Evolution and Eden: Integrating Genesis with Fossil Records

OUR CHALLENGE TODAY a theology of evolution

2010-06-29T15:34:00.001-04:00

Notes toward A theology of Evolution

who are we, how did we get here, what are we, and what is this one, singular, unique life of mine all about are critical questions for the thinking Christian today.

There exist two great stories that address these questions but neither story or its adherents are speaking to the other. Until recently the main story is the one in the book of Genesis in the Bible. The other is now held by practically all scientists in the wold today, the story of evolution, which is no longer a theory, but an established fact, with tons of fossil evidence.

Now as a Catholic. I do not believe there can be contradiction between faith and science, since they occupy different domains.
But since the story of creation in the book of Genesis is contradicted by facts of evolution, then I suggest we need a new story or midrash of creation, a theology of evolution so to speak.

I love mental challenges. So I have accepted the challenge to create and catch a new story, with Adam and Eve talking to god about their experience and the meaning of what happened in the biblical version. Last night, as a member of Dream Catchers, a group of Lexington Spellbinders, I gave my first performance of this story newly minted, a test drive at Natashas Café as part of s storytelling group performance. I took 30 minutes as m story had seven chapters. To my surprise my story was well received in this buckle of the bible belt town.

If anyone on this list would like to contribute to the ongoing development of this new creation story, they may do so by emailing me what must be the necessary and essential elements that the story must contain. In return, I will email them for their review and personal use the current version of my new creation midrash.

subtitle: How humans became believing and storytelling animals.

As I study this challenge, I gain new insists almost dally of how to integrate these two great story traditions. I will welcome suggestions. I intend to establish a blog for comment and discussion. During he next week. Thank you for listening.

Paschal
Lexington Spellbinders.
Beginning reference
Jeffery Korsemeyer

NOTE I will be posting chapters of this new story of creation as it emerges here and look forward to your comment. AS of today June 30, I have 7 chapters but each is \evolving....

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2010-04-28T11:55:00.001-04:00

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Kansan Governor Sebellius accuses Palin of Deceiving Voters

2008-09-04T14:56:00.001-04:00

n a Thursday morning conference call for reporters organized by the Democratic National Committee, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius pushed back against the idea that Republicans have cornered the market on small-town American values.

"I live in the American heartland, and have been a governor [here] for six years," she said. "I don't know any mayor in any small town in Kansas -- and we have a lot of mayors of small towns -- who hires a lobbyist and goes after earmarks the way Sarah Palin did." On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin secured more than $27 million in federal earmarks for a town with only 6,700 residents.

In her speech, Palin made a not-so-subtle pitch to snatch the sympathies of small-town voters -- touting her own experience as a mayor, and contrasting her self-professed values with those of Barack Obama. "I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening," Palin said, referring to remarks Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this year.

Sebelius would have none of it. "What I hear from these folks in the heartland, is that people want to know how they're going to afford health care ... whether they're going to keep their jobs [and manage] the cost of gas and groceries," Sebelius said. "Again last night, what we heard were partisan attacks and no real solutions. ... I work with a Republican legislature every day. And I know what people expect us to do ... is to roll up your sleeves and get the job done."

"There's a disconnect between the way she positions herself as a small-town mayor ... and an inside Washington strategy," Sebelius added. "The kind of persona she is putting forward is very enticing, but I don't think it matches with either her positions."

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz hammered a similar theme to Sebelius, saying that Palin "had a real problem with the truth last night" and adding that "even her hometown newspaper said she stretched the truth." (a reference to Thursday's Anchorage Daily News headline: "Some Of Palin's Remarks Stretch The Truth.")

Schultz also suggested that Palin had simply done a good job of robotically delivering an address she had little hand in crafting herself. "Whenever I have had to give significant speeches, I've spent a lot of time with the people assisting me in drafting remarks, adding my own voice," Schultz said. "Last night, I only heard Sarah Palin's voice [through] negative partisan attacks, with no substance or vision of where she thinks the country should go."

On Palin's effort to position herself and McCain as reformers, Schultz asked, "Where is the beef? Where is the evidence? Sarah Palin is not a reformer, she is under investigation in her home state for the abuse of power in trying to get a state trooper fired... If her best example of being a reformer was trying to sell a plane on E-Bay, that is not my definition of reform."

Shultz also questioned Palin's readiness to lead. "To say that her experience as a mayor of a town of 7,000 people ... makes her qualified to have her hands on the pillar of American foreign policy, if God forbid anything happens to John McCain, to suggest that is frightening," she said. "What kind of experience does Sarah Palin have to sit across the table from negotiators of the dangerous countries of this world?"

Obama adviser Robert Gibbs stepped in to rebut a few points of fact from Palin's speech. Specifically, he cited her reference to family members who own a small service station, saying they were precisely the kind of Americans who would receive "three times the tax relief" under Obama's tax plan. Gibbs also noted that Palin "picked up the worn-out playbook of Joe Lieberman," by claiming that Obama cannot point to any substantive legislative accomplishments. Even some of John McCain's surrogates know, Gibbs said, that the ethics and lobbying reforms in 2007, "the toughest since the scandal of Watergate," were passed due to Obama's work across party lines.

God Ditches the GOP

2008-09-03T16:16:00.001-04:00

God ditches the GOP

This just in: Even the Lord has abandoned the desperate, shameful Right

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

This just in: Hurricane of delicious irony slams Republican National Convention, flooding the streets of Minneapolis/St. Paul with rivers of savage hypocrisy as levees of evangelical denial and sexual confusion overflow into the streets, leaving stunned party members scrambling in vain for shaky moral high ground.

Meanwhile, clever looters smash windows of opportunity and steal valuable quips about underage sex and teen pregnancy, as everyone gets a very unsettling if not downright weird taste of warped pro-gun anti-choice elk-kabob conservative Alaskan family values. YouTube at 11.

Yes, the rumors are true. The cosmic votes have all been tallied, and I do believe we can now say, with some measure of happy certainty, that God appears to be just as sick-to-death of the Republican Party as the rest of us.

But let's back up for a moment, just to be sure. Let's imagine the hot 'n' febrile reaction if, say, an enormous storm had come thundering through Denver during DNC '08, if some gale force winds or bowel-shaking rainfall had shut the city down, prophetically timing itself just right to thwart the Democratic Party's biggest party and stop Barack Obama from making all sorts of stunning history as he delivered his record-breaking speech to a wary and Bush-ravaged nation.

Let us, in other words, imagine that "rains of Biblical proportions" had slammed the DNC to a halt, just as those nutball pastors from Focus on the Family prayed it would.

Can you imagine the joyful outcry? The righteous outpourings of "Praise Jesus!" from the scandal-plagued evangelicals from Orange County to Colorado Springs, with the corpse of Jerry Falwell itself rising from the depths of Hell's own restroom to yelp "Ha! God smites the gay-loving heathens once again! Now, who wants to come down here 'n' wash my back?"

Funny, then, the ironies of nature and time and God, no? For there was Gustav, roaring through the Gulf Coast and shutting down a large, sweaty chunk of the Republican National Convention as he conjured all manner of painful Katrina-esque nightmares, reminding anyone with the slightest sense of integrity of just how inept and dangerous the Republican Party has been lo these past eight insufferable years. Ah, cosmic irony. Sweet like candy.

Perhaps God has shifted political allegiances? Perhaps She has finally revealed her true liberal colors? Or perhaps She's simply indulging in a bit of the same cosmic Schadenfreude as the rest of us, enjoying the various miseries, scandals, humiliations, missteps, gay-outings, meth addictions and unmarried teen pregnancies of the crumbling GOP as they writhe and squirm and attempt to make this McCain/Palin ticket seem even the slightest bit palatable, as opposed to downright frightening. You think?

How else to explain the latest smack of GOP shame, the lovely news that Sarah Palin's unwed 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant? Even in Alaska, that's still considered "a little young" to be knocked up, despite how the Palins say the father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, a self-proclaimed "f--in' redneck" who "lives for hockey" and doesn't want kids, will "do the right thing" by Bristol, which certainly seems like sad shorthand for "sham marriage to lock down desperately needed evangelical support for John McCain." Oh, you poor kids.

To be sure, it's moments like these that make it difficult not to take some delight, not to sit back and feel the ironic righteousness melt over us like hot Cheez-Whiz over an Alaskan mooseburger. After all, Sarah Palin is anti-choice, pro-abstinence, anti sex-ed, religiously fundamentalist, a creationist, about as friendly to feminism and women's reproductive rights as John McCain is to his beloved "gooks."

But here's the saddest part of all: Governor Palin knew. She absolutely had to realize that her daughter's unfortunate condition would come to light when McCain offered her this bizarre gig. To which we can only say: Way to shove your own daughter under the wheels of the GOP Machine, Governor Palin. Ultimate sacrifice indeed.

Ah, but perhaps it's all a bit too much. Perhaps you think this perspective is just too negative, ugly, far too similar to how the right itself operates, full of low-vibration energy and fear and abhorrence of the Other, all topped by a cheerless belief in a cruel, micromanaging God who is so petty and small as to actually care about who you love, or how you vote, or what kind of sex you enjoy. Let me say this: I agree completely.

So let's flip it around. After all, if there's one thing we've learned in the past eight years, it's that the cavalcade of wanton scandal and hypocrisy among the GOP is never-ending, unstoppable, far more the rule than the exception. We could be here all day.

So, on to the good news: A staggering 40 million Americans watched Obama deliver his spectacular, rain-free speech in Denver. That's more than the opening ceremony of Olympics. More than "American Idol." Half again as much as Kerry or Bush earned for similar speeches from years before and an all-time record for any televised political speech anywhere. What a thing.

And let's recall, for a moment, Obama in Berlin back in July, where nearly a quarter million locals turned up to see a man who wasn't yet even a world leader, but merely a candidate. Recall those stunning images of cheering throngs at the Victory Column, hundreds of thousands of eager, curious foreigners, all there to catch a glimpse not of Mick Jagger or the Pope, not of the Dalai Lama or Brad Pitt, but a brilliant young American senator.

That's not middling celebrity. That's not merely good PR on behalf of Obama's team. That's something else entirely, a world electrified by new possibility. Hell, McCain would be lucky to draw 100 onlookers to the airport Sheraton, and most of those would be EMTs.

Even Bill Clinton, with his effortless charisma and fantastic oratory skill, could never draw like Obama. This man fills stadiums. Electrifies not just Democrats, but entire nations. He has that rarest of political power, the ability to make people want to get out there and feel it, be part of the shift. Bush gave the world hives. McCain gives the world the creeps. Obama gives the world goosebumps. Simple as that.

You gotta admit, amidst all the GOP scandal and meltdown and Obama's revitalizing, meteoric rise to international beacon of change -- a guy who, in Joe Biden's words, has "grabbed the lightning" like no one he's ever seen before -- it's tempting to say even God has abandoned the religious right.

Then again, it's probably far more accurate to say She was never really over there in the first place.

When Foix News IS the STORY

2008-07-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

The Media Equation

When Fox News Is the Story

By DAVID CARR

Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead.

Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to.

And if all that stuff doesn’t slow me down and I actually end up writing something, there might be a large hangover: Phone calls full of rebuke for a dependent clause in the third to the last paragraph, a ritual spanking in the blogs with anonymous quotes that sound very familiar, and — if I really hit the jackpot — the specter of my ungainly headshot appearing on one of Fox News’s shows along with some stern copy about what an idiot I am.

Part of me — the Irish, tribal part — admires Fox News’s ferocious defense of its guys. I work at a place where editors can make easy sport of teasing apart your flawed copy until it collapses in a steaming pile, but Lord help those outsiders who make an unwarranted or unfounded attack on me or my work. Our tactics may be different, but we, too, are strong for our posse.

Media reporting about other media’s approach to producing media is pretty confusing business to begin with. Feelings, which are always raw for people who make their mistakes in public, will be bruised. But that does not fully explain the scorched earth between Fox News and those who cover it.

Fox News found a huge runway and enormous success by setting aside the conventions of bloodless objectivity, but along the way, it altered the rules of engagement between reporters and the media organizations they cover. Under its chief executive, Roger Ailes, Fox News and its public relations apparatus have waged a permanent campaign on behalf of the channel that borrows its methodology from his days as a senior political adviser to Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process.

As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand.

But it cuts both ways: Fox News’s amazing coup d’état in the cable news war has very likely been undercovered because the organization is such a handful to deal with. Fox is so busy playing defense — mentioning it in the same story as CNN can be a high crime — that its business and journalism accomplishments don’t get traction and the cable station never seems to attain the legitimacy it so clearly craves.

There have been few stories about Bill O’Reilly’s softer side (I’m sure he has one), and while Shepard Smith’s amazing reporting in New Orleans got some play, he was not cast as one of the journalistic heroes of the disaster. The fact that Roger Ailes has won both Obie awards and Emmys does not come up a lot, nor does the fact that he donated a significant chunk of money to upgrade the student newsroom at Ohio University, his alma mater.

Instead, Mr. Ailes and Brian Lewis, his longtime head of public relations, act as if every organization that covers them is a potential threat and, in the process, have probably made it far more likely. And as the cable news race has tightened, because CNN has gained ground during a big election year, Fox News has become more prone to lashing out. Fun is fun, but it is getting uglier by the day out there.

•

A little more than a week ago, Jacques Steinberg, a reporter at The New York Times who covers television, wrote a straight-up-the-middle ratings story about cable news. His article acknowledged that while CNN was using a dynamic election to push Fox News from behind, Fox was still No. 1. Despite repeated calls, the public relations people at Fox News did not return his requests for comment. (In a neat trick, while they were ignoring his calls, they e-mailed his boss asking why they had not heard from him.)

After the article ran, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of “Fox and Friends,” the reliable water carriers on the morning show on the cable network, did a segment suggesting that Mr. Steinberg’s editor was a disgruntled former employee — Steven V. Reddicliffe once edited TV Guide, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation — and that Mr. Steinberg was his trained attack dog. (The audience was undoubtedly wondering what the heck they were talking about.)

The accompanying photographs were heavily altered, although the audience was probably none the wiser. Mr. Reddicliffe looked like the wicked witch after a hard night of drinking, but it was the photo of Mr. Steinberg that stopped traffic when it appeared on the Web at Media Matters side by side with his actual photo. In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. (Mr. Steinberg told me that as a working reporter who covers Fox News, he was not in a position to comment. A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.

It’s a particularly vivid example of how the Fox response team works, but hardly the only one. Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal wrote a profile of Roger Ailes in 2005. Again, her coverage was right up the middle, but that is not the way that Fox News saw it, and she was held out for ridicule over and over in items on various blogs penned by Fox News staff when she jumped the gun on the start date for the Fox business channel. (Ms. Angwin is on book leave and did not answer a message left on her cellphone.)

Earlier this year, a colleague of mine said, he was writing a story about CNN’s gains in the ratings and was told on deadline by a Fox News public relations executive that if he persisted, “they” would go after him. Within a day, “they” did, smearing him around the blogs, he said. (I did not ask him for a comment because the information was of a private nature.)

Some of the avenues of attack are easier to anticipate than others. Right now, there are advance copies circulating of a reported memoir I wrote about my times as a drug addict and drunk. I’ve already been called a “crack addict” on Bill O’Reilly’s show, which at least has the virtue of being true, if a little vintage. Expect a return engagement with some added detail. I have a bit of an advantage in that my laundry is already hanging on the line, not to mention that with a face made out of potatoes, the Photoshopped picture of me will have to go a long way to make me any uglier than I actually am. Having pointed a crooked columnist finger at Fox, at least I have it coming. Not so for many of the beat reporters who go to work every day confronted by a public relations machine that will go feral if it doesn’t get what it wants.

When I started calling around about Fox News, Mr. Lewis, the public relations head, made himself available on very short notice on the Fourth of July. He patiently explained that while yes, the game had changed, it was hardly in the way I was describing. There are no dark ops, he said, and no blacklist — “a myth” — only good relationships and bad ones.

Mr. Lewis said that members of his staff were not in the business of altering photos, that they had no control over stories that appeared on “Fox and Friends” or other shows, and he pointed out that it makes their job harder when they go after reporters. He called my suggestion that there was something anti-Semitic about the depiction of Mr. Steinberg “vile and untrue.” Mr. Lewis denied that his staff had threatened one of my colleagues or planted private information about him on blogs.

That comes as a surprise to reporters I talked to who say they have received e-mail messages from Fox News public relations staff that contained doctored photos, anonymous quotes and nasty items about competitors. And two former Fox employees said that they had participated in precisely those kinds of activities but had signed confidentiality agreements and could not say so on the record.

“Yes, we are an aggressive department in a passive industry, and believe me, the executives and talent appreciate it,” Mr. Lewis said, adding that with the 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of blogs, a new kind of engagement and activism was required.

“We are the biggest target in the industry and we accept that,” he said. “We embrace controversy,” but he said that he and his colleagues respect that reporters have a job to do.

Many of the television-beat reporters I called had horror stories, but few were willing to be quoted. In the last several years, reporters from The Associated Press, several large newspapers and various trade publications have said they were shut out from getting their calls returned because of stories they had written. Editors do not want to hear why your calls are not being returned, they just want you to fix the problem, or perhaps they will fix it by finding someone else to do your job.

David Folkenflik, now the media reporter for National Public Radio, ended up on the outs with Fox News in 2001 when he was at The Baltimore Sun. After he wrote that Fox’s Geraldo Rivera had not been at the site of an incident of friendly fire in Afghanistan as he had told viewers, Mr. Folkenflik said, his calls to Fox News were not returned for more than 15 months.

“My sense was that it was designed to make it appear that I was having trouble doing my job, but also to intimate that the people who cross them will be shut out,” he said.

Mr. Folkenflik said he did not take it personally because it was not aimed just at him. “I think it is a notably aggressive effort to manage the Fox News brand and image,” he said. “I think it is suffused with a political sensibility, and I don’t think it is any secret that it comes from the top with Roger Ailes. They behave less like a competitive news outlet and more like a political campaign when it comes to managing coverage.”

But he holds no grudge.

“I currently have a perfectly good relationship with Fox News,” Mr. Folkenflik said. “I touch base with them all the time, and I write the good and bad news as it occurs.”

Bill Carter has covered television for The New York Times for many years and has always had a good working relationship with Fox News, but he was appalled to see what he viewed as an anti-Semitic caricature of Mr. Steinberg, a colleague and a friend.

“I have not had a big problem with them, in part because their success has been such a great story, but this seemed over the line and really hateful,” Mr. Carter said. “It doesn’t seem like you can deal with them professionally. You do this kind of thing to a guy who’s writing a story for a newspaper?”

Fox News has long held that it is its politics and not its tactics that set it apart and require such vigilance. But working reporters have been shaking their heads for years about the nightmare of dealing with Fox News and as a result, the antagonism they believe they are fighting against seems to be on the march.

Mr. Lewis made it clear that Fox News has no problem working with reporters when they don’t have an agenda, and of course, I called with a very clear one. For the record, everyone I dealt with at Fox News in connection with this column was polite, highly responsive, and got right to the point, while still not giving ground on a single material fact. A guy could get used to that.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com

George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words

2008-06-23T22:30:00.002-04:00

George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words

The big seven words you weren't allowed to broadcast were:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

Here is the original Carlin comedy routine that caused the Fracas.

"I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have really.

We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. You know, [humming]. And, then we assign a word to a thought, [clicks tongue]. And we're stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people's feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list...like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are...those are heavy-weight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K's. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It's like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.

And we mentioned shit earlier, of course. Two of the other 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words are Piss and Cunt, which go together of course. But forget about that. A little accidental humor there. Piss and Cunt. The reason Piss and Cunt are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said 'Those are the two I am not going to say. I don't mind Fuck and Shit, but P and C are out. P and C are out.' Which led to such stupid sentences as 'OK, you fuckers, I am going to tinkle now.'

And of course the word Fuck. The word Fuck, I don't really...well, this is some more accidental humor, but I don't really want to get into that now. Because I think it takes too long. But I do mean that. I mean, I think the word fuck is an important word. It's the beginning of life, and, yet it's a word we use to hurt one other, quite often. And uh, people much wiser than I have said, I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one other. And I of course agree. I wish I know who said it first, and I agree with that. But I would like to take it a step further. I would like to substitute the word fuck, for the word kill in all those movie cliches we grew up with. 'Okay Sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now. But we're gonna fuck ya slow.' So maybe next year I'll have a whole fuckin' rap on that word. I hope so.

Uh, there are two-way words, but those are the seven you can never say on television. Under any circumstances you just can not say them ever, ever ever, not even clinically. You can not weave them in the panel with Doc and Ed and Johnny, I mean it's just impossible, forget those seven, they're out.

But, there are some two-way words. There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? 'And the cock crowed three times.''Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It's in the bible.' There are some Two-way words, like it's okay for Curt Gowdy [mis-spelled in original transcription. -ed.] to say 'Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.' But he can't say, 'I think he hurt his balls on that play Tony, don't you? He's holding them. He must have hurt them by God.' And the other two-way word that goes with that one is prick. It's okay if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick. No, no."

Obama and Dean recast the political map

2008-06-08T21:13:00.000-04:00

Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign's most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

A slew of political factors will determine Obama's success in turning red states blue. But the Senator, in no small measure, will be aided in his task by reforms that preceded his run for the presidency. For all of the hoopla surrounding the candidates, the 2008 presidential election will be the first truly national test of the viability and prescience of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Four years ago, when Dean was vaulted to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee -- following a failed presidential bid months earlier -- he pledged to rewrite the rules concerning where and how Democrats would compete. In the subsequent months, resources and staff were invested into unconventional and even previously untouched locales. The idea was that the party simply couldn't compete without a margin for error.

But at the time, party insiders, who believed Dean was stripping away important resources from key races, were privately and, on occasion, publicly livid.

"He says it's a long-term strategy," said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

When the Democrats made major congressional gains in 2006, questions persisted as to whether the electoral success had simply been the product of a fortunate circumstance. Dean himself admitted to Time Magazine, "I didn't expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years."

Now, four years have passed. And the Democrats have nominated a candidate that seems perfectly equipped to test-drive the party's 50-state vehicle. Obama has built his candidacy off of the pledge to expand the electoral playing field. Moreover, his campaign has leaned on an ability to drum up both grassroots support and the recruitment of Republicans and independents -- two stated objectives of the Dean vision.

On Thursday, Obama symbolically endorsed the DNC's efforts, declaring that Dean would remain party chairman heading into the general election.

As Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, told The Huffington Post: "I think that we are going to have a larger battlefield in 2008... I think we are going to stretch the Republicans. I don't think they can take for granted nearly as many states as they have in the past. And I think we are going to add several to the Democratic column this year and so our coalition is going to be broader."

* * *

But what tangible benefits will the 50-state strategy actually provide?

Obama will likely start the general election with 180 or so "reliably Democratic" electoral votes. With the goal of getting to 270, the DNC believes it could play a role in carrying the rest of the burden. The party already has more than 200 field staffers on the ground, and grassroots training programs in all fifty states. In addition, new Internet and communications operations have been started with the goal of facilitating participation in, and donations to, Democratic causes.

These might seem like ad-hoc measures. But if Sen. John Kerry had received ten additional votes per precinct in 2004, he would have won Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, and, subsequently, the White House.

Perhaps the most significant, and controversial, move made under the 50-state strategy has been the modernization of the party's voter file, in which Dean has invested more than $8 million dollars.

"We have gone light years from four years ago," said Moses Mercado, a Democratic operative and a former adviser to Dick Gephardt's presidential campaign. "Then it was a rag tag of what the party had accumulated and it wasn't what other local officials were using. The DNC got every state on a national voter file. The new file has better tracking to include voter history -- they now know the political habits of those who have moved... I don't feel the urgency now that we are behind because we have the infrastructure to capture the excitement of the primary."

But not everyone has been on board. Before he joined Hillary Clinton's campaign, Harold Ickes constructed a voter database of his own, in part because he wanted to target left-leaning interest groups, in part because he didn't particularly trust Dean. A debate currently rages as to which database is more useful. But in the end, having options will prove better than having none. And Obama seems poised to benefit from this type of ground work.

"The 50-state strategy has been implemented to varying degrees in a lot of states and Obama is going to make a lot of these states competitive," said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress. "And in a lot of these states, by virtue of the primary competition, they have generated a lot of registration and work on top of what the Dean folks have done. The whole controversy as to whether the 50 state strategy was a good idea -- with the establishment Democrats poo-pooing it -- I'm getting the impression that is less of a controversial idea then it once was, and it does fit into what Obama is trying to do."

* * *

The evidence of at least some progress is already visible on the ground. In late May, the Boston Globe identified six traditionally Republican states that Obama would have the greatest shot of turning.

Next to Virginia, Colorado appeared most ripe. Even though the state, with the exception of 1992, hasn't voted Democratic in more than four decades, it has witnessed an influx of younger, more liberal voters, as well as suburbanites emigrating from California. Spurred by the DNC, the state's Democratic Party has taken productive steps to improve its fortunes. Starting in 2005, field directors were sent out to rural areas, a new voter file was purchased, and ballot initiatives were run in non-traditional counties. In time, electoral results materialized. Currently, Colorado's governor, both houses of the state legislature and one of its Senators are Democratic; all of which, official claim, will transfer well to the presidential level.

