incipient heresy also reflects shortcomings of the Bush political operation. Its emphasis has been on fund-raising and organization, with deficiencies in communicating and leadership. The president is in political trouble, and his disaffected supporters who should be backing him aggressively provide the evidence.

The campaign's deficiencies in "communicating and leadership" are pretty much the same deficiencies of the Administration. What a shock.

Retreat from Modernity

Sidney Blumenthal connects the dots between Mel Gibson's Passion and Bush's base:

The neocons and the theocons were bound together in reaction against the 1960s for different reasons: the neocons by foreign policy, the theocons by their continuing fundamentalist revolt against modernity. Under Ronald Reagan, this coalition was held together in the crusade against godless communism. But George Bush is haunted by what happened next to his father.

The elder Bush won 35% of the Jewish vote in 1988, but only 11% in 1992. He had paid the price for his toughness in forcing the Likud government of Israel into the peace process that was continued by President Clinton. In 2000, the younger Bush won 19% of the Jewish vote. Fearful of repeating his father's fall, he immediately abandoned the peace process.

After September 11, Bush began extensive polling of Jews. "We have a figurehead at the top of the ticket who has the potential to catalyse a realignment," said Matthew Brooks, head of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Visions of carrying the entire east coast, including New York and California, and holding Florida for ever, danced in Bush's head.

Just as Bush stokes the culture war, Mel Gibson enters, sprinkling holy gasoline on the fires. Only in the combustible atmosphere Bush has fostered could Gibson's grand guignol version of an anti-Semitic medieval passion play, The Passion of the Christ, become the number one box-office hit. This is the ultimate Mad Max escapade: blowing up the cultural contradictions of American conservatism.

With his culture war the son is echoing another political error of the father, who alienated Jews and Catholics by permitting his 1992 convention to be used as a platform for the religious evangelical right. This latest revival is frightening Jews, cautioning American Catholics (overwhelmingly of the liberal John XXIII/Vatican II persuasion, and holding the same view on abortion as other Americans), and scourging mainline Protestants. The more Bush supplicates his base, the more he repels the others. Moreover, Bush is running against a Democrat who's a modern Catholic, with lineage to the oldest mainline Protestant families of New England and Jewish ancestry.

This political miscalculation at home is far outweighed by the disastrous consequences in the Middle East. With increasing desperation, Bush is campaigning on behalf of his various fundamentalisms in a crusade against modernity in America, his greatest war of all.

Here is the past Bush is retreating to, via History News Network (because the past is the present, and the future, too):

HNN Reading List: History of U.S. Interventions
By HNN Staff

Following is a list of books and articles that provide a history of U.S. interventions abroad. This list will be updated.

* Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War .

* Richard F. Grimmett, "Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1999" (Congressional Research Service Report, May 17, 1999).

* Richard F. Grimmett, "War Powers Resolution: Presidential Compliance" (Issue Brief for Congress published by Congressional Research Service, September 10, 2002).

* Max Boot, "Who Says We Never Strike First?" (New York Times, October 4, 2002).

* Max Boot, "Everything You Think You Know About the American Way of Fighting War Is Wrong" (HNN, October 7, 2002).

* Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold war World (Rev.;. Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

* Karen von Hippel, Democracy by Force: U.S. Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

* Alexander DeConde, Presidential Machismo: Executive Authority, Military Intervention, and Foreign Relations (Northeastern University Press, 2000).

* John Hillen, "American Military Intervention: A User's Guide," Backgrounder, No. 1079 (Heritage Foundation, May 2, 1996).

* Council on Foreign Relations, Humanitarian Intervention: Creating a Workable Doctrine (Brookings Institution Press, 2000).

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

AP Poll: Many in neighboring countries, Europe believe Iraq war increased terrorist threat

WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 3, 2004

(03-03) 22:59 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

A majority of people living in the two countries bordering the United States and in five major European countries say they think the war in Iraq increased the threat of terrorism in the world, Associated Press polls found.

In the United States, people were evenly divided on whether the war has increased or decreased the terror threat.

The AP polls were conducted by Ipsos, an international polling firm, in Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States.

While a majority in each of the countries polled except the United States said the terrorism threat was greater now, fewer than one in 10 in any of the European countries said the terror threat had been decreased by the war.

