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Is Rice Obstructing the Bolton Investigation?
A very serious allegation buried in a story in today’s Washington Post:
On Monday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told her senior staff she was disappointed about the stream of allegations [about John Bolton] and said she did not want any information coming out of the department that could adversely affect the nomination, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.
18 U.S.C. Section 1505:
Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede…the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress–
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
This is serious enough that a reporter covering the State Department should inquire about Rice’s conduct. What, exactly, did Rice tell her subordinates? How is this consistent with their full cooperation with a Congressional inquiry.
Posted by Judd April 20th, 2005 8:54 am
Permalink | Comment (73)
Filed Under: Congress, International Relations
73 Comments »
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1.
These people are bullies, plain and simple. They are willing to blow democratic principles out of the water to get what they want. The opposition needs to stand up to them, punch hard and true right square in the face, continuously if necessary. Tempers will flare, blood will be shed, but isn’t this country worth it! Fight them until they back down. Bullies always back down because they’re wrong, we just need a few good members of Congress to step in the ring.
Comment by Jay — April 20th, 2005 @ 9:26 am
2.
Anyone who thinks that this will be ‘investigated’ is seriously fooling themselves. If there is one thing that should have been learned in the last 5 years, it’s that criminals that investigate criminals always find out, hey!, we’re innocent! Really! Would we lie to you??? Come on folks, blogger and real investigations could find, not only the ’smoking gun’, but they could find in the hand of l’il Ms. Rice with her finger on the trigger about to squeeze off another round and the line would be thusly: “What are you going to believe, us, or your lying eyes?”
Comment by Jim — April 20th, 2005 @ 9:30 am
3.
There is a difference between ‘not obstructing’ and ‘not volunteering’. I don’t see anything wrong with Rice instructing people not to get ahead of the Senate in their investigation. If she meant that people should not respond to Senate requests, then she is in the wrong. If she meant that she didn’t want people volunteering information before it was requested (unless illegal activity was found) then she was in the right, and it is the same as we did during democratic administrations.
Of course, it is usually best to provide the bad information to the Senate in advance of the hearings rather than making them dig for it, but that isn’t how this administration works and it is contributing to Bolton’s problems.
Comment by Caitlyn Antrim — April 20th, 2005 @ 9:54 am
4.
Oh come on Caitlyn, what do you think she meant?
Comment by mudkitty — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:05 am
5.
I have no doubt that Condi Rice would go TO ANY LENGTHS to confirm the President’s nominee. Her devotion is, always has been, and always will be to George Bush first and foremost.
She exists to serve Bush. Not this country. That was made abundantly clear in the 9.11 hearings wherein her obvious goal was to protect the President from ctiticism. Not to honestly discuss issues that led to the attack.
She has no more interest in public service than she has in collecting stamps.
Comment by Victoria — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:11 am
6.
Victoria is exactly right. Remember when Condi accidentally referred to George Bush as “my husband"? She’s in love!
Comment by Audrey — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:33 am
7.
Condi is just protecting her boss. I don’t think it’s right, they both should be history. Unfortunately we are a country w/ 59 mil idiots so I’m not surprised by her actions either.
Happy 4/20 everyone!!!
Comment by kindness — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:40 am
8.
4 20. cool
Comment by Jim — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:53 am
9.
She was picked for one reason - to toe the line and do what Rove/Bush say to do: support all the policies, support the people they choose, and don’t ask questions. Powell gave them shit, and they will not have that from the help.
Comment by Flamethrower — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:05 am
10.
Condi Rice speaks out against Russia’s lack of an ‘independent free press’…
Her love of a free press must have inspired the Bush admin to create and distribute fake news segments to American media outlets.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&ncid=574&e=3&u=/nm/20050420/wl_nm/russia_usa_rice_dc
Comment by Victoria — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:16 am
11.
No! She’s not obstructing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Condi fan but in this case Condi’s undermining Bolton. By saying what she did she signaled there’s dirt on the guy. She doesn’t like Bolton. Cheney tried to plant him in her office and she didn’t want him reporting back to Cheney on every little thing. She also doesn’t want Bolton at the UN. So GW is going to have to pick who he loves most - Cheney or Condi.
Just the fact that she and not Bush announced his nomination was a signal that she’s got a slight edge. For now.
Comment by Maezeppa — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:34 am
12.
Bush praised Lincoln yesterday. The way Lincoln prevailed in 1864-1865 was by aggressively pressing the offensive against the Confederacy ON ALL FRONTS SIMULTANEOUSLY.
The Confederacy couldn’t fight that many battles at once, everywhere, and collapsed.
The only hope for the U.S. democracy is for Republican patriots to turn against the Bushco war on democracy. The Democratic party can’t fight all these battles on all these fronts simultaneously. Rice, Bolton, Blackbridge, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rove are all vulnerable, exposed. But like Sherman and Grant that march at the head of juggernauts gobbling their opposition.
Unless rank and file Republicans “desert” their fascist party and side with the opposition in these skirmishes and confrontations – like Voinovitch did yesterday – the juggernaut will roll right over our country and democracy as we have known it will collapse.
Look what happened to the Sioux.
Comment by flotron — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:44 am
13.
Winston Churchill:
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, What is our policy? I will say; “It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.” You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
- First Address as Prime Minister, May 13 1940.
Comment by bascombe — April 20th, 2005 @ 12:04 pm
14.
I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world. Much will depend upon this; every man and every woman will have the chance to show the finest qualities of their race, and render the highest service to their cause. For all of us, at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation or our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines: He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene.
- Winston Churchill, “Their Finest Hour", June 18 1940.
Comment by bascombe — April 20th, 2005 @ 12:07 pm
15.
The Republican Party appears to be “drunk with power". If it fails to reign in Tom DeLay and tuck him quietly away, it may well find itself no longer the majority. Frist, also, needs to be careful of his utterances to the media … “our voice is not being heard"?? The voice of the American people have not been heard since Bush & Company took over this country!
Comment by Marva — April 20th, 2005 @ 12:33 pm
16.
Ive watched the hearings and was aghast when Senator Lugar began the vote, and I’m very relieved that Senator Joe Biden spoke so forcefully at the outset and redoubled his remarks to the chairman. For a short while there I thought well, here go the republicans again, they arent going to consider their actions they’re going to do this, even Senator Hagel’s remark that he may note vote for the nominee on the full vote didnt account for much, knowing the greater body of course has the greater numbers of members who atleast on a party line are more inclined to approve this nomination made by the President.
But nothing meant more to me than when a statesman was heard by the name of Voinovich!
There is serious considerations at hand here about the future of the nation and verily the world if this nominee is sent to represent you and me.
His remarks in the past are inflamatory, his conduct towrds subordinates, reprehensible, the pattern fatal to the well being of the relationship we have with the world.
Like it or not till the day the UN is ever closed down, the US will have a seat there and a voice and that voice should be in the best tradition of the State Department, and in the interest of the People, not the skewed prerogatives of the individuals on the scene at the moment.
Comment by stew — April 20th, 2005 @ 12:43 pm
17.
e-mail address edited to reflect correct spelling
Comment by stew — April 20th, 2005 @ 12:45 pm
18.
If Watergate was a “cancer” on Nixon’s presidency, then Dubya’s consistent promotion of grossly incompetent (but fiercely loyal) Constitution-hating toadies is a brain tumor.
People - it’s time to stand and be counted.
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 1:00 pm
19.
Everyone can forget investigating this little allegation regarding Aunt Condi-mima…the inmates are running the asylum, remember? Who really thinks anyone will look into this, two years after we still don’t know who outed Valerie Plame?
This government, and the people who continue to support it, have so long passed from the realm of outrageous to the farcical (only to foreigners, it can’t be funny for most Americans), and Blaghdaddy is beginnig to wonder if perhaps America doesn’t deserve the leader America chooses…Prove him wrong.
Comment by Blaghdaddy — April 20th, 2005 @ 1:36 pm
20.
So what else is new? I’m not surprised about Convoluted Rice’s criminal behavior to supress the truth about John Bolt-on. G Wrong Bush-it and his mob of thugs have been breaking laws right from the start.
Comment by KEVIN SCHMIDT — April 20th, 2005 @ 1:42 pm
21.
Rice Obstructing Bolton Investigation?
Rice Obstructing Bolton Investigation?
Trackback by The Supreme Irony of Life… — April 20th, 2005 @ 1:53 pm
22.
Kindalousy Rice - wow, did she POOCH 9/11. National Security Advisor my aching butt. She’s already proved she will cover up anything - Americans be damned.
Comment by Patriot — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:04 pm
23.
Well, this discussion has been entertaining to watch…but very sad! The rhetoric and the logic are shallow, childish, silly…few of the comments carry much weight, nothing but a lot of arrogant whining, especially the ‘59mill idiots’ comment! Wake up…..find a different approach because this reactionary venting isn’t convincing. Find some substance!!!
Comment by kris — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:27 pm
24.
Now is the time to stand and be counted. Hey Dr. Lee……..ONE! Give me a break.
Mark
W………still the PRESIDENT
D……….still the LEADER
Comment by Mark — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:33 pm
25.
bite me kris. I stand by my 59 mil idiots statement.
Comment by kindness — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:45 pm
26.
Kris, critiquing the banter is fine, but you have added zero to the debate yourself. Where are your substantive comments? I think the discussion illustrates the level of disgust pretty well, and having a forum to vent useful as far as I’m concerned.
It’s arrogant to complain about the problem when you’ve just inserted yourself as an obvious party to it.
Comment by Jay — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:55 pm
27.
The thing about Democrats is they dont stand up and fight at ALL. No position and act like a dog being kicked by tucking their tal between their legs. Totally playing into “Repugnents” hands. we have a screaming guy from Vermotn leading us to no where again. My vote is put you rmoney and time in Move On and forget the Dems as far as policy goes. The whole point is…hard to stand up when you are standing up with a bunch of p**sys…Man, I really am embarrassed I am a Democrat, we need fresh blood, courage and a clean start…then we can take on the Condi’d. Delay is getting away with this as well…watch and wait.
Comment by rebe — April 20th, 2005 @ 2:58 pm
28.
I hope the 59 Mil idiots get every thing they voted for. Four months into this new term and going down hill fast. My only hope at the end we never hear of the GOP again.
Comment by Willie Loucks — April 20th, 2005 @ 3:23 pm
29.
CONTRARY TO POPULAR OPINION, CONDI RICE IS A STUPID PERSON. THERE IS NO OTHER WORD FOR HER. SHE IS NOT HALF-BRIGHT, NOT SLOW, SIMPLY STUPID. DON’T GET ME STARTED.
Comment by MICHAEL R. ASHLEY — April 20th, 2005 @ 3:46 pm
30.
Hey Mark - Bush was NEVER a leader - just the spoiled scion of a ruthlessly rich family. David Koresh was more of a leader.
kris - use your real name: Ann Coulter.
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 3:47 pm
31.
Four months into this new term - look on the bright side - only 3 and a half years left! Just think all the trillions more in national debt that’s not a problem, all the wonderful nominees, the countries yet to invade, the …
Comment by Flamethrower — April 20th, 2005 @ 3:58 pm
32.
Rebe, part of the problem is, it’s in our mindset to NOT be violent fascist pigs. Claiming to be “moral” and “decent” and “compassionate", then “shedding blood” as an early method to ‘get what you want’ is what THEY do, not us. If you want to make changes for the better, and in a “moral” way, you have to be the part, not just give it lip-service. Republicans talk about “morals", yet let companies set policies that starve a portion of our population, poison people and cause heinous illnesses, and shift production to 3rd worlds where they can use slave labor. We aren’t “pussies", we’re standing on the moral high-ground here. Once it get’s to the point where they (the pugs) get ‘violent’ in a real-world context, belive me.. there will be plenty of us “pussies” content to get out our guns and drive them back to the shadows they came from. But, for now, we have to keep a level head and use facts and persistence to make our point.
As far as Rice’s obstruction, she doesn’t say diddly about “don’t volunteer info", she says she doesn’t want ANY info COMING OUT OF THAT DEPARTMENT.. that’s not saying “hey, only do what you have to", that’s saying “block the info from getting out". That’s criminal.
Anyway, we know nothing will come of it. Our leaders aren’t able to get anything done because the Repugs stole the majority and refuse to lead.. they just want to pass more laws that put more of your tax dollars in the hands of corperations while making sure the richest 2% never pay taxes again..
Comment by Savantster — April 20th, 2005 @ 3:58 pm
33.
Ya know, I think Condi is probably a VERY intelligent person. But she shows us repeatedly that she is more concerned with covering her boss’s ass than she is covering the American people. Now is that unusual in a political situation? NO. Does she owe us more than Bush? I think so but she obviously does not.
Comment by kindness — April 20th, 2005 @ 4:16 pm
34.
Savantster-
Possibly it’s time to rethink that mode of behaviour.
Even though we have a RIGHT WINGED media, and facsists in power, headlines still leak out about Tom DeLay’s criminal activities, Bush clamps down harder on the poor and supresses the truth about terrorism, and STILL morons like this kris idiot want something “substantive.” Any more GD substantive would be debtor’s prison. It’s time to stop being “decent” about it, and give Mark the “break” he so eagerly wants and desperately needs.
ONE.
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 4:18 pm
35.
Dr. Lee #34
I agree that it’s -almost- time, but we still have to see what’s gonna happen with the voting issues (following the commission closely). If we get some real progress on that front, we can vote the nasty folks out in 2006 and 08, then start repealing the joke laws they put in place.
If we don’t get satisfaction on voting rules, if we don’t get full disclosure on various issues (Plame, Bolton, etc), -then- I’m with ya.. completely..
TWO
Comment by Savantster — April 20th, 2005 @ 4:26 pm
36.
Savantster - it’s “almost” time. Are you kidding? It’s so past time, that on many issues it’s too late.
