No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

bush shifts blame

OK. Yesterday Bush said that the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the carrier in his famous "War is over" speech was put up by the Navy, not by his advance people.

The president told reporters the sign was put up by the Navy, not the White House.

"I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way," the president said Tuesday. CNN Washington Bureau

Next Bush will announce "It was the Pentagon and Tommy Franks who decided to invade Iraq, not the White House. I know it has been attributed to the White House, but who in the White House could even conceive of such a plan?"
posted by Richard at 4:43 PM

 

McCain may be leaving the fold

As the Howard Fineman article in Newsweek says, while there is no love lost between McCain and Bush, McCain has continued to support the Republican President. But it seems to be getting harder for him. Take a look at what he said recently"

McCain, aides say, was rankled by what he saw as a useless, Panglossian classified briefing, especially after reading Donald Rumsfeld's now infamous internal memo. In it, the secretary of Defense said that Iraq would be a long slog, and admitted the government had no metric for knowing if it was making net progress in ridding the world of terrorists.

"This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam," McCain declared, "in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground. I'm not saying the situation in Iraq now is as bad as Vietnam. But we have a problem in the Sunni Triangle and we should face up to it and tell the American people about it. Also reminiscent of Vietnam, McCain said, was the administration's reluctance to deploy forces with the urgency required for the quickest victory. "I think we can be OK, but time is not on our side... If we don't succeed more rapidly, the challenges grow greater."

MSNBC reports today's bombings timed for the first day of Ramadan, and Bush characterizes it as proving the desperation of the terrorists because we are succeding so effectively and rapidly at rebuilding Iraq.

I guess we can tell how well we are succeeding by how many more bombs are delivered. More bombs per day equals greater success. Perhaps that is the metric Rumsfield was looking for in his now famous memo.

The administration seems to be trying to use its credibility to convince us that all is well. Unfortunately, after seeing how well they read Intelligence, it does not appear that they have any credibility left.

Apparently the Congress is getting no better information in its classified briefings than we are in the public out of the White House.

Bush really needs to get his act together. It has been clear for a long time that he focuses only on the November 2004 election, but the Iraq mess appears likely to effect that if something doesn't change. These bombings may even get his attention.

Unfortunately, I see no sign at all that Bush will get his act together.
posted by Richard at 9:06 PM

 

National Review Online starts new anti-semitic smear

Donald Luskin in National Review Online wrote this smear of Paul Krugman.

This is Krugman’s response.

THE SMEAR MACHINE CRANKS UP AGAIN (10/24/03)

Unbelievable The smear machine cranks up again. They’ve done it to me before, they did it to Joseph Wilson, and now they’re trying to do it again.

Now, if you believe these people, I am a paid agent of Mahathir, and condone anti-Semitism – maybe even the Holocaust. Too bad for these people that I’m Jewish – otherwise they’d claim that I was anti-Semitic myself. Anyway, on one of my many visits to Israel I was told that most of my grandfather’s relatives died in Treblinka, so you can take your moral outrage someplace else.

What about those links to Mahathir? Read my Slate piece about my visit in 1999. I guess it’s because of my close links to Mahathir that I wrote this:

“Mahathir can therefore claim a partial vindication for his economic heresies. That is not a political endorsement. Some right-wingers have claimed that anyone with a good word for Malaysian capital controls (me in particular) is also in effect an accomplice in the imprisonment, on what certainly sound like trumped-up charges, of Mahathir's former heir apparent Anwar Ibrahim--an advocate of more conventional policies. Well, I still remember the days when left-wingers used to claim that anyone with a good word for Chile's free-market reforms had bloodstained hands, because he was in effect endorsing Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The point is that economics is not a morality play. Sometimes bad men make good policies, and vice versa.”

Just in case you didn’t get it: I called Mahathir a bad man, putting him in the same class as Pinochet (who was responsible for killing thousands of innocent people), and suggested that he framed his finance minister.

After I wrote that piece, I received an abusive letter from Mahathir; when I get back (I’m in London right now) I’ll see if I still have it. And no, in case you were wondering, I have never received any money from Mahathir or the Malaysian government. And my trip to Malaysia was no more a pleasure outing than Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger; it was, as the Slate piece makes clear, an unpleasant professional duty.

Why didn’t my NYT column mention my own role in the capital controls dispute? Because it would have seemed like tooting my own horn, and wasn’t relevant to this article. Everyone who follows the subject knows the story; what would be the point of trying to hide something that everyone in the international economics business knows about, and that was the subject of articles in Slate, Fortune, and the NYT magazine?

By the way, one of the reasons I was so eager to find a way out of the Asian crisis was precisely my fear that a prolonged crisis might lead to widespread violence against the Chinese minority in southeast Asia. Like any Jew with a sense of history, I feel sympathy with all endangered minorities, and in 1998 the threat of pogroms against overseas Chinese (there are more Chinese in Indonesia than Jews in America) seemed very real.

They key thing to notice in this episode is the cynical way my attackers apply a double standard. Many people have written about the political motives that induce Moslem leaders to promote anti-Semitism; they aren’t accused of condoning that anti-Semitism. For that matter, people who try to analyze the rise of Hitler aren’t accused of being pro-Nazi when they try to understand his motives and those of his supporters. The reason I’m suddenly being accused of being soft on anti-Semitism has nothing to do with defending the Jews, and everything to do with trying, yet again, to silence my criticism of the Bush administration. *

What a disgusting episode. And what a demonstration of the sleaziness of these people.*

Krugman’s Editorial on the anti-semitic statements made by Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia.

*the bolding is mine, not in the original document by Paul Krugman
posted by Richard at 6:21 PM

 

Former Ambassador Wilson endorses John Kerry

Yahoo News

Thu Oct 23, 2:17 PM ET

By DAVID TIRRELL-WYSOCKI, Associated Press Writer

CONCORD, N.H. - Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq (news - web sites), endorsed Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) for president on Thursday. 10 23 2003

In a conference call with New Hampshire reporters, Wilson said he and Kerry have shared the experience of challenging their government — Wilson when he questioned the "rush to war" with Iraq, Kerry when he challenged America's role in Vietnam.

Wilson is, of course,Valerie (Plame) Wilson's husband and the apparently intended target of the White House leak of his wife's status as a CIA undercover operator.

I don't know how significant such endorsements will be in the Democratic Primary, but this reinforces the interest I had when several months ago a long-term career Intelligence analyst resigned from the White House National Security Council and announced that he was going to work for John Kerry.
posted by Richard at 5:57 PM

 

FBI Regrets bug was found during Philadelphia mayoral election

Yahoo News

Pennsylvania is likely to be a swing state in the 2004 election. The election of a Republican mayor in Philadephia this year could have a significant influence on the election results in 2004.

PHILADELPHIA - Acknowledging for the first time that the FBI (news - web sites) hid listening devices in the mayor's office, the bureau's top agent in Philadelphia expressed regret Wednesday that the discovery has created turmoil weeks before a mayoral election.

Speaking at an unscheduled news conference, Special Agent Jeffrey Lampinski offered an apology, but declined to discuss details of the federal investigation

An FBI bug was found on Oct. 7 in the office of incumbent Democrat John Street during a routine security sweep. Since then, agents have subpoenaed records from city agencies, searched the offices of at least two of the mayor's political allies and confiscated three of Street's computers.

The raids have prompted accusations by Democrats that the probe was launched by the Justice Department (news - web sites) to disrupt Street's re-election campaign against Republican businessman Sam Katz.