"The thing about the Obama campaign that was interesting is that when they came into Colorado they set up about ten offices in the state," said Pat Waak, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. "It was great. It reinforced the same effort that we had been working on for the past three years or so. It means that with all the training that we've done over the past three years and with our own efforts we are enabled for success in the fall campaign."

Added Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: "I think the 50 state strategy put in play a lot of western states that are extremely good for Obama, because they are change oriented and increasingly Democratic. Though no one noticed it, the west is purple."

Obama's task, however, is not just to flip states into his column, but rather to make enough areas competitive so that McCain and the Republican Party are forced to drain their resources. In this regard, Dean's vision may prove more successful.

Take Idaho. In 2006, the Democratic Party was able to field an aggressive challenger in what had been, since 1994, a safe GOP district. With help from on-the-ground staffers and the influx of small but strategic resources, Larry Grant forced his Republican opponent, Bill Sali, to turn to Washington for money and two separate appearances by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Grant ultimately lost, but ripple effects were felt on other races. Among the Obama folks, the lessons from that 2006 race apparently still resonate. According to the state's Democratic Party chair, the Illinois Democrat has pledged to open an office in Idaho for the fall -- an unheard of development in recent presidential elections.

"Bear in mind that I received assurance when I was back in Chicago that they would have paid people on the ground in Idaho," said Idaho Democratic Party Chairman Keith Roark. "Now clearly they won't have the same presence in Idaho as they do in Colorado and New Mexico where Obama has a chance of winning. But they will have people on the ground here and we haven't had that since 1964. If you mix that kind of operation with what our state party already has, who knows what is going to happen."

* * *

Not every Democratic operative or political observer is convinced that the 50-state-strategy will prove consequentially beneficial for Obama. For starters, the DNC is currently strapped for money compared to its Republican counterpart, with $4.4 million in the bank going into the general election (the RNC has $40 million). As such, the party may be indirectly forcing Obama's hand -- persuading the Illinois Senator to forgo public funding despite the hits he may take from good government reform groups.

"I think there is some infrastructure, even if it is minimal, that will be a benefit for anyone who pursues the [50-state-strategy]," said Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic operative and adviser to Kerry. "And the way to do it, and I wish we did it in the Kerry campaign, is to stay outside of public funding, amass a resource advantage bigger than your opponent and put new states in play. The way to win is to target the states that not only you can win but forcing your opponent to defend... Obama can do this by arguing that he has a whole new system of public funding."

But other steps are needed. Indeed, with unsure financial commitments from the DNC -- their coffers should bulge now that the primary is over -- and with the 50-state strategy still in its early stages, the Obama campaign faces the uphill task of organizing its own efforts in non-Democratic states in a matter of months.

In early May, the Senator took the first step down that road by launching a country-wide voter registration drive, with the hopes of playing off of his primary successes. The campaign would not discuss how and where Obama would look to open offices, spend advertising dollars, or coordinate resources. Since securing the nomination, however, the Senator is tightening his control over the party. News circulated this week that Obama will persuade the DNC to refuse any lobbyist funding, a stance in line with his own campaign. And a high-ranking Obama official, Paul Tewes, is slated to help oversee fundraising efforts at the committee.

The potential beneficiaries of the Obama-Dean alliance could be numerous. Down-ticket Democrats are not only banking on an influx of resources into their races, but are hoping that a synthesized effort between the presidential candidate and campaign committees provides a political boost even in traditionally hostile locales. The environment is certainly ripe. Already Democrats have ripped three congressional seats away from the GOP in special elections. The Cook Political Report list 27 seats GOP House seats that will be in play, in addition to seven in the Senate.

"It is not that Obama needs what the DNC under what Dean has done," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institute. "It is that the Obama nominating campaign has reinforced what the DNC was doing. And all of this will be primarily helpful down ticket. It gives Democrats some opportunities to win Senate, House and other legislative contests and over time puts them in the position of turning around some truly red states."

Right wing and Left wing brains we have, Cf.

2008-04-20T16:52:00.000-04:00

Study finds Difference between
Right Wing brain and Left wing brain.

Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.
By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=57431

PAINFUL THINGS HILARY SHOULD KNOW...

2008-03-22T11:29:00.003-04:00

HALPERINS TAKE: Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows — Or Should Know

1. She can't win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.

2. She can't win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.

3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates.

4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don't think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.

5. Obamas skilled, close-knit staff can do things like silently kill re-votes in Florida and Michigan and not pay a political price.

6. Many of her supporters and even some of her staffers would be relieved (and even delighted) if she quit the race; none of his supporters or staff feel that way. Some think she just might throw in the towel in June if it appears efforts to fight on would hurt Obamas general election chances.

7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee and that has an impact every day.

8. Obama might not be able to talk that well about the new global economy, but she (and McCain) can't either.

9. Many of the remaining prominent superdelegates want to be for Obama and she (and Harold Ickes) are just barely keeping them from making public commitments to him.

10. She can't publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.

11. If she somehow found a way to win the nomination, she would have to offer Obama the veep slot, and she doesn't want to do that.

12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.

13. Obama is having fun most days, and she isn't.

14. Even though her campaign staff is having more fun than it has for a long time, there’s hardly anyone there who, given half a chance, wouldn't slit Mark Penns throat and such internal dissension won't help her in the home stretch.

COMMNENT?

Yes, He Can (on Obama) "Hope is a theological virtue"

2008-03-20T17:36:00.005-04:00

March 14, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 5 COMMONWEAL.

Yes He Can: The Case for Obama

Robert N. Bellah

Author, HABITS OF THE HEART, and THE GOOD SOCIETY.

This year's presidential election is surely one of the most important in recent history. After more than seven years of the most incompetent administration in American history, it is time for a change. The question is, What kind of change?

Before trying to answer that question, let me put my cards on the table: I am highly partisan. I have never voted for a Republican in my sixty years as a voter. I have on rare occasions voted for a third-party candidate, but on the whole, often as the lesser evil, I have voted for Democrats. Although I think I would have done the same wherever I lived, I must also confess that I am conformist in terms of my immediate environment. It is rumored that there are Republicans in Berkeley, but no one knows who they are: they are perhaps a secret society. Voting consistently for Democrats makes one something of a conservative in Berkeley terms. I suspect if I had lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I did for the first twenty years of my academic life, it wouldn’t have been much different.

I must also confess that I am highly partisan in the present Democratic primary race. I have a high regard for both Clintons and I believe Hillary Clinton is a strong candidate. But Barack Obama has stirred my political hopes like no one since Franklin Roosevelt. Yes, I am old enough to remember Roosevelt. He became president when I was five years old and died when I was eighteen. Even as a child I was partisan and, while too young to know enough to support him in 1932, I did strongly support him in 1936, 1940, and 1944, though I was not yet old enough to vote.

Hearing Obama give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was one of the most electrifying experiences of my political life. Who is this person? I thought. How is it possible for anyone today to formulate the very best of the American tradition in such eloquent terms? (Needless to say, with a sense of the centrality of rhetoric to the Western political tradition from Aristotle and Cicero to Jefferson and Lincoln, I have never accepted the derogatory use of the word. I believe that speaking well and thinking well usually go together, and vice versa, as the incumbent president so vividly illustrates. It will be easier for John McCain to attack Obama’s “rhetoric” than to equal it.) Recently going over my 2007 checkbooks for tax purposes, I noted that I wrote a check to Obama for America on February 10, 2007, which was the very day he announced his candidacy. What impressed me during the last long year of campaigning was not so much his stand on particular issues (I generally agree with him, though on health care I think Clinton’s plan may be slightly better); it was the way Obama framed where we are today and how we can move to a better place. In other words, what I first heard in 2004 has only become clearer in the past year: Obama, like no one I have heard in a very long time, understands our political tradition, how it has been distorted in recent years, and how we can return to it at its best. I know Obama talks a lot about hope, but that is what he has given me: hope, when I had begun to believe that the situation in my country was hopeless.

I believe both Clintons have read Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, because they have told me that they have, and I believe Hillary Clinton would try to put into practice some of the things that I and my coauthors were talking about in those books. I have no reason to believe that Obama has read the books, yet he has caught their spirit in a most remarkable way and expressed it more eloquently than anyone in living memory. In Habits of the Heart I and my coauthors described four traditions that are powerful in America today. We called our primary moral language “utilitarian individualism,” the calculating concern for self-interest that is natural in our kind of economy, and a language that all candidates, Republicans and Democrats, must often use as they appeal to various interest groups to support them. But we have three secondary moral languages that give a greater richness and moral adequacy to our discourse (even as they are often shunted aside by the dominance of the language of self-interest), expressive individualism, biblical language, and the language of civic republicanism. All candidates use the language of expressive individualism when they try to show us their human side, tell their individual stories and the stories of those who support them. But the substantial alternatives to the language of utilitarian individualism are biblical and civic republican. Biblical language, like all the others, comes in several forms, but here I am referring to the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin—that is, a language that expresses the dominant biblical concern for those most in need, a language that reminds us of our solidarity with all human beings. When Obama says “we are our brothers’ keepers; we are our sisters’ keepers,” when he suggests, as he does in so many ways, that we all need one another, all depend on one another, he is using that biblical language at its most appropriate. And in his emphasis on public participation at every level, in his refusal to take money from lobbyists and political action committees, he is reviving the spirit of civic republicanism, of voters as citizens responsible for the common good, not political consumers concerned only with themselves.

The probable Republican nominee, John McCain, seems to be a better human being than his Republican rivals, more human and more moral. But to the degree that he relies on the politics of fear—apparently the Republicans’ only hope (Paschal: He just did, again, yesterday if you are paying attention)—and demonizes Islam in the process, he would lead us to follow our worst instincts and continue a policy that has the gravest consequences for the world and the place of America in the world. That leaves the only real choice (I’m writing this in late February) as that between Clinton and Obama. I am not sure Obama can deliver on what he promises—he will surely face fanatical and powerful opposition to anything he tries to do. And I am not sure he can resist the temptations of our political culture to compromise—not to compromise for the sake of doing what is realistically possible, but to compromise principles. And I believe Hillary Clinton is probably better prepared to deal with the realities of the presidency from “day one,” as she has said. But there is a grandeur and a hope in Obama that makes me want to give him the chance to lead our country.

Should Clinton be the nominee, I would strongly support her. I hope that Obama’s example would encourage her best instincts, as Edwards’s example has encouraged both Obama and Clinton. But if Obama is not the nominee, and if he is never elected president, I am sure that, God willing, he will long be a political presence that will forever be calling us to heed “the better angels of our nature.”

I am not as confident as many that the Democratic nominee will win in November. Americans of late have been very vulnerable to the politics of fear, as have many nations in the past. I am reasonably sure that the Democrats will have a significant majority in both houses of Congress, that if McCain wins it will be a personal victory with very short coattails. That means a great deal of conflict and gridlock in a period when we can ill afford it.

If we have, as expected, a Democratic president next year, the road will still not be easy. Both Democratic candidates have promised what amounts to universal health care, but opposition to that is enormously well financed and it will be a struggle to keep even a significant Democratic majority sufficiently together to pass it. Every significant issue, domestic and foreign, will be contested, will require both presidential leadership of a high quality and public pressure on the Congress to do the right thing. We may be confident that, whoever is elected, things cannot be as bad as under George W. Bush. Yet that is a very low standard. I cannot say I am very optimistic that the standard will be significantly lifted. Still, hope is a theological virtue; it is something required of us. Whatever we may fear, we must keep hope alive.

I agree mostly with these sentiments, except that with her (and Bill's) strong corporate support, and her fundamentalist religious views (new book due out in May), I do NOT think she is better prepeared and I believe that she is less free.

Comment?

New Hampshire, Granite State Reps vote to Impeach.

2008-02-21T15:46:00.000-05:00

In a packed hearing room on Feb 19th, under a carved wooden sign reading "Live Free or Die"-, the New Hampshire House committee of State-Federal Relations and Veterans' Affairs heard testimony on Representative Betty Hall's HR 24, which calls on the U.S. Congress to begin impeachment hearings for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

What was most notable about the four straight hours of testimony was not that opponents of the resolution could only muster two people willing to testify against it, both Republican stalwarts using selected excerpts from Jefferson's parliamentary manual or from the bill itself, whose arguments were embarrassingly empty.

It was not that Kris Roberts, the committee chair, had taken this hearing seriously enough to have researched the law, history and nuances of the subject, and that he used this to inform the proceedings in a reasonably fair manner.

It was not the fact that after the hearing ended, several pro-impeachment witnesses were approached by committee members and thanked for their clarity and useful testimony.

It was not even the novelty of the interjections by one committee member that would periodically steer the conversation abruptly into Rockefeller/Trilateral Commission territory.

The most remarkable moment came late in the afternoon when Republican House member Steve Vaillancourt strode into the room to testify. After passing out copies of the second chapter of Patrick Buchanan's "Day of Reckoning"- as supporting evidence, Vaillancourt opened his remarks quoting "fools rush in where wise men fear to tread"-, and it sounded like a set up to condemn a rush to impeach. But instead he said that Betty Hall is neither fool nor wise man, but is a model of courage and that her impeachment resolution should be supported.

And then the fun began.

Member Vaillancourt then gave a short history lesson, telling the committee that until Bush/Cheney, America had never engaged in an offensive war [sic.], and pointing out that the Truman, Eisenhower. Kennedy and Reagan "Doctrines"- had all been based on defense and had not been offensive in nature. Warming to the subject, he delved into the ramifications of Bush/Cheney's actions, saying that their reckless foreign policy has been anti-American, unconstitutional, and ruinously costly to the nation.

He was fairly thundering by the time that he pronounced that not only should Bush and Cheney be impeached, but also they should be tried as war criminals in a Nuremburg style trial for crimes against humanity. He flatly stated that the war in Iraq has provided grounds for war crimes charges against the President and Vice President. And there was not one word of protest from a single committee member. They may or may not support this resolution to impeach, but there seems to be no one left with a credible argument to defend Bush/Cheney.

Vaillancourt said that he spoke not as a Republican, a New Hampshire citizen or an American, but as a member of humanity. His remarks made a common sense plea for an honest appraisal of our current political situation, for the acknowledgement that we have a duty to act as a decent and responsible people, and that principle be the governing factor of our government's actions. These are all values that should, and once did, cut across party lines. If the current political parties have forgotten this, and become so degraded as to allow the lawlessness and criminality of this administration to go unchecked, the people have not.

And at that hearing the people had their chance to speak. One member of the committee remarked that she had never before seen such a wide range of viewpoints as represented by the witnesses, to be so united on one issue.

After deliberation the next day, loyalty to party leadership proved a stronger pull than reasoned argument, for five committee members voted to recommend the bill, with eleven voting against. Now facing an uphill battle to get it passed in a full House vote in March, Betty Hall was still encouraged by the committee hearing and vote. She has received much more support for this resolution than she did with a similar effort last year, and is already working to get grass roots supporters out between now and the vote to get their legislators' attention.

If the grass roots continue to pour out as they did on Tuesday, and if there were a few more politicians like Steve Vaillancourt and Betty Hall, we might see things begin to change. It's instructive to remember that some politicians who are now leading the charge for impeachment did not want to talk about it only a few short months ago. The spotlight is now on the New Hampshire House, the third largest deliberative body on the planet, and arguably one of the more democratic representative systems anywhere as well.

These representatives may listen to an outsider's viewpoint on what to do about the Constitution, but they will be influenced most by the neighbors whom they represent. The question is, is New Hampshire angry enough and organized enough to convince the legislature to call for impeachment?

For those outside of New Hampshire the question is, how can we raise the temperature everywhere else, making it all the more plausible that the Granite State will reach the boiling point.

Dan Dewalt is a musician/woodworker/teacher who authored the Newfane impeachment resolution passed at March 2006 town meetings.

KEATS SECRET: THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION.

2007-11-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

John Lundberg
Keats Secret: the Power of the Imagination.

If you live under a rock like I do, you may have missed out on the phenomenon that is The Secret, an uber-popular film (turned book) by Australian writer and producer Rhonda Byrne. I know, I know. How could I resist opening one of those faux-parchment paperbacks with the "secret" emanating toward me in glossy beams of light? Well, curiosity finally got the better of me this week. If you don't know already, The Secret claims that "people's feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into their lives; from the workings of the cosmos to interactions among individuals in their physical, emotional, and professional affairs." More simply: if you imagine something you want hard enough, it happens.

In a materialistic twist, the film actually encourages people to use this imaginative power to get rich and collect stuff they want. As Reason's Greg Beato put it, for Secret believers, "The universe is a giant vibrating ATM, ready to shower you with new cars, fine jewelry, unexpected checks in the mail, and magical sunsets." Byrne herself admitted that her inspiration for the film came from a book called The Science of Getting Rich Quick.

No, this is not your daddy's New Age philosophy. I miss those days. When I was in college, a girl approached me at a coffee shop convinced that I had something to tell her. I tried to laugh it off, but she insisted that I was supposed to be some sort of guide. You see, she'd been reading The Celestine Prophecy. I could have given her a dead-serious look and told her to go to Machu Picchu and wait for Miguel, but I ended up offering advice so banal I can't even remember what it was.

Some guru I would be.

Anyway, according to Byrne, the Secret isn't something she invented. It has been known to certain highly successful people throughout history. Her list of "keepers" includes Plato, Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell(!) but is surprisingly bereft of great writers. Honestly, if the guy who may have invented the telephone made the list, how about a poet or two?

In fact, long before Byrne had ever been thought up, the English poet John Keats was exploring the power of the imagination. In a letter to a friend, Keats famously wrote: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affection and the truth of Imagination--what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not..." Keats didn't think that the imagination could create, say, money or a woman, but it could create beauty--and he was certain that beauty, even when imagined, is real.

Whether you agree or not, the beauty you imagine can certainly spill into and impact your reality. I experienced this idea firsthand a few years back when I had a dream about a friend of mine. I'd never been attracted to her before, but in the dream I was, and when I woke up I was still attracted. The beauty I'd imagined had changed the way I really felt. We even ended up dating. How'd it go? Let's just say that was the last time I let my imagination set me up.

Keats explores this phenomenon in some of his poems. In "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline, a young heroine, is dreaming of her lover Porphyro when the real Porphyro wakes her up. Madeline finds that her imagination has changed the way she feels about the real Porphyro, who's now a little disappointing:

"Ah Porphyro! said she, "but even now

Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear...

How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!"

She implores him to act more like the man she'd been dreaming of:

"Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!"

In Keats's ballad "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a traveler comes across a "haggard" and "woe begone" knight, whose reality has been shattered by a beautiful woman who lures men in and traps them. She seems to exist somewhere between reality and a dream:

"I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death pale were they all;

they cried--La belle dame sans merci

Hath thee in thrall.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side."

Why is this important? When we explore how the imagination impacts real life, we explore the potential power of art. Because instead of coming from a dream, couldn't the imaginative spark come from a novel, a poem, or even a movie? It's something to think about. That is, when you're not thinking really hard about the promotion and the Jaguar you want.

For more on Keats, take a look at John Lundberg's Poem of the Week blog

School of Americas: now 20,000 protest

2007-11-19T16:54:00.000-05:00

Twenty Thousand Protest at Fort Benning: Eleven Face Federal Criminal Trials
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 19 November 2007

In what has become the nation's largest annual gathering for peace and human rights, over twenty thousand people protested outside the gates of Fort Benning, GA, on November 18, 2007. Eleven people were arrested on federal criminal charges and face up to six months in prison.

Fort Benning is the site of the internationally notorious US Army training school for Latin American military and security personnel. For decades it was called the School of the Americas (SOA) - it is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The school has graduated hundreds of military officers who have led or participated in nearly every human rights atrocity in the hemisphere. Organizations across the world, including Amnesty International USA, have called for its closure since discovering copies of torture manuals used at the school. In June 2007, 203 members of the US House of Representatives voted to close the scandal-ridden school - six votes shy of the margin of victory.

Thousands listened quietly as Adriana Portillo-Bartow told how her father, stepmother, sister, sister-in-law and two daughters, ages nine and 11, were "disappeared" in Guatemala in a war directed and carried out by graduates of the US Army School of the Americas. Thousands moved towards the gates of the Fort and called out "presente!" as the names of hundreds of other victims of graduates of the school were sung out.

Veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the never-ending Gulf Wars marched side by side with Catholic sisters and Buddhist monks.

Flowers, posters, pictures and thousands of small white crosses bearing the names of people executed by graduates of the school were put on the closed padlocked gates topped with barbed wire. Thousands of college and high school students chanted and prayed Grandmothers for Peace as military loudspeakers blared warnings and law enforcement helicopters hovered overhead. Huge puppets, singing children and drum circles alternated with the spirited calls of priests, rabbis and ministers of many faiths and races. Songs in many languages, indigenous chants, guitars, horns and mountain flutes filled the air.

The eleven people who crossed onto the grounds were arrested by military police. The eleven, ranging in age from 25 to 76, are scheduled for federal criminal trial January 28, 2008, for trespass - punishable by up to six months in federal prison. Over 200 people have served federal prison time for civil disobedience at prior protests - dozens of others arrested have served years of supervised federal probation. The movement to close the school started in 1990 when about 20 people held the first protest outside Fort Benning.

Even if the US government is reluctant to close the school, Latin American countries look like they will do it themselves. Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Venezuela have announced they are withdrawing their militaries from the school.

Crimes by graduates continue. Colombia recently arrested five high-ranking military officers who received training at the US Army School of Americas and two additional officers who were instructors at WHINSEC. All are charged with providing security and troops for the major drug cartel in Colombia.

Simultaneous protests occurred in Santiago, Chile, Tucson, Arizona - outside of Fort Huachuca - where three people were also arrested and face federal criminal charges, Toronto, Canada, as well as Berkeley and Monterey California.

For more on the movement to close the School of the Americas see www.soaw.org.

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Bill is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Bill is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch. Quigley@loyno.edu

Hidden Epidemic: Military Suicides.:

2007-11-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

Tonight CBS will air the first of a two-part series on the "hidden epidemic" of military suicides, revealing numbers that CBS calls "stunning." The report examines data on the suicide rate amongst veterans once they return home, which indicates a serious mental health issue — and a hidden mortality rate.

"We first started researching military suicides because it had never been done before," said Armen Keteyian, CBS News' chief investigative correspondent in a statement forwarded by CBS News. "But when all the data was collected, we were astonished. I had no idea how much of an epidemic CBS uncovered. We expect this to be a wake up call."

Keteyian previewed the segment on the "CBS Early Show" today, saying that the CBS five-month study found that vets were "more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets." Chillingly, though the Veterans Affairs Department estimates that "some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year,' that's a lowball estimate. Said Keteyian: "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

According to a CBS spokesperson, the report represents the first time an actual count of veteran suicides at home has been tallied, as opposed to estimates. "We also have number from the DOD of active duty suicides that we believed have never been reported before dating back to 1995," said the spokesperson. "Many believe, including the family members, that they VA hasn't done a true nationwide count of the numbers (which are stunning) because they just don't want to know."

This echoes findings in a CBS report on the matter back in January 2004, which focused on soldier suicides during deployment but which also noted that the Pentagon did not count post-release suicides, and that a pre-Iraq war army study had predicted "an impending soldier-suicide crisis" (which, according to critics, was "largely ignored").

The two-part series will focus tonight on the numbers, and tomorrow on how the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is handling this problem (our guess, based on the above: Not well). According to CBS, tonight's segment runs 5 minutes — long for a newscast (though tonight is a single-sponsor broadcast (Pfizer) which will definitely save a few minutes).

Military suicides have been in the news recently owing to the passage last month of the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (HR. 327), named for 22-year-old Army Reservist Joshua Omvig who commited suicide a few months after his return from Iraq. The bill "directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop and implement a comprehensive program to reduce the incidence of suicide among veterans," by virtue of better screening of veteran patients for mental health, tracking of veterans, better suicide prevention training for VA staff (including designating one suicide-specific counselor at each facility), and a 24-hour mental-health care, including a hotline. The legislation also requires the VA to report back on "status, timeline and costs for complete implementation within 2 years" within 90 days (i.e. by late January). Hopefully they can reverse the trend. If not, hopefully CBS will still be there.

Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning" [CBS]

Another way we got into the Iraqi war mess revealed: false reports on biological weapons.

2007-11-02T05:28:00.000-04:00

Faulty Intel Source "Curve Ball" Revealed

Nov. 1, 2007

(CBS) 60 Minutes has identified the man whose fabricated story of Iraqi biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq. It has also obtained video of "Curve Ball," as he was known in intelligence circles, and discovered he was not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be.

60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon's two-year investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons.

60 Minutes has learned that Alwan’s university records indicate he did study chemical engineering but earned nearly all low marks, mostly 50s. Simon’s investigation also uncovered an arrest warrant for theft from the Babel television production company in Baghdad where he once worked.