How’s this for substance:
It is public record that the Bush Administration stonewalled on the 9/11 invesigation and in fact fought to prevent it in the first place. Why?
They tried to keep the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief about “Bin Laden determined to Strike within the US” a secret.
They ignored warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration that terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular was a grave concern and they did the same when the Richard Clarke’s of the world warned that the system was “flashing red” in the summer of 01.
When the dots are connected, the picture is clear. The Bush people knew that something major was about to happen, yet they did…..nothing.
Bush stays in Crawford after the 8/6 PDB warning and he jets back to D.C. for the bogus Schiavo matter.
What more needs to be said?
Comment by Jason — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:02 pm
37.
Many thanks to kindness (??), Dr. Lee, Jay and company…you proved my point! I’m not a Repug, simply disappointed with the tone of the response. Jay, sorry bud…my ‘contribution’ is to encourage that we raise the level of discussion beyond ‘bite me’. If we want serious change, then we need serious discussion, not paranoia name-calling and bumper sticker slogans.
Comment by kris — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:12 pm
38.
Ann: NO “level of discussion” is going to change a DAMN thing. You came in here insulting people to “raise the level of discussion?”
What EXACTLY would make you happy? Kindalousy Rice and the entire Bush “administration” are a bunch of THIEVES that LIE, and I frankly don’t care if you believe it, or not. I don’t have a video taped confession from them.
You’re very welcome - you deserved every bit of it.
Jason - do I hear a “THREE"?
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:20 pm
39.
Dr. L - It’s a beautiful thing to watch, first you dig your own hole and then bury yourself…no wonder we lost and got stuck with Howard for the future. L stands for Loser. Don’t worry about making me happy, not your job.
Comment by kris — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:32 pm
40.
Ann: Thanks so much for “raising the level of discussion.”
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:36 pm
41.
Doesn’t that statute apply even more clearly to Scully’s threat to fire medicare actuary Foster if he revealed his estimate of the cost of the medicare drug benefit?
Comment by Upper West — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:43 pm
42.
kris, you are burdened by some kind of angst today, eh? Well listen up. We may have lost the election in November. But we haven’t lost our souls. Now I don’t mean that in the religious sense. I mean that in the honor and character sense. Do those things buy or mean anything with this administration? They would probably ask you what your yearly income is, how much you contributed to their party, PACS, etc and then give an answer from that.
That is my point exactly. Rather than spend time flogging ourselves, talking about stuff helps us build on tomorrow. Don’t be so down.
There is always hope (just not with this administration).
Comment by kindness — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:45 pm
43.
I think that this site is an excellent forum to toss ideas around with all walks. If we keep it civil, ask questions, give reasoned responses and differing opinions….it’s a powerful form of democracy (blogocracy?).
Kris: waste of keystrokes.
Dr. Lee: Fill me in on the meaning of One, Two, Three?
Comment by Jason — April 20th, 2005 @ 5:48 pm
44.
Jason -
I said it was time to stand and be counted (#18).
“Mark” decided that deserved an obnoxious reply (#24)
But I ain’t F***ing kidding - I ‘ve had enough of trying to reason with liars, and started counting (#34)
Savantster thinks it’s still worth while trying to get reason from zealots, but gives a tentative TWO (#35)
It sounds like you agree with me - being truthful with liars has proved pointless - we only lose more ground as the Repugs whine “Liberal press! Liberal press!” when the “liberal press” helped sell the war of conquest in Iraq. The “Liberal press” has forgotten:
Osama Bin Laden
Valery Plame
Max Cleland
Cheney’s energy task force (including Taliban representatives)
anyway…we try to be reasonable - they only get more arrogant and obnoxious. It’s time to stand up and be counted - or be ground asunder.
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 6:03 pm
45.
Welcome to the new Orwellian world. Only the Rovian administration could screw this all up so bad. Dont the neo-cons realize that they are only sending us into a twisted downward spiral of hate and fascism? Wasn’t it US that went to war with Germany for trying to take over other countries? Isnt that why we went to war with Iraq? All this religious re-awakening, massive deception campaigns, and name calling from both sides, is turning america’s “morals” into another bought and sold commodity for the rich and the people with power. Hey KRIS> absolute power corrupts absolutely, and last time i checked people like Condi Rice, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and GW Bush were the heads of the hydra. Not to mention the fact that Rove will make anyone in the government dissappear if they so much as say a nasty comment about our “furher".
Although we all know Condi is guilty of obstruction, and all these other Bush appointent numbskulls are just pieces of Bush and Rove’s lil political gambit, the public KNOWS. We see it, and we cant stop it yet, but we only have to wait till 2006 or until a few SMART republicans start to grow a conscience. Hey its allready happening with the blocking of Bolton, and the hearings for DeLay. They may get away with it now, but there will be more transgressions and they cannot keep chainging the laws and rigging the game forever. The real politicians (the ones who seriously care about why they are where they are) will eventually prevail. That or China will kick our ass.
Comment by Matt — April 20th, 2005 @ 6:31 pm
46.
Gotcha. I’m in for the Three spot then, wholeheartedly.
The people that appear to stand in the middle and ask for concessions from both sides in order to “elevate” the level of discourse just haven’t done enough reading yet. The Republicans are not screwing around, they play this game to win and they will destroy everything in their paths. I would like to continue on the theme that Dr. Lee started with his list of people/issues that the media has conveniently given short-shrift (ok, so they’ve ignored them)…and start a new list of people that I think have been nothing short of heroic in speaking truth to power:
Barbara Boxer
Richard Clarke
Joe Wilson
Paul O’Neill
Howard Dean
Siebel Edmonds
General Shinseki
Randi Rhodes
etc….
Comment by Jason — April 20th, 2005 @ 6:33 pm
47.
Yay Barbara Boxer!! Proud to have here here in CA.
Comment by Matt — April 20th, 2005 @ 6:34 pm
48.
I agree wit Maezeppa
Everyone knows that you must be standing squarely behind a man before you can stab him in the back…
Comment by Humphrey Appleby — April 20th, 2005 @ 6:57 pm
49.
“bite me kris. I stand by my 59 mil idiots statement. ”
It is a fake statistic, but don’t let that bother you.
THE LAST ELECTION WAS STOLEN.
I hope that doesn’t disturb your nightmare.
We haven’t had a legal election in five years.
28 states have no paper trail.
Diebold, ES&S, Triad – all have committed FELONIES.
John Kerry won the last election.
Al Gore won the one before him.
Unless we get our voting rights back, game over.
Quoting fake statistics in order to engage in BIGOTRY is just plain stupid.
Comment by Paul in LA — April 20th, 2005 @ 7:13 pm
50.
Why don’t Kris and Dr. Lee and friends develop some maturity and insight - not to mention some appreciation for the King’s or Queen’s English. I am not a fan of Bush - father or son - and am far left of center on issues involving human rights and limitations on government power. I do believe, though, that a ligitimate function of government is the protection of the weak from the rapacity of those holding power. Nothing is accomplished nor is anyone served by “You’re one!", “No, you’re one!” “Nuhun!”
Comment by Avi Noel — April 20th, 2005 @ 7:20 pm
51.
Kindasleezy Wheat should be in jail. Period. Along with most of this embarrasing host of morons called an administration. I’ve seen better performances at a high school play.
Comment by Black Dog — April 20th, 2005 @ 7:26 pm
52.
Some Bush defender above asked for substance. Here is substance: GM posted a billion dollar loss because they ignored the public’s demand for hybrids. Why didn’t GM bother to develop a hybrid? Because they had assurances from the Bush junta that there be plenty of oil for everyone. The public speaks, we the people. There are waiting lists for hybrids in California made by, you guessed it, our Japanese friends. So, party of W’s legacy will be the eventual bankruptcy of one of the largest corporations in the history of the planet. And, if Dopey and the boys eliminate the fillibuster, they better pray that there is never again a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress because they will eviscerate everything Dopey and his gang of whores did in their eight year feeding frenzy. Just sit back and watch the fun. Don’t stress out so much.
Comment by Mark Cannon — April 20th, 2005 @ 9:48 pm
53.
to the bushies out there.how many soldiers died when mr clinton was president.
Comment by dan savitsky — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:00 pm
54.
Rove-induced paranoia about “statesman” Voinovich. Do you think any of these guys really act independently? That would be refreshing, but my concern is that his “orders” were to make the outraged senator statement he did… then, as he recounted in his soliloquoy about Richard Holbrooke, he investigates the charges against Bolton, talks to Bolton, then decides the guy isn’t so bad… and then once he annoints the guy, then the other “hand wringers” like Chafee and Hagel go along with him. And it’s all part of the scheme. OR Voinovich actually showed some true courage and principles; apparently with Democrats muted at every turn, often by their own fear of red statery, our only hope is for Republicans to show some guts.
Comment by Bobbygoode — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:08 pm
55.
Mark at #52.. try this on for size
guess it matters not
soon you’ll be taxed for the amount of air you breath since the government needs to keep air clean.. Here’s a thought, how about making corperations pay some taxes? Stop giving them all kinds of loop-holes and make them pay for what they get a TON more use out of than the average American..
Comment by Savantster — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:36 pm
56.
I appologize.. my #55 above has a link to where they are trying to tax “per mile driven” instead of “per gallon of gas", based on our shifting to Hybrids soon (since we’ll be out of oil before long)
Comment by Savantster — April 20th, 2005 @ 10:38 pm
57.
#50-
You’ve added……what, besides your opinion?
If I may move on:
We need to be more militant. We need to use there strong suit against them. We need coordinated replies to the STINKING lies we hear over and over, i.e., “liberal media.” This should uniformally answered with a consistent list of media items we would LIKE to see pursued. Just interrupt any GOP windbag as soon as the magic words get said. Another good example would be “liberal lawyers,” answered with a tidy list of GOP lawyers. “Activist judges” should be answered with “rule of law.” They loved it in Florida.
Their pride is their pain.
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:42 pm
58.
Avi Neol:
EXXXXCCCUUUUUSSSSEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEE!
(I used “there” when I should have used “their.” I am but the scum under your shoe. How’s that for insight - like it now? From now on, until I feel redeemed, I am “Intern Lee.")
Comment by Dr. Lee — April 20th, 2005 @ 11:47 pm
59.
Very interesting Savantster. My concern is that there is no ‘them’ to close corporate tax loop holes. People still don’t get it. There is no government. It is ALL corporations. They are not about to raise taxes on themselves. As for getting more militant, we tried that in the ’60’s and they are still chasing us down and throwing us in prison. Remember, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Remember?? As for turning militant now, why bother? All empires end, Alexander, Napolean, Adolf, Bush. It’s time the american empire ended. Perhaps God is just after all. Let justice fall like rain from the sky. Watch the republicans destroy themselves and the country at the same time. What a legacy!!
Comment by Mark Cannon — April 21st, 2005 @ 1:16 am
60.
If you REALLY want to make a difference, instead of arguing with each other on this, or any other site, and start writing letters to the editor of your local paper, register people to vote, contribute to the state party HQ, etc.
We’re exerting an awful lot of energy on these blogs, but are we accomplishing anything, other than irritating each other?
Comment by Georgia Dem — April 21st, 2005 @ 9:04 am
61.
Georgia Dem, your point is well taken but many of us do those things anyway. This is extracurricular activity. A day-to-day ventfest if you will.
Embrace it, enjoy it, have some fun.
Comment by Jay — April 21st, 2005 @ 9:40 am
62.
I don’t mean SDS militant - not just yet, anyway. I mean shutting them up each and every time they start to spout the usual rational-discussion-ending rhetoric, such as the phrase “liberal media.”
One reason those fascists pigs have so many devotees is because they always spoke with one voice. I think a little of what’s good for the goose-step would be good for the gander.
(I’ve had several letters to the Editor printed - didn’t see any big changes. I sent money, and they didn’t spend it on a legal challenge in Ohio. We need to put it to Fox Spews and Flush Dimballs with a unified front.)
Comment by Intern Lee — April 21st, 2005 @ 9:44 am
63.
Georgia Dem
Part of our “problem” is, with the problems in 2000 which caused some concern, we started wondering if our votes actually mattered. People say “of course they do, this is America".. Ok.. so a -lot- of what happened in 2000 around the country looked ok.. it was -mostly- Florida where it came down to “stopped counting votes".
Then you have 2004.. where there is a LOT of evidence to show that the elections were totally hijacked. Several states (all with electronic voting) reported a LOT of problems.. The exit polls (used around the world as an indicator to voting problems.. NOT as a ‘predictor’ of the election like a lot of people believe) indicate a VERY HIGH probability of FRAUD in the 2004 election. Yet, no one is doing anything about that yet either. Because they (neo-cons) were able to slink in in 2000, they got bigger in 2004. Clint Curtis shows that in 2000 they were already working on it.. Also note that the -bulk- of the people against ‘paper trials’ are Repubs and neo-cons and the companies that make the machines. MOST reasonable people think paper is a GOOD idea.. will we get it? probably not for 2006 or 2008. If we don’t fix our “voting", it won’t matter how many people you bring to the polls.. a 30 second exercise by any ONE person can change all that .. flip 100s of thousands of votes (or just change names of the “winners", there’s no way to audit that either).. and without paper trails, there is NO way to verify the original votes.
you see, it’s not about “being active” anymore, it’s about our contry being hijacked by the neo-cons and right-wing fanatics. We have to step in and stop that, and soon.
Comment by Savantster — April 21st, 2005 @ 3:20 pm
64.
To get back to the original question: if she was correctly quoted, then it seems clear she is obstructing an inquiry, which generates a big: “Heavens to Mergatriod! A Bush administration official blatantly breaking the law! What a shock! It’s ALMOST as if….they run the government in secret - despite the American people instead of for the American people. Again: what a shock.”