Lampinski denied those charges Wednesday, saying the timing was dictated by "the facts in the case," and was not of the bureau's choosing.

Three Democratic congressmen who have been critical of the investigation — Robert Brady, Chaka Fattah and Joseph Hoeffel — said they tried to arrange a meeting with Ashcroft to discuss the investigation but were rebuffed.

Lampanski could be telling the truth. The decision to place the bug in the mayors office at this time could be simply dictated by the facts of the case. Or this could be a major dirty trick by the Republicans to smear Street just before the election. Karl rove is known to have "discovered" a bug planted in his office just before a Texas election, but the FBI later stated that he probably planted it himself in order to discover it. The Republican Rove was working for won that election.

Right now we have nothing to help us decide which of the two options is true except the sterling reputation this administration has for honest and upright dealings and the way Ashcroft was so reassuring when the Congressmen went to talk to him.



posted by Richard at 5:36 PM

 

Leaking Valerie Plame's Name may have violated the Patriot act.

Sam Dash wrote in the Newsday that the high White House officials who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Bob Novak may well have violated the Patriot Act. The Act describes an act of terrorism as follows:

Section 802 of the act defines, in part, domestic terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state" that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population."

Clearly, disclosing the identity of a CIA undercover agent is an act dangerous to life - the lives of the agent and her contacts abroad whom terrorists groups can now trace - and a violation of the criminal laws of the United States.

And what about the intent of those White House officials in disclosing this classified information? Surely, this mean-spirited action on their part was for the purpose of intimidating the CIA agent's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had become a strong critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. And not just Wilson. By showing their willingness to make such a dangerous disclosure, the White House officials involved were sending a message to all critics of the administration to beware that they too can be destroyed if they persist. That apparent intention "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" - in this case American citizens - also meets the Patriot Act definition of domestic terrorism.

So now what the Bush administration people simply intended to be a bit of hardball politics appears to also be legally an act of terrorism under the (overly broad?) definition that they themselves had enshrined into law to make fighting terrorism easier.

Newsday

Samuel Dash, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973-74.

My source for this is Calpundit and he references Talkleft

posted by Richard at 5:01 PM

 

9/11 Commission Could Subpoena Oval Office Files

NYTimes

October 26, 2003
By PHILIP SHENON


ADISON, N.J., Oct. 25 — The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks says that the White House is continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are not turned over within weeks.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.

"That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."

He said that while he had not directly threatened a subpoena in his recent conversations with the White House legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, "it's always on the table, because they know that Congress in their wisdom gave us the power to subpoena, to use it if necessary."

A White House spokeswoman, Ashley Snee, said that the White House believed it was being fully cooperative with the commission, which is known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. She said that it hoped to meet all of the panel's demands for documents.

Mr. Kean suggested that he understood the concerns of the White House about the sensitivity of the documents at issue, saying that they were the sort of Oval Office intelligence reports that were so sensitive and highly classified that they had never been provided to Congress or to other outside investigators.

"These are documents that only two or three people would normally have access to," he said. "To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history.

"But I've argued very strongly with the White House that we are unique, that we are not the Congress, that these arguments about presidential privilege do not apply in the case of our commission," he said.

"Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it — anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as long as there is any document out there that bears on any of those theories, we're going to leave questions unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."

While Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the White House from describing the Oval Office documents at issue in any detail — he said the White House was "quite nervous" about any public hint at their contents — other commission officials said they included the detailed daily intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing.

Despite the threat of a subpoena and his warning of the possibility of a court battle over the documents, Mr. Kean said he maintained a good relationship with Mr. Gonzales and others at the White House, and that he was still hopeful that the White House would produce all of the classified material demanded by the panel without a subpoena.
"We've been very successful in getting a lot of materials that I don't think anybody has ever seen before," he said of his earlier dealings with the White House. "Within the legal constraints that they seem to have, they've been fully cooperative. But we're not going to be satisfied until we get every document that we need."

Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush received a written intelligence report in August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda might try to hijack American passenger planes.

Ms. Snee, the White House spokeswoman, said, "The president has stated a clear policy of support for the commission's work and, at the direction of the president, the executive branch has dedicated tremendous resources to support the commission, including providing over two million pages of documents."

After months of stating that it believed subpoenas to the executive branch would not be necessary, the commission voted unanimously this month to issue its first subpoena to the Federal Aviation Administration after determining that the F.A.A. had withheld dozens of boxes of documents involving the Sept. 11 attacks.

The subpoena appeared to be a turning point for the commission and for Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican known for his independence. In a statement on Oct. 15, the commission said it was re-examining "its general policy of relying on document requests rather than subpoenas" as a result of the issues with the F.A.A.

The commission, which has a membership that is equally divided among Republicans and Democrats, was created by Congress last year over the initial opposition of the White House. The law creating the panel requires that it complete its work by next May, a deadline that commission members say may be impossible to meet because of the Bush administration's delays in turning over many documents.

Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it's disgusting."
He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Interviews with several other members of the commission show that Mr. Kean's concerns are widely shared on the panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.
Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/national/26KEAN.html?position=&hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

posted by Richard at 12:46 AM

 

Republican Senator Pat Roberts blames CIA for Intelligence Failures

The finger-pointing and blame game is really getting hot in Washington now, because the public perception is that the White House misused Intelligence in order to influence support for their preemptive war against Iraq. Senator Roberts has reported that the problem is that the Intelligence Community passed flawed intelligence to the White House.

Knight Ridder offers the following:

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing a report evaluating why U.S. intelligence about the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to U.S. interests exaggerated the severity of the threat. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the panel's chairman, was quoted Friday as saying the White House was served badly by the CIA, which provided "sloppy" prewar intelligence.

Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller, D-W.Va., responded Friday by saying that Roberts was trying to "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies."

A senior administration official, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, said Roberts' CIA comments were issued with Cheney's encouragement. The official said Cheney is trying to shift the blame for the lack of progress in Iraq, which is becoming an issue in next year's presidential and congressional elections, from the White House to the CIA. The Roberts aide denied that encouraged Roberts to criticize the CIA.

Once again this administration is attempting to use public relations, the Republican right-wing lock-step lie machine, and misdirection to blame someone else for their own failures. Apparently Karl Rove is getting antsy about their image as they begin to count down to November 2004.
posted by Richard at 5:39 PM

 

The money from other nations doesn't add up

Josh Marshal has this to say about the apparent money to be provide by other nations to rebuild Iraq TMP

Much of the money is either loans, much of it forgiveness of prior loans which could not have been collected anyway, or as $1 billion of the $1.5 billion promised by Kuwait, money that has already been spent.

Kevin Drum of Calpundit provides a more detailed breakdown.

Like the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" it is primarily smoke and mirrors, designed to hide from the American People how much the Republican Folly is going to cost taxpayers.
posted by Richard at 3:31 PM

 

Republicans Report Up is Down, Black is White

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is going to issue a report that blisters the Intelligence Communiy's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued prior to the Iraq war. But they are going to ignore the way the White House used it.

Here is what Josh Marshall TPM has to say about it.

This NIE was done after the White House had already chosen its policy. And it wasn't even the White House that called for it, but rather Senate Democrats who were miffed that the administration had never requested an NIE.

In fact, the White House specifically resisted requesting an NIE because it didn't want the findings getting in the way of its policy.

So Roberts' claim that the White House was “ill-served” fails on chronology and simple logic. The NIE could not have failed the White House, because the White House didn't use it. Simple as that.