In Canada and France, just over half felt it had been increased, whereas in Germany, three-fourths thought the Iraq war has made the terror problem worse.

Concern about terrorism was very high in Italy and Germany, where about seven in 10 said they were very worried or somewhat worried, and especially in Spain, 85 percent, where residents also have to contend with domestic terrorism by Basque separatists. The high levels of concern about terrorism are probably linked to the recent history of terror in those countries, one public opinion analyst said.

"Italy and Germany were the countries most heavily affected by terrorism during the 1970s," said Christian Holst, director of opinion research at Ipsos Germany. "This kind of sticks in people's memories -- the older they are, the more they remember, and the higher the level of fear is."
....
The polls found that people living in all the countries except the United States have an unfavorable view of the role that President Bush plays in world affairs. Only in the United States did a majority, 57 percent, have a positive view of the role played by the U.S. president.

Just over half in Mexico and Italy had a negative view of Bush's role. In Britain, the closest U.S. ally in the war in Iraq, and in Canada, two-thirds have a negative view.

Sam McGuire, director of opinion research at Ipsos UK, said Bush's low ratings in Britain are notable, given that country's close alliance with the United States. Britain traditionally has been seen as the United States' "staunchest European ally on world affairs," he said, and long has been a buffer between the United State and Europe.

Three-fourths of those in Spain and more than four in five in France and Germany had a negative view of Bush's role in world affairs.

Remember that cultural disconnect between us and the rest of the world I was talking about the other day? Thanks to AP-Ipsos for running the numbers.

Ineptitude Writ Large

AITI:
Caribbean Calls for Independent Probe of Aristide Ouster

Peter Richards

Caribbean leaders ended a two-day emergency meeting in Jamaica on Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the removal of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office and into exile.

PORT OF SPAIN, Mar 3 (IPS) - Caribbean leaders ended a two-day emergency meeting in Jamaica on Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the removal of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office and into exile.

Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson, who is also chairman of the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM), stopped short of indicating the leaders wanted to suspend or expel Haiti from the organisation, although he did say they were not prepared to "deliberate in any of our meetings with thugs and anarchists".

Aristide fled Haiti on Sunday morning after weeks of violence sparked by demands from opposition forces and armed rebels who had taken control of the northern part of the country that he leave office because of corruption and mismanagement.

In the final days before he left, the United States and France also pressured the former popular priest, who became the country's first democratically elected president since independence 200 years ago, to resign.

On his arrival in the Central African Republic, Aristide telephoned a number of Caribbean leaders, including Patterson, to say he had been forced out at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and had no idea where he was being taken.

Washington has dismissed the allegation, but Patterson said the Caribbean leaders, who spoke with both Aristide and South African President Thabo Mbeki by telephone, were not convinced the Haitian leader had "voluntarily" resigned.

"Despite what we have heard in public and besides what we have learnt in private, we simply say that the situation calls for an investigation of what transpired and we believe that this should be done under the auspices of some independent international body such as the United Nations, which would clarify the circumstances leading to the relinquishing of the presidency of Haiti by President Aristide," Patterson said.

He added that CARICOM would use its membership in various international bodies, such as the Organisation of American States (OAS), to ensure the probe is carried out.

Patterson said what happened in Haiti constituted a "dangerous precedent" not only for Port-au-Prince but for democratically elected governments throughout the world, especially small states in the Caribbean.

Ya think? Busting up other governments seems to be a pattern. But I have to admit the overreach from Saddam to Aristide is breathtaking, while exceptionally stupid. I can only speculate on Bush's fixation on Aristide. The man was a marginally better leader than his even more corrupt predecessors. There is nothing to gain from this other than another quagmire and a replay of the failed interventions going back to Woodrow Wilson in 1919. There aren't any practical politics which makes sense of this, but this admin likes symbols. I'm damned if I can figure out what the symbol is here. Yikes, these people are inept.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Wilson Book Will Reveal White House Leak
Publisher's Weekly Newsletter

Tuesday 02 March 2004

The much-awaited May book from nuclear expert Joseph Wilson will disclose who in the White House he says leaked information that led to the outing of his wife as a CIA agent, PW has learned.