Comment by “Just plain” Lee — April 21st, 2005 @ 6:04 pm
65.
If you haven’t already read this….I recommend that you do. It is sobering and grave, but I fear all too true:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031005_globalcorp.shtml
Comment by Jason — April 21st, 2005 @ 6:05 pm
66.
OK, some fun: Did someone mention bumper stickers? Here ya go:
B-U-S-H: Beating Up Saddam Hussein
B-U-S-H: Being Unilateral Sure Hurts
B-U-S-H: Belligerence Undermines Safe Homeland
B-U-S-H: BinLaden Unearths Safe Haven
B-U-S-H: Beefing Up the Saudi Hegemony
B-U-S-H: Blatant Use of Spin and Hyperbole
B-U-S-H: Building the United States of Halliburton
Enjoy! -Tubeman
Comment by tubeman — April 21st, 2005 @ 6:26 pm
67.
“you see, it’s not about “being active” anymore, it’s about our contry being hijacked by the neo-cons and right-wing fanatics. We have to step in and stop that, and soon.”
So - now you’re saying “enough is enough"?
Jason - a very sobering read, but not that far from what my paranoid self envisioned. My question is: lot’s of people must know about this, including John Kerry and our last (and probably THE last) freely-elected President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Why do they all stay mum?
Comment by I be Lee — April 21st, 2005 @ 8:24 pm
68.
Stand up and be counted is all well and good and accomplished much in the 19th century.
The game is SO rigged now that if you marched 1,000,000 people on Washington for one week, all you’d have are alot of dead patriots and more crowding of newly built,"privatized” prisons.
All of this ties in with Peak Oil, facism, and the continuing economic extermination of what once was the middle class or as J.P. Morgan called it,
“the nigger buffer". They’ve known about oil depletion for decades and have built dozens of these new private prisons to house the “rabble”
when it comes down to out and out rebellion, debtors prisons, gas rationing, and depression.
Comment by Bruce — April 21st, 2005 @ 8:52 pm
69.
Lee, sure they know about it. Even superhawk ultra-neocon James Woolsey has recently called for conservation and investment in alternative sources of energy (that alone should be sounding the alarm). Kerry touched on the relationship between our oil consumption and having troops stationed in the Middle East long-term, but he didn’t pound that message and I imagine the Bush ads that referenced old legislation to increase the gas tax that Kerry got behind when the economy was strong kept that message at bay. The Kerry campaign did tout a plan for kicking our oil dependence, and for alternative fuels, but they were afraid to make it a prominent issue.
We must have leadership on this issue. The transition to other sources of energy MUST start now. The resistance to these changes is powerful and well-funded….but reality has to be a part of the equation…..right?
I’m terrified for my kids. The future is indeed bleak if our leaders don’t act now!
Comment by Jason — April 21st, 2005 @ 10:10 pm
70.
What difference does voter registration make in a stolen election? We have allowed a non-elected president occupy the White House for going on six years now. What further proof do you need that the system is entirely broken? You cannot work through a broken system. We figured that out when the country re-elected Tricky Dick on the eve of indictment. How do you reason with people who knowingly allowed a crook to lead them? The people who voted for Bush will not understand how wrong they were until their children are slaughtered in some foreign hell hole and the official language of America is Spanish. It’s coming folks!
Comment by Mark Cannon — April 21st, 2005 @ 10:20 pm
71.
First of all, that woman has proven that her first and only job is to cover Bush’s rear end. She got up in front of the 9-11 commission and blatantly LIED. Why she’s not in a jail cell, preferably Guantanamo Bay, is beyond me. For her lies, Bush promoted her to Secretary of State because Colin Powell wasn’t going to do another term with people he has been quoted as describing “f****** crazies,” in which I believe him to be absolutely right. And now, in addition to frightening off anyone who might have “information which could adversely affect the nomination,” Congressman Henry Waxman is now trying to find out why “Secretary Rice” is withholding data from the Annual Terrorism Report of 2004. Of course, it’s painfully obvious WHY that’s happening: it’s a report which shows although the State Department touted having the “lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969,” Secretary Rice is trying to hide the fact that the REAL numbers show a 20-YEAR-HIGH, and which proves once again that Bush and his administration is LYING TO AMERICA, and she doesn’t want her meal ticket to look bad. Too late.
Lose Bolton. Ask questions. Seek the truth.
Comment by THE SHADOWDRAGON — April 22nd, 2005 @ 6:08 am
72.
I think they put assholes like Bolton out front to take the heat of them and their criminal activities. At least we have someone in the Intel community who knows how to run a right-wing death squad. Negroponte should be in an Latin American jail. These bastards are simply out of control.
Comment by Lee — April 22nd, 2005 @ 9:58 am
73.
Well, why don’t we just wait for Herr Gonzales to order the Justice Department to investigate this? He has sworn to uphold the law, & he wouldn’t weasel out of that, would he?
Friday, April 22, 2005
Justice Sunday
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
April 22nd, 2005 4:19 pm
Frist Draws Criticism From Some Church Leaders
By David D. Kirkpatrick and Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times
WASHINGTON, April 21 - As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major Protestant denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of faith."
Dr. Frist's participation has rekindled a debate over the role of religion in public life that may be complicating his efforts to overcome the Democrats' use of the filibuster, a parliamentary tactic used by Congressional minorities, to block President Bush's judicial nominees.
Dr. Frist has threatened to change the Senate rules to eliminate judicial filibusters, and in response Democrats have threatened a virtual shutdown of the Senate. A confrontation had been expected as early as next week, but it now appears that the showdown may be delayed.
Religious groups, including the National Council of Churches and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, plan to conduct a conference call with journalists on Friday to criticize Senator Frist's participation in the telecast. The program is sponsored by Christian conservative organizations that want to build support for Dr. Frist's filibuster proposal.
Among those scheduled to speak in the conference call is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr. Frist is an active member.
"One of the hallmarks of our denomination is that we are an ecumenical church," Mr. Kirkpatrick said in an interview on Thursday. He also said, "Elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith."
A spokesman for Dr. Frist said his remarks, which are not yet available, would be consistent with previous statements about fair treatment for judicial nominees. "I would hope that he would read Dr. Frist's remarks," the spokesman, Bob Stevenson, said of Mr. Kirkpatrick.
Mr. Stevenson added that the timing of the confrontation on filibusters was not related to the criticisms that have been raised about the telecast, saying Dr. Frist still planned to propose a compromise to the Democrats.
Still, the Senate moved closer to a showdown on Thursday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee, voting along party lines, approved two nominees, Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, who were blocked by a filibuster in the last Congress and are expected to be blocked again. Republican strategists consider the nominees - two women, one of whom is black - favorable choices for a filibuster fight.
There were signs, though, that Dr. Frist was planning to postpone the confrontation for at least another two weeks, when the Senate returns from a spring recess.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said Dr. Frist had told him he would like to take up a transportation measure next week, an indication that he did not expect a filibuster fight before the Congressional recess. Polls, meanwhile, suggest a lack of public support for ending the filibuster. A recent survey conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that 50 percent of those polled believed that the Senate should retain the filibusters for judicial nominations, while 40 percent were against and 10 percent undecided.
The theme of the telecast, which is called Justice Sunday and will be broadcast to churches and Christian radio and television networks, is "The Filibuster Against People of Faith." Its sponsors argue that by blocking judicial nominees who oppose abortion rights on religious and moral grounds, Democrats are effectively discriminating against those nominees.
Dr. Frist has agreed to provide a four-minute videotaped statement for the event. Democrats are calling his participation evidence of Republican extremism.
"We're going to allow the majority leader to invoke faith to rewrite Senate rules, to put substandard, extremist judges on the bench?" Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential nominee, said Thursday on the Senate floor. Mr. Kerry added, "It's not up to us to tell any one of our colleagues what to believe as a matter of faith."
Christian conservatives have also accused Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, a Roman Catholic, of tolerating anti-Catholicism from his fellow Democrats who oppose nominees who follow the church's teachings on abortions.
On Thursday, Mr. Salazar responded by issuing a statement taking to task one of the telecast's speakers, Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, for deprecating the Catholic faith. It quoted Mr. Mohler as saying "the Roman church is a false church and it teaches a false gospel" and "the pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office."
Dr. Mohler called Mr. Salazar's statement "absolutely ridiculous," saying it was hardly news that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics "differ on many key theological issues." He said he supported a Catholic nominee the Democrats had opposed.
In the past two weeks, religious leaders on both sides of the judicial battle have plunged into the debate. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is distributing millions of postcards around the country for parishioners to send their senators asking them not to insist that nominees uphold abortion rights. Evangelical Protestant groups like Focus on the Family have been portraying the confirmation debates as a fight over public expression of religion and respect for traditionalist values.
Now the liberal group People for the American Way is buying advertisements and distributing church program inserts that attack Senator Frist for invoking religious faith in what it says is a partisan context. The National Council of Churches is asking members to organize news conferences denouncing Dr. Frist.
The criticism of the telecast underscores the delicate task facing Dr. Frist, who is laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign in 2008, as he courts the evangelical Protestant groups and other religious traditionalists that formed the bedrock of President Bush's winning coalition. With his patrician bearing and background in the relatively liberal Presbyterian Church, Dr. Frist, a Harvard-trained transplant surgeon, does not fit in as naturally with Christian conservatives as President Bush.
Dr. Frist's overtures to Christian conservatives have drawn the ire of the more liberal hierarchies of other religious groups, including the officials of his own denomination. Dr. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman, said he had sought to include Mr. Kirkpatrick, of the Presbyterian Church, in the conference call both because Dr. Frist is Presbyterian and because of the church's emphasis on ecumenicalism.
"To say that some group of Christians has a monopoly on the ear of God is especially an outrage to Presbyterians," Mr. Edgar said.
Mr. Kirkpatrick said Dr. Frist's participation in the telecast undermined "the historical commitment in our nation and our church to an understanding of the First Amendment that elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith."
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, said those who were offended did not have to watch the telecast.
"There are millions of other Americans who see a connection between the filibuster and judicial activism," Mr. Perkins said. "And when we talk about judicial activism, we are talking about issues that people faith care about deeply."
April 22nd, 2005 4:19 pm
Frist Draws Criticism From Some Church Leaders
By David D. Kirkpatrick and Sheryl Gay Stolberg / New York Times
WASHINGTON, April 21 - As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major Protestant denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of faith."
Dr. Frist's participation has rekindled a debate over the role of religion in public life that may be complicating his efforts to overcome the Democrats' use of the filibuster, a parliamentary tactic used by Congressional minorities, to block President Bush's judicial nominees.
Dr. Frist has threatened to change the Senate rules to eliminate judicial filibusters, and in response Democrats have threatened a virtual shutdown of the Senate. A confrontation had been expected as early as next week, but it now appears that the showdown may be delayed.
Religious groups, including the National Council of Churches and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, plan to conduct a conference call with journalists on Friday to criticize Senator Frist's participation in the telecast. The program is sponsored by Christian conservative organizations that want to build support for Dr. Frist's filibuster proposal.
Among those scheduled to speak in the conference call is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr. Frist is an active member.
"One of the hallmarks of our denomination is that we are an ecumenical church," Mr. Kirkpatrick said in an interview on Thursday. He also said, "Elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith."
A spokesman for Dr. Frist said his remarks, which are not yet available, would be consistent with previous statements about fair treatment for judicial nominees. "I would hope that he would read Dr. Frist's remarks," the spokesman, Bob Stevenson, said of Mr. Kirkpatrick.
Mr. Stevenson added that the timing of the confrontation on filibusters was not related to the criticisms that have been raised about the telecast, saying Dr. Frist still planned to propose a compromise to the Democrats.
Still, the Senate moved closer to a showdown on Thursday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee, voting along party lines, approved two nominees, Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, who were blocked by a filibuster in the last Congress and are expected to be blocked again. Republican strategists consider the nominees - two women, one of whom is black - favorable choices for a filibuster fight.
There were signs, though, that Dr. Frist was planning to postpone the confrontation for at least another two weeks, when the Senate returns from a spring recess.
Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said Dr. Frist had told him he would like to take up a transportation measure next week, an indication that he did not expect a filibuster fight before the Congressional recess. Polls, meanwhile, suggest a lack of public support for ending the filibuster. A recent survey conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that 50 percent of those polled believed that the Senate should retain the filibusters for judicial nominations, while 40 percent were against and 10 percent undecided.
The theme of the telecast, which is called Justice Sunday and will be broadcast to churches and Christian radio and television networks, is "The Filibuster Against People of Faith." Its sponsors argue that by blocking judicial nominees who oppose abortion rights on religious and moral grounds, Democrats are effectively discriminating against those nominees.
Dr. Frist has agreed to provide a four-minute videotaped statement for the event. Democrats are calling his participation evidence of Republican extremism.
"We're going to allow the majority leader to invoke faith to rewrite Senate rules, to put substandard, extremist judges on the bench?" Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential nominee, said Thursday on the Senate floor. Mr. Kerry added, "It's not up to us to tell any one of our colleagues what to believe as a matter of faith."
Christian conservatives have also accused Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, a Roman Catholic, of tolerating anti-Catholicism from his fellow Democrats who oppose nominees who follow the church's teachings on abortions.
On Thursday, Mr. Salazar responded by issuing a statement taking to task one of the telecast's speakers, Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, for deprecating the Catholic faith. It quoted Mr. Mohler as saying "the Roman church is a false church and it teaches a false gospel" and "the pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office."
Dr. Mohler called Mr. Salazar's statement "absolutely ridiculous," saying it was hardly news that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics "differ on many key theological issues." He said he supported a Catholic nominee the Democrats had opposed.