(The point of this NIE was not to frame policy but to sway votes in the Senate. And on that count, if one wanted to be cheeky, one would say the administration was served rather well.)

And why was the NIE so rushed? Because it was a double-quick affair rushed into print at the last minute to get Senate Democrats to vote for the Iraq resolution.

Marshall's source it this Washington Post article.

For background, go back and read Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on how the Bush administration has misused the intelligence system.
posted by Richard at 3:20 PM

 

Look for Republicans to scrap old rules that interfere with their arbitrary demands

Two recent articles seem to show what the conservatives are doing here. First is the New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh.
While it focuses on the administration's handling of Intelligence, what it says is that when the conservatives aren't getting the results they want, they are destroying the governmental systems that provide the unacceptable results.

Keep in mind that these systems are put into place to keep the government from acting arbitrarily.

The Texas redistricting is a similar conflict. The Texas Republicans didn't like any map that the Democrats would accept in 2001, so they blocked any map at all and sent it to the federal courts. The Court returned a map in 2001 that presented 21 majority Republican Congressional seats and 11 Democratic ones. But the voters in five of those Republican districts split their votes and re-elected Democrats even while voting for a Republican Governor. So the Repuplicans this year scrapped the once-in-ten-years redistricting tradition, and when that wasn't enough, scrapped the long-time traditional requirement for two-thirds vote in the Senate to pass the redistricting bill. Essentially they want it their way, and no rules are going to stand in the way of their arbitrary actions.

The second article is by Howard Fineman
about Rove's apparent strategy for the election in Nov 2004. He says Rove wants to make it a culture war.

"In Florida, at Gov. Jeb Bush’s urging, the Legislature empowered him to order the resumption of tube feeding to a severely brain-damaged woman named Terri Schiavo, who had been in a vegetative state for 13 years. The governor sided against Schiavo’s husband and with her parents, who wanted her kept alive. More important, Bush sided with anti-euthanasia forces, who share many ties and sympathies with those who oppose abortion."
As a family, the Bushes are making a political and moral statement: We are for the sanctity of life, as the Catholic Church defines it, and against legal powers that would extinguish it. (Except in the case of the death penalty, which the church also opposes.)"
If it sounds like a Holy War at home it is, and the Bushes are hoping that red is the color not just of blood but of victory."

Note the similarity to the Intelligence fiasco. Jeb bush is completely ignoring twenty years of legal, ethical and medical experience and arbitrarily doing things his way.

I think that Fineman has it right, and we are going to see a lot more of this for the next year.


posted by Richard at 5:02 PM

 

Why was US Intelligence on Iraq so bad?

Seymour Hersh has a new article on US Intelligence that explains a lot. It is an excellent article. Here are some excerpts:

" Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,?” the official said. ?“If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board."

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic?—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book ?“The Threatening Storm?” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was ?“dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d?’?©tat to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call ?“branches and sequels?”?—that is, ?“plan for what you expect not to happen.?” The official said, ?“It was a ?‘what could go wrong?’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What?’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don?’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow??”

The people in the policy offices didn?’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study?’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. ?“Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,?” the official told me. ?“You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.?”
excellentticle provides an excellant review of the intelligence problems, including the Plame Affair.

In essence, the people in the Bush administration came into office knowing Saddamhey needed to remove Sadaam from Iraq, so they searched for the information that made the case for what they wanted to do. When the intelliginformationes filtered the infornation to what was reliable, it did not make that case, so they began requiring the raw intellunfortunatelymselves.

Unfortunaltely, the raw intelligence was data that was not reliable. Then, note the story above about the study for what might go wrong if Chalabi went into Iraq and wasnTheaccepted by the Iraqis. the Bush people considered this planning to fail, rather than planning what to do it the main plan didn't work. The result was that when ChalaBatistat accepted and the Baathist government was eliminated, there was nothing left and nothing in the pipeline to substitute for the failed plans.

The brief answer to the question "Why was US Intelligence on Iraq so bad?" is that the Bush people didn't like the answers they were getting, assumed that the Intelligence Agencies had to be getting it wrong, so they eliminated the effective analysis process and stove-piped the data that supported the actions they wanted to take to the political decision-makers.
posted by Richard at 8:54 PM

 

Where the Conservatives want to take the US

Here is an editorial that starkly presents what the no-tax conservatives are pushing america to.

October 20, 2003
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
What Alabama's Low-Tax Mania Can Teach the Rest of the Country
By ADAM COHEN

MONTGOMERY, Ala.

The budget ax is swinging in Alabama, and the carnage is piling up. A hundred and fifty fewer low-income AIDS patients will receive life-saving medicines from the state. Fifteen thousand low-income Alabamians may lose their hypertension drugs.

High Hopes, a program that offers after-school tutoring to students who fail the high school graduation exam, is being slashed. And up to 1,500 poor children and adults with Down syndrome, autism and other disabilities will not be able to attend a state-supported special-needs camp.

The cuts are reaching down to core government functions. The court system is laying off 500 of 1,600 workers, from clerk's office employees to probation officers. The health department is losing investigators who track tuberculosis, and sharply reducing restaurant inspections.

Alabama's huge budget gap is a result of the voters' rejection, nearly six weeks ago, of Gov. Bob Riley's tax reform plan, which would have generated an additional $1.2 billion, much of it from undertaxed timberland. After the vote, Governor Riley was forced to cut most state agencies by 18 percent, and other recipients of state funds by 75 percent. Bad as things are, the impact is being blunted by a fortuitous one-time injection of federal funds. Next year agencies are bracing for a 56 percent hit. If the state cannot find more revenue — and Governor Riley is searching — it may be nearly impossible for basic services, including courts, prisons and police, to operate.

Alabama's disintegrating government is a problem, certainly, for anyone in the state. But it may also be a harbinger of where the nation is headed. There is a "starve the beast" ethic, currently fashionable among conservatives, holding that the best way to downsize government and end the social safety net is to get voters to demand lower taxes. But before we hurtle any further in that direction, we should think hard about whether we want the whole nation to look like Alabama does this year or, worse, next year.

Alabama is not a wealthy state, but its bigger problem is that it is not making an effort to raise the taxes it needs. It is 48th in the nation in state and local revenue as a percentage of personal income, according to Governing magazine. And it has the nation's least equitable tax system. Alabama's income tax kicks in for families of four earning just $4,600. Its property taxes are the lowest in the nation, Governing reports, and "heavily favor farming interests."

As a Republican congressman, Governor Riley strongly opposed tax increases. But when he took over the state government, he realized it could not run on the revenues coming in. He courageously offered up a tax package that raised the needed revenue while shifting the burden from overtaxed poor people to undertaxed business interests. But the package was defeated by a skeptical electorate, with many of the no votes coming from low-income Alabamians, whose taxes would have gone down.

The voters were not entirely wrong to be skeptical. No budget is free of waste, not even Alabama's meager one. There is a state tradition of legislative pork, patronage controlled by key legislators. And powerful lobbies, notably the teachers' union, have long gotten more than their share of state funds. But Governor Riley has already trimmed much of the pork. And next year, he will no doubt take aim at teacher benefit packages.

It is easy to sell voters on low taxes, and a well-financed campaign by Alabama's business community — aided, shamefully, by the state Christian Coalition — did just that. What is harder, but vital right now, is making the more challenging case for why taxes, and sometimes even tax increases, are necessary.