Also appearing in Sunday's segment is video that 60 Minutes obtained of Alwan at a Baghdad wedding in 1993 - the first time images of him have ever been made public.

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter. "[Tenet] needs to talk to his special assistants if he didn’t see it," says Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official. "I am sure they showed it to him and I am sure ... it wasn’t what they wanted to see," he tells Simon.

Other CIA officials doubted Curve Ball’s authenticity, including former Central Group Chief Margaret Henoch, who speaks publicly for the first time, telling Simon she openly refuted Alwan’s story. "And it was like 'Whack a Mole.' He just popped right back up. It was unbelievable."

Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it. Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents.

In the end, however, Alwan got what he wanted. He is believed to be in Germany, free and probably living under an assumed name.

Why did he do it?

"It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth," says Drumheller. "It just shows ... the law of unintended consequences," he tells Simon.

Paschal: when government wants to do something, it will do it, hook or crook. This is true of every administration, Democratic and Republican.

It is the arrogance and blindness of power, and further the filtering out of data that would challenge the drive already underway to impose will on another without reckoning consequences.. Name every disaster: the failed Cuban invasion, Vietnam, two space disasters, Katrina, and now the Iraqi invasion and war.

Bush hiding behind the General?

2007-09-09T16:47:00.000-04:00

Hiding Behind the General
The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 09 September 2007

The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage - not maximum clarity on Iraq's military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn't looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus's strategy - as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell - another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier's duty - play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general - then in charge of training and equipping Iraq's security forces - rhapsodized about "tangible progress" and how the Iraqi forces were "developing steadily," an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

And just last week, senior military commanders in Baghdad who work for General Petraeus entered the political fray by taking issue - anonymously - with the grim assessment of Iraq's politics and security by non-partisan Congressional investigators.

As Congress waited anxiously for General Petraeus's testimony, a flurry of well-timed news reports said that he told the White House he could go along with the withdrawal of about 4,000 American troops beginning in January but wanted to maintain increased force levels well into next year - just like Mr. Bush. Democrats who once demanded a firm date for the start of a troop pullout immediately started backpedaling.

Withdrawing 4,000 troops and dangling the prospect of additional withdrawals is a token political gesture, not a new strategy. If it proves enough to cow Congress into halting its push for a more robust and concrete exit strategy, that would be political cowardice at its worst.

We hope that General Petraeus can resist the political pressure and provide an unvarnished assessment of the military situation in Iraq. He is an important source of information, of course, but he is only one source - and he is not the man who sets American policy. If Mr. Bush insists on listening only to those who agree with him, Congress and the public must weigh General Petraeus's report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagon's claim that things in Iraq are substantially better.

The Government Accountability Office found that the Iraqi government has not met 11 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress and that violence remains high, despite the White House's disingenuous claims of success. And a commission of retired senior military officers determined that Iraq's army will be unable to take over responsibility for internal security in the next 12 to 18 months. That is four years beyond what the Pentagon predicted in 2004. It is too long.

Nothing has changed about Mr. Bush's intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq's chaos from spreading.

Fathers and Sons: perspective

2007-09-08T17:02:00.001-04:00

Questions for Christopher Dodd

A Son’s Story

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Your new book, "Letters from Nuremberg," takes us back to the rubble of postwar Germany, when your father, former U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, was a young attorney assigned to prosecute Nazi criminals. Why did you wait so long to publish his letters? I didn’t find them until 1990. My sister had them in the basement of her house, and she gave them to my brother, and he gave them to me.

What did you think when you first read through them? I wept. My father was one of four people doing interrogations, and in one letter he is interviewing a thug like Hermann Goring at 4 p.m. — a man responsible for the incineration of millions of people — and writing my mother an intimate letter that night. He could really change gears.

Virtually all the letters he wrote to your mom are love letters that offered him what he described as an “all too brief few minutes with you.” He absolutely adored her. And she him. When he was coming home, it was very clear that everything else was secondary. We were there, but we were not the central event. There was never any doubt in my mind as to where his greatest affection was.

You seem eager in the book to contrast the idealism of the American past with the moral disasters of the present. Nuremberg — say the word and it conjures images of moral authority, of global leadership, of responsibility. Say the words Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and what images come to mind?

You’re probably aware that the position of U.S. attorney general is currently available. I don’t think I am a candidate for attorney general. I don’t think I’m on the short list.

I hear you’re running for president. Yes, Ma’am. I hear as well. Thank you for hearing!

You’re barely a blip in the polls. As a fifth-term senator with decades of experience, why do you think you’ve failed to generate at least as much interest as, say, John Edwards? Well, he ran for vice president. This is all about names that people recognize.

Do you think Connecticut is the problem? It’s doesn’t exactly have a populist image. That’s an interesting question. Living between New York and Boston is sort of like living in Alsace-Lorraine, between the French and the Germans. We’re the quiet zone between two very robust cities.

Do you think the recent debates helped you distinguish yourself from the other Democratic candidates? No. At the debates, I felt like I was back at St. Thomas the Apostle School with Sister Louise, trying to be recognized in the room. If you had a parochial education, you’d appreciate how frightening that can be — trying to be recognized.

It’s true you’re not overexposed. The only time you made national headlines this summer was when your office in Hartford was burglarized by a homeless man. Well, as someone once said, as long as they spell your name right.

You came late to fatherhood. You’re 63 and have two young children. Grace was born two days after 9/11. She’s 5, and Christina is 2. Little girls are wonderful. Fathers and little girls have special relationships.

All of this represents a departure from your former image as a longtime bachelor who dated Bianca Jagger and Carrie Fisher. I wouldn’t even begin to make a comment on that.

Do you think Americans have a right to know about a candidate's personal life? Well, look. What’s that great line? There’s no such thing as a saint without a past and a sinner without a future.

Who said that? I just did.

2007-09-08T17:02:00.000-04:00

Questions for Christopher Dodd

A Son’s Story

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Your new book, “Letters from Nuremberg,” takes us back to the rubble of postwar Germany, when your father, former U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, was a young attorney assigned to prosecute Nazi criminals. Why did you wait so long to publish his letters? I didn’t find them until 1990. My sister had them in the basement of her house, and she gave them to my brother, and he gave them to me.

You’re probably aware that the position of U.S. attorney general is currently available. I don’t think I am a candidate for attorney general. I don’t think I’m on the short list.

I hear you’re running for president. Yes, Ma’am. I hear as well. Thank you for hearing!

All of this represents a departure from your former image as a longtime bachelor who dated Bianca Jagger and Carrie Fisher. I wouldn’t even begin to make a comment on that.

Do you think Americans have a right to know about a candidate’s personal life? Well, look. What’s that great line? There’s no such thing as a saint without a past and a sinner without a future.

Who said that? I just did.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS ABOUT WAR...

2007-09-03T20:39:00.000-04:00

What The Constitution Says About Iraq
Congress and The Courts Must Recommit To The Legislative Branch’s Sole Authority To Declare War.

by Mario M. Cuomo

Most Americans want the war in Iraq ended, but it continues and Americans are killed, mutilated or wounded every day, as the Democratic majorities in Congress struggle to produce legislation that will take our forces out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to insist that as commander in chief, he has the constitutional power to go to war and decide when to end it, unilaterally. At the same time, another possible disaster emerges from the shadows: Bush appears to be considering a military assault on Iran, again apparently without Congress declaring war first.

How did we get to this point and what, if anything, can we do now?

The war happened because when Bush first indicated his intention to go to war against Iraq, Congress refused to insist on enforcement of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, this article has spelled out that Congress — not the president — shall have “the power to declare war.” Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a “declaration” by Congress.

Nor were the feeble, post-factum congressional resolutions of support of the Iraq invasion — in 2001 and 2002 — adequate substitutes for the formal declaration of war demanded by the founding fathers.

What can be done now?

First, Democrats should make clear that it is the president who is keeping the war in Iraq from ending. Even if Congress were able to pass a veto-proof bill with respect to withdrawal, the president would resist enforcement of the bill, insisting that as commander in chief, he is immune from Congress’ decision. That would raise a constitutional issue for the courts.

But judging by the courts’ history concerning constitutional war powers, including decisions involving the Iraq war in the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts, the judiciary would, in all probability, choose not to intervene, claiming that the disagreement between the president and Congress is a political question.

However, the political-question thesis is nowhere referred to in the Constitution, and it denies the people the protection of the Constitution in dealing with perhaps the most serious question the nation has to face: “Should we go to war?” That position should be challenged as an abdication of constitutional duty by the courts, but the sad truth is that the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would probably support our current conservative president. As a practical matter, that means only the president can end this waror change our strategy in Iraq.

Even if it is too late for Congress to remedy its failure to comply with the Constitution with respect to Iraq, at the very least our candidates for president and our congressional leaders should assure us that they will not allow this lapse to result in further unilateral acts of war — against Iran, Pakistan or any other nation — by this president or any other. Our leaders must make it clear that in the future, Congress will insist on compliance with Article I, Section 8 for any military action that is not fairly deemed an unexpected emergency.

It is frightening that our government has permitted this fundamental and costly constitutional transgression to persist for more than four years.

We must do everything we can to end the war in Iraq and avoid a new tragedy abroad by recommitting to strict adherence to the rule of law and to the Constitution by the president, Congress and the courts — especially with respect to war powers.

Mario M. Cuomo, the governor of New York from 1983 to 1995, now practices law in New York.

What is changing for the ordinary guy and gal at work?

2007-09-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

Anxious About Tomorrow
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Saturday 01 September 2007

You know you've stepped into a different universe when you hear a major American labor leader saying matter-of-factly that employer-based health insurance and employer-based pensions are relics of a bygone industrial economy.

Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.9 million members and is the fastest-growing union in the country, is not your ordinary union leader. With Labor Day approaching, he was reflecting on some of the challenges facing workers in a post-20th-century globalized economy.

"I just don't think that as a country we've conceptualized that this is not our father's or our grandfather's economy," Mr. Stern said in an interview. "We're going through profound change and we have no plan."

The feeling that seems to override all others for workers is anxiety. American families, already saddled with enormous debt, are trying to make it in an environment in which employment is becoming increasingly contingent and subject to worldwide competition. Health insurance, unaffordable for millions, is a huge problem. And guaranteed pensions are going the way of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper.

"We're ending defined benefit pensions in front of our eyes," said Mr. Stern. "I'd say today's retirement plan for young workers is: 'I'm going to work until I die.'"

The result of all of this - along with such problems as the mortgage and housing crisis, and a domestic economy that is doing nothing to improve living standards for ordinary Americans - is fear.

"Workers are incredibly, legitimately scared that the American dream, particularly the belief that their kids will do better, is ending," said Mr. Stern. He is trying to get across the idea that in a period of such profound change, the old templates, the traditional ideas and policies of even the most progressive thinkers and officeholders, will not be sufficient to meet the new challenges.

"We can't be the only country on earth that asks our employers to put the price of health care on its products when a lot of our competitors don't," he said. "And job security? Even if you want to stay with your employer, as in the old economic model, we're seeing in many industries that your employer is not going to be around to stay with you."

A comprehensive new approach is needed, but what should that approach be? Franklin Roosevelt always hoped to inject a measure of economic security into the lives of ordinary Americans. But the New Deal was seven decades ago. Workers are insecure now for a host of different reasons and Mr. Stern wants the labor movement to be part of a vast cooperative effort to develop the solutions appropriate to today's environment.

He told me, "I'd like to say to the Democrats that we are as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War."

He wants more people to pay attention to the big issues that affect not just union workers but all working families: How do you bring health care to all? What do you do about retirement security? How will the jobs of the 21st century be created?

And what about schools, energy, global warming, the environment?

Mr. Stern tends to see the nation as a team and wants the team to pull together to develop a creative vision of what the U.S. should be about in the 21st century. A cornerstone of that vision, he said, should be adherence to the "primary value" of rewarding work.

"We're a team in the 21st-century period of rapid change and competition," he said. "And right now, we don't have leadership, and we don't have a plan. At the same time, a group of people are enriching themselves far beyond anything that's reasonable."

What he would like to see, he said, is a large group of thoughtful people from various walks of American life - business, labor, government, academia and so forth - convened to begin the serious work of cooperatively developing a real-world vision of a society that is fairer, healthier, better educated, better prepared to compete globally, and more economically secure.

"I think you're already seeing the beginnings of odd formations of people who appreciate, issue by issue, that we have to do something different here," he said.

The kind of effort Mr. Stern would like to see would logically be initiated at the highest levels of government, preferably the White House. But if that's not in the cards, someone else should take up the challenge. And there should be a sense of urgency about it.

The fears of America's workers are well founded. "There's something wrong with the system right now," said Mr. Stern, "and we can't just say, 'Well, it's all going to work out.' It's not."

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children's health care, a socialist plot: just ask a conservative.

2007-08-28T19:25:00.000-04:00

A Socialist Plot
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 27 August 2007

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They'd have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren't available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be - a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

O.K., in case you're wondering, I haven't lost my mind, I'm drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled "The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door," is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will "displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage."

And Rudy Giuliani's call for "free-market solutions, not socialist models" was about health care, not education.

But thinking about how we'd react if they said the same things about education helps dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children's health.

The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It's just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children's medical bills "welfare," with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here's what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be "to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly."

But a child who doesn't receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn't receive an adequate education, doesn't have the same shot - he or she doesn't have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem - "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room" - but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don't have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don't have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost.

Now, the public understands the importance of health insurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn't. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a "serious" or a "very serious" problem.

So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they're trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of "middle-class welfare."

Proponents of an expansion of children's health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.

But the more fundamental response should be, so what?

We offer free education, and don't worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don't need, because that's the only way to ensure that every child gets an education - and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.

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Democrat response by former Senator Max Cleland, to Bush radio address

2007-08-26T20:34:00.000-04:00

Saturday , August 25, 2007

by former Senator Max Cleland.

Paschal: I stand four square with Mr. Cleland on this. I lost friends and classmates both in Korea and Vietnam. I have served in or with all four branches of our military, both enlisted and commissioned, active and reserve. Over one half of the 58,000 on the Vietnam memorial were lost after our leaders knew the war could not be won, and could not and would not face it. Max was a combat veteran of Vietnam.

This week, President Bush gave a speech comparing the ongoing war in Iraq to the Vietnam War. He used this analogy in his latest plea to the American people for yet more time to continue his war.

I know something about the Vietnam War. I know something about the price that was paid for continuing that war long after it was clear we could not succeed. I know something about years of war failing to produce a stable, secure and democratic country.

I know something about enemy attacks increasing and taking an ever higher toll on our troops. Fifty-eight thousand young Americans were killed in Vietnam; 350,000 were wounded. I was one of them.

There are similarities between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. One of the lessons to be learned from Vietnam is that the commitment of American military strength alone cannot solve another country's political weakness. This should be a somber warning to us all to responsibly end the war in Iraq and the additional loss of precious American lives.

Congress has required the president to issue a report soon on the state of the war. This assessment gives him yet another opportunity to do the right thing and change course in Iraq.

Unfortunately, it appears he will continue to argue that, if the American people and the U.S. Congress will just be patient, things will work out. He is likely to say that, given more time, victory is just around the corner. He is likely to argue that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

But like political leaders during the Vietnam era, this president has a "credibility gap." The majority of Americans see a profound difference between President Bush's optimistic rhetoric and the grim reality which lies beneath. Our history in Vietnam and the facts on the ground in Iraq today prove the American people are right.

How do I know? Because I've seen this movie before. I know how it ends. I know that all the P.R. in the world didn't change the truth on the ground in Vietnam and won't change the truth on the ground today in Iraq.

What is this truth? The truth is that more than 3,700 Americans have already lost their lives, more than 20,000 have been wounded, and nearly $500 billion in American taxpayer funds have been expended.

The truth is that, despite this enormous sacrifice, we find ourselves mired in a civil war with no end in sight and Iraqis unable or unwilling to make the political decisions necessary to end this conflict.

And the truth is President Bush's decision to go to war and stay at war has actually encouraged thousands of new recruits for Al Qaida in Iraq and around the world, has made the Middle East and other parts of the globe less safe, has alienated the Muslim world and allowed Al Qaida — the enemy that attacked this nation six years ago — a chance to rebuild and restore its terror network.

These are the facts. But the facts will not stop the president and his fellow Republicans from trying once again to sell the American people a bill of goods on the Iraq war.

The failures in Iraq are not the fault of our troops or their courage in battle. They have done everything asked of them and more. The conflict in Iraq is an Iraqi political problem, not a U.S. military problem.

We can't continue to sacrifice American lives, deplete our treasury and weaken our national security. We can't expect our soldiers to continue to risk their lives, especially when the Iraqi leaders themselves show no interest in achieving a peaceful political solution.

President Bush's report to Congress will attempt to show that his escalation has produced improved security in certain parts of Iraq. But it will ignore the stark truth in Iraq: that his overall strategy to buy time for Iraqis to make the needed political decisions has failed and, just like Vietnam, we are enmeshed now in an open-ended war for which our troops and our country will pay the price for decades to come.

That's why we must act now. This fall, Democrats in Congress will continue to stand with our troops and with the American people to remember the lessons of history and end the Iraq war.

Amen.

Why our pullout from Vietnam worked and Bush is wrong...

2007-08-25T21:22:00.000-04:00

Why America's Pullout From Vietnam Was a Success
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

Thursday 23 August 2007

The truth behind Bush's mangling of Cold War history.

The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles ("Russians with dollars," we were called.) On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon - the where some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken - I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North's victory over the "U.S. imperialists." In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi's new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars). Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall - but the opposite way.

This was the "harsh" aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam. His remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City on Wednesday were an abuse of historical fact - no surprise, perhaps, coming from a president who is just now catching up with the Political Science 101 reading he shrugged off at Yale. Yes, a lot of Vietnamese boat people died on the high seas; but many others have returned to visit in the ensuing years. Above all, we have learned that Vietnam and Southeast Asia were never really central fronts in the cold war (although Korea at the time of the outbreak of war in 1950, when Beijing still kowtowed to Moscow and before the Soviet Union and China split, might have fit that bill). The decision to pull out had very little effect on the ultimate outcome. America triumphed in the cold war because it had the right kind of economy - an open one - compared to Moscow and Beijing, and its ideas about freedom were more attractive to the states within the Soviet bloc than their own failed ideas were.

The president would like to make the argument that Iraq is about the same struggle. It's not, for several important reasons. In contrast to the Soviet and Chinese communists, or for that matter the fascists of the 1930s and '40s, Al Qaeda and its ilk have no universalist program, no persuasive alternative ideology to globalization and some brand of democracy. They are nihilists, and they have failed to capture half the world's attention as communism and socialism once did. So, yes, while a U.S. pullout would no doubt inspire a great deal of Al Qaeda propaganda about how they succeeded in forcing the Americans to withdraw from Iraq as they forced the Soviets to do in Afghanistan, the majority of the world's elites won't buy it. And the truth is, the slow bleed of America's might and prestige on the streets of Iraq makes for a far more compelling picture of U.S. weakness than any Al Qaeda propaganda could ever do. If we leave, Al Qaeda will rant triumphantly on the Web sites and perhaps win more adherents, but that won't get them any closer to "victory" over us than they are now.

We need to face facts. The problem of Iraq has very little to do with "the terrorists" whom Bush vaguely refers to in speech after speech. The problem of Iraq is that four years of a botched bloody occupation have created a failed state defined by fear, sectarian slaughter and the flight of Iraq's educated class. Iraq is being held together by just one thing now: American glue, the glue of U.S. troops on the ground. The noises you hear now about the ineffectiveness of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are merely the sound of an approaching collapse long in the making. The only really appropriate analogy to Vietnam is that Bush's policy of Iraqification - handing over things to the Iraqis - is far too similar to Vietnamization. Like the South Vietnamese government, the Iraqi politicians hunkered down in the Green Zone have little legitimacy any longer. Whatever authority they gained in the January 2005 elections has long since been frittered away and overtaken by the sectarian power struggle that is the governing reality on the ground. This power struggle is the reason why the Parliament is hopelessly paralyzed and why Maliki has almost no freedom of action. As a loyal Shiite of the Dawa Party, he is and will remain incapable of defying the new consensus among his sect for Shiite dominance. So powerful are these centrifugal forces pulling Iraq apart that the Iraqi Army seems to be disintegrating faster than it can be trained up. As seven soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division wrote in The New York Times on Aug. 19: "Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias."

Iraq will have to sort out these problems itself. There needs to be dramatic scaling back of the U.S. presence so that U.S. attention and resources can turn to the real terrorists. Most of them are still outside Iraq, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the whole thing started and where the "war on terror" should have always been focused. Even some very smart people don't seem to understand that Bush's larger idea of a "war on terror" has always been a fraudulent concept ginned up to justify his invasion of Iraq by broadening the enemy beyond the handful of Afghanistan-based bad guys who attacked us on 9/11. Mark Lilla, the Columbia University professor whose forthcoming book, "The Stillborn God," was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday, is so intimidated by the threat of Islamism that he argues, nonsensically, that the separation of religion and politics achieved in the West is the exception rather than the rule in the world today. Lilla writes: "A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism."

This is a misreading of history almost as profound as Bush's. In fact this process has happened. It's called globalization. Yes, there are some pretty large parts of the globe that haven't experienced it much yet: much of the Islamic world - let's narrow that to certain Islamist and Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran - and most of Africa. But in every other developed or developing part of the globe - the Americas, Europe, most of Asia, even Putin-controlled Russia - this Western-engendered system in which secularism eclipses religion in politics and governance has been accepted. (In fact, when it comes to mixing religion and politics, the most backsliding we've seen in the developed world in recent years has been right here in the United States, with the rise of the evangelical right). Even if we were to vastly oversimplify the terms of the conflict, we'd have to conclude it's the 4 or 5 billion (give or take a few hundred million) of the international community versus 1 billion or so Muslims. And thanks to this process, we of the majority - the international community - are still winning. Just ask that dwindling band of communists in Hanoi.

Go to Original

Recommended: The Politics of God, by Mark Lilla,

2007-08-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

There is in today's Sunday Magazine of the NY Times, a very relevant and important analysis of how and why our society has the conflicts it currently experiences and some thoughtful recommendations of what is necessary for peace and justice.

You can go to the New York Times, find the Sunday Magazine button on the left of indices, and go to the article itself and print it if you choose for reading. It is 12 pages, but here I will copy the last two, re recommendations.

VII. The Opposite Shore

This is not welcome news. For more than two centuries, promoters of modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization and education would eventually “disenchant” the charmed world of believers, and that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those predictions may eventually prove right. But Europe’s rapid secularization is historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.

Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a “liberal” Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life — even an attractive one like liberal democracy — the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.

The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we’ve encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.

Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation — and we cannot — we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within their own traditions to make it happen.

Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.

HOuse of War, by James Carroll, review by Mick J

2007-08-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

August 16, 2007

Book Review "House of War" by James Carroll

By Mick J

I have just completed James Carroll's "House of War"which is a history of the Pentagon. I should start with a disclaimer - I read it as a CD during my daily commute and I was not planning on reviewing it before I started.

The basic statement of the book is that the Pentagon, almost from its inception, has been a "House of War" intent on propagating its own huge defense (offense) budgets by persistently and erroneously inducing paranoia among administration, politicians, and citizens. Carroll's thesis is that it has largely failed in its wars and that its much touted success of "winning the cold war" is not true. It was the citizens of the Communist world that did that, as well as the Communist systems internal inefficiencies.

I chose to read the book because I had been extremely impressed by "Constantine's Sword" a previous Carroll tome (and Carroll's books are tomes - long and wandering while also being informative and well written). Lurking within each of these massive books is a more readable book 70% of the length, never to be published. "Constantine's Sword" deals with the Roman Catholic church, anti-semitism and much European history.

"House of War" deals with a totally different subject and is focused on a mere 60 years of history. It shares with "Constantine's Sword" much personal anecdotal information. In "House of War" this is more relevant since Carroll's father was a 4-star Air Force general in the Pentagon and Carroll , as a young boy, sometimes used to play in the Pentagon on Sundays when his father was in the office. He also was able to interview many people who knew his father, e.g. McNamara, because of their connection to his father.

The Pentagon was dedicated in 1943, which year also happens to mark Carroll's birth. The book spends many chapters discussing American bombing in WW II leading up to the double dropping of the atomic bomb. In that discussion it is interesting to note that the Americans, initially, were much more reluctant to bomb civilians than the British, but moved quickly to the British position of high level bombing of cities. The death toll of this bombing was very high in some of the cities e.g. the bombing of Tokyo. Curtis LeMay, who Carroll calls his 'dark hero" was an advocate of such bombing and said of the Japanese that there are "no innocent civilians". Hmmm, I thought, that is what Osama Bin Laden might say today of Americans.