In the past two weeks, religious leaders on both sides of the judicial battle have plunged into the debate. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is distributing millions of postcards around the country for parishioners to send their senators asking them not to insist that nominees uphold abortion rights. Evangelical Protestant groups like Focus on the Family have been portraying the confirmation debates as a fight over public expression of religion and respect for traditionalist values.
Now the liberal group People for the American Way is buying advertisements and distributing church program inserts that attack Senator Frist for invoking religious faith in what it says is a partisan context. The National Council of Churches is asking members to organize news conferences denouncing Dr. Frist.
The criticism of the telecast underscores the delicate task facing Dr. Frist, who is laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign in 2008, as he courts the evangelical Protestant groups and other religious traditionalists that formed the bedrock of President Bush's winning coalition. With his patrician bearing and background in the relatively liberal Presbyterian Church, Dr. Frist, a Harvard-trained transplant surgeon, does not fit in as naturally with Christian conservatives as President Bush.
Dr. Frist's overtures to Christian conservatives have drawn the ire of the more liberal hierarchies of other religious groups, including the officials of his own denomination. Dr. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman, said he had sought to include Mr. Kirkpatrick, of the Presbyterian Church, in the conference call both because Dr. Frist is Presbyterian and because of the church's emphasis on ecumenicalism.
"To say that some group of Christians has a monopoly on the ear of God is especially an outrage to Presbyterians," Mr. Edgar said.
Mr. Kirkpatrick said Dr. Frist's participation in the telecast undermined "the historical commitment in our nation and our church to an understanding of the First Amendment that elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith."
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, said those who were offended did not have to watch the telecast.
"There are millions of other Americans who see a connection between the filibuster and judicial activism," Mr. Perkins said. "And when we talk about judicial activism, we are talking about issues that people faith care about deeply."
DeLay and Frist: Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
jbcard's Xanga Site
THE NATION
2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
# Taped at a private conference, the leaders outline ways to punish jurists they oppose.
Times Headlines
Cheney Says He'd Vote to End Judge Filibusters
Weather Confounds Bush's Earth Day Appeal
Texas GOP Leaders Retreat from Foster Parent Prohibition Plan
Testimony of U.N. Nominee Is Disputed
Florida Readies Sex Offender Bill
more >
Most E-mailed
2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
A German Lesson: the Fallacy of One True Path
Stained by permanent ink
> more e-mailed stories
AUDIO RECORDINGS
RELIGIOUS OFFICIALS
THE NATION
CHRISTIANS
CHRISTIANS RELIGIOUS OFFICIALS CONSERVATIVES POLIT
POLITICAL STRATEGY
CONSERVATIVES
COURTS
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.
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The discussion took place during a Washington conference last month that included addresses by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who discussed efforts to bring a more conservative cast to the courts.
Frist and DeLay have not publicly endorsed the evangelical groups' proposed actions. But the taped discussion among evangelical leaders provides a glimpse of the road map they are drafting as they work with congressional Republicans to achieve a judiciary that sides with them on abortion, same-sex marriage and other elements of their agenda.
"There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench," said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session. The tape was provided to The Times by the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
DeLay has spoken generally about one of the ideas the leaders discussed in greater detail: using legislative tactics to withhold money from courts.
"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse," DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.
The leaders present at the March conference, including Perkins and James C. Dobson, founder of the influential group Focus on the Family, have been working with Frist to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations, a legislative tool that has allowed Senate Democrats to stall 10 of President Bush's nominations. Frist is scheduled to appear, via a taped statement, during a satellite broadcast to churches nationwide Sunday that the Family Research Council has organized to build support for the Bush nominees.
The March conference featuring Dobson and Perkins showed that the evangelical leaders, in addition to working to place conservative nominees on the bench, have been trying to find ways to remove certain judges.
Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was "prominently" discussed. "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them," Perkins said.
He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to "just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."
These curbs on courts are "on the radar screen, especially of conservatives here in Congress," he said.
Dobson, who emerged last year as one of the evangelical movement's most important political leaders, named one potential target: the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson said. "They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
Robert Stevenson, a spokesman for Frist, said Thursday that the Senate leader does not agree with the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, pointing to Frist's comments earlier this month embracing a "fair and independent judiciary." A spokesman for DeLay declined to comment.
The remarks by Perkins and Dobson drew fire from Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who charged that the two leaders were more brazen in such private encounters with supporters than their more genteel public images portray.
"To talk about defunding judges is just about the most bizarre, radical approach to controlling the outcome of court decisions that you can imagine," Lynn said.
Frist is expected to try as early as next week to push the Senate to ban filibusters on judicial nominations — a move so explosive that Democrats are calling it the "nuclear option."
Democrats have been using the filibuster to block 10 of Bush's appeals court nominees who they believe are too extreme in their views, but the skirmishes are considered a preview of a highly anticipated fight over replacing the ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whose retirement is considered imminent.
"Folks, I am telling you all that it is going to be the mother of all battles," Dobson predicted at the March 17 meeting. "And it's right around the corner. I mean, Justice Rehnquist could resign at any time, and the other side is mobilized to the teeth."
The remarks by Perkins and Dobson reflect the passion felt by Christians who helped fuel Bush's reelection last year with massive turnout in battleground states, and who also spurred Republican gains in the Senate and House.
Claiming a role by the movement in the GOP gains, Dobson concluded: "We've got a right to hold them accountable for what happens here."
Both leaders chastised what Perkins termed "squishy" and "weak" Republican senators who have not wholeheartedly endorsed ending Democrats' power to filibuster judicial nominees. They said these included moderates such as Sens. Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. They also grumbled that Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and George Allen of Virginia needed prodding.
"We need to shake these guys up," Perkins said.
Said Dobson: "Sometimes it's just amazing to me that they seem to forget how they got here."
Even Bush was not spared criticism. Dobson and Perkins encouraged their supporters to demand that the president act as aggressively on the judiciary as he has for his Social Security overhaul.
"These are not Bill Frist's nominees; these are President George W. Bush's nominees," Perkins said. "He needs to be out there putting pressure on these senators who are weak on this issue and standing in obstruction to these nominations," he said.
Dobson chided Frist, a likely 2008 presidential contender, for not acting sooner on the filibuster issue, urging "conservatives all over the country" to tell Frist "that he needs to get on with it."
Dobson also said Republicans risked inflicting long-term damage on their party if they failed to seize the moment — a time when Bush still has the momentum of his reelection victory — to transform the courts. He said they had just 18 months to act before Bush becomes a "lame-duck president."
"If we let that 18 months get away from us and then maybe we got Hillary to deal with or who knows what, we absolutely will not recover from that," he said.
Perkins and Dobson laid out a history of court rulings they found offensive, singling out the recent finding by the Supreme Court that executing minors was unconstitutional. They criticized Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion, noting that the Republican appointee had cited the laws of foreign nations that, Dobson said, applied the same standard as "the most liberal countries in Europe."
"What about Latin America, South America, Central America? What about China? What about Africa?" Dobson asked. "They pick and choose the international law that they want and then apply it here as though we're somehow accountable to Europe. I resent that greatly."
DeLay has also criticized Kennedy for citing foreign laws in that opinion, calling the practice "outrageous."
As part of the discussion, Perkins and Dobson referred to remarks by Dobson earlier this year at a congressional dinner in which he singled out the use by one group of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants in a video that Dobson said promoted a homosexual agenda.
Dobson was ridiculed for his comments, which some critics interpreted to mean the evangelist had determined that the cartoon character was gay.
Dobson said the beating he took in the media, coming after his appearance on the cover of newsmagazines hailing his prominence in Bush's reelection, proved that the press will only seek to tear him down.
"This will not be the last thing that you read about that makes me look ridiculous," he said.
THE NATION
2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
# Taped at a private conference, the leaders outline ways to punish jurists they oppose.
Times Headlines
Cheney Says He'd Vote to End Judge Filibusters
Weather Confounds Bush's Earth Day Appeal
Texas GOP Leaders Retreat from Foster Parent Prohibition Plan
Testimony of U.N. Nominee Is Disputed
Florida Readies Sex Offender Bill
more >
Most E-mailed
2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds
A German Lesson: the Fallacy of One True Path
Stained by permanent ink
> more e-mailed stories
AUDIO RECORDINGS
RELIGIOUS OFFICIALS
THE NATION
CHRISTIANS
CHRISTIANS RELIGIOUS OFFICIALS CONSERVATIVES POLIT
POLITICAL STRATEGY
CONSERVATIVES
COURTS
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.
advertisement
advertisement
The discussion took place during a Washington conference last month that included addresses by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who discussed efforts to bring a more conservative cast to the courts.
Frist and DeLay have not publicly endorsed the evangelical groups' proposed actions. But the taped discussion among evangelical leaders provides a glimpse of the road map they are drafting as they work with congressional Republicans to achieve a judiciary that sides with them on abortion, same-sex marriage and other elements of their agenda.
"There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench," said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session. The tape was provided to The Times by the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
DeLay has spoken generally about one of the ideas the leaders discussed in greater detail: using legislative tactics to withhold money from courts.
"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse," DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.
The leaders present at the March conference, including Perkins and James C. Dobson, founder of the influential group Focus on the Family, have been working with Frist to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations, a legislative tool that has allowed Senate Democrats to stall 10 of President Bush's nominations. Frist is scheduled to appear, via a taped statement, during a satellite broadcast to churches nationwide Sunday that the Family Research Council has organized to build support for the Bush nominees.
The March conference featuring Dobson and Perkins showed that the evangelical leaders, in addition to working to place conservative nominees on the bench, have been trying to find ways to remove certain judges.
Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was "prominently" discussed. "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them," Perkins said.
He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to "just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."
These curbs on courts are "on the radar screen, especially of conservatives here in Congress," he said.
Dobson, who emerged last year as one of the evangelical movement's most important political leaders, named one potential target: the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson said. "They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
Robert Stevenson, a spokesman for Frist, said Thursday that the Senate leader does not agree with the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, pointing to Frist's comments earlier this month embracing a "fair and independent judiciary." A spokesman for DeLay declined to comment.
The remarks by Perkins and Dobson drew fire from Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who charged that the two leaders were more brazen in such private encounters with supporters than their more genteel public images portray.
"To talk about defunding judges is just about the most bizarre, radical approach to controlling the outcome of court decisions that you can imagine," Lynn said.
Frist is expected to try as early as next week to push the Senate to ban filibusters on judicial nominations — a move so explosive that Democrats are calling it the "nuclear option."
Democrats have been using the filibuster to block 10 of Bush's appeals court nominees who they believe are too extreme in their views, but the skirmishes are considered a preview of a highly anticipated fight over replacing the ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whose retirement is considered imminent.
"Folks, I am telling you all that it is going to be the mother of all battles," Dobson predicted at the March 17 meeting. "And it's right around the corner. I mean, Justice Rehnquist could resign at any time, and the other side is mobilized to the teeth."
The remarks by Perkins and Dobson reflect the passion felt by Christians who helped fuel Bush's reelection last year with massive turnout in battleground states, and who also spurred Republican gains in the Senate and House.
Claiming a role by the movement in the GOP gains, Dobson concluded: "We've got a right to hold them accountable for what happens here."
Both leaders chastised what Perkins termed "squishy" and "weak" Republican senators who have not wholeheartedly endorsed ending Democrats' power to filibuster judicial nominees. They said these included moderates such as Sens. Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. They also grumbled that Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and George Allen of Virginia needed prodding.
"We need to shake these guys up," Perkins said.
Said Dobson: "Sometimes it's just amazing to me that they seem to forget how they got here."
Even Bush was not spared criticism. Dobson and Perkins encouraged their supporters to demand that the president act as aggressively on the judiciary as he has for his Social Security overhaul.
"These are not Bill Frist's nominees; these are President George W. Bush's nominees," Perkins said. "He needs to be out there putting pressure on these senators who are weak on this issue and standing in obstruction to these nominations," he said.
Dobson chided Frist, a likely 2008 presidential contender, for not acting sooner on the filibuster issue, urging "conservatives all over the country" to tell Frist "that he needs to get on with it."
Dobson also said Republicans risked inflicting long-term damage on their party if they failed to seize the moment — a time when Bush still has the momentum of his reelection victory — to transform the courts. He said they had just 18 months to act before Bush becomes a "lame-duck president."
"If we let that 18 months get away from us and then maybe we got Hillary to deal with or who knows what, we absolutely will not recover from that," he said.
Perkins and Dobson laid out a history of court rulings they found offensive, singling out the recent finding by the Supreme Court that executing minors was unconstitutional. They criticized Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion, noting that the Republican appointee had cited the laws of foreign nations that, Dobson said, applied the same standard as "the most liberal countries in Europe."
"What about Latin America, South America, Central America? What about China? What about Africa?" Dobson asked. "They pick and choose the international law that they want and then apply it here as though we're somehow accountable to Europe. I resent that greatly."
DeLay has also criticized Kennedy for citing foreign laws in that opinion, calling the practice "outrageous."
As part of the discussion, Perkins and Dobson referred to remarks by Dobson earlier this year at a congressional dinner in which he singled out the use by one group of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants in a video that Dobson said promoted a homosexual agenda.
Dobson was ridiculed for his comments, which some critics interpreted to mean the evangelist had determined that the cartoon character was gay.
Dobson said the beating he took in the media, coming after his appearance on the cover of newsmagazines hailing his prominence in Bush's reelection, proved that the press will only seek to tear him down.
"This will not be the last thing that you read about that makes me look ridiculous," he said.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
A Stain in the House
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April 19th, 2005 12:11 pm
A stain on the House
Chicago Tribune
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay apologized last week for his assault on the federal judiciary, though it sounded like an apology more for his style than his substance. "... I said something in an inartful way, and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I apologize for saying it that way." Yes, that's what he said.
DeLay had suggested that the judiciary would be in the crosshairs of Congress because the courts didn't rule DeLay's way in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo. DeLay's comments looked to all the world like an effort to intimidate the judges because he didn't like the way they upheld the rule of law.