One message Alabama voters needed to hear more clearly was that rejecting higher taxes costs more in the long run. Saving $10,000 by denying medicine to a poor, H.I.V.-positive woman is no bargain if she ends up in a state hospital with full-blown AIDS needing $100,000 in care. Tutoring high school students in danger of failing is cheap compared with paying for welfare — or prison.

Alabama voters also need to realize that by entrenching their state at the bottom of the national rankings in taxes and government services, they are putting themselves on the margins of the new, global economy, and sabotaging their future tax base. Businesses looking for low taxes and cheap government will pass right over Alabama and head for Mexico. And companies that want well-educated, skilled workers, the companies Alabama needs to attract, will not locate in a state where high school students do not graduate, TB cases are not tracked and the restaurants may be hazardous.

The nation is facing precisely the same issues as Alabama. The Bush administration has tried to delude the public into thinking we can fight a war, rebuild Iraq, fix our schools, get prescription drug benefits and still enjoy the largest tax cut in history. But the deficit cannot grow forever. Eventually, we will have to pay more or, as "starve the beast" proponents hope, do with much less.

Last month, Alabama voted for fewer social services, less education, and a shoddier legal system — to become, that is, more like a third-world nation. But low as taxes are, the state will never be better at being an underdeveloped country than actual underdeveloped countries are. Alabama's best chance, and the nation's, is to invest in its people and civic institutions, the things that set America apart.

Governor Riley's setback last month is being hailed by national antitax forces as a great victory. But if Alabama heads into next year without additional revenues, students may have to learn without textbooks, prisoners may be released early, and people may start dying of preventable diseases. We should all pay attention, because if the "starve the beast" crowd continues to prevail in Washington, as goes Alabama so may go the nation.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
New York Times
posted by Richard at 11:00 AM

 

A Modest Prediction

Being from Texas, I am a moderate Democrat partly because I don't see Democrats doing the hate radio stuff or the Ann Coulter stuff. Al Franken did good research as far as I have been able to determine, and he is funny. Coulter, as near as I can determine, spouts nasty opinion and nothing else. I also consider Tom Delay to be whatever the secular for 'antiChrist' would be. [My thesaurus failed me here.] Ashcroft is as dangerous a man as America has ever spawned. George bush either represents or appointed them all (except, of course, Al Franken.)

Being a Texan, I watched Bush buy his way into office as governor and lie repeatedly to the electorate. Then I watched him do it again on the federal level. Since then I have watched him avoid the issues that Clinton considered important for no better reason than simply because they were identified with Clinton [not because they were not important] and cease to consider anything at the Presidential level important except getting reelected, appointing more ultra-conservative Judges to the bench, and cutting taxes no matter what the need the federal government had for funds. [the last is pure Grover Norquist.]

His creation of the most extreme deficit this nation has ever seen and his failure to deal with the economic problems of the nation and the loss of jobs to lower-cost nations should be enough to eliminate him from consideration for reelection all by itself. He simply has no clue.

His attack on Afghanistan was correct after 9/11, but then after that he walked out and has ignored it since then. It may well go back to the Taliban.

His preemptory invasion of Iraq is a farce as an anti-terrorist action. It has created more anti-American terrorists than it could possible eliminate and has stretched the Army to the point that the Reserves and National Guard will not recover for a decade. He will need to expand the Army or he will decimate it.

The financial cost to America will strain, if not severely damage, both Social Security and Medicare for the next twenty years at least. Saddam is age 68. Upon his death, Iraq could have been handled at significantly less cost, and his death wasn't that far off. While his sons would have tried to retain the power of their father, the uncertainty would have made the replacement much easier and cheaper, both in American lives and in dollars. In any case, it has NO connection to the 9/11 attack on America.

In the meantime, the degree to which the al Quada terrorists have been dealt with is certainly no more than if we had not invaded Iraq, and may very likely be a lot less. First, we have fewer resources available to deal with al Quada terrorists because so many are tied up in Iraq, and second, the many nations who object to the high-handed actions of the Bush administration are clearly not as likely to cooperate with this administration.

The Bush-administrations focus on terrorist-supporting ~nations~ is simpler than focusing on non-national terrorist organizations, but frankly is not as productive as focusing on going after terroists themselves. The problem for the Bush ideologues is that focusing on terrorist organizations instead of the nations who supposedly support them means using intelligence agencies, diplomats and special operations troops as the first line of action instead of our greatest (and most politically exploitable) strength - the military. The military is designed to use against enemy nations, not against non-national organizations. The ideologues of this adminstration do not appear to understand this.

This is not a time for ideologues. The problems are unlike those of the past, not easily handled using existing systems of government and society, and not easily described in political sound bytes. Unfortunately, our government has been taken control of by ideologues and the solutions they are offering simply don't match the problems WE are facing.

Look at the Democratic candidates for President. Eliminate Kucinich, Sharpton, Brown and (I am sad to say) Edwards. One of the remaining five will be our next President if we are lucky, because the only way Bush can win is by fraud.

A fraud at that level will result in American internal disruption that is at this time unimaginable. It is my prediction that a Bush "reelection" will result in civil strife on the level of that in the 1960's and early 1970's at least. Probably more.

We ~really~ need to get out and support the Democratic nominee, whoever it is. The alternative is just flat scary.
posted by Richard at 12:03 AM

 

Under God - Religious or not?

The Supreme court has agreed to take a case from the Ninth Circuit regarding whether it is constitutional for public schools as government institutions to require children to recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag including the line "under God."

The phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegience in 1954 during the height of the McCarthy period. New York Times

This must be a religious right-wing nightmare. The court has two choices. Either they can agree with the Ninth Circuit that children cannot be forced to say the pledge because it establishes religion, or they can state that the phrase "under God" has no religious meaning at all.

Neither choice seems to me to forward the efforts of the Christian right wind to prosetelyze those who do not agree with their extremist view of Christianity.

I see no way the religious right can win this case. This makes me wonder if the relatively liberal four justices decided to take the case to effectively stick it to them. If that is the case, then the decision will be decided by those four and Justice O'Conner. It will go whichever way O'Conner goes, as is so true on most decisions of the Supreme court under Rhenquist.

Another unusual part of the case is that Justice Antonin Scalia has stated that he will not participate in the case. This is probably his admission that he has prejudged the issue before hearing the case, but he gives no reason.


The full article is here:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 14, 2003
Justices Take Case on Pledge of Allegiance's Reference to God
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

ASHINGTON, Oct. 14 — The Supreme Court added the Pledge of Allegiance to the docket for its new term on Tuesday, agreeing to consider whether public schools violate the Constitution by requiring teachers to lead their classes in pledging allegiance to the flag of "one Nation under God."

The justices, who begin their daily session with heads bowed as the marshal intones "God save the United States and this honorable court," accepted a case that like the affirmative-action and gay-rights cases of the last term places the court at the center of a heated public controversy.

The case is an appeal by a California school district of a decision that has been the subject of an intense national debate since the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, issued it 16 months ago.

The Federal District Court in Sacramento initially dismissed a lawsuit brought by an atheist, Michael A. Newdow, who said he did not want his daughter exposed daily in her elementary school classroom to "a ritual proclaiming that there is a God." The Ninth Circuit overturned that decision, first ruling in June 2002 that the words "under God," added by federal statute in 1954, made the pledge itself unconstitutional.