The first secretary of defense at the Pentagon was James Forrestal who set the pattern for much of the aggressive paranoid thinking that marks so much of the Pentagon's history. Today, a large statue of Forrestal greets the visitor at the main entrance to the Pentagon. Forrestal was a man who had an obsessive fear of Communism. He saw the nuclear bomb as just an instrument of war to be put under military control, as did Curtis LeMay. As we move on to the development of the H-bomb, and thermonuclear war we meet with Paul Nitze who was to remain a cold war warrior over 35 years and serve with nearly all the presidents during that period. He, along with George Kennan, totally distrusted the Soviets, and yet failed to see the obvious fact that in the development of the A-bomb, the H-bomb, submarine nuclear launch facility, intercontinental rockets, multiple independent nuclear warheads, Anti-Ballistic Missile systems, and many more such defense systems the Russians always lagged the Americans.

Truman, to his credit, firmly placed use of nuclear weapons under presidential control and thus made the use of nuclear weapons much more unlikely. In the book we learn, not surprisingly, that Kennedy put the US on highest nuclear alert during the Cuban crisis. We also learn that Nixon secretly did it three times. No other US president has ever put the country on the highest alert; nor did the Soviets, ever. It does not add much gratification when Carroll relates that in Kissinger's memoirs he relates that he called the White House in the evening and spoke to the "drunk". How close the world was to a nuclear holocaust!!

Carroll joined the anti-Vietnam protestors and was a great admirer of the Berrigan brothers. He marched against the Pentagon in sight of his father's window but was hidden from identification by the anonymity of the vast crowd of demonstrators. Carroll constantly praises Gorbachev in the ways that he responded to the growing civil nonviolent protests to Communist rule.

We continue to the depressing Clinton years, which actually slowed the nuclear arms reductions. It makes sad reading how Clinton was dominated by Powell, then armed services chief. I had forgotten, or perhaps, I never registered the incident when Clinton boarded the aircraft carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, and a young sailor did not salute his commander-in-chief. Clinton did nothing in face of this insubordination, and neither did the Navy brass. The Lewinsky affair would have terminated any respect of the military for Clinton, except it was already zero.

The book closes with a discussion of the new Bush doctrine of preventive war. Carroll is careful to differentiate between "preventive" and "pre-emptive" wars. The latter which may be defined as an attack to prevent an certain, imminent enemy attack (e.g. Israel in the 1967 war), may be permissible under international law. The latter never are.

Carroll is optimistic, believing as he does in the power of citizens to effect major systemic changes. I hope he is correct, but I fear that in the US the citizenry, collectively speaking, may be compared to the farm animals that bleat "baa, baa".

Authors Bio: Mick is an immigrant working in the computer industry living in the US heartland. He immigrated from Great Britain about 30 years ago and became a citizen. He likes biking and hiking. He is married with three kids.

Catholic priests for Justice, opposed to USA military use of torture.

2007-08-13T21:28:00.000-04:00

Pre-Trial Continues for Priests Who Denounce Torture
By Sari Gelzer
T r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 13 August 2007

Two Roman Catholic priests, who were arrested as they approached the Fort Huachuca gatehouse on November 19, 2006, will face a continuance of their pre-trial hearing this August 13 in Federal Court in Tucson, Arizona. The intent of Franciscan Fr. Louis Vitale, 74, and Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly, 58, was to speak with enlisted personnel and deliver a letter denouncing torture to Major General Barbara Fast, commander at the post.

The letter addressed to Major General Fast voices the priests' concern with what is being taught to interrogators who are being trained at Fort Huachuca, the headquarters for the intelligence services of the US military.

"The Army Field Manual on interrogation (Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual) was written at Fort Huachuca," wrote Bill Quigley, law professor and human rights lawyer at Loyola University New Orleans.

Quigley, who also happens to be representing both priests in this case, goes on to say: "A number of the officers and soldiers responsible for human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison have worked at or were trained at the Headquarters for Army Intelligence Training at Ft. Huachuca."

Before becoming the Commander of the US Army intelligence Center in Arizona, Major General Fast was the top US intelligence officer in Iraq. She was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees at Abu Ghraib before their release, and was serving her post during the period in which practices of torture by US military personnel were occurring in the prison.

The priests found it fitting to discuss US acts of Torture with Major General Fast and ask her what is specifically being taught to US military interrogators at the US base. In their letter, they address Major General Fast:

"We are here today as concerned US people, veterans and clergy, to speak with enlisted personnel about the illegality and immorality of torture according to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions. We condemn torture as a dehumanization of both prisoners and interrogators, resulting in humiliation, disability and even death."

The priests were at the base in Sierra Vista, Arizona as part of a demonstration of over 120 people that gathered on Sunday, November 19, 2006, to protest military training that fosters torture. Frs. Vitale and Kelly were stopped as they approached the military gates. When they were not allowed to go inside to speak with the service men and women being trained, the two men knelt in prayer and were arrested.

The demonstration at Fort Huachuca was held in conjunction with the 16th annual vigil at Fort Benning, Georgia, organized by the group, School of the Americas Watch. On Saturday, November 18, 2006, over 20,000 protesters arrived at Fort Benning to call for the closing of what was formerly known as the School of the Americas. The school's name was changed in 2000 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

A Congressional task force found that soldiers, responsible for the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in El Salvador in 1989, were trained at the School of the Americas, which moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984. The protesters accuse the school of participating in mass human rights abuses in Latin American and beyond.

Fr. Vitale and Fr. Steve Kelly face federal and state charges of trespass and refusal to follow police orders.

Fr. Vitale is co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based organization that has opposed nuclear weapons testing for a quarter of a century. He was arrested at a Fort Benning Protest in 2005 and served six months in federal prison.

Fr. Kelley has served time in federal prison for the nonviolent, direct disarmament of nuclear weapon delivery systems. In December of 2005, he served as chaplain for Witness to Torture, a delegation of US anti-torture activists who peacefully marched in Cuba to the gates of the Guantanamo Bay naval base and prison camp.

Links

To View the Letter: http://tortureontrial.org/media.html#letter
For Information on the Trial: www.Tortureontrial.org
School of the America Watch: www.soaw.org/

The Terror we (USA) wrought on civilians 62 years ago.

2007-08-09T13:41:00.000-04:00

The Terror America Wrought
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig

Tuesday 07 August 2007

During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary of a U.S. attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on April 6, 1945, "nearly all the school children ... were at work in the open," to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm that the planners back at the University of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the bomb's maximum psychological impact.

The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. ... Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies-Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead."

Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither the children nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but they were picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military base whose antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by U.S. atomic scientists-a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain-was rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying would be all the more dramatic.

The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were available soft targets, much like the children playing in Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of battles waged beyond their control. In "White Light/Black Rain," a devastating HBO documentary released this week, there is an interview with the sole survivor of a Japanese elementary school of 620 students. The murder of the other 619, and the 370,000 overall deaths attributed to the bombings, 85 percent of which were civilian deaths, has never compelled a widespread examination of the "end justifies the means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts of terror. Indeed, the horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American cameramen soon after the devastation, and shown in the HBO film, was long kept secret by the U.S. government for fear that an informed American public might question this nation's incipient nuclear arms race.

Just exactly what distinguishes the United States' use of the ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" atomic bombs on cities in Japan from the car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the World Trade Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one recent university case, can be a career-ending move.

Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do. Truman defended his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the objection of leading atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military action to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted on that imperative despite the objections of top military figures, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that the war would end quickly without dropping the bomb.

The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of Truman's rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the Japanese were on the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely by the Soviets' imminent entry into the fight.

At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of retaining their emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been abandoned with the shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the battlefront of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded Asian ally. Instead, the U.S. played midwife to the birth of the nuclear monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and growing threat to the survival of human life on Earth.

This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays power games with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main proliferator of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an expansion of the U.S. nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by "improving" the ultimate weapon of terror, which the U.S. alone stands guilty of using.

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More Links:

For a fuller explanation of the suppression of footage taken shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, follow this link.

Click here to go to HBO's site for "White Light/Black Rain."

Pariots who love our troops to death. . . .yes

2007-08-06T20:44:00.000-04:00

Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 05 August 2007

Gerald Ford spoke the truth when he called Watergate "our long national nightmare," but even a nightmare can have its interludes of rib-splitting farce.

None were zanier than the antics of Baruch Korff, a small-town New England rabbi who became a full-time Richard Nixon sycophant as the walls closed in. Korff was ubiquitous in the press and on television, where he would lambaste Democrats and the media "lynch mob" for vilifying "the greatest president of the century." Despite Nixon's reflexive anti-Semitism, he returned the favor by granting the rabbi audiences and an interview that allowed the embattled president to soliloquize about how his own faith and serenity reinforced his conviction "deep inside" that everything he did was right.

Clearly we've reached our own Korffian moment in our latest long national nightmare. The Nixon interviewed by the rabbi sounded uncannily like the resolute leader chronicled by the conservative columnists and talk-show jocks President Bush has lately welcomed into his bunker. For his part, William Kristol even published a Korffian manifesto, "Why Bush Will Be a Winner," in The Washington Post. It reassured us that the Bush presidency would "probably be a successful one" and that "we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome" in Iraq. A Bush flack let it be known that the president liked this piece so much that he recommended it to his White House staff.

Are you laughing yet? Maybe not. No one died in Watergate. This time around, the White House lying and cover-ups have been not just in the service of political thuggery but to gin up a gratuitous war without end.

There is another significant difference as well. Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.

The ranks of unreconstructed Iraq hawks are thinner than they used to be. Some politicians in both parties (John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Gordon Smith) and truculent pundits (Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan) who cheered on the war recanted (sooner in some cases than others), learned from their errors and moved on. One particularly eloquent mea culpa can be found in today's New York Times Magazine, where the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that those who "truly showed good judgment on Iraq" might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing "wishes for reality."

But those who remain dug in are having none of that. Some of them are busily lashing out Korff-style. Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars' critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.

It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, "A War We Just Might Win," by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued "at least into 2008."

The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, "No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" in Iraq if there's no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

But even more galling was the authors' effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." That's disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration's incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of "Mission Accomplished."

You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald's Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway "experts" now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn't do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.

At least the more rabid and Korff-like of the war's last defenders have the intellectual honesty not to deny what they've been saying all along. But their invective has gone over the top, with even mild recent critics of the war like John Warner and Richard Lugar being branded defeatist "pre- 9/11 Republicans" by Mr. Kristol.

It's also the tic of Mr. Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard (and its Murdoch sibling The New York Post), to claim that the war's critics hate the troops. When The New Republic ran a less-than-jingoistic essay by a pseudonymous American soldier in Iraq, The Weekly Standard even accused it of fabrication - only to have its bluff called when the author's identity was revealed and his controversial anecdotes were verified by other sources.

A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on "Meet the Press" last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views "into the mouths of soldiers." As Mr. Webb noted, the last New York Times-CBS News poll on the subject found that most members of the military and their immediate families have turned against the war, like other Americans.

As is becoming clearer than ever in this Korffian endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war's sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war's champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war's opponents.

Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of "Nightline" was branded unpatriotic by the right's vigilantes.

The same playbook was followed by the war's champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his "near insubordination." When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.

One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops' lives are.

"I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life," Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. "I've been handed the check." The amount, he said, was "roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning."

Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week's sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don't know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman's cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.

But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army's most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what "supporting the troops" means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.

Who are the least among us?

2007-07-30T11:50:00.000-04:00

July 30, 2007

WE ARE ALL THE LEAST AMONG US

By Bruce Allen Morris

In a recent discussion with my arch conservative son-in-law, whom I love dearly, he defended his argument for racially profiled secret surveillence, summary imprisonment, and torture of Americans and legal and illegal aliens suspected of being terrorists with this little gem: "let's face it, Bruce, you and I and people like us will never be suspected of terrorism, so why should we care if the government spies on Muslims to protect us?" Miraculously stifling a primal scream, I began, in a later quiet time to meditate on that question and seek an answer based in his ideology that addresses his self-interest.

It caused me to remember another conversation with a young, idealistic homeless and hunger activist a few years earlier. As I was awakening from years of suppressing my liberal background and nature in a conservative job, I lamented to her my shame that our society, with so much wealth, treats low-income people so poorly. She replied: "our society does not treat anyone well, its just that some people have the money to take better care of themselves than others."

Then in the last few days, our President announced he would veto a proposed law to increase funding to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, thereby denying health care to millions of low-income children to save less money per year than we spend in Iraq each month. Denying health care to poor children while pushing for permanent tax cuts for the richest people in the history of the world. Then another shameful development. I just read a the most graphic story yet about the Bush Administration's refusal to help the Iraqi refugees Bush's own war is creating. "Bush Administration Utterly Callous Toward Iraqi Refugees" http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/28/2826/

Adding this conversation and these recent events to my meditation on how we treat each other and why those of us who can take care of ourselves should care deeply about those who cannot, I naturally found my way to Jesus and his most beautiful words on right human action.

Jesus And The Least Among Us

In its grand depiction of the scene when Jesus returns to earth as The King and judges his professed followers, the Book of Matthew accounts the ultimate test Jesus will use to decide who joins him in the Kingdom of Heaven and who will burn in eternal fire. And Jesus declares that those will join him in heaven who fed him when hungry, gave him drink when thirsty, clothed him when naked, visited him when sick, came to him in prison, and invited him in as a stranger. When they ask when they did these things for Jesus, he replies, "to the extent that you did it to one of your brothers, even to the least among you, you did it to me."

To those who would burn in eternity, Jesus explained:

"Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me." They also will answer, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?" He will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me."

Matthew, 45, 31-46 (42-46 quoted in full) (emphasis added).

Now, you may or may not believe in the concept of judgment day, or Jesus or even God, but that is not needed to understand the basic moral principle announced. In a more universally accessible spiritual, secular moral, or ethical sense, Jesus is announcing the only reliable test of a person's basic humanity: how that person treats the least among his or her society.

Action Toward The Least Among Us As An Essential Political Assessment

This most fundamental moral principle of right behavior and action is as important a political assessment as it is an assessment of humanity. Of course, the Bible and the words of Jesus are the sources of the radical Christian right's claim to political and legal superiority. But it is also incredibly important in a world with huge movements setting up Jesus's or Allah's or whoever's criteria for judgment day as the basis for legal and governmental systems to understand that Jesus's ultimate assessment of his followers was not how well they followed the Ten Commandments, whether they were for or against abortion or gay marriage or war against infidels, had sex outside marriage, or went to church every Sunday. No, the ultimate measure was whether they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, visited the imprisoned, invited in strangers. And if they denied this even to the least among them, they also denied it to Jesus himself! But if they did this to all including the least among them, they also did it to Jesus himself! In short, God said through Jesus, how we treat each other is the single most important measure of our lives

More specifically, how we treat the least among us is the one and only truly reliable assessment of our genuine humanity and the only way to know how we can truly count on our political leaders to treat all members of society, including ourselves. To expand on that concept politically, let me first delve in to who are the least among us.

Who Are The Least Among Us?

The obvious groups are the ones Jesus listed: the poor, hungry, homeless, sick, mentally ill, imprisoned, strange, alien. Minorities, women and children are often among the least in societies. Native Americans have always been among the least here. But these listings are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Numerous times in history wealth or familiarity did not protect certain groups or persons from becoming "least". Wealth did not protect Jews in Europe, nor Palestinians in either Palestine or Israel. In America, minorities would generally be included, but wealth has protected certain minorities from oppression or even bought them the same apparent exceptions from the rules applying to the non-wealthy long experienced by wealthy whites. Illegal aliens are certainly the least among us, but some are considered lower than others depending on their skin color and religion-Latinos and Persian, Arabic and Asian Muslims are considered much lower than Canadians or Europeans or even Indians.

Neither wealth nor legal status nor innocence protected the thousands of Muslims rounded up in the United States after September 11, 2001 and hounded, followed, spied-on and suspected ever since for the crime only of being Muslim and having brown skin. Children, of course represent the least among us in stature and political right, but children of successful parents are seldom considered among the leastwhile children of the poor most certainly are. To expand the definition even further beyond easy categories, think of those suddenly and unexpectedly oppressed for their political beliefs in the McCarthy era, or for their ancestral home in the Japanese internment.

The bottom line here is that no listing or categorization can tell us who are the least among us. So what is the answer?

I believe the answer is functional. The answer best illuminating the critical importance of this measure of humanity is this: the least among us are the least able to resist the treatment given to, denied or imposed on them; least able to retaliate for negative treatment; or least able to reciprocate for positive treatment. The least among us are those who can neither resist, retaliate nor reciprocate.

Why is the inability to resist, retaliate or reciprocate the most functional and meaningful definition of the least among us? Because the way we treat someone who can resist or retaliate for negative treatment only reliably shows how we act in the face of fear or expedience. The way we treat someone who can reciprocate for positive treatment only reliably shows how we act when we expect or are hoping for something in return. The key word here is "reliably." We may very well act with love and respect to the richest person in town out of genuine humanity, but an outside observer cannot be sure we are not simply ingratiating ourselves in hopes of future favor. Only by seeing how we treat those who cannot resist, retaliate or reciprocate can we know how a person acts based purely on his or her own humanity, love, or morality.

Why Should The Mainstream Observe and Care How The Least Are Treated?

Politically the way the least among us are treated is crucial because, as we have seen many times throughout history, the categories included in those who cannot resist, retaliate or reciprocate can change, and sometimes rapidly. Who would have thought in the 1940's that successful, famous and wealthy movie directors and writers only a few year later would be rendered penniless untouchables just because of a rumor that they once belonged to a hated (least) political party?

But perhaps the best illustration of this principle is the famous poem written by Martin Niemoller, a Nazi concentration camp survivor. One popular version (of many) recites:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Viewed in Matthew's framing of the risen Jesus on judgment day, Neimoller informs us that the least among us can not only change with shifting political tides, but can grow and evolve as tyrants learn they must expand the circle of those they oppress to prolong and tighten their dominance of society and hasten their appropriation of its wealth and resources.

He instructs us not only that we must remain ever vigilant of the rights of temporally demonized, suspected, or scapegoated-lesser- groups to ensure the protection of our own rights. Niemoller also warns us to remain ever observant of how our leaders treat the least among us, for that shows us the true face of their humanity and teaches us how they will treat all others who find themselves for whatever reason unable to resist, retaliate or reciprocate. In short, how our leaders treat the least among us shows us how we will be treated if we become one of least. Few in history have ever known this reality better than Niemoller and his contemporaries who found themselves in German concentration camps after no one was left to speak for them. After, in other words, they could no longer resist or retaliate.

So the answer to my son-in-law and all other conservatives is that we must care how our government treats Muslims today because we may ourselves be among the hated and therefore least group one day in the future. Sometime in the next fifty years, whites will nolonger be a majority. What if all minorities cooperate and decide to oppress white people? What if you were a high-flying corporate CEO and suddenly found yourself in prison for fraud? How would you like the way we treat prisoners then? More importantly and probably, with our society's abject refusal to take care of the least among us economically, what if we are hit by an uninsured driver in a crosswalk and end up with a brain injury leaving us unable to earn a living and our savings are not sufficient to sustain us? Without a doubt in American today the unemployed and mentally challenged are clearly among our least. How will we want our society to treat us when we are forced to join their number?

Not to go all metaphysical on you, but if we are all one ignored red light away from becoming the least among us, we are all, in effect, among the least right now. Nothing actualizes that was not potential and potentiality is just latent reality. So we should pay attention to how our leaders and our society treat the least among us because we are, in fact, all the least among us.

Authors Website: http://madnessofdivinity.blogspot.com

Authors Bio: Bruce is 46 year-old father of one, stepfather of three and grandfather of two, who left a lucrative law practice at a large national law firm to work, advocate and write for social justice and equality and find a way to incorporate a spiritual life into the material world. He now struggles along to make a decent living while holding true to his deepest principles in Portland Oregon.

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2007-07-28T20:34:00.000-04:00

Howard Zinn: Are We Politicians or Citizens?

Are We Politicians or Citizens?

By Howard Zinn

May 2007 Issue

As I write this, Congress is debating timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. In response to the Bush Administration’s “surge” of troops, and the Republicans’ refusal to limit our occupation, the Democrats are behaving with their customary timidity, proposing withdrawal, but only after a year, or eighteen months. And it seems they expect the anti-war movement to support them.

That was suggested in a recent message from MoveOn, which polled its members on the Democrat proposal, saying that progressives in Congress, “like many of us, don’t think the bill goes far enough, but see it as the first concrete step to ending the war.”

Ironically, and shockingly, the same bill appropriates $124 billion in more funds to carry the war. It’s as if, before the Civil War, abolitionists agreed to postpone the emancipation of the slaves for a year, or two years, or five years, and coupled this with an appropriation of funds to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.

We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.

Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite—provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence—they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home.

It is four years since the United States invaded Iraq with a ferocious bombardment, with “shock and awe.” That is enough time to decide if the presence of our troops is making the lives of the Iraqis better or worse. The evidence is overwhelming. Since the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, and, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, about two million Iraqis have left the country, and an almost equal number are internal refugees, forced out of their homes, seeking shelter elsewhere in the country.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. But his capture and death have not made the lives of Iraqis better, as the U.S. occupation has created chaos: no clean water, rising rates of hunger, 50 percent unemployment, shortages of food, electricity, and fuel, a rise in child malnutrition and infant deaths. Has the U.S. presence diminished violence? On the contrary, by January 2007 the number of insurgent attacks has increased dramatically to 180 a day.

The response of the Bush Administration to four years of failure is to send more troops. To add more troops matches the definition of fanaticism: If you find you’re going in the wrong direction, redouble your speed. It reminds me of the physician in Europe in the early nineteenth century who decided that bloodletting would cure pneumonia. When that didn’t work, he concluded that not enough blood had been let.

The Congressional Democrats’ proposal is to give more funds to the war, and to set a timetable that will let the bloodletting go on for another year or more. It is necessary, they say, to compromise, and some anti-war people have been willing to go along. However, it is one thing to compromise when you are immediately given part of what you are demanding, if that can then be a springboard for getting more in the future. That is the situation described in the recent movie The Wind That Shakes The Barley, in which the Irish rebels against British rule are given a compromise solution—to have part of Ireland free, as the Irish Free State. In the movie, Irish brother fights against brother over whether to accept this compromise. But at least the acceptance of that compromise, however short of justice, created the Irish Free State. The withdrawal timetable proposed by the Democrats gets nothing tangible, only a promise, and leaves the fulfillment of that promise in the hands of the Bush Administration.

There have been similar dilemmas for the labor movement. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that unions, fighting for a new contract, must decide if they will accept an offer that gives them only part of what they have demanded. It’s always a difficult decision, but in almost all cases, whether the compromise can be considered a victory or a defeat, the workers have been given some thing palpable, improving their condition to some degree. If they were offered only a promise of something in the future, while continuing an unbearable situation in the present, it would not be considered a compromise, but a sellout. A union leader who said, “Take this, it’s the best we can get” (which is what the MoveOn people are saying about the Democrats’ resolution) would be hooted off the platform.

I am reminded of the situation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, when the black delegation from Mississippi asked to be seated, to represent the 40 percent black population of that state. They were offered a “compromise”—two nonvoting seats. “This is the best we can get,” some black leaders said. The Mississippians, led by Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses, turned it down, and thus held on to their fighting spirit, which later brought them what they had asked for. That mantra—“the best we can get”—is a recipe for corruption.

It is not easy, in the corrupting atmosphere of Washington, D.C., to hold on firmly to the truth, to resist the temptation of capitulation that presents itself as compromise. A few manage to do so. I think of Barbara Lee, the one person in the House of Representatives who, in the hysterical atmosphere of the days following 9/11, voted against the resolution authorizing Bush to invade Afghanistan. Today, she is one of the few who refuse to fund the Iraq War, insist on a prompt end to the war, reject the dishonesty of a false compromise.

Except for the rare few, like Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, and John Lewis, our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be “realistic.”

We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.

Howard Zinn is the author, most recently, of “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”

Iraqi Vets Sue VA Head for Poor Care,

2007-07-24T08:58:00.000-04:00

Published on Monday, July 23, 2007 by the Associated Press

Injured Iraq War Veterans Sue Bush’s VA Head for Poor Care, Cheating

by Hope Yen

WASHINGTON — Frustrated by delays in health care, a coalition of injured Iraq war veterans is accusing VA Secretary Jim Nicholson of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.

The class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad change in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed warriors on several fronts - from providing prompt disability benefits, to adding staff to reduce wait times for medical care to boosting services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by allegedly working with the Pentagon to misclassify PTSD claims as pre-existing personality disorders to avoid paying out benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.

VA spokesman Matt Smith said Monday he could not comment on a pending lawsuit. But he said the agency is committed to meeting the special needs of Iraq war veterans.

“Through outreach efforts, the VA ensures returning Global War on Terror service members have access to the widely recognized quality health care they have earned including services such as prosthetics or mental health care,” he said. “VA has also given priority handling to their monetary disability benefit claims.”

The lawsuit comes amid intense political and public scrutiny of the VA and Pentagon following reports of shoddy outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere.

“Unless systemic and drastic measures are instituted immediately, the costs to these veterans, their families, and our nation will be incalculable, including broken families, a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans, increases in drug abuse and alcoholism, and crushing burdens on the health care delivery system,” the complaint states.