Sources say the embargoed title, The Politics of Truth, from Carroll & Graf, will reveal who tipped off syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA--a felony punishable by as many as ten years in prison--and the larger circumstances around the leak. The matter is the subject of a grand-jury investigation that has seen Novak, Wilson and a number of high-profile administration members questioned.

Asked about such disclosures in the book, C&G; editor Philip Turner did not deny that the book was specific. "I think readers who want the personality side will not be disappointed. He lays it on the line." As for the author's candor on the leak's larger circumstances, Turner says, "Without going too far, he sketches out a scenario of events that is convincing and plausible and very personal." Turner says the book has been vetted carefully and that the publisher is prepared to defend it.

The book, which will come out May 20, will discuss Wilson's career as a diplomat in Africa and devote three chapters to the time he served as the last American diplomat in Baghdad, in 1990. But the juiciest part remains the name game: Who provided the leak, and how. Novak cited two senior administration officials in his July column but has declined to turn them over to investigators. Wilson has been silent since the grand jury convened.

Wilson, a retired ambassador, came to prominence with a NY Times op-ed in July about the investigation he made on behalf of the Bush administration over a claim, first made in the State of the Union address in 2003, that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. In the piece, titled "What I Didn't Find In Africa," Wilson said that he found no evidence that the transaction had been attempted. Several weeks later, Novak reported that Wilson's wife was CIA. Another grand jury is meeting over the Niger findings.

A first-person account that Wilson is writing himself, Politics of Truth is expected to draw heavy attention, and has already lined up media such as Dateline. Turner signed it up for an advance reportedly only in the low five-figures at the end of September, just days before a criminal referral was given that empanelled a grand jury. In the book, Wilson reportedly describes the last eight months as an "existential roller-coaster that has not yet come to rest."--Steven Zeitchik

Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened ships on March 29. We've got lots of great election-year reading to look forward to.

Dark Thoughts

Wow. Todays Dreyfuss Report reads like Steve Gilliard:

How To Surrender To The U.N.
March 3, 2004, 10 a.m.

President George W. Bush has no choice now: either surrender to the United Nations, or lose any chance of being re-elected.

Iraq is unraveling too fast for the Bush administration to have any hope of salvaging the U.S. position there. Here's my suggestion for U.S. policy: announce a firm date for the pullout of all U.S. forces from Iraq, say, by the end of 2004; state clearly that the U.S. does not want any bases or forward positions in Iraq after that; send Colin Powell to the U.N. to start negotiating the U.S. surrender, asking for a U.N. resolution for an international peacekeeping force led by Arab forces in Iraq; give full authority to Lakhdar Brahimi, the capable U.N. official who has reluctantly taken on the Iraq portfolio, to design both the transitional authority and to organize the elections; and then fire the neoconservatives who got us into this mess.

The U.S. can't prevent the disintegration of Iraq now. Maybe—just maybe—the U.N. can.

But it won't happen with U.S. forces occupying Iraq. In a sensible comment, the Russian deputy foreign minister, Yuri Fedotov, said over the weekend that no elections can occur with U.S. troops overseeing them. "The participation of the UN can only happen when the occupation of Iraq is ended." Earth to Bush: take the exit ramp.

It has long been obvious that Washington doesn't have a clue what to do next in Iraq. They are hoping that Brahimi will come up with some sort of idea about how to organize a post-June 30 transition regime and how to organize elections. But unless Bush gives the U.N. actual authority—through a new Security Council resolution, after abandoning Iraq as the cornerstone of its ersatz empire—the U.N. won't have much incentive to go beyond suggesting ideas. Meanwhile. . . UN Not Happy With U.S. WMD Lies

The U.S. isn't making a lot of friends among UN weapons inspectors and Iraq experts.