In an amended opinion issued earlier this year, the court narrowed its ruling by confining it to the public school context, invalidating school policies that require teachers to lead willing students in the pledge. Ever since a Supreme Court decision on behalf of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1943, public schools may not compel students to recite the pledge. The Supreme Court indicated today that it would address only the recitation of the pledge in public schools, not its constitutionality as a general matter.

The Supreme Court's action today had several unusual elements that could have an impact on the eventual outcome. One was the decision by Justice Antonin Scalia not to participate in the case, an evident if unacknowledged response to a "suggestion for recusal of Justice Scalia" that Mr. Newdow sent to the court last month.

Mr. Newdow cited news reports of remarks the justice made at an event in Fredericksburg, Va., last January that was co-sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic organization that a half-century ago played a leading role in persuading Congress to add "under God" to the pledge. According to the reports, Justice Scalia's speech at "Religious Freedom Day" pointed to the Ninth Circuit's decision in this case as an example of how courts were misinterpreting the Constitution to "exclude God from the public forums and from political life."

Mr. Newdow, who is a lawyer and medical doctor who has represented himself in the litigation, told the court that the remarks indicated that Justice Scalia was not just expressing general views on the Constitution but had formed a conclusion about the case itself, providing grounds for disqualification. The code of judicial conduct and a federal law that incorporates it both provide that judges "shall disqualify" themselves in cases where their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

While these provisions do not technically apply to Supreme Court justices, the justices adhere to them and recuse themselves from cases with which they have connections through stock holdings or personal associations. It is extremely unusual, however, for a recusal to be sought or granted on the basis of a public statement of opinion on the legal controversy before the court.

Another unusual aspect of the court's order today was the suggestion that at the end of the day, this case might not be suitable for decision. The court instructed the parties to discuss whether Mr. Newdow has standing to challenge the policy of his 9-year-old daughter's public school district, Elk Grove Unified School District, near Sacramento. The girl's mother, who has custody and to whom Mr. Newdow was never married, does not object to her daughter reciting the pledge.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
posted by Richard at 3:31 PM

 

Where is the US heading economically?

October 14, 2003
Don't Look Down
By PAUL KRUGMAN

uring the 1990's I spent much of my time focusing on economic crises around the world — in particular, on currency crises like those that struck Southeast Asia in 1997 and Argentina in 2001. The timing of such crises is hard to predict. But there are warning signs, like big trade and budget deficits and rising debt burdens.

And there's one thing I can't help noticing: a third world country with America's recent numbers — its huge budget and trade deficits, its growing reliance on short-term borrowing from the rest of the world — would definitely be on the watch list.

I'm not the only one thinking that. Lehman Brothers has a mathematical model known as Damocles that it calls "an early warning system to identify the likelihood of countries entering into financial crises." Developing nations are looking pretty safe these days. But applying the same model to some advanced countries "would set Damocles' alarm bells ringing." Lehman's press release adds, "Most conspicuous of these threats is the United States."

O.K., let's run through some reassuring counterarguments.

First, economists are very good at devising models that would have predicted past crises, but each new crisis tends to happen where and when they didn't expect it. So even though our budget deficit is bigger relative to the economy than Argentina's in 2000, and our trade deficit is bigger relative to the economy than Indonesia's in 1996, our experience needn't be the same.

Second, nasty crises in third world countries have a lot to do with the fact that their debt is in foreign currency, usually dollars. As a result, when the peso or the rupiah plunges, debts explode while assets don't, and balance sheets collapse. By contrast, thanks to the special international role of the dollar, America's burgeoning foreign debt is in our own currency.

Finally, financial markets are generally willing to give advanced countries the benefit of the doubt. Even when an advanced country seems to be deep in a financial hole, lenders usually assume that it will somehow find the resources and political will to climb back out.

So is America safe, despite its scary numbers?

Third world countries typically suffer from institutional weaknesses. They have poor corporate governance: you can't trust business accounting, and insiders often enrich themselves at stockholders' expense. Meanwhile, cronyism is rampant, with close personal and financial links between powerful politicians and the very companies that benefit from public largesse. Luckily, in America we don't have any of these weaknesses. Oh, wait. . . . (Isn't that all history? No. According to The Wall Street Journal, we are again hearing warnings that "optimism is based on massaged earnings.")

Still, there's no question that the U.S. has the resources to climb out of its financial hole. The question is whether it has the political will.

There is now a huge structural gap — that is, a gap that won't go away even if the economy recovers — between U.S. spending and revenue. For the time being, borrowing can fill that gap. But eventually there must be either a large tax increase or major cuts in popular programs. If our political system can't bring itself to choose one alternative or the other — and so far the commander in chief refuses even to admit that we have a problem — we will eventually face a nasty financial crisis.

The crisis won't come immediately. For a few years, America will still be able to borrow freely, simply because lenders assume that things will somehow work out.

But at a certain point we'll have a Wile E. Coyote moment. For those not familiar with the Road Runner cartoons, Mr. Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet. Only then would he plunge.

What will that plunge look like? It will certainly involve a sharp fall in the dollar and a sharp rise in interest rates. In the worst-case scenario, the government's access to borrowing will be cut off, creating a cash crisis that throws the nation into chaos.

I know: it all sounds unbelievable. But would you have believed, three years ago, that the U.S. budget would plunge so quickly from a record surplus to a record deficit? And would you have believed that, confronted with that plunge, our leaders would offer excuses rather than solutions?



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

posted by Richard at 1:50 PM

 

Bush is the worst President the US has Ever Had!

Atlantic Unbound | September 24, 2003

Politics & Prose | by Jack Beatty

"A Miserable Failure"

Will Bush be re-elected? Only if voters wittingly ignore his long list of failures while in office

.....

ith one phrase Dick Gephardt has defined the issue to be decided next November. Can a "miserable failure" of a president win re-election? Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on." Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Even Republicans must be capable of applying a cost-benefit analysis to this record of miserable failure. Their tax cuts on one side, the burden of Bush-begotten debt on their children on the other. And surely even Republicans breathe the air befouled by those power plants. I have it on good authority that the conservatives in the party do as well. Surely they must question the judgment of a President who proposes to turn Iraq into what James Fallows calls "the fifty-first state" in order to bring democracy to the Middle East—the kind of do-gooder fantasy conservatives have long ridiculed in liberals.

But the election won't be decided by Republicans and conservatives. Most will sacrifice independent judgment to ideology or party and vote for Bush. No, swing voters will pick the next President. They vote the man not the party, character not ideology. Many voted for Bush in 2000 because they liked him better than Al Gore—applying the standards of product acceptability to a job that entrusts its holder with the power to blow up the planet. Well, do they still "like" Bush? I fear many do. After all, he has spared them the embarrassment of having to discuss sex with their children. Swing voters like Bush's "image" as a strong leader, a CNN pundit claims. Are they incapable of looking behind that image and seeing the weak President who stayed away from the White House on September 11 because his Vice President said it was not safe for him to be there and whose PR people lied to cover up his failure of leadership? John F. Kennedy, as R. W. Apple wrote on the front page of The New York Times on September 12, remained in the White House throughout the Cuban missile crisis knowing that it would be hit in any nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

The Founders feared that the republic would succumb to corruption without republican citizenship—without citizens who could transcend privatism and hold elected officials to account, demanding probity and competence, and judging their performance against both the clamorous necessities of the time and the mute claims of posterity. They made property a criterion for voting because it secured a measure of economic independence. Property-less wage laborers, they feared, would vote as their employers instructed them to. The extension of democracy to those who could not rise to the responsibilities of republican freedom would corrupt the republic—hasten its decay into oligarchy or mob rule.