The guess here is that DeLay felt the need to back down because he's starting to get some heat from some fellow Republicans, who aren't happy that DeLay's various troubles are making the party look very bad. Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut has called for DeLay to step down as majority leader. Shays, a moderate, has never been a DeLay fan. But other Republicans, on up to the White House, have not exactly been eager to defend the Texas lawmaker.
Even when DeLay apologized for lashing out at what he had called an "arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable" federal judiciary, he didn't say he was wrong. He only said he didn't express himself clearly. He still wants Congress to look into judicial activism.
The problem for Republicans is that DeLay's troubles only seem to mount, and the notion that he's the victim of a Democratic Party/liberal media witch hunt just doesn't hold water. DeLay was admonished by the House Ethics Committee three times last year. That would be the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee.
For the good of his party, DeLay needs to answer the questions that dog him about campaign contributions and lobbyist-paid trips and nepotism hires--and step aside as majority leader.
But Republican leaders have to go beyond that. They can't continue to aid the efforts by DeLay to dodge responsibility. The worst example is this: After the Ethics Committee rebuked DeLay for the third time, the GOP leadership neutered the Ethics Committee. The Republican chairman of the committee, Rep. Joel Hefley, was removed from his post over his objections, and the committee rules were changed so either party could block an investigation of a House member.
Republicans can argue that the committee chairmanship was due to rotate. But the rules change to block investigations was an incredibly blind and arrogant tactic. Don't blame DeLay for that one. Blame House Speaker Dennis Hastert for letting it happen.
Hastert may be calculating that his friend DeLay can survive this ethics mess without doing too much damage to his party before the 2006 midterm elections. But the decision to stop the Ethics Committee from effectively doing its business stains the entire GOP leadership.
A Gallup poll released last week said only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job, while 54 percent disapprove. Mr. Speaker?
Republicans have enjoyed a good, decade-long run in control of the House. Maybe so good they've forgotten that they took power in large part because voters were fed up with the arrogant, ethically questionable practices of Washington. It would be ironic if the GOP lost power for the same reason.
April 19th, 2005 12:11 pm
A stain on the House
Chicago Tribune
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay apologized last week for his assault on the federal judiciary, though it sounded like an apology more for his style than his substance. "... I said something in an inartful way, and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I apologize for saying it that way." Yes, that's what he said.
DeLay had suggested that the judiciary would be in the crosshairs of Congress because the courts didn't rule DeLay's way in the tragic case of Terri Schiavo. DeLay's comments looked to all the world like an effort to intimidate the judges because he didn't like the way they upheld the rule of law.
The guess here is that DeLay felt the need to back down because he's starting to get some heat from some fellow Republicans, who aren't happy that DeLay's various troubles are making the party look very bad. Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut has called for DeLay to step down as majority leader. Shays, a moderate, has never been a DeLay fan. But other Republicans, on up to the White House, have not exactly been eager to defend the Texas lawmaker.
Even when DeLay apologized for lashing out at what he had called an "arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable" federal judiciary, he didn't say he was wrong. He only said he didn't express himself clearly. He still wants Congress to look into judicial activism.
The problem for Republicans is that DeLay's troubles only seem to mount, and the notion that he's the victim of a Democratic Party/liberal media witch hunt just doesn't hold water. DeLay was admonished by the House Ethics Committee three times last year. That would be the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee.
For the good of his party, DeLay needs to answer the questions that dog him about campaign contributions and lobbyist-paid trips and nepotism hires--and step aside as majority leader.
But Republican leaders have to go beyond that. They can't continue to aid the efforts by DeLay to dodge responsibility. The worst example is this: After the Ethics Committee rebuked DeLay for the third time, the GOP leadership neutered the Ethics Committee. The Republican chairman of the committee, Rep. Joel Hefley, was removed from his post over his objections, and the committee rules were changed so either party could block an investigation of a House member.
Republicans can argue that the committee chairmanship was due to rotate. But the rules change to block investigations was an incredibly blind and arrogant tactic. Don't blame DeLay for that one. Blame House Speaker Dennis Hastert for letting it happen.
Hastert may be calculating that his friend DeLay can survive this ethics mess without doing too much damage to his party before the 2006 midterm elections. But the decision to stop the Ethics Committee from effectively doing its business stains the entire GOP leadership.
A Gallup poll released last week said only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job, while 54 percent disapprove. Mr. Speaker?
Republicans have enjoyed a good, decade-long run in control of the House. Maybe so good they've forgotten that they took power in large part because voters were fed up with the arrogant, ethically questionable practices of Washington. It would be ironic if the GOP lost power for the same reason.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Conservative Lawmaker: DeLay Should Quit
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April 16th, 2005 3:50 pm
Conservative Lawmaker: DeLay Should Quit
By Suzanne Gamboa / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - One of Congress' most conservative members on Friday became the second House Republican to urge Majority Leader Tom DeLay to step aside because of the ethics scrutiny he's facing.
"If the majority leader were to temporarily step aside so that these trumped up charges can be dealt with in a less hostile environment, as they have proven to be an unnecessary distraction, it may be a productive move," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.
Tancredo's comments come after Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays, a moderate Republican, urged DeLay to resign from his leadership position at the beginning of the week. Also, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said DeLay needs to answer questions about his ethics.
Tancredo, elected in 1998, said he believes all charges against DeLay, R-Texas, "lack merit" and are "being leveled in the hopes of bringing him down and with him, the Republican majority."
Tancredo is known in the House for his tough stand on immigration and has 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union for votes and his position on issues.
DeLay has been dogged by questions for months about his overseas travel, corporate fundraising in 2002 for Texas legislative campaigns, campaign payments to family members and his connections to a lobbyist now under federal investigation.
Some GOP colleagues have suggested his continuing ethics controversy is harming the GOP, while others say the criticism has been orchestrated by Democrats and their liberal allies.
DeLay has said he is eager to appear before the leaders of the House ethics committee and give "everything I have" in connection with allegations of misconduct. Spokesman Dan Allen provided a similar comment Friday and cited a list of accomplishments by House Republicans with DeLay as majority leader.
Before DeLay can meet with the ethics committee, Democrats and Republicans must resolve a deadlock over rules Republicans pushed through the House. Democrats oppose the changes.
April 16th, 2005 3:50 pm
Conservative Lawmaker: DeLay Should Quit
By Suzanne Gamboa / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - One of Congress' most conservative members on Friday became the second House Republican to urge Majority Leader Tom DeLay to step aside because of the ethics scrutiny he's facing.
"If the majority leader were to temporarily step aside so that these trumped up charges can be dealt with in a less hostile environment, as they have proven to be an unnecessary distraction, it may be a productive move," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.
Tancredo's comments come after Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays, a moderate Republican, urged DeLay to resign from his leadership position at the beginning of the week. Also, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said DeLay needs to answer questions about his ethics.
Tancredo, elected in 1998, said he believes all charges against DeLay, R-Texas, "lack merit" and are "being leveled in the hopes of bringing him down and with him, the Republican majority."
Tancredo is known in the House for his tough stand on immigration and has 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union for votes and his position on issues.
DeLay has been dogged by questions for months about his overseas travel, corporate fundraising in 2002 for Texas legislative campaigns, campaign payments to family members and his connections to a lobbyist now under federal investigation.
Some GOP colleagues have suggested his continuing ethics controversy is harming the GOP, while others say the criticism has been orchestrated by Democrats and their liberal allies.
DeLay has said he is eager to appear before the leaders of the House ethics committee and give "everything I have" in connection with allegations of misconduct. Spokesman Dan Allen provided a similar comment Friday and cited a list of accomplishments by House Republicans with DeLay as majority leader.
Before DeLay can meet with the ethics committee, Democrats and Republicans must resolve a deadlock over rules Republicans pushed through the House. Democrats oppose the changes.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Negroponte's Contra role
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Papers illustrate Negroponte’s Contra role
Nominee was active in U.S. effort, documents show
By Michael Dobbs
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET April 11, 2005
The day after the House voted to halt all aid to rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte urged the president's national security adviser and the CIA director to hang tough.
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The thrust of the envoy's "back channel" July 1983 message to the men running the contra war against Nicaragua was contained in a single cryptic sentence: "Hondurans believe special project is as important as ever."
"Special project" was code for the secret arming of contra rebels from bases in Honduras -- a cause championed by Negroponte, then a rising diplomatic star. In cables and memos, Negroponte made it clear that he saw the "special project" as key to the Reagan administration's strategy of rolling back communism in Central America.
• More Bush administration coverage
As Negroponte prepares for his Senate confirmation hearing today for the new post of director of national intelligence, hundreds of previously secret cables and telegrams have become available that shed new light on the most controversial episode in his four-decade diplomatic career. The documents, drawn from Negroponte's personal records as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, were released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post.
The documents were initially declassified and provided to Negroponte in 1998, after his retirement from the Foreign Service, but the vast majority have never been made public. A State Department FOIA official said yesterday that about 100 documents from the collection are still being "processed."
Revealing glimpses
The documents offer revealing glimpses into the personality, leadership style and political attitudes of the man President Bush selected to shake up U.S. intelligence in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Negroponte's determination to reverse the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua occasionally put him at odds with fellow envoys and with more cautious State Department bureaucrats.
"I have my doubts about a dinner at the residence for a man who is in the business of overthrowing a neighboring government," cabled U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton, after Negroponte played host to the political leader of the contra rebels, Adolfo Calero. Quainton made it clear that he was not a fan of Negroponte's "gastronomic diplomacy."
Overall, Negroponte comes across as an exceptionally energetic, action-oriented ambassador whose anti-communist convictions led him to play down human rights abuses in Honduras, the most reliable U.S. ally in the region. There is little in the documents the State Department has released so far to support his assertion that he used "quiet diplomacy" to persuade the Honduran authorities to investigate the most egregious violations, including the mysterious disappearance of dozens of government opponents.
The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Jack R. Binns, who was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1981 to make way for Negroponte, is striking. Before departing, Binns sent several cables to Washington warning of possible "death squad" activity linked to Honduran strongman Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Negroponte dismissed the talk of death squads and, in an October 1983 cable to Washington, emphasized Alvarez's "dedication to democracy."
The cables show that the two men typically met once a week, and sometimes several times a week. Although the Honduran military had ostensibly turned over power to a civilian government headed by President Roberto Suazo, Negroponte and the U.S. Embassy viewed Alvarez as the go-to person on security matters. The ambassador supported an April 1983 request by Alvarez for more weapons for the contra rebels, and he predicted that the size of the contra force "could be doubled in next five months if we provided necessary weapons."
Papers illustrate Negroponte’s Contra role
Nominee was active in U.S. effort, documents show
By Michael Dobbs
Updated: 9:59 p.m. ET April 11, 2005
The day after the House voted to halt all aid to rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte urged the president's national security adviser and the CIA director to hang tough.
advertisement
The thrust of the envoy's "back channel" July 1983 message to the men running the contra war against Nicaragua was contained in a single cryptic sentence: "Hondurans believe special project is as important as ever."
"Special project" was code for the secret arming of contra rebels from bases in Honduras -- a cause championed by Negroponte, then a rising diplomatic star. In cables and memos, Negroponte made it clear that he saw the "special project" as key to the Reagan administration's strategy of rolling back communism in Central America.
• More Bush administration coverage
As Negroponte prepares for his Senate confirmation hearing today for the new post of director of national intelligence, hundreds of previously secret cables and telegrams have become available that shed new light on the most controversial episode in his four-decade diplomatic career. The documents, drawn from Negroponte's personal records as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, were released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post.
The documents were initially declassified and provided to Negroponte in 1998, after his retirement from the Foreign Service, but the vast majority have never been made public. A State Department FOIA official said yesterday that about 100 documents from the collection are still being "processed."
Revealing glimpses
The documents offer revealing glimpses into the personality, leadership style and political attitudes of the man President Bush selected to shake up U.S. intelligence in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Negroponte's determination to reverse the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua occasionally put him at odds with fellow envoys and with more cautious State Department bureaucrats.
"I have my doubts about a dinner at the residence for a man who is in the business of overthrowing a neighboring government," cabled U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton, after Negroponte played host to the political leader of the contra rebels, Adolfo Calero. Quainton made it clear that he was not a fan of Negroponte's "gastronomic diplomacy."
Overall, Negroponte comes across as an exceptionally energetic, action-oriented ambassador whose anti-communist convictions led him to play down human rights abuses in Honduras, the most reliable U.S. ally in the region. There is little in the documents the State Department has released so far to support his assertion that he used "quiet diplomacy" to persuade the Honduran authorities to investigate the most egregious violations, including the mysterious disappearance of dozens of government opponents.
The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Jack R. Binns, who was recalled to Washington in the fall of 1981 to make way for Negroponte, is striking. Before departing, Binns sent several cables to Washington warning of possible "death squad" activity linked to Honduran strongman Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Negroponte dismissed the talk of death squads and, in an October 1983 cable to Washington, emphasized Alvarez's "dedication to democracy."
The cables show that the two men typically met once a week, and sometimes several times a week. Although the Honduran military had ostensibly turned over power to a civilian government headed by President Roberto Suazo, Negroponte and the U.S. Embassy viewed Alvarez as the go-to person on security matters. The ambassador supported an April 1983 request by Alvarez for more weapons for the contra rebels, and he predicted that the size of the contra force "could be doubled in next five months if we provided necessary weapons."
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Tom DeLay Should Resign as House Leader
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April 11th, 2005 3:31 pm
Shays: DeLay Should Quit As House Leader
By Lou Kesten / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Private GOP tensions over Tom DeLay's ethics controversy spilled into public Sunday, as a Senate leader called on DeLay to explain his actions and one House Republican demanded the majority leader's resignation.