It asks that a federal court order the VA to make immediate improvements that would speed disability payments, ensure fairness in awards and provide more complete access to mental health care.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in San Francisco issued a strong rebuke of the VA in ordering the agency to pay retroactive benefits to Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and contracted a form of leukemia.

“The performance of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has contributed substantially to our sense of national shame,” the opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals read.

Nicholson abruptly announced last week he would step down by Oct. 1 to return to the private sector. He has repeatedly defended the agency during his 2 1/2-year tenure while acknowledging there was room for improvement.

More recently, following high-profile suicide incidents in which families of veterans say the VA did not provide adequate care, Nicholson pledged to add mental health services and hire more suicide-prevention coordinators.

Some veterans say those measures aren’t enough. In the lawsuit, they note that government investigators warned as early as 2002 that the VA needed to fix its backlogged claims system and make other changes.

Yet, the lawsuit says, Nicholson and other officials still insisted on a budget in 2005 that fell $1 billion short, and they made “a mockery of the rule of law” by awarding senior officials $3.8 million in bonuses despite their role in the budget foul-up.

Today, the VA’s backlog of disability payments is now between 400,000 and 600,000, with delays of up to 177 days to process an initial claim and an average of 657 days to process an appeal. Several congressional committees and a presidential commission are now studying ways to improve care.

“While steps can and will be taken in the political arena, responsibility for action lies with the agency itself,” said Melissa W. Kasnitz, managing attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, in a telephone interview. Her group is teaming up with a major law firm, Morrison & Foerster, to represent the veterans.

“We don’t believe the problems will be fixed by the VA if we wait for them,” she said. “In the meantime, it is veterans who risk their lives for our country who are suffering the consequences.”

The lawsuit cites violations of the Constitution and federal law, which mandates at least two years of health care to injured veterans.

The veterans groups involved in the lawsuit are Veterans for Common Sense in Washington, D.C., which claims 11,500 members, and Veterans United for Truth, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., with 500 members.

___

On the Net:

Disability Rights Advocates: http://www.dralegal.org/

Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov/

All the President's ENABLERS

2007-07-20T21:24:00.000-04:00

All the President's Enablers
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 20 July 2007

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits - amazingly, they still exist - to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don't understand is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration's own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush's poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that's not reassuring; it's terrifying. It doesn't demonstrate Mr. Bush's strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it's not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration's "infallibility complex," its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn't want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the "reality-based community," asserting that "when we act, we create our own reality."

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of "Bush derangement syndrome," liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush's success. Now, however, it's a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers - people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

This week's prime example is Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who made headlines a few weeks ago with a speech declaring that "our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests." Mr. Lugar is a smart, sensible man. He once acted courageously to head off another foreign policy disaster, persuading a reluctant Ronald Reagan to stop supporting Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt leader of the Philippines, after a stolen election.

Yet that political courage was nowhere in evidence when Senate Democrats tried to get a vote on a measure that would have forced a course change in Iraq, and Republicans responded by threatening a filibuster. Mr. Lugar, along with several other Republicans who have expressed doubts about the war, voted against cutting off debate, thereby helping ensure that the folly he described so accurately in his Iraq speech will go on.

Thanks to that vote, nothing will happen until Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, delivers his report in September. But don't expect too much even then. I hope he proves me wrong, but the general's history suggests that he's another smart, sensible enabler.

I don't know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn't gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don't think it's standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.

In the article, General Petraeus told us that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously." And those security forces were doing just fine: their leaders "are displaying courage and resilience" and "momentum has gathered in recent months."

In other words, General Petraeus, without saying anything falsifiable, conveyed the totally misleading impression, highly convenient for his political masters, that victory was just around the corner. And the best guess has to be that he'll do the same thing three years later.

You know, at this point I think we need to stop blaming Mr. Bush for the mess we're in. He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it.

Yet Mr. Bush keeps doing damage because many people who understand how his folly is endangering the nation's security still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it.

Amen , Paul Krugman, and thank you for pointing it out.

Paschal, July 20

On Impeachment, by Bill Moyers.

2007-07-17T13:04:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers: On Impeachment
Bill Moyers Journal

Friday 13 July 2007

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Journal.

Impeachment...the word feared and loathed by every sitting president is back. It's in the air and on your computer screen, a growing clamor aimed at both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.

This week's news only agitated the clamor. The president acknowledged that someone in his administration did leak the name of a CIA agent to the press, but he said let's move on - even as he refused to let his former White House counsel testify to Congress about political influence at the Justice Department.

So the talk in Washington was of executive arrogance. All the more so as the Democratic House voted to withdraw US troops from Iraq by next spring despite a threat of veto by President Bush. A public opinion poll from the American Research Group reports that more than four in ten Americans - 45 per cent-favor impeachment hearings for President Bush and more than half -54 per cent - favor putting Vice President Cheney in the dock.

Are these the first tremors of a major shock wave…or just much ado about nothing? First, let's take a look at the last time a president found himself fighting off an impeachment campaign. It happened less than a dozen years ago. And what was the issue:

President Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky...

Bill Moyers: But he did. And even after that denial in early 1998, President Clinton lied again seven months later - this time under oath to a federal grand jury. But that very evening he had a change of heart.

President Bill Clinton: "Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong….I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that."

Bill Moyers: For one powerful Republican member of Congress, an apology wasn't enough. Tom Delay, then the majority whip of the House, convinced speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican leaders that Clinton's lie called for nothing less than removing the president from office - impeachment. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was commissioned to gather the evidence. Starr eventually sent 36 boxes of evidence to the capitol. They catalogued his investigation of Clinton's finances, a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones and sting operations mounted by the prosecutor to uncover the details of the Lewinsky affair. Nearly 500 pages summarizing the report were quickly posted on the internet. For the next month, the house judiciary committee waded through the report. What the case meant depended largely on party affiliation. Democrats insisted it all came down to lying about sex.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL): The president betrayed his wife ...he did not betray his country

Bill Moyers: Republicans, who controlled the House, argued it was about something more important.

Rep. Bill McCollum (R-FL): Truthfullness is the glue that holds our justice system together

Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA): With his conduct and his arrogance...William Jefferson Clinton has thrown a gauntlet at the feet of the Congress.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI): This is not Watergate. This is an extramarital affair.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI): Even the president of the United States does not have the license to lie.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL): Wake up, America, they are about to impeach our president.

Bill Moyers: on october 5, 1998, the house judiciary committee authorized a full impeachment inquiry……only the third u.s. president in history to be seriously threatened with removal from office. The constitution says a president may be impeached for "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors". Experts were called to interpret those words:

Leon Higginbotham Jr., Former US Appeals Court Judge: There has never been, never been an impeachment proceeding on this miniscule level...

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., University of New York: All the independent counsel's charges thus far derive from the president's lies about his sex life. His attempts to hide personal misbehavior are certainly disgraceful. But if they are to be deemed impeachable, then we reject the standards laid down by the framers in the Constitution and trivialize the process of impeachment.

Prof. Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University: The only reason the majority of this committee cares about perjury is because they believe that President Clinton, their political opponent, is guilty of it.

Bill Moyers: The House Judiciary listened…and then drafted two articles of impeachment accusing Clinton of perjury…a third accusing him of obstruction of justice and yet a fourth, of making false statements. A week later, December 19, 1998, the full House met to consider the articles. They approved two of them…one for perjury…another for obstruction of justice. Republican leaders called for Clinton to resign. He didn't, and now it was the Senate's constitutional task to conduct the impeachment trial ordered by the House. The Senators met behind closed doors …and on Friday, February 12, 1999, the verdict was delivered to the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Is not guilty as charged in the second article of impeachment.

President Clinton: I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events and the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and on the American people.

Bill Moyers: One of the fellows you're about to meet wrote the first article of impeachment against President Clinton. Bruce Fein did so because perjury is a legal crime. And Fein believed no one is above the law. A constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein served in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration and as general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. Bruce Fein has been affiliated with conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and now writes a weekly column for THE WASHINGTON TIMES and Politico.com.

He's joined by John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for THE NATION and an associate editor of the CAPITOL TIMES. Among his many books is this most recent one, THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: THE FOUNDERS' CURE FOR ROYALISM. Good to see you both. Bruce, you wrote that article of impeachment against Bill Clinton. Why did you think he should be impeached?

Bill Moyers: Bruce you wrote that article of impeachment against Bill Clinton. Why did you think he should be impeached?

Bruce Fein: I think he was setting a precedent that placed the president above the law. I did not believe that the initial perjury or misstatements - that came perhaps in a moment of embarrassment stemming from the Paula Jones lawsuit was justified impeachment if he apologized. Even his second perjury before the grand jury when Ken Starr's staff was questioning him, as long as he expressed repentance, would not have set an example of saying every man, if you're president, is entitled to be a law unto himself. I think Bush's crimes are a little bit different. I think they're a little bit more worrisome than Clinton's. You don't have to have -

Bill Moyers: More worrisome?

Bruce Fein: More worrisome than Clinton's - because he is seeking more institutionally to cripple checks and balances and the authority of Congress and the judiciary to superintend his assertions of power. He has claimed the authority to tell Congress they don't have any right to know what he's doing with relation to spying on American citizens, using that information in any way that he wants in contradiction to a federal statute called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He's claimed authority to say he can kidnap people, throw them into dungeons abroad, dump them out into Siberia without any political or legal accountability. These are standards that are totally anathema to a democratic society devoted to the rule of law.

Bill Moyers: You're talking about terrifying power but this is a terrifying time. People are afraid of those people abroad who want to kill us. Do you think, in any way, that justifies the claims that Bruce just said Bush has made?

John Nichols: I think that the war on terror, as defined by our president, is perpetual war. And I think that he has acted precisely as Madison feared. He has taken powers unto himself that were never intended to be in the executive. And, frankly, that when an executive uses them, in the way that this president has, you actually undermine the process of uniting the country and really focusing the country on the issues that need to be dealt with. Let's be clear. If we had a president who was seeking to inspire us to take seriously the issues that are in play and to bring all the government together, he'd be consulting with Congress. He'd be working with Congress. And, frankly, Congress, through the system of checks and balances, would be preventing him from doing insane things like invading Iraq.

Bruce Fein: In the past, presidents like Abe Lincoln, who confronted a far dire emergency in the Civil War than today, sought congressional ratification approval of his emergency measures. He didn't seek to hide them from the people and from Congress and to prevent there to be accountability. And, of course, Congress did ratify what he had done. Secondly, sure, times can be terrifying. But that also should alert us to the fact that we can make mistakes. The executive can make mistakes.

Take World War II. We locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans, said they were all disloyal. Well, we got 120,000 mistakes. They lost their property. They lost their liberty for years and years because we made a huge mistake. And that can be true after 9/11 as well. No one wants other downgrade the fact that we have abominations out there and people want to kill us. But we should not inflate the danger and we should not cast aside what we are as a people. We can fight and defeat these individuals, these criminals, based upon our system of law and justice. It's not a - we have a fighting constitution. It's always worked in the past. But it still remains the constitution of checks of balances.

Bill Moyers: A fighting constitution -

Bruce Fein: It's a fighting constitution that enables us-

Bill Moyers: What do you mean?

Bruce Fein: That with the - with the consent of Congress and the president working hand in glove with consistent with due process of law, we have the authority to suspend habeas corpus in times of invasion or rebellion. It has enabled us to defeat all of our enemies consistent with the law.

Bill Moyers: Congress did not stand up to George Bush for five years when it was controlled by Republicans. And I don't see any strong evidence that the Democrats are playing the role that you think the Congress should be playing.

Bruce Fein: That is correct. But it doesn't exculpate the president that Congress has not sought immediately to sanctions his excesses.

Bruce Fein: - exactly right. And Bill, this could not happen if we had a Congress that was aggressive, if we had a Congress the likes of Watergate when Nixon was president and he tried to - obstruct justice and defeat the course of law. We have a Congress that basically is an invertebrate.

Bill Moyers: But why is Congress supine?

John Nichols: They are supine for two reasons. One, they are politicians who do not - quite know how to handle the moment. And they know that something very bad happened on September 11th, 2001, now five years ago, six years ago. And they don't know how to respond to it. Whereas Bush and Karl Rove have responded in a supremely political manner to it and, frankly, jumped around them. That's one part of the problem.

Bill Moyers: Jumped around Congress?

John Nichols: Jumped around Congress at every turn. I mean, they don't even tell them, they don't consult with them. They clearly have no regard for the checks and balances. But the other thing that's - in play here - and I think this is a - much deeper problem. I think the members of our Congress have no understanding of the Constitution. And as a result, they - don't understand their critical role in the governance of the country.

They - it - when the Republicans are in charge, they see their job as challenging - or as supporting the president in whatever he does, defending him, making it possible for him to do whatever he wants. When the Democrats are in charge, they seem to see their role as trying to score political points as opposed to what ought to be sort of a - common ground of -

Bill Moyers: - because the fact of the matter is approaching an - election year, you don't really think, do you, that the Democrats want to experience a backlash by taking on a Republican president in an election-

John Nichols: Well, it -

Bill Moyers: - or that the Republicans want to impeach an administration that they elected in 2000 and reelected in 2004? There is a political element here, right?

Bruce Fein: There's always going to be a political element, Bill. But in the past, there's always been a few statesmen who have said, "You know, the political fallout doesn't concern me as much as the Constitution of the United States." We have to keep that undefiled throughout posterity 'cause if it's not us, it will corrode. It will disappear on the installment plan. And that has been true in the past. When we had during Watergate Republicans and remember Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, who approached the president and said, "You've got to resign." There have always been that cream who said the country is more important than my party. We don't have that anymore.

Bill Moyers: It seems to me the country is ahead of Congress on this. How do you explain all this talk about impeachment today out across the country?

John Nichols: People don't want to let this go. They do not accept Nancy Pelosi's argument that impeachment is, quote/unquote, off the table. Because I guess maybe they're glad she didn't take some other part of the Constitution off the table like freedom of speech. But they also don't accept the argument that, oh, well, there's a presidential campaign going on. So let's just hold our breath till Bush and Cheney get done.

When I go out across America, what I hear is something that's really very refreshing and very hopeful about this country. An awfully lot of Americans understand what Thomas Jefferson understood. And that is that the election of a president does not make him a king for four years. That if a president sins against the Constitution - and does damage to the republic, the people have a right in an organic process to demand of their House of Representatives, the branch of government closest to the people, that it act to remove that president. And I think that sentiment is afoot in the land.

Bill Moyers: This is the first time I've heard talk of impeaching both a president and a vice-president. I mean, this - as you saw in that poll, more people want to impeach Dick Cheney than George Bush. What's going on?

Bruce Fein: Well, this is an unusual affair of president/vice-president, where the vice-president is de facto president most of the time. And that's why most of people recognize that these decisions, especially when it comes to overreaching with executive power, are the product of Dick Cheney and his aide, David Addington, not George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez or Harriet Miers, who don't have the cerebral capacity to think of these devilish ideas. And for that reason, they equate the administration more with Dick Cheney than with George Bush.

Bill Moyers: Bruce, you talk about overreaching. What, in practical terms, do you mean by that?

Bruce Fein: It means asserting powers and claiming that there are no other branches that have the authority to question it. Take, for instance, the assertion that he's made that when he is out to collect foreign intelligence, no other branch can tell him what to do. That means he can intercept your e-mails, your phone calls, open your regular mail, he can break and enter your home. He can even kidnap you, claiming I am seeking foreign intelligence and there's no other branch Congress can't say it's illegal - judges can't say this is illegal. I can do anything I want. That is overreaching. When he says that all of the world, all of the United States is a military battlefield because Osama bin Laden says he wants to kill us there, and I can then use the military to go into your homes and kill anyone there who I think is al-Qaeda or drop a rocket, that is overreaching. That is a claim even King George III didn't make -

Bruce Fein: - at the time of the Revolution.

John Nichols: Can I - can I -

Bruce Fein: That is clearly overreaching.

John Nichols: Let me keep us on Cheney for a second here, because that is -

Bill Moyers: You think Cheney should be subject to impeachment hearings?

John Nichols: Without a doubt. Cheney is, for all practical purposes, the foreign policy president of the United States. There are many domestic policies in which George Bush really is the dominant player. But on foreign policy Dick Cheney has been calling the shots for six years and he continues to call the shots. Remember back in 2000, in the presidential debates, George Bush said America should be a humble country in the world, shouldn't go about nation building. And Dick Cheney, in the vice-presidential debate, spent eight minutes talking about Iraq.

Now the fact of the matter is that on foreign policy, Dick Cheney believes that the executive branch should be supreme. He said this back to the days when he was in the House during Iran-Contra. He wrote the minority report saying Congress shouldn't sanction the president in any way, President Reagan.

Bill Moyers: And he's always taken an expansive -

John Nichols: Right.

Bill Moyers: - view of presidential power.

John Nichols: And put these pieces together. If Cheney believes in this expansive power. You've got a - unique crisis, a unique problem because the vice-president of the United States believes that Congress shouldn't even be a part of the foreign policy debate. And he is setting the foreign policy. I mean -

Bill Moyers: I served a president who went to war on his own initiative, and it was a mess, Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson. There wasn't serious talk about impeaching Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey. Something is different today.

Bruce Fein: Yeah, of course, the - difference is one thing to claim that, you know, Gulf of Tonkin resolution, was too broadly drafted. But we're talking about assertions of power that affect the individual liberties of every American citizen. Opening your mail, your e-mails, your phone calls. Breaking and entering your homes. Creating a pall of fear and intimidation if you say anything against the president you may find retaliation very quickly. We're claiming he's setting precedents that will lie around like loaded weapons anytime there's another 9/11.

Right now the victims are people whose names most Americans can't pronounce. And that's why they're not so concerned. They will start being Browns and Jones and Smiths. And that precedent is being set right now. And one of the dangers that I see is it's not just President Bush but the presidential candidates for 2008 aren't standing up and saying -

Bruce Fein: - "If I'm president, I won't imitate George Bush." That shows me that this is a far deeper problem than Mr. Bush and Cheney.

Bill Moyers: That struck me about your writings and your book. You say your great - your great fear is that Bush and Cheney will hand off to their successors a toolbox that they will not avoid using.

John Nichols: Well, let's try a metaphor. Let's say that - when George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, he used the wood to make a little box. And in that box the president puts his powers. We've taken things out. We've put things in over the years.

On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have.

Bruce Fein: Well, that's accurate but also we do find this peculiarity that Congress is giving up powers voluntarily. because there's nothing right now, Bill, that would prevent Congress from the immediate shutting down all of George Bush's and Dick Cheney's illegal programs. Simply saying there's no money to collect foreign intelligence-

Bill Moyers: The power of the purse-

Bruce Fein: - the power of the purse. That is an absolute power. And yet Congress shies from it. It was utilized during the Vietnam War, you may recall, in 1973. Congress said there's no money to go and extend the war into Laos and Cambodia. And even President Nixon said okay. This was a president who at one time said, "If I do it, it's legal." So that it we do find Congress yielding the power to the executive branch. It's the very puzzle that the founding fathers would have been stunned at. They worried most over the legislative branch in, you know, usurping powers of the other branches. And -

Bill Moyers: Well, what you just said indicts the Congress more than you're indicting George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Bruce Fein: In some sense, yes, because the founding fathers expected an executive to try to overreach and expected the executive would be hampered and curtailed by the legislative branch. And you're right. They have basically renounced - walked away from their responsibility to oversee and check. It's not an option. It's an obligation when they take that oath to faithfully uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. And I think the reason why this is. They do not have convictions about the importance of the Constitution. It's what in politics you would call the scientific method of discovering political truths and of preventing excesses because you require through the processes of review and vetting one individual's perception to be checked and - counterbalanced by another's. And when you abandon that process, you abandon the ship of state basically and it's going to capsize.

John Nichols: Can I mention another branch of government?

Bill Moyers: Yeah, sure.

John Nichols: Let me mention the unspoken branch of government, which is the fourth estate: The media. The fact of the matter is the founders anticipated that presidents would overreach. And they anticipated that at times politics would cause Congress to be a weaker player or a dysfunctional player. But they always assumed that the press would alert the people, that the press would tell the people. And the fact of the matter is I think that our media in the last few years has done an absolutely miserable job of highlighting the constitutional issues that are in play. You know, you can't have torture and extraordinary rendition. You cannot have spying. You cannot have a - lying to Congress. You cannot have what happened to Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, you know?

Bill Moyers: When she was outed and they tried to punish -

John Nichols: Plotted out of the vice-president's office without question. Notations of the vice-president on news articles saying, "Let's go get this guy." Right? You know, you can't have that and not have a media going and saying to the president at press conferences, you know, "Aren't - isn't what you're doing a violation of the Constitution?" Now, just imagine if the - if the members of the White House Press Corps on a regular basis were saying to Tony Snow, "But hasn't what the president's done here violated the Constitution?" The whole national dialogue would shift. And Congress itself would suddenly become a better player. So I'm not absolving Congress. I'm certainly not absolving Bush and Cheney. But I am saying that we have a media problem here as well.

Bruce Fein: Let me underscore one of the things that you remember, Bill, 'cause I was there at the time of Watergate. And this relates to one political - official in the White House, Sara Taylor's testimony. And claiming that George Bush could tell her to be silent.

Bill Moyers: That was a great moment when Sara Taylor said, "I took an oath to uphold the president." Did you see that?

Bruce Fein: Yes. And that was like the military in Germany saying, "My oath is to the Fuhrer, not to the country." She took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I did, too, when I was in the government. There's no oath that says, "I'm loyal to a president even if he defiles the Constitution."

John Nichols: Ever.

Bill Moyers: Just this week Harriet Miers, the president's former counsel, did not show up to testify before the congressional hearing. What do you make of that in regard to this issue of power?

Bruce Fein: Well, it shows how far we've come from even the mon - monarchical days of Richard Nixon where he didn't have the audacity to tell John Dean, "No, you can't testify before the Watergate committee about conversations you had with me about obstructing justice or otherwise."

Bill Moyers: John Dean was his counsel -

Bruce Fein: White House counsel -

Bill Moyers: - just as Harriet Miers -

Bruce Fein: - is to President Bush. Yes.

Bill Moyers: And Nixon said to Dean, "You must go up there and testify"?

Bruce Fein: No. He didn't attempt to impose any objection at all. And Dean, of course, broke the Watergate story that led to Nixon's impeachment and the House's judiciary committee -

Bill Moyers: And look what -

Bruce Fein: - and resignation. And now we have a comparable situation where a Harriet Miers could perhaps expose things regarding President - Bush's knowledge of the electronic surveillance program or the firing of U.S. attorneys, which seems to contradict what Alberto Gonzalez has said about White House involvement. And yet President Bush is saying, "You can't talk, Harriet Miers, because I don't want any of that political or legal embarrassment." And unlike John Dean who brought the Constitution forward with his testimony, Harriet Miers still is silent.

Bill Moyers: And you would put that in the bill of particular about impeachment?

Bruce Fein: Certainly with regard to the one example of the abuse of presidential authority, seeking to obstruct a legitimate congressional investigation by a preposterous assertion of executive privilege. Remember, in a democracy, in - under the Constitution, transparency and sunshine is the rule. The exception is only for matters of grave national security secrets. That certainly doesn't apply here.

Bill Moyers: How does the Scooter Libby affair play into this? Do you think that people - I mean, how did the Scooter Libby thing play into this? People seem really angry about this. And this is, to me, where the tipping point came.

John Nichols: If it wasn't for the president's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, we would not be sitting at this table and talking right now.

Bill Moyers: About impeachment?

John Nichols: About impeachment. That sentence opened up a dialogue in this country and even in Congress. A number of members of Congress stepped up and signed on to Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Vice-president Cheney after the Scooter Libby commutation.

John Nichols: We're talking tonight because of the Scooter Libby affair. And -

Bill Moyers: You mean the impeachment -

John Nichols: You - we're at this table because the fact of the matter is that impeachment has moved well up the list of things we can talk about because of the Scooter Libby affair. Now, should it be the - one that tipped it? I think Bruce and I would probably both agree no. There are probably more important issues. But the Scooter Libby affair gets to the heart of what I think an awfully lot of Americans are concerned about with this administration and with the executive branch in - general, that it is lawless, that - it can rewrite the rules for itself, that it can protect itself.

And, you know, the founders anticipated just such a moment. If you look at the discussions in the Federalist Papers but also at the Constitutional Convention, when they spoke about impeachment, one of the things that Madison and George Mason spoke about was the notion that you needed the power to impeach particularly as regards to pardons and commutations because a president might try to take the burden of the law off members of his administration to prevent them from cooperating with Congress in order to expose wrongdoings by the president himself. And so Madison said that is why we must have the power to impeach. Because otherwise a president might be able to use his authority and pardons and such to prevent an investigation from getting to him.

Bill Moyers: Are you suggesting that Libby had the goods on Cheney and Bush?

John Nichols: I think the bottom line is Scooter Libby was involved in conversations that, frankly, if those conversations were brought up, the American people would be very helpful to our discourse about whether we entered this war illegally and whether we've continued this war in ways which we never should have.