For all their worldliness the Founders were naïve to regard property as a shield of incorruptibility or the property-less as inherently corruptible. Their core insight, however, remains valid. A republic can be corrupted at the top and bottom, by leaders and led. The re-election of George W. Bush would signal that a kind of corruption had set in among the led. Our miserable failure as republican citizens would match his as President.


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/polipro/pp2003-09-24.htm.





posted by Richard at 3:16 PM

 

The Plame Affair

Here is a website with a list of source documents on the Plame affair. It is recommended by Kevin Drum at Calpundit.
The Parks Department

I haven't looked at everything in it yet, so I do not attest to its comprehensiveness myself.
posted by Richard at 12:43 PM

 

The Washington Post on the Plame Affair

The article below is a sidebar in addition to the article published by the Washington Post October 12, 2003.
Read this overview (below) first, then go to the main article on the Washington Post website.

For Kevin Drum's comments on the article, go to CalPundint.

For Josh Marshall's comments go to Talking Points Memo.

The Washington Post is doing really good reporting on this issue.
====

The Leak and Its Consequences
A Guide to the Scandal
The Washington Post

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 1, 2003; 2:31 PM


Why is the story breaking now? Why didn't the story become news when Robert D. Novak wrote his July 14 column?

Some reporters did report on the exposure of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a CIA operative back in July. For example, Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce, reporters for Newsday in New York reported on Novak's column They quoted Wilson as saying that he regarded the mention of his wife as an effort to "intimidate" him for his criticism of President Bush's claim that Iraq had attempted to buy nuclear material from the African country of Niger.

Novak's original column, entitled Mission to Niger, also stoked critical commentary from liberal columnists such as The Nation's David Corn and the New York Times' Paul Krugman.

But the story, in the judgment of Washington editors, did not generate much follow-up coverage because they did not yet know that CIA Director George J. Tenet had asked the Justice Department to look into the matter for possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

The story turned a corner on the evening of Sept. 26, when MSNBC.com. and NBC News broke the news of the CIA's request to the Justice Department.

In the opinion of Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, "The truth is, the press blew it on this one. The story was out there and very few picked up on it."

Could the leaker go to jail? What does the law actually say?

Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as follows:

"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."

Is Novak criminally liable?

No. The law says no person other than the one accused of leaking the information can be prosecuted, a provision that would protect journalists who report leaked classified information identifying a covert agent. The only exception is a journalist who make a practice of exposing undercover CIA operatives.

What did the source or sources of the leak hope to gain by exposing that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Sources familiar with the conversations told The Post that the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They alleged that Wilson, a former ambassador who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the mission to check out reports that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material in Niger partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an Sept. 29 interview that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

Why did The Washington Post publish Novak's column with Plame's name?

Novak is a syndicated columnist whose work appears in more than 300 newspapers. The Post was one of the newspapers that published the July 14 column. Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt told Post media reporter Howard Kurtz that "in retrospect, I wish I had asked more questions. If I had, given that his column appears in a lot of places, I'm not sure I would have done anything differently. But I wish we had thought about it harder. Alarm bells didn't go off. . . . We have a policy of trying not to publish anything that would endanger anybody."

Incidentally, washingtonpost.com does not have online rights to Novak's columns which is why they do not appear on the Web site.

Why is the Washington Post publishing Plame's name?

An intelligence official told The Post on Sept. 27 that no further harm would come from repeating Plame's name.

Do we know what kind of damage disclosure of Plame's name has done to U.S. intelligence operations on weapons of mass destruction?

No. The CIA is now conducting an assessment of the damage. Wilson has said, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."

A Post story quoted a senior administration official as saying that six journalists have been called. Why don't those journalists come forward now and identify the source?

Journalists do not typically reveal the identity of sources to whom they have promised confidentiality.

Isn't Joseph Wilson a critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy?

Yes, he is. In an opinion piece for the New York Times on July 6, Wilson criticized President Bush for including in his State of the Union address the claim that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in the African country of Niger. A former ambassador to that country, Wilson had checked out reports on such activities in February 2002 on behalf of the U.S. government and came away convinced they were not true. In an interview with The Post that same day, Wilson said, "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?"

Why was White House political adviser Karl Rove initially thought to be the leaker as opposed to someone in Vice President Cheney's office or the National Security Council?

Wilson initially said he thought Rove had told Novak about his wife's undercover work, although he has since backed off that assertion. He now says that he believes Rove "condoned" the leak. Asked about the accusation, a White House spokesman responded on Rove's behalf by saying, "It is a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true."

Has there been any reaction from former president George H.W. Bush?

Several commentators have noted the elder Bush's remarks at the dedication ceremony for the George Bush Center for Intelligence at the CIA on April 26, 1999. According to a text available on the CIA Web site, the president's father said, "Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors."


© 2003 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Washington Post
posted by Richard at 11:44 AM

 

How much damage has the Bush Administration done?

From Talking Points Memo
Leak of CIA officers leaves trail of damage
By Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - It's just a 12-letter name - Valerie Plame - but the leak by Bush administration officials of that CIA officer's identity may have damaged U.S. national security to a much greater extent than generally realized, current and former agency officials say.

Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson, was a member of a small elite-within-an-elite, a CIA employee operating under "nonofficial cover," in her case as an energy analyst, with little or no protection from the U.S. government if she got caught.

Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called "legends," including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.

Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency's chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.

In other words, it costs at least as much to build up an NOC agent as it does to train an Air Force pilot, probably more. One difference - if the enemy learns who the NOC is, then they can go back and cancel out much of the effectiveness of any operation the NOC was involved in. Whoever leaked the name of Valerie Plame clearly damaged American interests and cost us a great deal in many ways.

So - let's consider Robert Novak, who ~published~ her name. Here is what Kristoff of the New York Times had to say:

We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it.

The US Constitution has this to say about Treason:

Section. 3.
Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

What Novak did was to "adhere to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." when he published Valerie Plames' name and CIA association. There may be no specific law which makes what he did a crime, but even without that law, he is a traitor to the United States of America.

At the very least, he should be shunned by all Americans.







posted by Richard at 7:08 PM

 

An analysis of the Patriot Act

A Brief Analysis of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003
Also Known as Patriot Act II
by Alex Jones
http://www.infowars.com


Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was allowed to read the first Patriot Act that was passed by the House on October 27, 2001. The first Patriot Act was universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. William Safire, while writing for the New York Times, described the first Patriot Act's powers by saying that President Bush was "seizing dictatorial control." On February 7, 2003 the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan public interest think-tank in DC, revealed the full text of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. The classified document had been leaked to them by an unnamed source inside the Federal government. The document consisted of a 33-page section by section analysis of the accompanying 87-page bill.


The bill itself is stamped "Confidential - Not for Distribution." Upon reading the analysis and bill, I was stunned by the scientifically crafted tyranny contained in the legislation. The Justice Department Office of Legislative Affairs admits that they had indeed covertly transmitted a copy of the legislation to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, (R-Il) and the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney as well as the executive heads of federal law enforcement agencies.


It is important to note that no member of Congress was allowed to see the first Patriot Act before its passage, and that no debate was tolerate by the House and Senate leadership. The intentions of the White House and Speaker Hastert concerning Patriot Act II appear to be a carbon copy replay of the events that led to the unprecedented passage of the first Patriot Act.