"Tom's conduct is hurting the Republican Party, is hurting this Republican majority and it is hurting any Republican who is up for re-election," Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., told The Associated Press in an interview, calling for DeLay to step down as majority leader.
DeLay, R-Texas, who was admonished by the House ethics committee last year, has been dogged in recent months by new reports about his overseas travel funded by special interests, campaign payments to family members and connections to a lobbyist who is under criminal investigation.
A moderate Republican from Connecticut who has battled with his party's leadership on a number of issues, Shays said efforts by the House GOP members to change ethics rules to protect DeLay only make the party look bad.
"My party is going to have to decide whether we are going to continue to make excuses for Tom to the detriment of Republicans seeking election," Shays said.
Rick Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Sunday that DeLay needs to explain his conduct to the public.
"I think he has to come forward and lay out what he did and why he did it and let the people then judge for themselves," Santorum told ABC's "This Week." "But from everything I've heard, again, from the comments and responding to those, is everything he's done was according to the law.
"Now you may not like some of the things he's done," said Santorum, who is up for re-election next year in Pennsylvania. "That's for the people of his district to decide, whether they want to approve that kind of behavior or not."
DeLay's spokesman, Dan Allen, told AP that the congressman "looks forward to the opportunity of sitting down with the ethics committee chairman and ranking member to get the facts out and to dispel the fiction and innuendo that's being launched at him by House Democrats and their liberal allies."
Responding specifically to Shays' remarks later, Allen added that DeLay's "effective leadership has helped to build and maintain the Republican majority in the House and that's exactly why liberal groups funded by George Soros have set their sights on him."
The majority leader was admonished three times last year by that committee. The committee has been in limbo since March, when its five Democrats balked at adopting Republican-developed rules.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week that the controversy was distracting DeLay from dealing with more pressing problems before Congress.
Santorum, however, said DeLay is "very effective in leading the House" and "to date, has not been compromised."
A senior Democratic senator, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, had this advice for the Republicans who control both the House and Senate: "Be careful about how closely you embrace Mr. DeLay."
Dodd cited the new rules for the ethics committee that House Republicans rammed through in the wake of DeLay's difficulties. Those rules require a bipartisan vote before an investigation can be launched. DeLay's office also helped mount a counterattack last fall against Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., who was the ethics committee chairman when it came down against DeLay.
"Unfortunately, in his particular case, there's a process that he's tried to change so they could actually reach a determination as to whether or not he's innocent or guilty of the things he's been charged with," Dodd said. "But this is not going to go away."
DeLay "becomes the poster child for a lot of the things the Democrats think are wrong about Republican leadership. As long as he's there, he's going to become a pretty good target," Dodd said on ABC.
DeLay, who took center stage in passing legislation designed to keep alive Terri Schiavo, also has found that President Bush and congressional colleagues are distancing themselves from his comments, after her death, about the judges involved in her case.
"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," DeLay said, raising the prospect of impeaching members of a separate and independent branch of government. Later, he complained of "an arrogant and out of control judiciary that thumbs its nose at Congress and the president."
Bush, declining to endorse DeLay's comments, said Friday that he supports "an independent judiciary." He added, "I believe in proper checks and balances."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said last week that the judges "handled it in a fair and independent way," although he had hoped for a different result.
Democrats have said DeLay's remarks were tantamount to inciting violence against judges.
April 11th, 2005 3:31 pm
Shays: DeLay Should Quit As House Leader
By Lou Kesten / Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Private GOP tensions over Tom DeLay's ethics controversy spilled into public Sunday, as a Senate leader called on DeLay to explain his actions and one House Republican demanded the majority leader's resignation.
"Tom's conduct is hurting the Republican Party, is hurting this Republican majority and it is hurting any Republican who is up for re-election," Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., told The Associated Press in an interview, calling for DeLay to step down as majority leader.
DeLay, R-Texas, who was admonished by the House ethics committee last year, has been dogged in recent months by new reports about his overseas travel funded by special interests, campaign payments to family members and connections to a lobbyist who is under criminal investigation.
A moderate Republican from Connecticut who has battled with his party's leadership on a number of issues, Shays said efforts by the House GOP members to change ethics rules to protect DeLay only make the party look bad.
"My party is going to have to decide whether we are going to continue to make excuses for Tom to the detriment of Republicans seeking election," Shays said.
Rick Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Sunday that DeLay needs to explain his conduct to the public.
"I think he has to come forward and lay out what he did and why he did it and let the people then judge for themselves," Santorum told ABC's "This Week." "But from everything I've heard, again, from the comments and responding to those, is everything he's done was according to the law.
"Now you may not like some of the things he's done," said Santorum, who is up for re-election next year in Pennsylvania. "That's for the people of his district to decide, whether they want to approve that kind of behavior or not."
DeLay's spokesman, Dan Allen, told AP that the congressman "looks forward to the opportunity of sitting down with the ethics committee chairman and ranking member to get the facts out and to dispel the fiction and innuendo that's being launched at him by House Democrats and their liberal allies."
Responding specifically to Shays' remarks later, Allen added that DeLay's "effective leadership has helped to build and maintain the Republican majority in the House and that's exactly why liberal groups funded by George Soros have set their sights on him."
The majority leader was admonished three times last year by that committee. The committee has been in limbo since March, when its five Democrats balked at adopting Republican-developed rules.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week that the controversy was distracting DeLay from dealing with more pressing problems before Congress.
Santorum, however, said DeLay is "very effective in leading the House" and "to date, has not been compromised."
A senior Democratic senator, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, had this advice for the Republicans who control both the House and Senate: "Be careful about how closely you embrace Mr. DeLay."
Dodd cited the new rules for the ethics committee that House Republicans rammed through in the wake of DeLay's difficulties. Those rules require a bipartisan vote before an investigation can be launched. DeLay's office also helped mount a counterattack last fall against Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., who was the ethics committee chairman when it came down against DeLay.
"Unfortunately, in his particular case, there's a process that he's tried to change so they could actually reach a determination as to whether or not he's innocent or guilty of the things he's been charged with," Dodd said. "But this is not going to go away."
DeLay "becomes the poster child for a lot of the things the Democrats think are wrong about Republican leadership. As long as he's there, he's going to become a pretty good target," Dodd said on ABC.
DeLay, who took center stage in passing legislation designed to keep alive Terri Schiavo, also has found that President Bush and congressional colleagues are distancing themselves from his comments, after her death, about the judges involved in her case.
"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," DeLay said, raising the prospect of impeaching members of a separate and independent branch of government. Later, he complained of "an arrogant and out of control judiciary that thumbs its nose at Congress and the president."
Bush, declining to endorse DeLay's comments, said Friday that he supports "an independent judiciary." He added, "I believe in proper checks and balances."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said last week that the judges "handled it in a fair and independent way," although he had hoped for a different result.
Democrats have said DeLay's remarks were tantamount to inciting violence against judges.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Congress should fire Tom Delay
jbcard's Xanga Site
April 6, 2005
Congress Should Fire Tom Delay
By Baiano
Congress is waisting time with Schiavo related issues, and not doing its job like to fire the Republican Majority Leader of the House Tom Delay.
The news are there about Tom Delay fund raising scandals involving receiving money from a indian tribe in Texas to oil deals involving Russia, South Korea and even the Taliban (Representatives from Taliban met with Tom Delay in SugarLand, Texas).
Tom Delay and the Bush family crime syndicate do not care about the American people. While the big oil companies are having record profit year we are paying about $2.65 minimum here in California. There are 50 million people without health insurance. The education system is getting worse by the day. The record debt is sinking the dollar and causing the interest rates to start climbing.
April 6, 2005
Congress Should Fire Tom Delay
By Baiano
Congress is waisting time with Schiavo related issues, and not doing its job like to fire the Republican Majority Leader of the House Tom Delay.
The news are there about Tom Delay fund raising scandals involving receiving money from a indian tribe in Texas to oil deals involving Russia, South Korea and even the Taliban (Representatives from Taliban met with Tom Delay in SugarLand, Texas).
Tom Delay and the Bush family crime syndicate do not care about the American people. While the big oil companies are having record profit year we are paying about $2.65 minimum here in California. There are 50 million people without health insurance. The education system is getting worse by the day. The record debt is sinking the dollar and causing the interest rates to start climbing.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Our leader: Tom Delay
Mozilla Firefox Start Page
Tom Delay and Bill Frist speech
via American United (our thanks to AU)
The Family Research Council, a Washington-based Religious Right group, held a closed-door “Washington Briefing” March 17-19, 2005. During the event, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) addressed attendees and pledged that Republican leaders in Congress would work to implement the Religious Right’s controversial political agenda...read on
Delay also blamed LBJ for making Churches stay out of politics. As if they actually do.
Audio- it's 20 min. Delay comes in about the midpoint
Ezra: So in three days, he went from concerned, to outraged, all the way to issuing press releases from a land entirely of his imagination. But Terry was still slipping from the headlines! How dare she!? So here's Tom on the 21st:
One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.
Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in." read on
Tom sure sounds a lot like Bill O'Reilly all of a sudden. "They are after me!"
Think Progress has more: Tom Delay Uncensored
Tom Delay and Bill Frist speech
via American United (our thanks to AU)
The Family Research Council, a Washington-based Religious Right group, held a closed-door “Washington Briefing” March 17-19, 2005. During the event, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) addressed attendees and pledged that Republican leaders in Congress would work to implement the Religious Right’s controversial political agenda...read on
Delay also blamed LBJ for making Churches stay out of politics. As if they actually do.
Audio- it's 20 min. Delay comes in about the midpoint
Ezra: So in three days, he went from concerned, to outraged, all the way to issuing press releases from a land entirely of his imagination. But Terry was still slipping from the headlines! How dare she!? So here's Tom on the 21st:
One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.
Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in." read on
Tom sure sounds a lot like Bill O'Reilly all of a sudden. "They are after me!"
Think Progress has more: Tom Delay Uncensored
Monday, March 14, 2005
Bloglines | My Feeds
Bloglines | My Feeds
March 14th, 2005 1:58 pm
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
By David Barstow and Robin Stein / New York Times
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.
It is also a world where all participants benefit.
Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.
In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.
What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.
Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.
So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."
Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."
March 14th, 2005 1:58 pm
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
By David Barstow and Robin Stein / New York Times
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.
It is also a world where all participants benefit.
Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to support his policies.
In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.
What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.
Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.
So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."
Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Bloglines | My Feeds
Bloglines | My Feeds
Turning Chinese
So Much for the New Bush Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The February payroll jobs figures released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a continuation of America's descent into a third world service economy.
The Bush administration cheered the creation of 229,000 private sector jobs (which still leaves Bush with a net private sector job loss during his reign). However, once we look at the details, the joy vanishes: 174,000 of the jobs, or 76% of the total, are in nontradable services.
Administrative and waste services (largely temporary help and employment services) account for 61,000 or 35% of the new service jobs. The remainder are accounted for by construction (30,000), retail trade (30,000), healthcare and social assistance (27,000), and waitresses and bar tenders (27,000).
The US has apparently lost the ability to create high productivity, high value-added jobs in tradable goods and services. The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled by offshore production for home markets and outsourcing of knowledge jobs.
The BLS reports that the number of employed US technical workers has fallen by 221,000 in six major computer and engineering job classifications during 2000-2004. The largest drops were suffered by computer programmers, followed by electrical and electronics engineers, computer scientists and systems analysts.
So much for the new economy that economists promised would take the place of the lost manufacturing economy.
America's remaining job market is domestic nontradable services. While India and China develop first world job markets, the US labor market takes on the characteristics of a third world work force. Only jobs that cannot be outsourced are growing.
The Bush economy has seen a loss of 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, a rise in the unemployment rate of 1.2 percentage points, and a stagnation in real weekly earnings.
How bad will things have to get before economists realize that outsourced jobs are not being replaced? Indeed, many American companies are ceasing to have any presence in the US except for a sales force.
Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, declared recently: "What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company."
Cisco is establishing a new R&D center in Shanghai. The US corporation manufactures $5 billion of products in China where it employes 10,000 people.
That is just one company, and there are many doing the same thing. The result is abandonment of the American work force by American corporations. Little wonder the Bush administration is the first administration in 70 years to have a net loss of private sector jobs.
If one US company or a few move offshore, their profits improve and consumer prices are lower. However, when work in general moves offshore, American lose the incomes associated with the production of the goods they consume. Domestic production is turned into imports, with the result that America draws down its accumulated wealth in order to pay for the imports on which it is dependent.
The dollar's value and status as reserve currency cannot forever stand the trade and budget deficits that are now part and parcel of America's economic policy.
Unless there are major changes soon, America's economic future is a third world work force with a banana democracy's worthless currency.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: pcroberts@postmark.net
Turning Chinese
So Much for the New Bush Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The February payroll jobs figures released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a continuation of America's descent into a third world service economy.
The Bush administration cheered the creation of 229,000 private sector jobs (which still leaves Bush with a net private sector job loss during his reign). However, once we look at the details, the joy vanishes: 174,000 of the jobs, or 76% of the total, are in nontradable services.
Administrative and waste services (largely temporary help and employment services) account for 61,000 or 35% of the new service jobs. The remainder are accounted for by construction (30,000), retail trade (30,000), healthcare and social assistance (27,000), and waitresses and bar tenders (27,000).
The US has apparently lost the ability to create high productivity, high value-added jobs in tradable goods and services. The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled by offshore production for home markets and outsourcing of knowledge jobs.
The BLS reports that the number of employed US technical workers has fallen by 221,000 in six major computer and engineering job classifications during 2000-2004. The largest drops were suffered by computer programmers, followed by electrical and electronics engineers, computer scientists and systems analysts.
So much for the new economy that economists promised would take the place of the lost manufacturing economy.
America's remaining job market is domestic nontradable services. While India and China develop first world job markets, the US labor market takes on the characteristics of a third world work force. Only jobs that cannot be outsourced are growing.