Dreyfus is making some assumptions here that I'm not sure are correct. First, he is assuming that having the US out will quell the violence. With sectarian warfare breaking out this week on the holiest day of the Shi'ite religious calendar, the genie may be out of the bottle. Juan Cole, typically cautious, doesn't see civil war breaking out just yet, but:

that urban turmoil could break out. My point is that in Lebanon, where I saw the civil war with my own eyes, you had militias that marched in formation and engaged in set piece battles (often over tourist hotels, atop which you could position mortars and command the surrounding territory). The US and the Coalition armed forces can stop such militia battles. Even just a few AC-130s could. But if you got rioting between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk, those urban byways would be extremely difficult to police and that could be a major setback. The initial indications are that it is unlikely to happen, because all the Iraqi leaders are taking a very mature position, calling for national unity, and blaming outsiders. The problem is that there will be more attacks and sooner or later one may provoke rioting that spreads, at the level of the street, and becomes hard to control.

Next, Dreyfus is assuming that the UN could field a force large enough to adequately ensure stability. Under the current circumstances, that would require at least twice the troop strength the US currently has on the ground, and only the US has a force that size. It also assumes that the Europeans would be willing to put their kids in harm's way to bail out W, and that's one hell of a big assumption. It is in no one's best interests to see an Iraq in flames and civil war, but if we already have one cranking up, Dr. Cole notwithstanding, no one is going to be able to get in there and clean it up.

Backtalk

No, I didn't write this, but I sure wish I had. I'm giving it an original "post" format treatment because it is long and this will be more readable. There will be some fiddling around with formats for a couple of days as I get used to the new tools and look for ways to keep things readable. The redesign was done with the Middle Aged Eyes Readability Standard in mind.

Divine Words
A missive from the main character of The Passion to director Mel Gibson.
Tony Hendra

TO: Mel Gibson

FROM: Jesus the Christ

RE: My Passion

Mel, Mel, Mel,

Why do you hate me so? We're not five minutes into your movie before the high priest's men have punched out my lights, almost bisected me with a rope, and closed my right eye so that I look like Jake LaMotta in his final showdown with Sugar Ray Robinson. Then it's off to the flaying; once those Romans take over you really sock it to me. I get up already covered with bleeding welts, you cut me down; you turn my back into steak tartare, then turn me over and do my front. It makes the end of Braveheart look like the Three Stooges. And we haven't even gotten to the nails yet. But the cruelest cut of all: Did you really have to cast that talent-free pretty boy as me? Haven't we had enough soppy, doe-eyed saviors down the centuries? Especially since the poor kid has to act the entire movie with one eye shut.

Actually Mel, the Byzantine and Romanesque and Renaissance guys notwithstanding, I wasn't that pretty at all. Kind of short and dark and simian. Like Ben Stiller -- only funnier.

But, of course, what I actually looked like and said has never made much difference to people. It's a commonplace as old as the catacombs that everyone always remakes me in their own image; anyone who depicts me is actually painting a self-portrait. Even the guy who's writing this -- as he knows full well -- is giving me a certain non-Scriptural flavor to make his points stick. And it's not just writers and artists; everyone down the centuries and across the globe who believes in me, or has me deep in his or her heart ,or beside whom I walk, is really not walking with me at all but with an ideal of themselves, someone just like them but inconceivably better, a phony savior who cannot save them, with whom, poor things; they're locked forever in the cell of self.

You're no different, Mel. The Christ you flog and flay and strip the meat from, the one you chew the ears and lips of, the one you smash the nails through the helpless palms of --that's you, Mel. Because, for all the reasons that only you and I know, you hate yourself. Self-hatred drives you as it has driven so many self-flagellators and sunken-faced self-deniers, born-again, self-loathing sinners, washed in my blood, dripping with the precious blood that flowed from the bloody gash made in my side by the holy spear -- all those terrible and murderous images that sublimate the anger and savagery in their hearts. But self-hatred is still hatred, Mel, and the only thing I hate is hatred.

Your film, Mel, is far worse than anti-Semitic.(Though, as you're well aware, it is pretty anti-Semitic -- or at least not pro-Semitic.) Plus -- here's something no one seems to have picked up on: Your Satan is gay. Which I find offensive if for no other reason than that my 12 best friends were men. But the real problem is far deeper than these nasty, quotidian prejudices.