Bruce Fein: I think the spark against the Libby commutation is a little bit different focus. I think it's less on the idea he's covering up for Cheney or Bush than the indication that Bush is totally heedless of any honor for law and accountability. That he has special rules for him and his cabinet. You may recall at the outset of the investigation he said, "Anybody in my office who is responsible for this leak will not work for me." Karl Rove was shown to leak and Karl Rove was still sitting in the White House. And he says, "Well, he will issue a commutation here." But he's not issued commutations in similar circumstances to anybody else.

Moreover, the perjury of the obstruction of justice of Libby is a carbon copy of Clinton, which Republicans, including me, supported. That's why I said you've got to give a stiff sentence here. How can you say that Clinton's deserves impeachment and here you're communing someone who did the same thing. And it's that sort of outrage that this is now a sneering attitude towards everybody else. "I am king. You play by other people's rules, but as long as I am in the White House, I get to play by my rules." That is something that-

Bruce Fein: - offends everybody.

Bill Moyers: Sneering is not an impeachable offense.

Bruce Fein: Screening in isolation is not but this is combined with all of the other things he's done outside the law. The intelligence gathering, the enemy combatant status, the kidnappings in - dungeons abroad, all in secret and never disclosing anything to Congress or the American people. Indeed, we couldn't even be discussing some of these issues here like the foreign intelligence collection program if it weren't leaked to the New York Times. If he had his way, this would be secret forever.

John Nichols: Sneering is not an impeachable sentence. But the founders who had recently fought a revolution against a king named George would tell you that monarchical behavior, the behavior of a king, acting like a king, is an impeachable offense. You need not look for specific laws or statutes. What you need to look for is a pattern of behavior that says that the presidency is superior not merely to Congress but to the laws of the land, to the rules of law. And that is why we ought to be discussing impeachment. Not because of George Bush and Dick Cheney but because we are establishing a presidency that does not respect the rule of law. And people, Americans, are rightly frightened by that. Their fear is the fear of the founders. It is appropriate. It is necessary.

Bill Moyers: Very quickly, is there a - you and I have been on almost parallel tracks. I'm older than you. But we've been in the been in and around the presidency. We've been in Washington during the Cold War and now the war on terrorism. Is there a pathology at work here in the presidency that deeply troubles you?

Bruce Fein: Well, it's - I'm not sure I would call it a pathology in the sense that the founding fathers understood how power and national security affairs would naturally tend to aggrandize the executive branch. But I do think that we have this deforming of the Constitution when we have become a superpower and we have been engaged then in global politics which naturally gravitate authority to the executive branch. And what the founding fathers couldn't have understood is why Congress has taken such a back seat.

And the American people I think, because the executive branch has tried to exploit the natural fear factor instead of explaining this - yes, we have a right to be concerned but we can do this within the law. They've exploited that fear and say, "No, we've got to go outside the law." And that's something that I'd say is very deep seated and it's continued - started with the - Gulf of Tonkin resolution, you know, with the administration, Johnson administration, and continued on with Nixon and Ford and Carter. And it's - had, you know, periods where it's been allegro and then adagio. So the speed has changed but otherwise the direction has been the same.

Bill Moyers: So practically, what do you think should happen now? And what do people listening, what can they do?

Bruce Fein: I think what ought to happen is there needs to be these hearings in the judiciary hearing this is why we care.

Bill Moyers: Impeachment hearing -

Bruce Fein: Impeachment -

Bruce Fein: This is why these are -

Bill Moyers: You're saying you want the judiciary committee to call formal hearings on the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

Bruce Fein: Yes. Because there are political crimes that have been perpetrated in combination. It hasn't been one, the other being in isolation. And the hearings have to be not into this is a Republican or Democrat. This is something that needs to set a precedent, whoever occupies the White House in 2009. You do not want to have that occupant, whether it's John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or John Edwards to have this authority to go outside the law and say, "I am the law. I do what I want. No one else's view matters."

John Nichols: The hearings are important. There's no question at that. And we should be at that stage. Remember, Thomas Jefferson and others, the founders, suggested that impeachment was an organic process. That information would come out. The people would be horrified. They would tell their representatives in Congress, "You must act upon this." Well, the interesting thing is we are well down the track in the organic process. The people are saying it's time. We need some accountability.

Bill Moyers: But Nancy Pelosi doesn't agree.

John Nichols: Nancy Pelosi is wrong. Nancy Pelosi is disregarding her oath of office. She should change course now. And more importantly, members of her caucus and responsible Republicans should step up. It is not enough -

Bill Moyers: Well, Bruce is not the only conservative -

John Nichols: - and others are. But -

Bill Moyers: And Bob Barr, who's been here.

Bruce Fein: David Keene

John Nichols: But they do so, by and large, in a cautious way. They say, "Well, the president's done too much." Let's start to use the "i" word. Impeach is a useful word. It is a necessary word. The founders in the Constitution made no mention of corporation or political parties or conventions or primaries or caucuses. But they made six separate references to impeachment. They wanted us to know this word, and they wanted us to use it.

Bill Moyers: You're - does this process have to go all the way to the end? Do Bush and Cheney have to be impeached before it serves the public?

John Nichols: I think that what Bush and Cheney have done makes a very good case that the public and the future would be well served if it did go all the way to the end. But there is absolutely a good that comes of this if the process begins, if we take it seriously. And the founders would have told you that, - that impeachment is a dialogue. It is a discourse. And it is an educational process. If Congress were to get serious about the impeachment discussions, to hold the hearings, to begin that dialogue, they would begin to educate the American people and perhaps themselves about the system of checks and balances, about the powers of the presidency, about, you know, what we can expect and what we should expect of our government.

And so I think that when Jefferson spoke about this wonderful notion of his that said the tree of liberty must be watered every 20 years with the blood of patriots, I don't know that he was necessarily talked about warfare. I think he was saying that at a pretty regular basis we ought to seek to hold our - highest officials to account and that process, the seeking to hold them to account, wherever it holds up, is - a necessary function of the republic. If we don't do it, we move further and further toward an imperial presidency.

Bruce Fein: The great genius of the founding fathers, their revolutionary idea, with the chief mission of the state is to make you and them free to pursue their ambitions and faculties. Not to build empires, not to aggrandize government. That's the mission of the state, to make them free, to think, to chart their own destiny. And the burden is on government to give really good explanations as to why they're taking these extraordinary measures. And on that score, Bush has flunked on every single occasion. And we need to get the American people to think. Every time that there's an incursion on freedom, they have to demand why. What is the explanation? Give me a good reason before I give up my freedom.

Bill Moyers: But read that prologue of the Constitution. The first obligation is to defend the people, to defend their freedom, to defend their rights. And I hear people out there talking in their living rooms right now, Bruce and John, saying, "But wait a minute, you know, we've got these terrorists. We know. Look what happened in London just two weeks ago. We know they're out there. Who else is looking out for us except Bush and Cheney?"

Bruce Fein: And Cheney and Bush have shown that these measures are optical. Take, for instance, these military conditions that combine judge, jury, and prosecutors. What have they done? They tried the same offenses that are tried in civilian courts. American Taliban John Walker Lindh got 20 years in the civilian courts. And then we have the same offense, David Hicks, he gets nine months in military prison. Why are you creating these extraordinary measures? They aren't needed. We have the foreign intelligence -

Bill Moyers: - we don't need to do what Bush-

Bruce Fein: No, we don't. They're doing these for optical purposes.

Bill Moyers: What do you mean "optical"?

Bruce Fein: They're trying to create the appearance that they're tougher than all of their opponents 'cause they're willing to violate the law, even though the violations have nothing to do with actually defeating the terrorism. And we have instances where the president now for years has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Act. He's never said why the act has ever inhibited anybody. Remember, this act has been around for over a quarter of a century, and no president ever said it impaired his gathering of foreign intelligence. And suddenly the president's, "No, we have to violate it and flout it because it doesn't work." Well, why? He's never explained it. He's never explained why this act stopped gathering of all the intelligence that was needed to fight the terrorists.

Bill Moyers: No president and no vice-president have been sitting in the White House or sitting in Washington when terrorists, when killers tried to come in airplanes and crashed into the White House, crashed into the Capitol. Can - isn't there something to be said for -

Bruce Fein: Let me - there's truth and then there's an inaccuracies. Certainly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we were in a fog. There could have been hundreds of thousands terrorist cells. You could understand the president, "I've got to take any action I need right now to uncover a possible second edition of 9/11." And, of course, as soon as I do that, I will go to Congress as soon as possible. I will seek ratification. That's an immediate aftermath of 9/11. We know a lot more in 2007, in July. We know this is not 100 or 1,000 terrorist cells.

We know this is not the danger of the Soviet Union or Hirohito or the Third Reich. And yet the president continues to insist. That's why we need military commissions. We need to say you're an enemy combatant and stick you in prison forever without any judicial review and otherwise.That is a total distortion of what the genuine nature of the problem is and our ability to fight and defeat these terrorists with ordinary civil - the criminal proceedings. And then - and as you say, they have utilized, Bill, repeatedly. The World Trade Center bombings in 1993, in the aftermath of 9/11 we've had countless conspiracy cases that stopped the terrorist - enterprises in the bud. And the - fact is that the utilization of these extraordinary measures has been relatively infrequent, showing that they're largely, they're relevant to the quest to defeat al-Qaeda.

John Nichols: Let's go to another zone of this where, you know, they've really been way off the deep end and that is torture. Has the use of torture has the vice-president sort of winking and nodding enthusiasm for the use of torture, has Abu Ghraib helped America? Are we in a better position in the world, in - getting cooperation from other countries? Are we in a better position in Iraq because of those pictures from Abu Ghraib? I would suggest to you that using these extraordinary powers and doing so in a non-transparent way, in a secretive way, which certainly suggests that even a - an awareness of the illegality of it, that - does more harm than good.

And this is, again, what the founders intended. They intended a consultative process. When the president seizes power, extraordinary power unto himself, he isolates himself. He isolates himself from the rest of the government, and he isolates himself from the people. And so I think that people out there in America who are worried, you know, "Wow, if we take on and try and constrain the president in a time of war, in a time of danger, we may be endangering the country," are actually going the wrong direction.

Bruce Fein: And, in fact, without the dialogue you continue the folly like in Vietnam when you shut off debate. And that's what's happened in Iraq, why we continue to persist. Like the 88th charge of the Light Brigade that keeps failing. You think it'll work on the 89th time. But I want to go to a more important point that John mentioned, with specifics as to how - what the president has done, has made us less safe. We have now indictments in both Italy and Germany against CIA operatives because they abducted and threw into dungeons and tortured people abroad. We need their cooperation if we're going to defeat al-Qaeda.

Bill Moyers: You mean the cooperation of those governments.

Bruce Fein: Of those governments. And now they're saying, "The heck with it. You know, you can't come on our soil and kidnap people outside the law and throw them into dungeons."

Bill Moyers: That's what Putin does. Putin is doing that -

Bruce Fein: Polonium 210, you know? You - can we borrow some from you? And moreover, think, Bill, of the precedent it sets. It is basically saying, "Mr. Putin, you can kidnap an American outside the Louvre in Paris, throw him in a dungeon in Belarus and say, "Hey, he said sympathetic things about the Chechyans." And therefore, you can operate outside the law because the Chechyans are people you oppose. That's the precedent the president is saying is legal. But the other element with regard to the abuses to point out are Abu Ghraib. That's - those pictures are all on al-Jazeera television. And they get shown every single day, 24 hours a day, to the Muslim youth that's seeking some meaning in their life. And that's what increases the recruitment attractiveness of al-Qaeda. Those Abu Ghraib abuses -

Bill Moyers: Well, did you see the Associated Press reported a day or two ago that al-Qaeda, according to intelligence reports, al-Qaeda is now at greater strength than it was before 9/11.

Bruce Fein: And that's because of the recruitment. That's - and because of the abuses, they are able to portray the United States' conflict with terrorism as a conflict with Islam, not with terrorists.

John Nichols: And let us -

Bruce Fein: And that is a terrible, terrible danger for the American people.

John Nichols: But let's take President Bush at his word. Let's take him at his word. He says that what he is doing is that this is a war on terror. That the goal is to weaken al-Qaeda, that is to make America more secure. And so throw out all this other discussion, all the other dialogue we've had. Has he been successful? Has - is he doing it the right way? Well, I think we have an awful lot of evidence from the government itself, from the CIA itself is that it hasn't worked. It has been a highly ineffective strategy. And so the question of whether he's making us more secure really is a debatable one. And the role of Congress at such a point becomes absolutely critical. We don't - you don't say, "Oh, well, you know, the Congress - the president seems to be screwing up. And so - well, let's sit back and see what he does next." And that seems to be what Democrats in Congress are saying.

Bill Moyers: Remember in the setup to our discussion I pointed out that Tom DeLay, then the third most powerful Republican in the House, made it his mission to impeach Bill Clinton. Is there a Tom DeLay in the Congress today making it his or her mission to impeach Bush and Cheney?

John Nichols: Look - I'm glad there - I'm glad there isn't a Tom DeLay. Because Tom DeLay was seeking to impeach Bill Clinton for political reasons. He did not -

Bill Moyers: Infidelity.

John Nichols: No, it wasn't infidelity. It was he didn't like the fact that Bill Clinton was president. He wanted to remove the president by means other than an election. I hope there is someone there who seeks to constrain the presidents of the United States and constrains the presidency of the United States, not merely because they happen to disagree with the guy but because -

Bill Moyers: I have to interrupt you and say, look, you guys don't live in la-la land. Both of you are in - in and around power all the time. Why doesn't Nancy Pelosi see it her duty to take on at least the impeachment hearings that you say would educate the public about the states that you think -

Bruce Fein: Because I think that politics has become debased so that it's a matter of one party against another and jockeying and maneuvering. There is no longer any statesmanship.

Bruce Fein: I go back to the real vulnerability and weakness of Congress, that they don't have anybody who can, as a chairman or even asking a question like John or me say, "Mr. Attorney General, you answer that question. This is the United States of America. Transparency is the rule here. We don't have secret government. That's what Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about in the Gulag. That's not the United States of America. We pay your salary. We have a right to know 'cause it's our duty to decide whether what you're doing is legal and wise, not yours. Answer that question or you're held in contempt right now." And that's - and all you need is that tone of voice. But what happens up there? "Well, would you please answer?" Well, are you sure? When - could you get John Ashcroft? I mean, it's just staggering.

John Nichols: And you know what?

Bruce Fein: All you would need a lecture like that and they'd answer. They'd be embarrassed - And you have to have a certain vision, Bill. You have - you have to have a certain depth of conviction about philosophy and what the Constitution means, why those people died. They reached that last full measure of devotion, Cemetery Hill, Guatel Canal, Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge, because there was something higher. You have to feel that in your body and your stomach cause you've mastered all those people who have sacrificed in the past and you know the danger of unchecked power 'cause you read history. You're not a novice. There isn't anybody in the Congress who's able to do that because they don't have that background. But they don't have that temperament.

John Nichols: - there may be such people but their first step, their first step must be something that is very hard in these days of extreme partisanship and these days in money and politics and a media that doesn't cover politics very well. Their first step has to be to say, "I cherish my country more than my party and more than the next election." And so - probably. We're talking about a Democrat.

Bill Moyers:BILL MOYERS: - to take the lead?

John Nichols: And that Democrat's first responsibility is to go to Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, the person who decides what committee assignments they may have and even how nice an office they may get, and say, "You know, Nancy, I respect you. I respect you greatly, Mrs. Speaker. But the country's more important. So you can - you can get mad at me. You can, you know, push back internally and whatever. But I'm going to the American people and I'm going to talk to them like Bruce Fein just did. Now, my sense is the response to the American people and, frankly, the response of a lot of other members of Congress would be to stand up and applaud. But you have to have that initial courage to do so.

Bruce Fein: I think that you have to have not only the courage but you have to have that conviction because it's part of your being.

Bill Moyers: But the -

Bruce Fein: You understand what the United States is about.

Bill Moyers: But by your - by what you're saying, you're admitting that nobody has that conviction because it's not happening.

Bruce Fein: I agree. And it's hard to know how to just make it happen by spontaneous combustion, Bill. And that's the frustrating element here. Because without that those intellectual and temperamental ingredients, it just isn't going to happen. You do need a leadership element in there. And I don't see it either in the House or the Senate now.

Bill Moyers: You just said in one sentence there "impeach Bush and Cheney." You're talking about taking that ax against the head of government, both of them.

John Nichols: No. No, no, no.

Bruce Fein: It's not an ax, Bill.

John Nichols: We're talking -

Bruce Fein: It's not an ax - it's not - Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding.

John Nichols: You are being -

Bruce Fein: - we cannot entrust the reins of power, unchecked power, with these people. They're untrustworthy. They're asserting theories of governments that are monarchical. We don't want them to exercise it. We don't want Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or anyone in the future to exercise that.

John Nichols: Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake. You are making a mistake that too many people make.

Bill Moyers: Yes.

John Nichols: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and go to Washington. We have procedures in place where we can sanction a president appropriately, do what needs to be done up to the point of removing him from office and continue the republic. So we're not talking here about taking an ax to government. Quite the opposite. We are talking about applying some necessary strong medicine that may cure not merely the crisis of the moment but, done right-

Bruce Fein: Moreover, it's -

John Nichols: - might actually cure -

Bruce Fein: It's not an attack on Bush and Cheney in the sense of their personal - attacks. Listen, if you impeach them, they can live happily ever after into their-

John Nichols: And go to San Clemente.

Bruce Fein: Yes, go to San Clemente or go back to the ranch or whatever. But it's saying no, it's the Constitution that's more important than your aggrandizing of power. And not just for you because the precedent that would be set would bind every successor in the presidency as well, no matter Republican, Democrat, Independent, or otherwise.

John Nichols: The fact of the matter is that, again, the genius of impeachment is it tells the president that, wow, there is a Congress. And that Congress is on your case. And it causes, I think at its best, it causes a president to want to prove he can cooperate, to want to prove he can live within the law.

Bruce Fein: Can I interrupt just a second here?

Bill Moyers: Yeah, sure, sure.

Bruce Fein: 'Cause it seems to me very important. I think that if impeachment proceedings began and the president and the vice-president sat back and said, "We understand now. We both understand. We renounce this claim. No military commissions. We're going to comply with the law," the impeachment proceedings ought to stop and they should. It's not trying to be punitive and recriminate against the officials but you've got to get it right. And it's that what I hope would happen.

I've said if the president now renouncing the power and said, "It was wrong and I now respect and honor the separation and the genius of the founding fathers," that's great. And all of the purpose of impeachment would have been accomplished. They could stay in office and we'd have the greatest precedent with regards to executive authority and the separation of powers and checks and balances. This is not an effort to try to blacken the names of the president and vice-president. And nothing would gratify me more than having them stand up and say, "Yeah, I've thought about this now. My mind is concentrated wonderfully," as Sam Johnson would say. The prospect of impeachment, I've been convinced.

John Nichols: But also we would have hit that educational moment, that rare moment where a president of the United States has been forced to - go before the American people and say, "Oh, yeah, I just remembered, you're the boss. You are the bosses. Not me. And that I am not a king." Again, this is why raising impeachment at this point, it's a very late point, is so important. Because we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a - rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress

If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. You - we can find out that you've done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that's the standard that we've set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future.

Bruce Fein: One of the lessons we should have learned from the Nixon impeachment is that it didn't quite fulfill its purpose because Nixon was never compelled to renounce what he'd done.

John Nichols: Yes.

Bruce Fein: And after which he boasted that what the president does it it's legal. He wasn't repentant at all. If we had insisted maybe as a condition of the pardon or otherwise, you need to repent. We are a government of laws, not of men. And it's wrong for anyone to assert unchecked power. That would have had such a pedagogical effect that would have deterred anything in the future. We've got to make certain this time around we get that proper acknowledgement from the -

John Nichols: - there was a group of members, Democratic members of the House, who went to Tipp O'Neil and to-

Bill Moyers: Then speaker of the House.

John Nichols: - back in 1974, after Nixon had resigned, and said, "We must continue the impeachment process." It's - it is under the Constitution certainly appropriate to do so. And we must continue it because we have to close the circle on presidential power. And the leaders in Congress, the Democratic leaders in Congress at the time said, "No, the - country has suffered too much." Well, this is the problem. Our leaders treat us as children. They think that we cannot handle a serious dialogue about the future of our republic, about what it will be and how it will operate. And so, you know, to an extent, we begin to act like children. We, you know, follow other interests. We decide to be entertained rather than to be citizens.

Well, you know, and Bruce makes frequent references to the fall of the Roman Empire. You know, that's the point at where the fall comes. It doesn't come because of a bad leader. It doesn't come because of a dysfunctional Congress. It comes when the people accept that - role of the child or of the subject and are no longer citizens. And so I think this moment becomes so very, very important because we know the high crimes and misdemeanors.

The people themselves have said, if the polls are correct, that, you know, something ought to be done. If nothing is done, if we do not step forward at this point, if we do not step up to this point, then we have, frankly, told the people, you know, you can even recognize that the king has no clothes, but we're not gonna put any clothes on him. And at that point, the country is in very, very dire circumstances.

Bill Moyers: Bruce Fein and John Nichols, thanks to both of you for being with us on The Journal. It's been a very interesting discussion.

Bruce Fein: Thank you.

John Nichols: Thank you.

Bill Moyers: As we just heard from Bruce Fein and John Nichols, our country is in a constitutional crisis that could change the nature of our democracy. There was a sense it earlier in the week as the Senate debated what to do about the war in Iraq. Here are some excerpts.

Sen. Joseph Biden: Do we continue to send our kids into the middle of a meat grinder based on a policy that is fundamentally flawed? I don't think there are a dozen Republicans on that side of the aisle who agree with the President's strategy.

Sen. Gordon Smith: Some of my colleagues have said just cut off the funding. I have felt that dangerous and dishonorable. President Bush has said stay the course, and I find that troubling.

Sen. Lindsey Graham: This is a democracy that's less than four years old. Their constitution's less than 18 months old. The army and the police force four years ago was there to support the dictator, not democracy. So if you expect from the ashes of the dictatorship a functioning democracy in four years, I think you're sadly mistaken, because it took us 11 years to write our own Constitution.

Sen. Joe Lieberman: We were elected to defend our beloved country, it's security and it's values. All that is on the line in Iraq today. So I appeal to my colleagues, let's not undercut our troops and legislate a defeat in Iraq where none is occurring.

Sen. John McCain: When you lose a war, the consequences of failure are far, far more severe on the military than the strain that is put on the military when they are fighting. It is a fact. It is a fact of military history. It is a fact of the war that we lost in Vietnam, which took us well over a decade to restore any kind of efficiency in our military.

Sen. Barbara Boxer: After this weekend's violence, senior Iraqi officials called on Iraqi civilians to arm themselves and fight insurgents. That's from the government. They're not telling the people this government will protect you, the Americans have drained 300,000 of us, no, we're ready to protect you, no. The answer is arm yourselves so that when the insurgents break down your door you can kill them before they kill you. What a situation.

Sen. John McCain: I welcome this debate, as I said earlier. I think it is important to inform the American people. I think it is important to have a respectful exchange of views. And I will continue to respect the views of the Senator from California, but I will tell her that I have seen this movie before, and I have seen what happens when we have a defeated military and we have people who assure us that a withdrawal is without consequences.

Sen. Joseph Biden: This administration has not made, when given a choice, a single correct decision on Iraq. Hear me. That is a bold statement. I cannot think of a single decision when they have been faced with a choice that theyÕve made the right choice. I cannot think of one. Way back, when the President asked me why I was calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, and the Vice President was in the room, in the Oval Office, I said: With all due respect, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, if, Mr. Vice President, if you were not a constitutional officer, I would call for your resignation too. He looked at me and said: Why? I said: Because, Mr. President, name me one piece of advice either Rumsfeld or Cheney have given you in Iraq that has turned out to be right. Name me one. One. One.

Bill Moyers: As that debate revealed Congress is polarized and paralyzed. And down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bush still was insisting Congress should stay out of the war. he and Vice President Cheney are holding out for better news from Iraq in September. But when September comes, you can count on more appeals for delay or excuses. that's the formula for perpetual war - what our founders most feared, because it would turn our Constituion on its head, throwing off the checks and balances so crucial to liberty, and leaving all power in an imperial executive. Already the war in Iraq is in its 5th year, costing $10 billion a month, with the casualties mounting. All week a line from the poet Marvin Bell floated through my mind:

"What/shall we do, we who are at war but are asked/to pretend we are not?"

What shall we do? impeachment hearings are one way to go, as you heard Fein and Nichols say. In the meantime, those of us in public television have an obligation to make sure viewers like you stay in the loop. I wish we had carried the congressional debate this week in full - all of it - in prime time. When we broadcast teach-ins on the Vietnam war, and the Watergate hearings during the trial of Richard Nixon, it was a real public service - the reason PBS was created. We should keep Iraq in prime time every week - the fighting and dying, the suffering, the debate, the politics - the extraordinary costs. It's months until September. This war is killing us now, body and soul.