The Bush economy has seen a loss of 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, a rise in the unemployment rate of 1.2 percentage points, and a stagnation in real weekly earnings.
How bad will things have to get before economists realize that outsourced jobs are not being replaced? Indeed, many American companies are ceasing to have any presence in the US except for a sales force.
Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, declared recently: "What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company."
Cisco is establishing a new R&D center in Shanghai. The US corporation manufactures $5 billion of products in China where it employes 10,000 people.
That is just one company, and there are many doing the same thing. The result is abandonment of the American work force by American corporations. Little wonder the Bush administration is the first administration in 70 years to have a net loss of private sector jobs.
If one US company or a few move offshore, their profits improve and consumer prices are lower. However, when work in general moves offshore, American lose the incomes associated with the production of the goods they consume. Domestic production is turned into imports, with the result that America draws down its accumulated wealth in order to pay for the imports on which it is dependent.
The dollar's value and status as reserve currency cannot forever stand the trade and budget deficits that are now part and parcel of America's economic policy.
Unless there are major changes soon, America's economic future is a third world work force with a banana democracy's worthless currency.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: pcroberts@postmark.net
bankaruptcy Reform
Dear Senator,
I am very disappointed with the Democratic senators like you who vote for the “Bankruptcy Reform”. I know that you guys need money for your campaigns, therefore you took money from the credit card companies like MBNA, etc. It is a shame on what is happening in this country:
Bush and the “Neocons” with the help of Democrats are after all the poor people, minority, single mothers, elderly, etc. Bush is cutting all kinds of Social programs in his budget proposal, trying to dismantle Social-Security, doing nothing about Medicare, Health Insurance (About 45 million Americans do not have it). All the Bush wants is to please the big companies. Gas price is hitting record highs. The oil companies hah record profits last year.
I think we should have another party that stands for the people.
Regards,
John Kard
I am very disappointed with the Democratic senators like you who vote for the “Bankruptcy Reform”. I know that you guys need money for your campaigns, therefore you took money from the credit card companies like MBNA, etc. It is a shame on what is happening in this country:
Bush and the “Neocons” with the help of Democrats are after all the poor people, minority, single mothers, elderly, etc. Bush is cutting all kinds of Social programs in his budget proposal, trying to dismantle Social-Security, doing nothing about Medicare, Health Insurance (About 45 million Americans do not have it). All the Bush wants is to please the big companies. Gas price is hitting record highs. The oil companies hah record profits last year.
I think we should have another party that stands for the people.
Regards,
John Kard
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Deficts and Deceit
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Deficits and Deceit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 4, 2005
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
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3.
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4.
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Four years ago, Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, asserting that the federal government was in imminent danger of paying off too much debt.
On Wednesday the Fed chairman warned Congress of the opposite fiscal danger: he asserted that there would be large budget deficits for the foreseeable future, leading to an unsustainable rise in federal debt. But he counseled against reversing the tax cuts, calling instead for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Does anyone still take Mr. Greenspan's pose as a nonpartisan font of wisdom seriously?
When Mr. Greenspan made his contorted argument for tax cuts back in 2001, his reputation made it hard for many observers to admit the obvious: he was mainly looking for some way to do the Bush administration a political favor. But there's no reason to be taken in by his equally weak, contorted argument against reversing those cuts today.
To put Mr. Greenspan's game of fiscal three-card monte in perspective, remember that the push for Social Security privatization is only part of the right's strategy for dismantling the New Deal and the Great Society. The other big piece of that strategy is the use of tax cuts to "starve the beast."
Until the 1970's conservatives tended to be open about their disdain for Social Security and Medicare. But honesty was bad politics, because voters value those programs.
So conservative intellectuals proposed a bait-and-switch strategy: First, advocate tax cuts, using whatever tactics you think may work - supply-side economics, inflated budget projections, whatever. Then use the resulting deficits to argue for slashing government spending.
And that's the story of the last four years. In 2001, President Bush and Mr. Greenspan justified tax cuts with sunny predictions that the budget would remain comfortably in surplus. But Mr. Bush's advisers knew that the tax cuts would probably cause budget problems, and welcomed the prospect.
In fact, Mr. Bush celebrated the budget's initial slide into deficit. In the summer of 2001 he called plunging federal revenue "incredibly positive news" because it would "put a straitjacket" on federal spending.
To keep that straitjacket on, however, those who sold tax cuts with the assurance that they were easily affordable must convince the public that the cuts can't be reversed now that those assurances have proved false. And Mr. Greenspan has once again tried to come to the president's aid, insisting this week that we should deal with deficits "primarily, if not wholly," by slashing Social Security and Medicare because tax increases would "pose significant risks to economic growth."
Really? America prospered for half a century under a level of federal taxes higher than the one we face today. According to the administration's own estimates, Mr. Bush's second term will see the lowest tax take as a percentage of G.D.P. since the Truman administration. And don't forget that President Clinton's 1993 tax increase ushered in an economic boom. Why, exactly, are tax increases out of the question?
O.K., enough about Mr. Greenspan. The real news is the growing evidence that the political theory behind the Bush tax cuts was as wrong as the economic theory.
According to starve-the-beast doctrine, right-wing politicians can use the big deficits generated by tax cuts as an excuse to slash social insurance programs. Mr. Bush's advisers thought that it would prove especially easy to sell benefit cuts in the context of Social Security privatization because the president could pretend that a plan that sharply cut benefits would actually be good for workers.
But the theory isn't working. As soon as voters heard that privatization would involve benefit cuts, support for Social Security "reform" plunged. Another sign of the theory's falsity: across the nation, Republican governors, finding that voters really want adequate public services, are talking about tax increases.
The best bet now is that Mr. Bush will manage to make the poor suffer, but fail to make a dent in the great middle-class entitlement programs.
And the consequence of the failure of the starve-the-beast theory is a looming fiscal crisis - Mr. Greenspan isn't wrong about that. The middle class won't give up programs that are essential to its financial security; the right won't give up tax cuts that it sold on false pretenses. The only question now is when foreign investors, who have financed our deficits so far, will decide to pull the plug.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Bob Herbert is on vacation.
Deficits and Deceit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 4, 2005
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
ARTICLE TOOLS
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.Paul Krugman
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1.
Op-Ed Columnist: Deficits and Deceit
2.
Strivers Sharpen No. 2's for Different College Test
3.
36 Hours: Old San Juan, P.R.
4.
Journeys: In Death Valley, a Technicolor Season
5.
Violent New Front in Drug War Opens on the Canadian Border
Go to Complete List
Four years ago, Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, asserting that the federal government was in imminent danger of paying off too much debt.
On Wednesday the Fed chairman warned Congress of the opposite fiscal danger: he asserted that there would be large budget deficits for the foreseeable future, leading to an unsustainable rise in federal debt. But he counseled against reversing the tax cuts, calling instead for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Does anyone still take Mr. Greenspan's pose as a nonpartisan font of wisdom seriously?
When Mr. Greenspan made his contorted argument for tax cuts back in 2001, his reputation made it hard for many observers to admit the obvious: he was mainly looking for some way to do the Bush administration a political favor. But there's no reason to be taken in by his equally weak, contorted argument against reversing those cuts today.
To put Mr. Greenspan's game of fiscal three-card monte in perspective, remember that the push for Social Security privatization is only part of the right's strategy for dismantling the New Deal and the Great Society. The other big piece of that strategy is the use of tax cuts to "starve the beast."
Until the 1970's conservatives tended to be open about their disdain for Social Security and Medicare. But honesty was bad politics, because voters value those programs.
So conservative intellectuals proposed a bait-and-switch strategy: First, advocate tax cuts, using whatever tactics you think may work - supply-side economics, inflated budget projections, whatever. Then use the resulting deficits to argue for slashing government spending.
And that's the story of the last four years. In 2001, President Bush and Mr. Greenspan justified tax cuts with sunny predictions that the budget would remain comfortably in surplus. But Mr. Bush's advisers knew that the tax cuts would probably cause budget problems, and welcomed the prospect.
In fact, Mr. Bush celebrated the budget's initial slide into deficit. In the summer of 2001 he called plunging federal revenue "incredibly positive news" because it would "put a straitjacket" on federal spending.
To keep that straitjacket on, however, those who sold tax cuts with the assurance that they were easily affordable must convince the public that the cuts can't be reversed now that those assurances have proved false. And Mr. Greenspan has once again tried to come to the president's aid, insisting this week that we should deal with deficits "primarily, if not wholly," by slashing Social Security and Medicare because tax increases would "pose significant risks to economic growth."
Really? America prospered for half a century under a level of federal taxes higher than the one we face today. According to the administration's own estimates, Mr. Bush's second term will see the lowest tax take as a percentage of G.D.P. since the Truman administration. And don't forget that President Clinton's 1993 tax increase ushered in an economic boom. Why, exactly, are tax increases out of the question?
O.K., enough about Mr. Greenspan. The real news is the growing evidence that the political theory behind the Bush tax cuts was as wrong as the economic theory.
According to starve-the-beast doctrine, right-wing politicians can use the big deficits generated by tax cuts as an excuse to slash social insurance programs. Mr. Bush's advisers thought that it would prove especially easy to sell benefit cuts in the context of Social Security privatization because the president could pretend that a plan that sharply cut benefits would actually be good for workers.
But the theory isn't working. As soon as voters heard that privatization would involve benefit cuts, support for Social Security "reform" plunged. Another sign of the theory's falsity: across the nation, Republican governors, finding that voters really want adequate public services, are talking about tax increases.
The best bet now is that Mr. Bush will manage to make the poor suffer, but fail to make a dent in the great middle-class entitlement programs.
And the consequence of the failure of the starve-the-beast theory is a looming fiscal crisis - Mr. Greenspan isn't wrong about that. The middle class won't give up programs that are essential to its financial security; the right won't give up tax cuts that it sold on false pretenses. The only question now is when foreign investors, who have financed our deficits so far, will decide to pull the plug.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Bob Herbert is on vacation.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Condi Lied
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Condi Lied: Declassified Memo from Clarke
by SusanHu
Thu Feb 10th, 2005 at 18:40:42 PST
(From the diaries -- kos)
Although then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration," a newly declassified document [image below the fold] tells the story.
U.S. media haven't got this yet, but Australian papers have:
US al-Qaeda warning revealed
11feb05
EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.
"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," ... Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign ... when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice ... had been warned of the threat.
CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED
Condi Lied: Declassified Memo from Clarke
by SusanHu
Thu Feb 10th, 2005 at 18:40:42 PST
(From the diaries -- kos)
Although then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration," a newly declassified document [image below the fold] tells the story.
U.S. media haven't got this yet, but Australian papers have:
US al-Qaeda warning revealed
11feb05
EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.
"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," ... Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign ... when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice ... had been warned of the threat.
CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED
George Bush's Moby Dick
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Commentary: George Bush’s Moby Dick
As Captain Ahab obsessively led his crew toward disaster, so George Bush is leading America.
By Gerald Rellick
It is not without good reason that Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick has been used to capture some sense of the madness of George W. Bush and his obsessive war against evil. We see in the legendary White Whale and Captain Ahab the madness that now haunts us all:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
The start of Ahab’s fateful journey is described, fittingly for our time, in an insightful article, “Leviathan,” in the New York Review of Books, written in 2003 just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Author Jason Epstein writes:
Captain Ahab of the Nantucket whaler Pequod called his officers and crew together on the afterdeck to announce a change of plans. Instead of filling his hold with oil and returning safely home, he will subordinate the fiscal point of the voyage to a preemptive first strike against evil, embodied, he claimed, in a particular whale of an unusual color which in a previous encounter had torn his leg away.
To a leery and frightened first mate, Mr. Starbuck, Ahab screams, “Death to Moby-Dick. God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”
And so, George Bush, compelled at first by the obvious, the need to hunt the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, did not rest easy with the progress of this “voyage.” The fighting in Afghanistan, with its mountains and circuitous caves, the sluggish going after the initial air bombardment, was simply bad theatre for a president who was untested, unsure of himself, and now suddenly in over his head. George Bush desperately needed a media-age victory.
The villain fit the script well on the surface of things; but the harsh reality was that bin Laden was so clever, so elusive, so enabled by his environs, that this hunt could go on for years without resolve. What George Bush needed now, in the words of Norman Mailer, was to punch out some “bozo in the boondocks” to prove his manhood. And the “hollowed-out Palooka,” just made to order, was Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This was a chance for America to show its ‘stuff,” not in intelligence, wisdom or craft, but in raw military power, America’s hole card -- or so Bush and his Neocon gang believed.
Now, nearly two years into Mad George’s senseless charge into Iraq, and over 1400 American servicemen killed, and possibly as many as 100,00 Iraqis killed, what are we Americans to make of all this?
As the media lavishes attention on the elections in war-torn Iraq, are we to be misled again? Are we to forget that this war was never about democracy in Iraq? Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready to be used against us in America, an imminent threat to our security, and Saddam Hussein’s ties to bin Laden and al Qaeda -- all this has evaporated and been revealed as lies and deception. Do we now accept lying to the American people at the highest levels of government as acceptable policy? Even when it means our young men and women die for these lies? How much more are we to take?
As Seymour Hersh put it recently:
…the amazing thing is we are being taken over basically by a cult. Eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease…. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
A big part of it is that an unusually virulent strain of moral cowardice has taken over our nation’s capital and much of the “heartland” of America. Fear is the dominant emotion. Fear of authority, fear of speaking out, fear of just about everything. Enemies are everywhere. Whatever happened to the “home of the brave?”
Just as the mad Ahab deceived his crew into believing their expedition was about hunting whales, so mad George Bush, aided by his chief Neocon thugs -- Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice -- lied to the American people about their true mission, until it was too late to turn back. We had to hunt Saddam Hussein or else. And not to worry, said Mr. Cheney, Iraq would be a “cake walk.”