Your hymn to bloodlust, despite the unconvincing sops you throw to my true message -- that clunky love-your-enemies scene on the hilltop, for example -- is driven by the same terrible force that underpins all prejudice, that dark energy of the collective id that can in a nanosecond flip from self-hatred to unstoppable, brain-dead inhumanity. It's that raging Nietzschean hormone that floods through mind and muscle, making horrific brutality look like personal redemption, the one that fuels Sturm und Drang and blood and fire and the Cult of the Sang Real, all the deadly old rubbish you'll find in The Da Vinci Code and, yes, even that sweaty éclat of release and relief that finds salvation in a tent in Texas, supposedly in my name but really in a delicious vision of the horrific destruction and eternal torment of other human beings.

Call it what you like: conversion, revelation, the last days, jihad, the final coming of the messiah (or my second one, which I can assure you will not happen anytime soon) -- it's a vision of, and a yearning for, faith-based genocide. The truth is, Mel, your treatment of my passion is profoundly fascist. This is a film Osama bin Laden would (and may) thrill to.

That's because there's only a hair's breadth between fascism and fundamentalism. Both gloat over the bloody death and torment of their enemies. Both long for the earth to be cleansed of them to snowy whiteness. Both interpret with brutal literalism myths and symbols that, even when they first came to the cultural surface, were never meant literally. Both are precisely what I came to overthrow; it's their message of justifiable hate I sought to counter in everything I said and did -- including refusing to defend myself against deadly force. Because it is the fundamentalists of every major faith who are pushing your world toward yet another vast and murderous cataclysm, whatever your good intentions may have been, Mel, the last thing that world needed was another hymn to bloodlust.

Did I experience pain? Of course. Terrible pain. The scourging I was given -- routine for criminals in those days -- was nothing to crucifixion, one of the worst means of execution ever devised, a slow, panicked agony of asphyxiation as the arms were dragged by the body's weight from their sockets and the rib cage collapsed on the lower body. But my real pain -- as you were once taught, Mel -- was not physical. It was terrible gift of omniscience: the horror of knowing every act of violence and hatred, great and small, acts as innumerable as the atoms of the universe, that had ever happened or ever would. Including, Mel, the making of this horrific movie in my name.

Redemption is always possible, Mel. In the tradition of your faith, I'll set you a penance. It seems inevitable that you have a worldwide hit on your hands. All hits this big need sequels. So, having made a movie of the last 12 hours of my life, I instruct you to make one about the first 12 hours of my new life: The Resurrection of the Christ. (The film-school-level throwaway you gave it may well have that intention: It has all the skill of reminding us that Jason or Freddy is still lurking somewhere.) After all, the resurrection was the whole point of my going through the Passion. Let me know when you're ready and this time I'll breathe my true spirit into your hands and eyes. Till then, poor, sad, self-hating Mel, I send you all my love.

Sincerely,

Jesus.

Open House

So, how do you like the new place? Drop Reid a note and thank him.

Wishful Politics

Reality 1, Neocons 0
by William S. Lind

Haiti is in fact a fair test of the neo-cons' thesis, a thesis we are now putting to further trials in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their core argument is that history and culture simply don't matter. Everyone in the world wants American-style "democratic capitalism," and everyone is also capable of it. To think otherwise is to commit the sin of "historicism."

The argument is absurd on the face of it. History and culture don't matter? Not only do the failed cultures and disastrous histories of most of the world argue the contrary, so does our own history and culture. Democratic capitalism first developed in one place, England, over an historical course that goes back almost a thousand years, to the Magna Carta. America was born as an independent country to guarantee the rights of Englishmen. If England had possessed the culture of, say Mongolia, can anyone with the slightest grasp on reality think we would be what we are today?

While the neo-cons' thesis says nothing about reality, it says a great deal about the neo-cons themselves. First, it tells us that they are ideologues. All ideologies posit that certain things must be true, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. That evidence is to be suppressed, along with the people who insist on pointing to it. Sadly, the neo-cons have been able to do exactly that within the Bush Administration, and the mess in Iraq is the price.

Second, it reveals the nature of the neo-con ideology, which has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism (as Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is the negation of ideology). The neo-cons in fact are Jacobins, les ultras of the French Revolution who also tried to export "human rights" (which are very different from the concrete, specific rights of Englishmen) on bayonets. Then, the effort eventually united all of Europe against France. Today, it is uniting the rest of the world against America.