That's it for the journal. I'm Bill Moyers.

Texas as a Fascist state; buying politicians.

2007-07-09T19:40:00.000-04:00

Texas: Where Every Fascist Worth his Swastika Owns Himself a Politician Like Bush

Texas barely resembles the state it once was. Under Bush, it became a sleazy auction where would-be Bushes sell out the rule of law and the people. Columnist Joseph Galloway asks: "Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government?"

I have a simple explanation. The GOP looks and acts like a criminal conspiracy because it is one. It looks like a crime syndicate because it's cheaper to buy a politician than it is to obey the law. They proved it all in Texas.

Surely, there is probable cause in the public record to justify a Federal Grand Jury investigation of Bush's inner circle for violations under RICO statutes. Galloway goes on to ask:

What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world?

Joe, listen up! I am fourth generation, native Texan. I can tell you --Bush was always a crook. He didn't "go over to The Dark Side"! He never left it! He did leave Texas in ruins --dead last in education, polluted, divided. Bush is not a horseman in the Texas sense of the word. He is, rather, one of four horsemen of a GOP apocalypse. The others are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice.

Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot?

What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?

Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?

What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list?

Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?
--Joseph Galloway, What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?

Bush is not Texan. He's a carpetbagger born in Connecticut who left the state of Texas much worse than he found it. Already the state of the state had not been good thanks to Texas' recent flirtation with Republicanism, corporatism, fascism. I am a Native Texan. I recall another Texas. A better Texas. A Texas not yet sold out to privilege with the Oil Depletion Allowance. While I still lived there, government at all levels outsourced almost everything to "private enterprise", most notoriously the prisons. Convicts are a source of cheap if not slave labor. It is an Orwellian nightmare of no accountability, waste, graft, and fascism.

Suicide Exposes Squalor in Texas Prison
Suicide Shows Squalid Conditions in Privately-Run Texas Prison; Company Operates in 15 States

By JOHN MILLER

After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.

"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."

Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.

It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector.
...

While Governor, Bush presided over significant declines in Texas' education standards. Most notorious was the so-called "Houston Miracle", the brain child of then Governor Bush’s secretary of education, Rod Paige. Briefly, it was all a fraud.

When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.

There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.

In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.
--Rod Paige’s Houston ‘Miracle’, The Carpetbagger Report

Texas still ranks dead last in education. But it was not only in education that Bush failed Texas. Bush left behind an environmental waste land. Under George W. Bush's "leadership", Texas went from dead last in education to "number one polluter" in many categories.

1 in the Emission of Ozone Causing Air Pollution Chemicals
1 in Toxic Chemical releases into the Air
1 in use of Deep Well Injectors as method of Waste Disposal
1 in counties listed in top 20 of Emitting Cancer Causing Chemicals
1 in Total Number of Hazardous Waste Incinerators
1 in Environmental Justice Title 6 complaints
1 in production of Cancer causing Benzene & Vinyl Chloride
1 Largest Sludge Dump in Country

Bush "outsourced", in other words, "corporatized" the protection of the Texas environment. He insisted upon the state handling the protection of endangered species even as he promoted further, corporate activities, primarily unchecked development, that would endanger those very species. There is, as far as I know, no moves to halt this practice. The Bush legacy in Texas remains a threat to endangered species, a threat to the global environment. Bush's legacy includes his misguided policies with regard to air pollution, wastewater discharges, pesticides, and even nuclear wastes. Bush's misrule was as disastrous to Texas as his occupancy in Washington has been to the rest of the world including Iraq. It was Bush occupied Texas!

It is no coincidence that the state's biggest polluters are also Bush's biggest contributors. The following list is what the word "fascism" is all about.

Apache Corporation $1,000

ARCO $13,250

Assn. of Electric Companies of TX $1,500

BP Amoco $5,000

Central and Southwest Corp/ American Electric Power Co $18,500

Champion International Corp $5,250

Coastal Corp $37,250

Crown Central Petroleum Corp $6,000

Dow Chemical Company $26,000

Duke Capital Corp $23,000

Eastman Chemical Company $7,200

El Paso Energy Corporation $6,000

Enron Corp $30,000

Entergy Gulf States $9,500

Exxon $24,200

Fulbright & Jaworski $67,000

International Paper $5,000

Hired Gun Lobbyists for Grandfathered Firms $150,500

Koch Industries $4,500

Lockheed $17,400

Lyondell Petrochemical GP Inc. $3,500

MND Energy Corporation $2,250

Mobil Oil $250

New Century Energies $2,000

Oryx Energy Company $3,000

PG & E $5,000

Phillips/GPM $11,998

Rohm & Haas $2,000

Southwestern Electric Service Co. $6,250

Tenneco, Inc. $1,000

Texaco Inc $20,000

Texas Utilities $64,800

Torch Energy Marketing $2,400

TX Assn. of Business & Commerce PAC $20,000

TX Cattle Feeders Assn./BEEF PAC $20,000

TX Cotton Ginners Assn. PAC $500

TX Mid-Continent Oil & Gas $18,000

Ultramar Diamond Shamrock $5,000

Union Carbide $3,500

Union Pacific Resources $11,000

Valero Refining $30,000

TOTAL $692,498

Why do corporate polluters buy politicians like Bush? It's cheaper to pony up for crooks than it is to respect the law and the environment. I've often wondered how big corporations could make a credible moral distinction between paying off the mob and paying off the GOP, a Bush, a Harding, a DeLay!

In Texas, it is all systemized. It's the way things are done. Election laws in the "Lone Star" state allow unlimited personal or political action committee contributions to elected officials. It's a licence to buy yourself a politician. Every fascist fat cat has one or several. As braggin' rights, it beats a four car garage, a membership at the River Oaks Country Club, or the Enclave. Best of all, it's a hedge against having to act responsibly. It's license to act like an asshole.

Corporations get away with it because they claim the right of free speech. It's called "corporate personhood" i.e., corporations have the same rights as do individuals. Clearly, however, corporations do not have the same responsibilities. I submit to this forum that if corporations have the same rights as people, then, when corporations break the laws, then the President, the Chairman of the board, the entire board of directors and every large stockholder should be rounded up and brought to trial. They are, after all, "persons" in the eyes of the law. Do the crime. Do the time!

Goebbels Would be Proud.
How did it get like this? How does it continue? Yes, corporations are running the show and that guarantees fascism; that’s how fascism happens. Yes, the leaders are all in hock to the money men. You can’t get elected if you don’t have the money. Yes, the people aren’t as bright as they once were and that isn’t saying much. Yes, the glitter of bright shiny plastic and the star power veneer of bimbo and bozo celebrity as well as the gangsta soundtrack make what should embarrass a borderline intellect look hot, but, what’s the real problem? ...

Deny personhood to "legal abstractions"! The idea that corporations, mere legal abstractions, are to be treated in the eyes of the law as persons possessing First Amendment rights including free speech is absurd. Begin a citizen's movement now to support a Constitutional Amendment spelling out clearly that corporations are not people and are, therefore, subject to any law that "we the people" care to legislate in order to keep out environments clean, our governments free of crooks and liars, our schools excellent, our neighborhoods free of poisons, our lives free of war crimes and the megalomaniacal ambitions of fascist admirers of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
Source: Public Research Works.

Is current terrorism against the West and the US a blowback from US terrorism and assassinations?

2007-07-05T14:41:00.000-04:00

Gates of Hell

By Russ Wellen

UNDERSTANDING THE ROOTS OF TERRORISM

In the same week as The Washington Post ran its landmark series "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," Asia Times Online, among other sites, featured a series about the Secretary of Defense called "The Gates Inheritance" by Roger Morris. It seems that, in spite of breaking the spell Rumsfeld cast on the Defense Department, Robert Gates, like fellow Iran-Contra veterans John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams, could do with an exorcism himself.

The CIA deputy director for intelligence in 1985, he was among those who advised Ronald Reagan to sanction a car bombing in Bir el-Abed, a Shi'ite ghetto of Beirut. It was intended as retaliation for the 1983 truck-bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks at Beirut airport that killed 241 servicemen.

For its part, Morris writes, that attack was a "reprisal for earlier US acts of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon's civil war that had cost hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian lives." It also held the world record for the most massive peace-time blowback against the US until 9/11.

The Bir bombing, meanwhile, was of those broadly targeted acts of retaliation to which the US is partial –- a precursor, if you will, to attacking Iraq apparently just because it shares the same language as the Saudi and Yemeni 9/11 hijackers. The intended target was Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, chosen because, Morris writes, "allied spy agencies -- Israel's Mossad, Saudi Arabia's GID and Phalangist informers -- claimed he led a militant Shi'ite group that bore responsibility for the attack on the marines."

Not only wasn't that likely, according to Morris, the cleric in question wasn't even home. Eighty-one were killed and over 200 wounded. Would more blowback be forthcoming? Morris explains.

"Among those of Fadlallah's bodyguards not killed in the explosion, 22-year-old Imad Mugniyah would join the emerging Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah" and direct operations like hijacking TWA Flight 847, kidnapping Terry Anderson and Beirut CIA bureau chief William Francis Buckley (subsequently murdered), as well as bombing two Argentinian Jewish centers that killed 115.

Another of the targeted cleric's admirers was "outraged by the bombing and ever after distrustful of the Americans he had once admired": current Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

As progressives, we feel it's our duty to point out that our foreign policy creates terrorists. But besides belaboring the obvious, this has the unintended effect of increasing the contempt in which we're held by the hard right.

See, real men don't fear blowback. In other words, if you're in –- or apparently, on -- the right, you don't worry about retaliation. Nor do they care that, according to a recent Pew Institute poll of 45,239 people in 47 nations, "Global distrust of President Bush is mutating into. . . . a broad and deepening dislike of American values and. . . ideas." Concerning itself with what the rest of the world thinks doesn't become a superpower.

But what gets the hard right's back up the most is when not only progressives but policy makers point out that terrorists have legitimate complaints. And that they don't stand a chance of getting them redressed through normal channels. Excuses, excuses, scoff the hawks.

Why, progressives wonder, can't the right, as well as the public at large, fathom that it takes more than "hating our freedoms" to motivate terrorists? But it turns out that, however justified we may be in asking that question, the deaf ear the public turns to terrorists' grievances may, in fact, be a valid response.

In "Why Terrorism Does Not Work" (MIT's Global Security magazine, Fall 2006), Max Abrahms explains. After studying 28 terrorist groups, he concludes that, contrary to conventional wisdom, not only doesn't terrorism achieve its intended aims, but that its "poor success rate is inherent in the tactic of terrorism itself." [Emphasis added]

It's true that Abrahms contributes to National Review. But that scarcely disqualifies him from the debate. After all, the hard right typically magnifies threats and while Abrahms doesn't downplay them, he keeps them in perspective. Of course, he's dealing with terrorism past and present, not the ghost of terrorism yet to come -– nuclear weapons.

Abrahms's point of departure is a psychological theory called "attribution," which holds that an action is judged not by its intent, but by its consequences. In other words, he writes, "a boy notices his mother close the door, and the room becomes less noisy. . . [thus] she wanted quiet [as opposed to, say, privacy]."

He applies that to terrorism: "Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty." Instead, the public interprets "the deaths of innocent citizens, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties" as evidence that terrorists want to destroy its "way of life."

The "unfavorable external conditions" that al-Qaida protests include US presence in the Persian Gulf region, our support for dictators, and, of course, the existence of Israel. Supposedly, terrorists won't negotiate, but they don't believe traditional diplomacy will give them a fair shake. Suicide bombers are their ambassadors; a demolished marketplace their negotiating table.

Abrahms fails to acknowledge that the havoc al-Qaida wreaks is a pretty good consolation prize. Nor that it might be subject to "style drift," a financial term for fund managers who depart from the investment strategy they were initially bound by, such as income preservation, and switch to another, usually more aggressive.

In al-Qaida's case, its main goal may have drifted to killing Westerners, once secondary to its policy pursuits. In other words, blowback -– revenge to the nth degree –- may now, thanks in part to the likes of Robert Gates, be its raison d'etre.

Authors Bio:

Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also a columnist and editor at Freezerbox.com.

The Shelf life of married love: 3 years?

2007-07-02T21:27:00.000-04:00

July 1, 2007

The Shelf Life of Bliss

By SAM ROBERTS

FORGET the proverbial seven-year itch.

Not to disillusion the half million or so June brides and bridegrooms who were just married, but new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years.

Researchers analyzed responses from two sets of married or cohabitating couples: one group was together for one to three years, the other for four to six years.

While the researchers could not pinpoint a precise turning point — the seven-year itch, as popularized in the play and film about errant husbands, was largely a theory — they found distinct differences between the groups.

“We know the earlier ones are happier,” said Prof. Kelly Musick, a University of Southern California sociologist. “The initial boost that marriage seems to provide fades over time.”

Research also showed that the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce remains a little more than seven years, which means that those couples will likely spend more than half their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake.

“Some folks start getting less happy at the wedding reception,” said Larry Bumpass, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the study with Professor Musick.

Is there a three-year itch?

“There is not necessarily anything magical about year three,” Professor Musick said. “We know that typically when marriages end in divorce, half end before seven or so years and half end after. This is the same idea.”

Their analysis, which included unmarried, cohabitating partners but not gay couples, was based on the National Survey of Families and Households, a national
sample of 9,637 racially diverse households conducted by the University of Wisconsin Center fo
Demography and Ecology. The research, coupled with a survey released today by the Pew Research Center, provides an intriguing look at an ethereal part of marriage. Everyone knows the first blush of love is the strongest, but measuring how long it will last and whether that bliss is unique to marriage has always fallen more into the category of “here’s what my mother says” than something quantifiable.

In an academic paper they completed last year that analyzed earlier findings from the national surveys, Professors Musick and Bumpass compared responses to questions about how couples described their relationships, how often they fought and over what, and how they would envision their lives if they separated.

The research doesn’t address whether blissful 21st-century relationships are any more or less enduring than they were in the 20th century, so it may be that happy coupledom always came with a three-year expiration date. With nonmarital childbearing more common and women more economically independent, “What’s keeping people together is their love and commitment for each other,” Professor Musick said, “and that’s fragile.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the findings have some foundation.

Bart Blasengame, a 33-year-old freelance writer from Portland, Ore., was with his former fiancée for three years. “I felt like, by year three, we were both forcing it,” he recalled.

“It’s the whole cliché of pursuit,” he said. “Your dates are planned out like some Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with unicorns and rainbows. By year two, we were cruising along, living together, relatively happy. But from a growth standpoint things had started to atrophy. We were happy, content is a better word, but there was no spark.”

But the evolving rules of marriage provide both opportunities and pitfalls, Professor Musick said. “There may be greater potential to find fulfillment in relationships,” she said, “but that possibility and the expectations that come from it may lead to greater disappointment for some” if the expectations aren’t fulfilled.

Her bleak statistical assessment of the durability of enchantment is one of several new findings about relationships and marriage in America. In a word, the State of the Unions is precarious.

Even with the nation’s population increasing, the number of married Americans age 21 to 54 has declined slightly since 2000 — apparently for the first time, as measured by the Census Bureau. In the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of Americans in every racial and ethnic group who were never married has continued to grow by double digits.

The United States is far from embracing Europe’s postmarriage model or its much higher rates of nonmarital births. Most Americans surveyed this year by the Pew center, in fact, still say marriage is an ideal, if a more elusive one.

While roughly 9 in 10 American adults eventually marry, the time they spend married has declined sharply, in part because they are marrying later and living longer as widows. Moreover, the Pew survey found that 79 percent of Americans say a woman can lead a complete and happy life if she remains single. The comparable figure for men was 67 percent.

While married couples generally say they are more satisfied with their lives, younger adults are far less likely to stigmatize alternatives such as living together and having children out of wedlock, according to the Pew telephone survey of 2,020 adults, which is available at www.pewresearch.org.

The Pew survey found that nearly half of Americans in their 30s and 40s have cohabitated. Among all adults, a minority (44 percent) said that living together without getting married was bad for society (only 10 percent said it was a good thing), although the Pew survey concluded that “by providing an alternative to marriage, cohabitation for some appears to diminish rather than strengthen the impulse to legally marry.”

In general, married people are presumed to be happier and better off, but Professor Bumpass, who found that most marriages nowadays are preceded by cohabitation, and Professor Musick questioned whether those benefits were unique to marriage and whether they are stable over time.

“We conclude that the boundaries between marriage and cohabitation may become increasingly blurred,” Professor Musick said.

As for the three-year itch, Byron Lester, a 49-year-old information technology administrator from Bloomfield, Conn., is well suited to consider it. Married three years and two months ago, he said the secret to success is often in the details. “Little things really do mean a lot,” he said.

Mr. Lester said he abandoned his cherished newspaper reading during dinner because that is when his wife most enjoys conversation. “And I think she’s adapted to watching more sports,” he said.

Marriage rates vary widely by race, ethnicity, education, income (63 percent of white women over 18 who make more than $100,000 are married; 25 percent of poor black women are). Soaring divorce rates have leveled off, most experts agree, but one reason may be that the dissolution of live-in relationships are not taken into account.

Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer whose favorite aphorism is that marriage is the first step on the road to divorce, says marital longevity has fallen victim to the velocity of our suped-up society.

“We’re all addicted to a television-clicker lifestyle,” he said.

But a dissipation of that all-enveloping rapture is no reason to give up on a relationship, many people insist.

“At times, sure, I’m bored,” said Sean Meehan, 51, a therapist from West Hartford who has been married for 14 years. “Who isn’t? But you talk about it with your spouse and you can switch things up.”

“People are so used to everything being disposable,” he said. “They throw out diapers, lighters, coffee cups, so they can throw out a marriage.”

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex adviser, cautioned, too, that the notion of a three-year itch can become self-fulfilling. “How dangerous it is to say something like that,” she said. “From now on, everyone who’s getting married will say it will last three years and then I will have to look for someone else.”

Or, as Paul D. Neuthaler, a divorce mediator in Westchester, said: “The fizzle tends to bubble out within a three- to five-year period when the basis for the marriage was purely physical or related to some attraction not closely associated with each partner’s essential character.”

Another new study, by Prof. Evelyn Lehrer of the University of Illinois at Chicago, contradicts the chestnut that women who marry later are more likely to divorce. She found that with both men and women marrying later than ever, later marriages seem to last longer.

Stephanie Coontz, director of and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group, said: “We’re getting close to a 180-degree turn in many of the rules about what makes marriage work and not work. The marriages of college-educated couples are becoming more stable.”

Professor Musick is happily married herself — “mostly,” she says — and will celebrate her third anniversary this fall. “My honeymoon,” she mused, “is almost over.”

Whatever the trends, marriage and relationships are in an unusual state of flux, as they were for baby boomers. With so much room to maneuver, younger couples have fewer firm markers to guide them.

In the film “Knocked Up,” Ben beseeches his father for advice after his one-night stand results in a pregnancy.

“I’ve been divorced three times,” his father replies. “Why are you asking me?”

Reporting was contributed by Abby Ellin, Carolyn Marshall, Kayleen Schaefer and Stacey Stowe.

Lies, Politictis, the War and the Media.

2007-06-08T20:03:00.000-04:00

Lies, Sighs and Politics

by Paul Krugman

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.

40th Anniversay of the Six Day War, 1967, the war that changed the Middle East and us ever since.

2007-06-05T18:59:00.000-04:00

We haven't learned all we should about Israel
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/413817,CST-EDT-edits05a.article)

June 5, 2007

Forty years ago today, in one of the most stunning developments of the last half-century, Israel pulled off the ultimate in go-for-broke gambles. On the morning of June 5, 1967, it sent all but 12 of its 200 air force planes on a surprise attack on Egypt's air force, knowing if those planes were detected and destroyed, the Israeli homeland would be vulnerable in the extreme to the combined Arab air forces. They weren't and it wasn't, and the Six Day War was written into history.

In marking the occasion, the world remembers the speed and overwhelming force of Israel's campaign, and what a supreme statement it was of Israel's right to exist. The world remembers how Israeli forces captured the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza -- and how Jerusalem, divided after the 1948 War of Independence, was reunited.

What the world may not remember, or choose to remember, is how Egypt brought about the air strike by imposing a naval blockade of the Strait of Tiran and forcing the United Nations to remove its forces from the Sinai, after 10 years of keeping the peace, in preparation for a war to wipe Israel off the map -- and how alone in the world Israel was in defending itself. The world may not remember that even after their humiliating defeat, the Arabs' response to Israel's offer to negotiate a peaceful solution to their conflict came in the words: "no recognition, no peace and no negotiations."

Still, in the 40 years since the Six Day War, Israel and the Arab world have negotiated, most promisingly when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat courageously promoted moderation and participated in the 1978 agreement with Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- this five years after the 1973 October War. But as dramatized by PLO head Yasser Arafat's unconscionable trashing of a 2000 peace proposal orchestrated by Bill Clinton, too many Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular have no interest in doing anything but what PLO chieftain Ahmad Shuqayri promised in the '60s: to "destroy Israel and its inhabitants."

Celebrations of the 40th are said to be muted in Israel. There's widespread despair that peace seems more remote than ever. Pride in the military suffered with its failures in last year's war in Lebanon, which led to harsh condemnations of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for overreaching and under-preparing. His political survival is in doubt. But even as the United Nations and much of Europe regularly find reason to condemn Israel for defending itself against Hamas and Hezbollah, while not criticizing those groups for their terrorist actions, Israel's resolve -- to do what is right -- is unshaken. Yes, it will answer aggression with force. But it also will make more concessions in the name of peace than the world will acknowledge or its enemies deserve.

The Curse of Iraq: "sahel" - utter crushing defeat of the extremists (the other party)

2007-06-03T13:42:00.000-04:00

Iraq's Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

“Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’ ” Razzaq said. “It has always been that way in Iraq.”

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction — not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds — has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.

President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have grown weary. But they are not the ones at the country’s helm; many are among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists to take control of their homeland.

“We’ve changed nothing,” said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician who has three bullets lodged in his torso from a recent assassination attempt. “It’s dark. There will be more blood.”

I first met Mr. Qaisi in 2003 at a Salafi mosque in western Baghdad, when the Sunni Arab insurgency was gaining momentum. He articulated the Sunnis’ simmering anger at being ousted from power. That fury has blossomed and is likely only to grow, as religious Shiite leaders and their militias become more entrenched in the government and as Kurds in the north push to expand their region and secede in all but name.

Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq’s factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: their will is ebbing and their time here is limited. That leaves Iraqis more motivated than ever to cling to their weapons, preparing for what many see as an inevitable plunge into the abyss.

“Everyone — the Sunni, the Shia — is playing the waiting game,” an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. “They’re waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you.”

Much seemed different in April 2003, when the Americans pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square and allowed Iraqis to drag it through the streets. It looked like an act of sahel at the time, but the Americans failed to establish total control, as Iraqi history says a conqueror must.

Four years on, Sunni and Shiite attacks against the Americans are expanding. There is little love among Iraqi civilians for the troops, though many fear the anarchy that could follow an American withdrawal.

“I’m still sticking by my principle, which is against the occupation,” Mr. Qaisi said in an interview here while visiting from his new home in Tikrit. “I’m Iraqi, and I think the Iraqi people should have this principle. We have the right to defend our country as George Washington did.”

As long as I have known him, Mr. Qaisi has rejected the idea that the Sunni Arabs are the minority in this country. To him and many other Sunni Arabs, the borders of Iraq do not delineate the boundaries of the war. The conflict is set, instead, against the backdrop of the entire Islamic world, in which demography and history have always favored the Sunnis. That sense of entitlement is fed by the notion that Iraq’s Shiite Arabs are just proxies for Iran’s Persian rulers.

For the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraqis, the unalloyed hostility of the Sunni Arabs only reinforces a centuries-old sense of victimhood. So the Shiite militias grow, stoking vengeance. Through force of arms, and backed by the Americans and Iran, the religious Shiites intend to dominate the country entirely, taking what they believe was stripped from them when their revered leader Hussein was murdered in the desert of seventh-century Mesopotamia.

It was at the site of that ancient bloodletting, Karbala, that I twice witnessed the intense Shiite ache for righteousness and triumph. In early 2004, thousands of young fighters in the Mahdi Army, the militia of the nationalist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, fought and died in a fevered uprising against the Americans. Last March, the same zealotry showed in a different way, as millions of Shiite pilgrims marched to Karbala’s shrines to commemorate the death of Hussein. They went despite relentless attacks by Sunni Arab suicide bombers. To them, it was all part of the unending war.

“No country in the world is fighting such terrorism,” said Adel Abdul Mehdi, an Iraqi vice president and leader in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a powerful Shiite party, on the day he made his pilgrimage. “Every time we give more martyrs, we are more determined. This is a big battle, there is no such battle in the world.”

The Shiites have waited centuries for their moment on the throne, and the war is something they are willing to tolerate as the price for taking power, said the Iraqi leader who had invited me to dinner in the Green Zone. “The Shia say this is not exceptional for them, this is normal,” he said.