There are two glaring areas that need to be looked at concerning this new legislation:


1. The secretive tactics being used by the White House and Speaker Hastert to keep even the existence of this legislation secret would be more at home in Communist China than in the United States. The fact that Dick Cheney publicly managed the steamroller passage of the first Patriot Act, ensuring that no one was allowed to read it and publicly threatening members of Congress that if they didn't vote in favor of it that they would be blamed for the next terrorist attack, is by the White House's own definition terrorism. The move to clandestinely craft and then bully passage of any legislation by the Executive Branch is clearly an impeachable offense.

2. The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganizes the entire Federal government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship.


I challenge all Americans to study the new Patriot Act and to compare it to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. Ninety percent of the act has nothing to do with terrorism and is instead a giant Federal power-grab with tentacles reaching into every facet of our society. It strips American citizens of all of their rights and grants the government and its private agents total immunity. Here is a quick thumbnail sketch of just some of the draconian measures encapsulated within this tyrannical legislation:

SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the Bush administration's "enemy combatant" definition to all American citizens who "may" have violated any provision of Section 802 of the first Patriot Act. (Section 802 is the new definition of domestic terrorism, and the definition is "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law.") Section 501 of the second Patriot Act directly connects to Section 125 of the same act. The Justice Department boldly claims that the incredibly broad Section 802 of the First USA Patriot Act isn't broad enough and that a new, unlimited definition of terrorism is needed.


Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The Justice Department states that they can do this because the person "had inferred from conduct" that they were not a US citizen. Remember Section 802 of the First USA Patriot Act states that any violation of Federal or State law can result in the "enemy combatant" terrorist designation.


SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a criminal act for any member of the government or any citizen to release any information concerning the incarceration or whereabouts of detainees. It also states that law enforcement does not even have to tell the press who they have arrested and they never have to release the names.


SECTION 301 and 306 (Terrorist Identification Database) set up a national database of "suspected terrorists" and radically expand the database to include anyone associated with suspected terrorist groups and anyone involved in crimes or having supported any group designated as "terrorist." These sections also set up a national DNA database for anyone on probation or who has been on probation for any crime, and orders State governments to collect the DNA for the Federal government.

SECTION 312 gives immunity to law enforcement engaging in spying operations against the American people and would place substantial restrictions on court injunctions against Federal violations of civil rights across the board.

SECTION 101 will designate individual terrorists as foreign powers and again strip them of all rights under the "enemy combatant" designation.

SECTION 102 states clearly that any information gathering, regardless of whether or not those activities are illegal, can be considered to be clandestine intelligence activities for a foreign power. This makes news gathering illegal.

SECTION 103 allows the Federal government to use wartime martial law powers domestically and internationally without Congress declaring that a state of war exists.

SECTION 106 is bone-chilling in its straightforwardness. It states that broad general warrants by the secret FSIA court (a panel of secret judges set up in a star chamber system that convenes in an undisclosed location) granted under the first Patriot Act are not good enough. It states that government agents must be given immunity for carrying out searches with no prior court approval. This section throws out the entire Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures.

SECTION 109 allows secret star chamber courts to issue contempt charges against any individual or corporation who refuses to incriminate themselves or others. This sections annihilate the last vestiges of the Fifth Amendment.

SECTION 110 restates that key police state clauses in the first Patriot Act were not sunsetted and removes the five year sunset clause from other subsections of the first Patriot Act. After all, the media has told us: "This is the New America. Get used to it. This is forever."

SECTION 111 expands the definition of the "enemy combatant" designation.

SECTION 122 restates the government's newly announced power of "surveillance without a court order."

SECTION 123 restates that the government no longer needs warrants and that the investigations can be a giant dragnet-style sweep described in press reports about the Total Information Awareness Network. One passage reads, "thus the focus of domestic surveillance may be less precise than that directed against more conventional types of crime."

*Note: Over and over again, in subsection after subsection, the second Patriot Act states that its new Soviet-type powers will be used to fight international terrorism, domestic terrorism and other types of crimes. Of course the government has already announced in Section 802 of the first USA Patriot act that any crime is considered domestic terrorism.

SECTION 126 grants the government the right to mine the entire spectrum of public and private sector information from bank records to educational and medical records. This is the enacting law to allow ECHELON and the Total Information Awareness Network to break down any and all walls of privacy. The government states that they must look at everything to "determine" if individuals or groups might have a connection to terrorist groups. As you can now see, you are guilty until proven innocent.

SECTION 127 allows the government to takeover coroners' and medical examiners' operations whenever they see fit. See how this is like Bill Clinton's special medical examiner he had in Arkansas that ruled that people had committed suicide when their arms and legs had been cut off.

SECTION 128 allows the Federal government to place gag orders on Federal and State Grand Juries and to take over the proceedings. It also disallows individuals or organizations to even try to quash a Federal subpoena. So now defending yourself will be a terrorist action.

SECTION 129 destroys any remaining whistle blower protection for Federal agents.

SECTION 202 allows corporations to keep secret their activities with toxic biological, chemical or radiological materials.

SECTION 205 allows top Federal officials to keep all their financial dealings secret, and anyone investigating them can be considered a terrorist. This should be very useful for Dick Cheney to stop anyone investigating Haliburton.

SECTION 303 sets up national DNA database of suspected terrorists. The database will also be used to "stop other unlawful activities." It will share the information with state, local and foreign agencies for the same purposes.

SECTION 311 federalizes your local police department in the area of information sharing.

SECTION 313 provides liability protection for businesses, especially big businesses that spy on their customers for Homeland Security, violating their privacy agreements. It goes on to say that these are all preventative measures - has anyone seen Minority Report? This is the access hub for the Total Information Awareness Network.

SECTION 321 authorizes foreign governments to spy on the American people and to share information with foreign governments.

SECTION 322 removes Congress from the extradition process and allows officers of the Homeland Security complex to extradite American citizens anywhere they wish. It also allows Homeland Security to secretly take individuals out of foreign countries.

SECTION 402 is titled "Providing Material Support to Terrorism." The section reads that there is no requirement to show that the individual even had the intent to aid terrorists.

SECTION 403 expands the definition of weapons of mass destruction to include any activity that affects interstate or foreign commerce.

SECTION 404 makes it a crime for a terrorist or "other criminals" to use encryption in the commission of a crime.

SECTION 408 creates "lifetime parole" (basically, slavery) for a whole host of crimes.

SECTION 410 creates no statute of limitations for anyone that engages in terrorist actions or supports terrorists. Remember: any crime is now considered terrorism under the first Patriot Act.

SECTION 411 expands crimes that are punishable by death. Again, they point to Section 802 of the first Patriot Act and state that any terrorist act or support of terrorist act can result in the death penalty.

SECTION 421 increases penalties for terrorist financing. This section states that any type of financial activity connected to terrorism will result to time in prison and $10-50,000 fines per violation.

SECTIONS 427 sets up asset forfeiture provisions for anyone engaging in terrorist activities. There are many other sections that I did not cover in the interest of time. The American people were shocked by the despotic nature of the first Patriot Act. The second Patriot Act dwarfs all police state legislation in modern world history.


posted by Richard at 11:06 AM

 

FOX news has found a new source of experienced employees

Almost all of the bureaucrats at the information ministry have done very nicely for themselves since the war. The government minders who spent their days reporting to the intelligence services on foreign reporters or doing their best to obstruct their work have gone on to well-paid jobs - for the same foreign news organisations they once hounded.