Finally it reveals the neo-cons as fools, lightweights who can dismiss history and culture because they know nothing of history or culture. The first generation of neo-cons were serious intellectuals, Trotskyites but serious Trotskyites. The generation now in power in Washington is made up of poseurs who happen to have the infighting skills of the Sopranos. If you don't believe me, look at Mr. Wolfowitz's book. Or, more precisely, look for Mr. Wolfowitz's book (hint: he never wrote one).

Perhaps it was America's turn to have its foreign policy captured by a gang of ignorant and reckless adventurers. It has happened to others: Russia before the Russo-Japanese War, Japan in the 1930's. The results are seldom happy.

Before we get ourselves into any more neo-con led follies, we should apply their thesis to a simple test: send them to Haiti and see if they can make a go of it, after the U.S. Marines pull out. If they can, I'll put my money in a Haitian bank.

Lind hits the nail on the head. I have some serious problems with Straussian political philsophy because it seems to me like a strain of gnosticism: it begins with an assumption, not rooted in fact or history, that possessers of "secret knowledge" are somehow of a different order of humanity than the rest of us. What utter nonsense, but nonsense which is enshrined in our cultural genetics, it seems. The Seven Habits is gnostic, as is the current "spiritual success=material success" doctrine preached in some of the Evangelical Megachurches these days. This kind of thinking is rooted in the very human attempt to think we are in control of our environment.

Vocation or Profession?

Rev. Dr. Andrew Greeley, Catholic priest, sociologist, crummy thriller author and Chicago Sun Times columnist, has an op-ed in the NYT today. He addresses himself to the Catholic Church child abuse scandal, priestly celibacy and manages to miss the point completely.

So where does today's negative picture of priests come from? In part, it's a relic of the anti-Catholic, anti-celibacy sentiment of 19th century nativism. In addition, priests themselves tend to be silent when their vocation is attacked, either by men who have left the priesthood or by the public over the crimes of the abusers. Indeed, their response to the latter is pathetic: my colleagues tend to feel sorry for themselves, to blame the news media, to assert that it is the bishops' problem, and to argue that it is not the most serious crisis facing the church.

Denial, research shows, is a major factor in clerical culture — the dark side of the priesthood. Just as teachers stereotype their students and doctors their patients, priests stereotype their parishioners. In response to an open-ended question in the 2002 Los Angeles Times survey about why the laity was growing disaffected with the church, 13 percent of priests said parishioners were suffering from moral decline, 10 percent cited loss of faith, 7 percent secularism, 5 percent apathy, 5 percent materialism, 4 percent lack of responsibility and 4 percent lack of "personal leadership."

Only 13 percent saw problems arising from failures of the clergy — sexual abuse, decline of confidence in leadership, poor sermons and liturgy, and clerical authoritarianism. Only 19 of the more than 1,800 thought that poor sermons were a problem. The mindset is clear: if the laity have religious problems, the fault is either their own or cultural trends over which priests have no control.

When asked in the survey why congregants leave the church, a quarter of priests (and only 16 percent of the younger clergymen) accepted some personal responsibility — insensitivity, inadequate leadership, poor sermons and liturgy, and the sexual abuse scandal. The rest cited the usual litany of horrors: individualism, secularism, no faith, poor prayer life, no commitment, media bias, hedonism, sex, feminism, family breakdown and apathy. In essence, three-quarters of the priests surveyed washed their hands of responsibility for Catholics who leave the church and excused themselves from an obligation to respond.

On the other side of the steel door that seems to separate priests from parishioners, the laity give their clergy, on the average, scores only about half as high as what Protestants give their ministers on preaching, liturgy, sympathetic counseling, respect for women and work with young people. In the 1950's, according to a study by Ben Gaffin Associates, 40 percent of Americans (Protestants and Catholics alike) rated the sermons they heard as "excellent." In 2002, according to the National Opinion Research Study, 36 percent of Protestants still found their sermons excellent, compared to just 18 percent of Catholics.

In addition to the abuse cases, the big problems in the priesthood, then, are not celibacy or sexual frustration, but the constraints on excellence in an envy-ridden, rigid and mediocre clerical culture that does a poor job in serving church members.