The belief of the Shiites that they must consolidate power through force of arms is tethered to ever-present suspicions of an impending betrayal by the Americans. Though the Americans have helped institute the representative system of government that the Shiites now dominate, they have failed to eliminate memories of how the first President Bush allowed Saddam Hussein to slaughter rebelling Shiites in 1991. Shiite leaders are all too aware, as well, of America’s hostility toward Iran, the seat of Shiite power, and of its close alliances with Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia.

“One day we’ll find that we’ve returned back to 1917,” said Sheik Muhammad Bakr Khamis al-Suhail, a respected Shiite neighborhood leader in Baghdad, referring to the installation here of a Sunni Arab monarchy by the British after World War I. “The pressure of the Arab countries on the American administration might push the Americans to choose the Sunni Arabs.”

Sitting in the cool recesses of his home, the white-robed sheik said he was a moderate, a supporter of democracy. It is for people like him that the Americans have fought this war. But the solution he proposes is not one the Americans would easily embrace.

“In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders,” he said. “We need strong rulers or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite.”

I was surprised to hear those words. But perhaps I was being naïve. Looking back on all I have seen of this war, it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel, the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.

$27 million dollars to Catholic school children because without the Roman Catholic church there would be no Western Civilization

2007-05-25T22:56:00.001-04:00

Atheist donates $27 million to NY archdiocese

A retired financier who is not religious has given a gift of over $27 million to charitable works of the archdiocese of New York because "without the Roman Catholic church there would be no Western civilisation".

Describing him as an atheist, Catholic World News reports that Robert Wilson has given the sum to a program that will pay tuition for needy children attending New York's parochial schools.

A publicity-shy former Wall Street investor, Mr Wilson told the New York Sun that he hope the gift will inspire others "to pony up."

Cardinal Edward Egan called the donation a "historic and farsighted support" of his inner-city scholarship campaign, started in 2005.

The gift is the largest single donation ever recorded by the Church in New York.

Explaining his decision to make the grant to a Catholic charity, Mr Wilson pointed out that his money would be used to pay for the education of children, rather than for specifically religious purposes.

While he is not religious, Mr Wilson indicated a deep respect for the Catholic faith. "Let's face it," he told a reporter, "without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western civilisation."

Mr Wilson, who is retired and in his 80s, according to the archdiocese, is one of the nation's major philanthropists, ABC 7 says.

According to Business Week, he has also contributed millions to environmental and wildlife conservation causes, the New York Public Library and the city's arts institutions.

He reportedly made his money on Wall Street by turning a $15,000 investment into $225 million.

SOURCE
Record gift to New York archdiocese comes from atheist (Catholic World News, 24/5/07)
Philanthropist To Donate $23M To Archdiocese (New York Sun 23/5/07)
Man gives $22.5 million donation to Archdiocese of NY (ABC 7, 23/5/07)

LINKS (not necessarily endorsed by Church Resources)
New York Archdiocese

Mr Bush's loyal and incompetent syncophants. (suck-ups)

2007-05-23T17:43:00.000-04:00

Their Master's Voice
The New York Times

Saturday 19 May 2007

In March 2004, the acting attorney general distrusted Alberto Gonzales so much that he wouldn't meet with him at the White House without a witness. Eight months later, President Bush promoted Mr. Gonzales from White House counsel to attorney general, the top law enforcement job in the land. The president is still standing by his man, ignoring Mr. Gonzales's efforts to mislead Congress, his disregard for the Constitution and his gross neglect of even basic bureaucratic duties.

It's a familiar pattern: Mr. Bush sticks by his most trusted aides no matter how evident it is - even to the Republican Congressional chorus - that they are guilty of incompetence, bad judgment, malfeasance or all three. (George Tenet, the director of central intelligence; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and the Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers spring to mind.)

Each time, we're told Mr. Bush repays loyalty with loyalty. We're told it's a sign of character.

We don't buy the explanation. The more persuasive answer is that Mr. Bush protects his embattled advisers because they are doing precisely what he told them to do.

Mr. Tenet was not off freelancing on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He delivered what the White House wanted: claims that sounded dire enough to herd Americans into war. (His recent self-serving insistence that he admires the president but was shocked at the lack of thought and planning behind the war comes too late.) Mr. Tenet put the party line and his own career above the good of the country, and for that, he was rewarded with a Medal of Freedom.

Mr. Rumsfeld wasn't conducting a rogue operation when he planned the war in Iraq. He gave the president his victory on the cheap, which could be presented to Americans as sacrifice-free. When the plan literally exploded in the faces of an undermanned, poorly armored and badly led American force, Mr. Rumsfeld did Mr. Bush's bidding by denying failure after failure. The president stuck by him until the 2006 campaign ended in the one condition that trumps loyalty in the Bush family playbook: losing an election.

The president also clung to his nomination of Ms. Miers to the Supreme Court long after there was a bipartisan consensus that she was unqualified. Now we know that there is powerful evidence that Ms. Miers helped to orchestrate the political purge of United States attorneys.

The more of these White House psychodramas we get to witness, the more obvious it is that Mr. Bush's warm embrace is really a payoff to yes-men who didn't challenge his orders or question ideology-driven policies. It is a cynical way to run the United States government. And, as Mr. Tenet's recent book shows, it doesn't even buy silence.

Wolfowitx lessons and perspective: World Bank., politics and morals.

2007-05-20T15:37:00.000-04:00

LIKE SO much that has happened in the career of Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, it was not the leaving of his presidency of the World Bank that mattered, but the manner in which it happened. After weeks of briefing and counter-briefing over the rights and wrongs of the case - Wolfowitz stood accused of using his position to give financial rewards to his British-born girlfriend Shaha Riza - the former US deputy defence secretary, a neoconservative to his boots, finally bowed to the inevitable and sent in his papers.

Following a spate of frenzied soul-bearing, the 24-member board of the World Bank came up with a face-saving solution which allowed Wolfowitz to resign with effect from June 30 and to leave with his reputation relatively intact. In the statement announcing their decision, the board appeared to let Wolfowitz off the hook by accepting that he had "acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution".

While this fell short of Wolfowitz's earlier demand that he should be exonerated completely - he claimed he had been given poor advice about Riza's $50,000-a-year, tax-free pay rise - it has still been a humiliating experience for a man who prided himself on being one of Washington's "untouchables".

As the dust began to settle yesterday, it was easier to see how the resignation had polarised thinking about the whole affair. Never before in its 63-year history had the board of the World Bank been forced into the position where it had to question the probity of its chief executive, and in diplomatic and financial circles the overwhelming feeling is one of relief that the crisis is over.

For those infuriated by Wolfowitz's original decision to press ahead with Riza's pay rise and his attempts to justify his behaviour, there is satisfaction that he has fallen on his sword - but this is balanced by anger that his resignation is a fairly modest outcome.

"I know that some of the Europeans would have liked to take it further and to rub his nose in what they clearly saw as his guilt," said a US diplomatic source. "In itself, the money was probably neither here nor there, but Wolfowitz had already made a scourge for himself by insisting from the outset that ethical business practices were going to be a priority. He belongs to a generation of Washington neocons who tend to believe that all organisations like the UN and the World Bank are mired in corruption."

By finding him an exit route, the bank's board has avoided the necessity of sacking Wolfowitz and asking its members to wield the axe. This would have put Britain, a key US ally, in a difficult position although, as the diplomatic source insisted, Wolfowitz's disgrace probably prompted an outbreak of schadenfreude among the Germans and French.

During the drawn-out deliberations over Wolfowitz's fate, there was a tendency for his supporters in Washington, most notably his fellow neocon ally Richard Perle, to dismiss the issue as a proxy battle between anti-American governments in Europe and the Bush administration in Washington. With Wolfowitz, one of the architects of US policy in Iraq, caught in the middle, Perle and others saw the scandal as payback time for the Europeans.

In fact, there might be some truth in that assertion. As deputy to defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, himself no shrinking violet when it comes to waving the big stick, Wolfowitz was an enthusiastic advocate of attacking Iraq in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He was also a perfervid supporter of his boss's decision to oust Saddam Hussein quickly and cheaply by using "lite tactics" - that is to say deploying smaller and more lightly armed forces to carry out the assault and to control the subsequent occupation.

When senior officers protested that the plans were unworkable, they were simply over-ruled, even though - with the benefit of hindsight and the experience of past military operations - they were absolutely right.

The failure of the Iraq operation and its consequences for US policy weighed heavily on Wolfowitz. As much of the thinking had been evolved inside the Pentagon during his and Rumsfeld's watch, they were both heavily implicated in what had gone wrong. Instead of celebrating Saddam's downfall and the creation of an Arab democracy in alliance with the US, Bush's main defence planners were confronted by a shambles which saw Iraq descending into failed nation status and with little chance of finding redemption.

Wolfowitz would not have been human had he not wanted to find his own exit strategy. By the time of Bush's second term as president, he had seen the departure of colleagues such as George Tenet from the CIA and L Paul Bremer from his disastrous governorship of post-war Iraq, and he no longer wanted to be associated with a failed policy. The presidency of the World Bank gave him the opportunity to begin again, to remove himself from the shadow of disappointment and to try pastures new.

It helped that the post was in the gift of the White House - early in 2005 when it was up for grabs, he threw his hat in the ring and it was quickly accepted. A widely quoted "friend" confirmed that this was the chance Wolfowitz had been seeking. "It was not that he was looking for a redemption from Iraq per se," he was quoted as saying. "But he was always looking for something to do as a great man in foreign policy, which is how he has always seen himself."

Others were less generous, wondering if he would simply be a wolf in sheep's clothing, unable to accept the liberal, collegiate way in which the World Bank operates. To begin with it seemed that the fears were groundless.

Wolfowitz certainly has all the qualifications to succeed in his chosen field. He is intelligent, analytical and blessed with a razor-sharp mind. In the past he has worked in academia and has served as US ambassador in Indonesia, giving him a mix of intellectual and diplomatic skills. In the early days at the bank, those attributes stood him in good stead: he pushed through plans to cancel the debts of African countries and showed a steely determination to address corruption and inefficiency.

But the flipside is less appealing. In common with many high-flying intellectuals, he is intolerant of lesser beings and has a tendency to trust his own thinking at the expense of what others tell him. Soon he was complaining to friends that the World Bank was nothing more than a sleepy hollow peopled by liberal bureaucrats who ring-fenced their own empires and opposed attempts to introduce change.

Wolfowitz responded to what he believed was a deep-rooted problem in the same way that he had behaved at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war in Iraq: by refusing to listen to rational alternative arguments and by driving through his own agenda. As the situation was described by Manish Bapna, the executive director of one of the bank's watchdogs, Wolfowitz employed a management style which "was seen as an ad hoc, subjective approach to punishing enemies and rewarding friends".

Fatally for Wolfowitz's ambitions, one of the friends in receipt of his patronage was his girlfriend Shaha Riza. According to papers released by the World Bank in the early stages, Wolfowitz intended to do everything by the book but quickly lost patience and started following his instinct. Instead of distancing himself from Riza by ending the relationship or sending her back to the State Department without any financial reward (the reason for the hefty pay rise), he took the problem to the bank's ethics committee and then proceeded to fall out with the chairman Al Melkert over the correct procedures to adopt.

Wolfowitz then quarrelled with other key officials and the complexion of the issue changed. Instead of being about the propriety of awarding a sum of money to an employee with whom he was in a relationship, it descended into a quarrel about who was right and who was wrong. Wolfowitz complained he was given faulty or misleading advice, and that at least was conceded by the board, whose members admitted that Melkert's findings were "not a model of clarity". For their part, the officials have accused Wolfowitz of evasion and of attempting to keep the whole business secret from the ethics committee.

With the battlelines drawn, there was no way back. As Wolfowitz had no key allies in the upper echelons, he imported officials who had worked with him in the Pentagon, but their style was often at odds with the way the bank worked.

All too quickly the scandal over Riza became a battle to get Wolfowitz out of office. Those who never wanted him to be president of the World Bank finally got their way - but the story is far from over. Under current rules, his successor will be chosen by the US president and a number of candidates are being toted this weekend, including the extremely unlikely option of Tony Blair.

Sources within the White House say the president will move quickly to nominate a successor to allow "for an early transition that will have the World Bank refocused on its mission" but that might be wishful thinking.

Far from kicking the subject into touch, Wolfowitz's early departure has simply opened a wider debate about how the bank is run and whether or not the US should be the sole arbiter for the choice of its chief executive.

Hamas must give up its mandate, by W. M. Awad

2007-05-19T19:11:00.000-04:00

Hamas must give up mandate

Walid M Awad

20-May-07

ONE committee meeting after another was held in Gaza to find a solution for the protracted infighting there.

On Wednesday evening a truce was finally struck. The same day, Israel found it convenient and appropriate to hit Gaza. Israeli warplanes attacked Palestinian targets, including buildings and moving vehicles in which at least 15 Palestinians were killed and more than 40 injured, many seriously.

As usual, the pinpoint Israeli attacks are never on target, and many civilian bystanders, mostly women and children, were hit.

The occupied Palestinian territories are in a big mess, a mess created by the Israeli occupation. One very significant mess the occupation has caused is the rift among the Palestinians on how best to end the occupation and the conflict. One aspect of this rift is causing the current difficult and ugly infighting taking place in Gaza.

So far the local media refers to the clashes between Hamas militias and Palestinian security forces, including armed men affiliated to Fatah, as regrettable incidents. This, when in fact, what is taking place in Gaza are bloody clashes, best described as criminal actions motivated by political and other agendas. Hamas was elected in January last year, because many believed the Oslo accords had failed, and a chance should be given to Hamas to pursue its strategy. Since that election, after which Hamas took the reins of power, the Palestinian situation deteriorated very fast.

One very negative outcome of that election is the fact that the Palestinian people are being led now by two opposing parties, with two different agendas, and two different world views, and most important of all two different visions on how to deal with the occupation and Israel. Like a cart being pulled by two horses going in opposite directions.

Gaza is one of the most congested areas on earth, poverty-stricken and under siege. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children currently are hungry, electricity supplies minimal, and municipal services dysfunctional. Over the last five days the dead and wounded due to the infighting has exceeded 241 people. In short, if the infighting in Gaza continues for another few days, the world community will have a catastrophic humanitarian disaster unfolding before its eyes.

The Palestinian security forces, due to internal legal constraints, lack of equipment and other necessary resources, are apparently unable to take the necessary action to end the infighting. International sanctions have crippled the Palestinian economy.

Hamas thinks and believes it has a legitimate authority to implement its agenda, and has no time for any suggestion that stipulates that it might need even to rethink it.

Many believe Hamas does not have a Palestinian national agenda. It has an ideological agenda, a pan-Islamic agenda as advocated by the Islamic Brotherhood movement, and this as far as Hamas is concerned, has priority above all else.

Furthermore, as Hamas has its own worldview, and can only accept its own vision for a solution for the Middle East conflict, Hamas is willing and is sacrificing all Palestinian national gains achieved by the Palestinian people, led by the Palestine Liberation Organisation over the last forty years, and those gained after the Oslo peace accords, in particular.

The situation that has developed over the last few months, culminating in the latest showdown between Fatah and Hamas, and the inability of all despite frantic efforts to calm the situation down, dictates the need to search for new effective ways to deal with the standoff.

If Hamas does not rethink its position, and or is not convinced of changing it, the likely outcome of the ongoing infighting is more debilitating, and would render Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence worthless.

In the circumstances, and in the absence of internal agreed-upon understandings that would end the infighting for good, create an environment conducive to renewing efforts towards a just peace in accordance with United Nations resolutions, President Bush's two-state vision, the Arab peace initiative, and the road map, the only way out of the disastrous situation in Gaza is an effective and determined effort to help the Palestinian National Authority and the PLO.

This help and assistance can take many forms and shapes. The bottom line is to end the infighting, restore normal life to Gaza, end the siege on its people, enable freedom, create job opportunities, and enhance the education system. Israel, which has a vested interest in weakening the Palestinian people, must stay out.

As a matter of fact, part of such help would be to pressure Israel to stop its aggression in the West Bank and Gaza, release Palestinian funds and end its crippling siege. A collective Arab initiative for assistance supported by the Quartet is the only feasible action that might produce the desired results.

All help and assistance needed by the elected president of the Palestinian people and his government to take whatever measures necessary to enforce the principle of one gun one law and one authority must be granted to them.

All outlawed militias must be dissolved and all outlawed weapons must be confiscated. Hamas, initially an honorable Islamic resistance movement, does not have by definition a clear internationally-acceptable political vision for a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and subsequently was rejected by the relevant politically-active world community.

Hamas tenure in office therefore has cost the Palestinian people much world support and sympathy, allowed others to impose crippling sanctions on the Palestinian people, causing increased poverty and hardships, and most important of all, allowed anarchy and chaos to spread in Palestine.

Hamas, therefore, would do itself and the Palestinian people a huge favour if it swallows its pride, steps aside, and allows other capable and empowered Palestinians to take complete charge of the governing institutions, or alternatively, accept the people's call to hand the mandate back, and accept new legislative and presidential elections.

Walid M Awad is the foreign press spokesperson for the Central Media Commission in Ramallah.Arab News

Are we politicians or citizens? by Howard Zinn

2007-05-16T20:42:00.003-04:00

Are We Politicians or Citizens?

By Howard Zinn

May 2007 Issue

When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.

Except for the rare few, like Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, and John Lewis, our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be “realistic.”

We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.

Howard Zinn is the author, most recently, of “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”

The Liberal media bias in TV debates, please note:

2007-05-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

The Wrong Questions

Compare Hardball questions given Dems vs softball questions given Repubs.

by Devilstower

Tue May 15, 2007 at 05:25:57 PM PDT

This past weekend, I made a post suggesting that the Democratic candidates need to make better responses to the questions asked in the media "debates," and not allow the moderators to lead them into defensive positions. As the Republicans get ready to line up for another game of softball tonight, I thought it would be interesting to look at the other end of this affair. Just what did the good ol' MSNBC boys ask Democratic candidates when compared to Republican candidates?

Here then are the first three questions asked in each debate.

Senator Clinton, your party's leader in the United States Senate, Harry Reid, recently said the war in Iraq is lost. A letter to today's USA Today calls his comments "treasonous" and says if General Patton were alive today, Patton would "wipe his boots" with Senator Reid. Do you agree with the position of your leader in the Senate?

In the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, just 22 percent believe this country is on the right track. Mayor Giuliani, how do we get back to Ronald Reagan's morning in America?

Okay, in round one, a Democratic leader is declared a treasonous weakling based on a misquote and ravings from a LTE. A former Republican leader is seen as the goal to which we should aspire. Certainly "fair and balanced" so far.

Senator Obama, you have called this war in Iraq, quote, "dumb," close quote. How do you square that position with those who have sacrificed so much? And why have you voted for appropriations for it in the past?

Senator McCain, most of the public pessimism today has to do with Iraq. What would you need, as commander in chief, to win the war in Iraq?

In round two, a Democratic senator is shown to be a hypocrite who doesn't respect the troops, while a Republican senator is asked what he needs to dispel public gloom and seize victory. Nothing to see here.

Senator Edwards, you made a high-profile apology for your vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution. You have said, quote, "We need a leader who will be open and honest, who will tell the truth when they made a mistake." Was that not a direct shot at your opponent, Senator Clinton?

Governor Thompson, if you're commander in chief and you want to win this war in Iraq, what do you need to do to win it?

And in round three, Democrats are invited to wallow in their past mistakes and take pot shots at each other, while Republicans are given another opportunity to win, Win, WIN! All good.

Look for more of that "liberal media bias" at work in tonight's debate, as Republican candidates are forced to field tough choices between whether they think mom, apple pie, and Jesus are merely great, or really, really super cool.

from the Daily Kos

"I'm Harry" by Bill Moyers

2007-05-12T17:32:00.000-04:00

“I’m Harry.”

by Bill Moyers

When people are having a good time, you don’t want to be the skunk in the garden. And this week, people were having such a good time at that big White House welcome for the Queen. The New York Times says her majesty was “making Americans go weak in the knees.” Sometimes we colonials seem so dazzled by British royalty that I wonder if General
Washington did defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown.

But a less playful thought also occurred to me watching the first and royal families all gussied up. I couldn’t help but think of Prince Harry, the Queen’s grandson, who is headed for Iraq with a cavalry regiment, even though he’s a conspicuous target for assassination or kidnapping. There’s angst in official circles that other members of his regiment will be put at graver risk because of his celebrity. So guess what his comrades — his fellow soldiers — are doing? Rather than petition the Queen to keep the young man home, they have gotten shirts printed up with the words across them: “I’m Harry.” Marvelous, no? The commoners and the Prince are in this together: one for all and all for one. What a notion — that war should be the great equalizer, that no one’s son or daughter is privileged from duty or danger.

You have to wonder how the last four years might have been different if only our President had asked sacrifice from everyone. Instead, mostly folks from the working class and professional soldiers are doing the dying in Iraq, while the rich spend their tax cuts. War on the cheap, except for those fighting it.

Watching all the wrangling in Washington this week over timetables and exit strategies and benchmarks, it occurred to me that this travesty might end much more quickly if what is happening in Iraq were not just word-play to our leaders — something others die for while officials talk, talk, and talk. Suppose the next time they pow-wow and palaver the President and Congress were asked to wear shirts with the words written across them, “I’m Harry.”

Bill Moyers is the host of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. This essay appears on tonight’s program. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at pbs.org/moyers.

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They hate us for our hypocrisy. Opinion, Cuba, Posada

2007-05-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

They Hate Us For Our Hypocrisy

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070511_they_hate_us_for_our_hypocrisy/

Posted on May 11, 2007

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON—The Bush administration says that its zero-tolerance policy against terrorism applies to all suspected evildoers, not just Muslims, and that its zero-tolerance policy against Cuba is a principled position, not just an exercise in pandering to the implacable anti-Castro exiles in Miami. On both counts, evidence suggests otherwise.

The fact is that Luis Posada Carriles, an accused terrorist who entered the United States illegally and was taken into custody by authorities, is not being kept in solitary confinement and dragged out for occasional waterboarding. As of this writing, he is a free man.

Posada, 79, has a long history of violent opposition to Fidel Castro’s regime. He was accused of masterminding the 1976 mid-air bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner, a terrorist act that killed 73 innocent people. He is also suspected of involvement in a 1997 series of bombings of Havana hotels and nightclubs; several people were injured and an Italian tourist was killed.

Terrorism, our government constantly reminds us, is the scourge of our times. So why is a man described by our government as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites” looking forward to a hero’s welcome in Miami from his old Bay of Pigs comrades?

Posada sneaked into the country in 2005, and had the temerity to advertise his presence by giving a news conference. After some dithering, Homeland Security officials took him into custody. He was indicted in January on federal charges of immigration fraud for lying about how he entered the United States.

On Tuesday, in El Paso, Texas—where Posada had been held—U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone dismissed the indictment against Posada, saying the government had resorted to unconstitutional “trickery” in gathering its evidence against him. It was Cardone’s dismissal order that set Posada free.

Cardone found that in Posada’s formal immigration interview after the feds whisked him away in 2005, the government failed to provide adequate translation of the questions and answers. What the government contended were lies about how Posada had made his way into the United States looked more like misunderstandings, Cardone concluded.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time Posada has used his allegedly poor command of English as an excuse: He claims he didn’t understand what he was saying years ago when he boasted to a reporter of his role in the Havana bombings.

So, was the judge snookered into letting a hardened terrorist walk on a technicality? Not really. It’s more the case that the judge refused to play along.

Cardone’s point was that if the government really wanted to keep Posada behind bars because he was a career terrorist, then prosecutors should have prosecuted him as a terrorist. Then, faster than you can say “Patriot Act,” authorities could have made him disappear into the netherworld of indefinite detention where terrorist suspects named Muhammad are kept.

I’ll wager that the evidence against Posada, which I find compelling, is more solid than the secret evidence against most of the detainees at Guantanamo. But Posada’s alleged crimes were against the Castro regime. George W. Bush’s stance toward Cuba has been even more hardheaded and counterproductive than the policies of his predecessors. This administration has tightened the travel ban, increased economic pressure and made a show of planning for a post-Castro Cuba. Meanwhile, Castro (apparently recovering slowly from intestinal surgery) and his brother Raul are as firmly in power as ever. The administration’s hard-line tactics have accomplished less than nothing—in Cuba, at least.

The zero-tolerance policy toward the Castro government has been popular, however, among the most strident exiles in Florida—the old men who will greet Posada when he comes home to Miami and a comfortable retirement.

A grand jury in New Jersey reportedly is investigating Posada’s alleged involvement in the Havana hotel bombings, and it’s possible that he will someday face a new indictment. Meanwhile, our government has given Castro another cause celebre for billboards and demonstrations.

The administration is about to increase funding for its broadcasts into Cuba, even though they are seen and heard by few Cubans because Castro’s people have gotten so good at jamming them. The message is that the United States opposes the Castro regime but offers a hand of friendship to the Cuban people.

That’s a tough idea to sell when our government won’t call a terrorist a terrorist—and when a bitter old man who likely has killed scores of Cuban civilians is allowed to walk free.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at symbol)washpost.com.