The second-in-command at the information ministry, who spent his days reading the reports the minders wrote about visiting foreign journalists, has been employed by Fox News. The Guardian

Why am I not too surprised.
posted by Richard at 10:51 AM

 

right-wing hypocrisy

This is from Bill Berkowitz .

Years ago, popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was brought down when he was found to have been cavorting for years with prostitutes; Jim Bakker served time in the pen, lost his multi-million dollar religious empire, and his wife Tammy Faye, as a result of a series of sex scandals and fraudulent business activities; William Bennett, the self-appointed maven of morality, has thankfully been silenced after it was revealed that he had/has a major gambling problems. We now find that Limbaugh has been hopped up on pills for several years. What's next? There never were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

A gambling addict decries immorality. Two preachers decry sexual immorality. A drug addict gets on radio and states that drug addicts should be given long prison sentences. This is the right wing, the group who has taken control of the Republican Party, the Congress, and the Presidency.

Then there is the fact that organized gambling brings in crime and does nothing productive for the community, the sale of sex is extremely destructive to the people involved and also increases crime, and sale of 'recreational drugs' have the same set of problems as the sale of sex. The right-wing hypocrites are not wrong that these are symptoms of social problems. They are, however, wrong about the solutions. That is what they, the hypocrities themselves, prove.

The people involved have personal problems that they attempt to solve in ways that become social problems. This is, frankly, the downside of the degree of individual freedom that we attempt to provide to people. If you give parents total freedom to raise their children, some will get it wrong. Then, if you give those children total freedom to act as they wish, many of them will get it socially wrong. Recreational drugs are a reasonable personal solution to problems the individuals cannot handle (as is alcohol) but is a really bad problem tof society. Drug addicts commit what the rest of us consider crimes to suppor their habit.

This cannot be prevented by giving out draconian punishments to those who screw up really badly. Many won't get caught. Even more, like William Bennet, will find that they can continue gambling without damaging other people.

But there are those who try living the socially unacceptable lives and can't handle it. So they go into crime and many get caught. These are the ones the right-wing excoriate, but the right-wingers support the system that put them there. Rush condemns the drug addicts, but objects to providing the recovery and detox programs they need. Instead, he simply wants to throw them into prison and warehouse them. Then he complains about the taxes that pay for the prisons.

Limbaugh, Bennet, and the others show that the simplistic "throw the crooks in jail and forget them" while ignoring detox programs and ways to help people learn to raise children properly is not a winning strategy.
posted by Richard at 1:54 PM

 

A Progressive Agenda

George Lakoff, a linguist, explains how progressives and conservatives think and why. The article is fascinating. Here is his view of the Progressive Worldview.

It is assumed that the world should be a nurturant place. The job of parents is to nurture their children and raise their children to be nurturers. To be a nurturer you have to be empathic and responsible (for yourself and others). Empathy and responsibility have many implications: Responsibility implies protection, competence, education, hard work and social connectedness; empathy requires freedom, fairness and honesty, two-way communication, a fulfilled life (unhappy, unfulfilled people are less likely to want others to be happy) and restitution rather than retribution to balance the moral books. Social responsibility requires cooperation and community building over competition. In the place of specific strict rules, there is a general "ethics of care" that says, "Help, don't harm." To be of good character is to be empathic and responsible, in all of the above ways. Empathy and responsibility are the central values, implying other values: freedom, protection, fairness, cooperation, open communication, competence, happiness, mutual respect and restitution as opposed to retribution.


In this view, the job of government is to care for, serve and protect the population (especially those who are helpless), to guarantee democracy (the equal sharing of political power), to promote the well-being of all and to ensure fairness for all. The economy should be a means to these moral ends. There should be openness in government. Nature is seen as a source of nurture to be respected and preserved. Empathy and responsibility are to be promoted in every area of life, public and private. Art and education are parts of self-fulfillment and therefore moral necessities.


Progressive policies grow from progressive morality. Unfortunately, much of Democratic policy making has been issue by issue and program oriented, and thus doesn't show an overall picture with a moral vision. But, intuitively, progressive policy making is organized into five implicit categories that define both a progressive culture and a progressive form of government, and encompass all progressive policies. Those categories are:


Safety. Post-September 11, it includes secure harbors, industrial facilities and cities. It also includes safe neighborhoods (community policing) and schools (gun control); safe water, air and food (a poison-free environment); safety on the job; and products safe to use. Safety implies health -- health care for all, pre- and post-natal care for children, a focus on wellness and preventive care, and care for the elderly (Medicare, Social Security and so on).


Freedom. Civil liberties must be both protected and extended. The individual issues include gay rights, affirmative action, women's rights and so on, but the moral issue is freedom. That includes freedom of motherhood -- the freedom of a woman to decide whether, when and with whom. It excludes state control of pregnancy. For there to be freedom, the media must be open to all. The airwaves must be kept public, and media monopolies (Murdoch, Clear Channel) broken up.


A Moral Economy. Prosperity is for everybody. Government makes investments, and those investments should reflect the overall public good. Corporate reform is necessary for a more ethical business environment. That means honest bookkeeping (e.g., no free environmental dumping), no poisoning of people and the environment and no exploitation of labor (living wages, safe workplaces, no intimidation). Corporations are chartered by and accountable to the public. Instead of maximizing only shareholder profits, corporations should be chartered to maximize stakeholder well-being, where shareholders, employees, communities and the environment are all recognized and represented on corporate boards.


The bottom quarter of our workforce does absolutely essential work for the economy (caring for children, cleaning houses, producing agriculture, cooking, day laboring and so on). Its members have earned the right to living wages and health care. But the economy is so structured that they cannot be fairly compensated all the time by those who pay their salaries. The economy as a whole should decently compensate those who hold it up. Bill Clinton captured this idea when he declared that people who work hard and play by the rules shouldn't be poor. That validated an ethic of work, but also of community and nurturance.


Global Cooperation. The United States should function as a good world citizen, maximizing cooperation with other governments, not just seeking to maximize its wealth and military power. That means recognizing the same moral values internationally as domestically. An ethical foreign policy means the inclusion of issues previously left out: women's rights and education, children's rights, labor issues, poverty and hunger, the global environment and global health. Many of these concerns are now addressed through global civil society -- international organizations dedicated to peacekeeping and nation building. As the Iraq debacle shows, this worldview is not naive; it is a more effective brand of realism.


The Future. Progressive values center on our children's future -- their education, their health, their prosperity, the environment they will inherit and the global situation they will find themselves in. That is the moral perspective. The issues include everything from education (teacher salaries, class size, diversity) to the federal deficit (will they be burdened with our debt?) to global warming and the extinction of species (will there still be elephants and bananas?) to health (will their bodies be poisoned as a result of our policies, and will there be health care for them?). Securing that future is central to our values.


These are the central themes of a progressive politics that comes out of progressive values. That is an important point. A progressive vision must cut across the usual program and interest-group categories. What we need are strategic initiatives that change many things at once. For example, the New Apollo Program -- an investment of hundreds of billions over 10 years in alternative energy development (solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen) is also a jobs program, a foreign-policy issue (freedom from dependence on Middle East oil), a health issue (clean air and water, many fewer poisons in our bodies) and an ecology issue (cleans up pollution, addresses global warming). Corporate reform is another such strategic initiative.

For the rest of a very interesting article, read
Alternet
The conservative worldview is equally fascinating - and I really don' t like it.
posted by Richard at 2:53 PM