We are now like Ahab’s crew, trapped it seems into doing his insane bidding. Is our fate sealed? Can Ahab be stopped?
Gerald S. Rellick, PhD, worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. To send Jerry your comments, send an email to info@interventionmag.com
Commentary: George Bush’s Moby Dick
As Captain Ahab obsessively led his crew toward disaster, so George Bush is leading America.
By Gerald Rellick
It is not without good reason that Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick has been used to capture some sense of the madness of George W. Bush and his obsessive war against evil. We see in the legendary White Whale and Captain Ahab the madness that now haunts us all:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
The start of Ahab’s fateful journey is described, fittingly for our time, in an insightful article, “Leviathan,” in the New York Review of Books, written in 2003 just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Author Jason Epstein writes:
Captain Ahab of the Nantucket whaler Pequod called his officers and crew together on the afterdeck to announce a change of plans. Instead of filling his hold with oil and returning safely home, he will subordinate the fiscal point of the voyage to a preemptive first strike against evil, embodied, he claimed, in a particular whale of an unusual color which in a previous encounter had torn his leg away.
To a leery and frightened first mate, Mr. Starbuck, Ahab screams, “Death to Moby-Dick. God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”
And so, George Bush, compelled at first by the obvious, the need to hunt the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, did not rest easy with the progress of this “voyage.” The fighting in Afghanistan, with its mountains and circuitous caves, the sluggish going after the initial air bombardment, was simply bad theatre for a president who was untested, unsure of himself, and now suddenly in over his head. George Bush desperately needed a media-age victory.
The villain fit the script well on the surface of things; but the harsh reality was that bin Laden was so clever, so elusive, so enabled by his environs, that this hunt could go on for years without resolve. What George Bush needed now, in the words of Norman Mailer, was to punch out some “bozo in the boondocks” to prove his manhood. And the “hollowed-out Palooka,” just made to order, was Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This was a chance for America to show its ‘stuff,” not in intelligence, wisdom or craft, but in raw military power, America’s hole card -- or so Bush and his Neocon gang believed.
Now, nearly two years into Mad George’s senseless charge into Iraq, and over 1400 American servicemen killed, and possibly as many as 100,00 Iraqis killed, what are we Americans to make of all this?
As the media lavishes attention on the elections in war-torn Iraq, are we to be misled again? Are we to forget that this war was never about democracy in Iraq? Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready to be used against us in America, an imminent threat to our security, and Saddam Hussein’s ties to bin Laden and al Qaeda -- all this has evaporated and been revealed as lies and deception. Do we now accept lying to the American people at the highest levels of government as acceptable policy? Even when it means our young men and women die for these lies? How much more are we to take?
As Seymour Hersh put it recently:
…the amazing thing is we are being taken over basically by a cult. Eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease…. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
A big part of it is that an unusually virulent strain of moral cowardice has taken over our nation’s capital and much of the “heartland” of America. Fear is the dominant emotion. Fear of authority, fear of speaking out, fear of just about everything. Enemies are everywhere. Whatever happened to the “home of the brave?”
Just as the mad Ahab deceived his crew into believing their expedition was about hunting whales, so mad George Bush, aided by his chief Neocon thugs -- Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice -- lied to the American people about their true mission, until it was too late to turn back. We had to hunt Saddam Hussein or else. And not to worry, said Mr. Cheney, Iraq would be a “cake walk.”
We are now like Ahab’s crew, trapped it seems into doing his insane bidding. Is our fate sealed? Can Ahab be stopped?
Gerald S. Rellick, PhD, worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. To send Jerry your comments, send an email to info@interventionmag.com
Monday, February 07, 2005
Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
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Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
Mon Feb 7, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Joel Havemann Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The budget President Bush (news - web sites) will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.
• Latimes.com home page
• Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times
Reuters Photo
Reuters
Slideshow Slideshow: President Bush
At least technically it will.
Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out.
When Bush took office in 2001, the nation had experienced a four-year string of budget surpluses. That changed quickly as the economy slowed, tax rates were cut and spending in the war on terrorism skyrocketed.
By July 2003, the president was urging Congress in his weekly radio address "to make spending discipline a priority, so that we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, Bush said his fiscal 2006 budget, which he will unveil today, "stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."
But students of the budget say that the president will find it nearly impossible to steer the government along the course that the budget will map out between now and 2009.
"It doesn't quite compute," said Isabel V. Sawhill, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, who foresees a shortfall slightly larger in 2009 than now.
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.
Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.
If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.
There are more twists. Bush proposes to cut the deficit in half not in dollars but as a share of the economy. If the economy grows, as is projected, then the deficit will decline as a share of the economy even if it does not shrink by a single dollar.
The 2004 deficit was 4.5% of the economy. So in fiscal 2009 it must be 2.2% or less. That is exactly the average share of the last 43 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites).
Finally, the budget that the president will send to Congress will, like his past budgets, omit some major deficit-raising items.
It will, as Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said on "Fox News Sunday," be "the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here." It will hold the growth in domestic programs whose spending levels are set in annual appropriations bills to less than inflation.
But these programs, because they exclude defense and giant benefit programs such as Social Security (news - web sites), account for about $1 of every $5 the government spends.
Most of the cost of the Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) wars will not be included in the budget. Instead, it will be sent to Congress as a supplemental budget request for 2006, just as the administration recently announced an $80-billion supplemental request for the current fiscal year.
Nor will the cost of introducing private investment accounts to Social Security — $754 billion over the first 10 years alone — be found in the budget, according to administration officials.
That cost will be borrowed, Cheney said, calling the figure a "manageable amount" in terms of dealing with the deficit. He acknowledged that it would also be necessary to borrow "trillions more" after the first decade, but he argued that the private accounts eventually would greatly enhance Social Security recipients' retirement income.
On the tax side, the budget is not expected to show the effect of its proposal to curb the alternative minimum tax, which is likely to win congressional approval.
This tax, designed to hit wealthy individuals who shelter much of their income from taxes, has been snaring a growing number of taxpayers whose income has merely grown with inflation. Preventing the alternative minimum tax's reach from growing would add $44 billion to the deficit that today's budget will project for 2009, the CBO said.
Even if the administration succeeded in getting the actual 2009 deficit to half of its 2004 size, analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities expect it to rocket back upward shortly thereafter. They point out that the first wave of the baby boom generation would reach the full retirement age of 66 in 2012, sending federal retirement and healthcare costs soaring.
"The 2.2% deficits won't be sustainable for long," predicted Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the center.
The problem, watchdog groups say, is that the government's spending habits and penchant for cutting taxes do not match the administration's budget-restraint rhetoric.
"This administration has a schizophrenic fiscal policy," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which lobbies for smaller deficits. "It has a big-government spending policy and a small-government revenue policy."
Bush's tax cuts, whatever their economic merit, have taken their toll on government income. Tax revenue fell in each of Bush's first three years in office, though this year it is projected to rise to a record level.
But as a share of the nation's economic output, tax payments to the government fell to 16.3% last year, the lowest level since 1959. And in 1959, the government was not paying for Medicare (which cost $297 billion in 2004), Medicaid ($176 billion), food stamps ($29 billion) or the space program ($15 billion).
Spending, meanwhile, was lower than its 25-year average by about 1 percentage point. But at 19.8% of the economy it was $412 billion greater than revenue — a record deficit.
Faced with growing deficits, more conservatives are abandoning the doctrine that the government should run surpluses or hold deficits to a minimum.
"The deficit is merely the uninteresting difference between two very interesting numbers," said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform and an informal advisor to the White House and Republican lawmakers.
Norquist's organization is dedicated to restraining both spending and revenue. Spending is the key, Norquist said. Whether financed by tax revenue or borrowing, it drains money from the private economy.
"The fundamental difference between the two parties," he said, "is how big the government should be."
Norquist's argument has become sufficiently popular that it has spurred formal rebuttal from deficit hawks. Brookings Institution scholars Sawhill and Alice M. Rivlin write in a recent book for the Washington policy research organization that "deficits matter a lot" and "better policies are possible and urgently needed."
Deficits, Sawhill and Rivlin argue, drain money from the economy that could otherwise be used for private investment, thus inhibiting economic growth and forcing interest rates upward. Deficits force the government to set aside a growing share of tax revenue for the payment of interest on the national debt, and "they impose enormous burdens on future generations."
Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
Mon Feb 7, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Joel Havemann Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The budget President Bush (news - web sites) will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.
• Latimes.com home page
• Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times
Reuters Photo
Reuters
Slideshow Slideshow: President Bush
At least technically it will.
Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out.
When Bush took office in 2001, the nation had experienced a four-year string of budget surpluses. That changed quickly as the economy slowed, tax rates were cut and spending in the war on terrorism skyrocketed.
By July 2003, the president was urging Congress in his weekly radio address "to make spending discipline a priority, so that we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, Bush said his fiscal 2006 budget, which he will unveil today, "stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."
But students of the budget say that the president will find it nearly impossible to steer the government along the course that the budget will map out between now and 2009.
"It doesn't quite compute," said Isabel V. Sawhill, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, who foresees a shortfall slightly larger in 2009 than now.
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.
Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.
If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.
There are more twists. Bush proposes to cut the deficit in half not in dollars but as a share of the economy. If the economy grows, as is projected, then the deficit will decline as a share of the economy even if it does not shrink by a single dollar.
The 2004 deficit was 4.5% of the economy. So in fiscal 2009 it must be 2.2% or less. That is exactly the average share of the last 43 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites).
Finally, the budget that the president will send to Congress will, like his past budgets, omit some major deficit-raising items.
It will, as Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said on "Fox News Sunday," be "the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here." It will hold the growth in domestic programs whose spending levels are set in annual appropriations bills to less than inflation.
But these programs, because they exclude defense and giant benefit programs such as Social Security (news - web sites), account for about $1 of every $5 the government spends.
Most of the cost of the Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) wars will not be included in the budget. Instead, it will be sent to Congress as a supplemental budget request for 2006, just as the administration recently announced an $80-billion supplemental request for the current fiscal year.
Nor will the cost of introducing private investment accounts to Social Security — $754 billion over the first 10 years alone — be found in the budget, according to administration officials.
That cost will be borrowed, Cheney said, calling the figure a "manageable amount" in terms of dealing with the deficit. He acknowledged that it would also be necessary to borrow "trillions more" after the first decade, but he argued that the private accounts eventually would greatly enhance Social Security recipients' retirement income.
On the tax side, the budget is not expected to show the effect of its proposal to curb the alternative minimum tax, which is likely to win congressional approval.
This tax, designed to hit wealthy individuals who shelter much of their income from taxes, has been snaring a growing number of taxpayers whose income has merely grown with inflation. Preventing the alternative minimum tax's reach from growing would add $44 billion to the deficit that today's budget will project for 2009, the CBO said.
Even if the administration succeeded in getting the actual 2009 deficit to half of its 2004 size, analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities expect it to rocket back upward shortly thereafter. They point out that the first wave of the baby boom generation would reach the full retirement age of 66 in 2012, sending federal retirement and healthcare costs soaring.
"The 2.2% deficits won't be sustainable for long," predicted Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the center.
The problem, watchdog groups say, is that the government's spending habits and penchant for cutting taxes do not match the administration's budget-restraint rhetoric.
"This administration has a schizophrenic fiscal policy," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which lobbies for smaller deficits. "It has a big-government spending policy and a small-government revenue policy."
Bush's tax cuts, whatever their economic merit, have taken their toll on government income. Tax revenue fell in each of Bush's first three years in office, though this year it is projected to rise to a record level.
But as a share of the nation's economic output, tax payments to the government fell to 16.3% last year, the lowest level since 1959. And in 1959, the government was not paying for Medicare (which cost $297 billion in 2004), Medicaid ($176 billion), food stamps ($29 billion) or the space program ($15 billion).
Spending, meanwhile, was lower than its 25-year average by about 1 percentage point. But at 19.8% of the economy it was $412 billion greater than revenue — a record deficit.
Faced with growing deficits, more conservatives are abandoning the doctrine that the government should run surpluses or hold deficits to a minimum.
"The deficit is merely the uninteresting difference between two very interesting numbers," said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform and an informal advisor to the White House and Republican lawmakers.
Norquist's organization is dedicated to restraining both spending and revenue. Spending is the key, Norquist said. Whether financed by tax revenue or borrowing, it drains money from the private economy.
"The fundamental difference between the two parties," he said, "is how big the government should be."
Norquist's argument has become sufficiently popular that it has spurred formal rebuttal from deficit hawks. Brookings Institution scholars Sawhill and Alice M. Rivlin write in a recent book for the Washington policy research organization that "deficits matter a lot" and "better policies are possible and urgently needed."
Deficits, Sawhill and Rivlin argue, drain money from the economy that could otherwise be used for private investment, thus inhibiting economic growth and forcing interest rates upward. Deficits force the government to set aside a growing share of tax revenue for the payment of interest on the national debt, and "they impose enormous burdens on future generations."
Saturday, February 05, 2005
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Gambling With Your Retirement
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Gambling With Your Retirement
Gambling With Your Retirement
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 4, 2005
A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains.
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Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual.
Here's the money quote: "In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."
Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real interest rate of 3 percent.
Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution got it exactly right: "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan."
For years, privatizers - including Mr. Bush - have claimed that people would do better with private accounts than with traditional Social Security even if they played it safe and invested in U.S. government bonds (which yield 3 percent after inflation).
But the official at the briefing made it clear that his boss was fibbing: if you invested your private account in government bonds, you would face benefit cuts equal in value to your investment, so you would be no better off than under the current system.
The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.
So people are expected to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad.
Experts usually tell people to plan for their retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. They disapprove strongly of speculation on margin: borrowing to buy stocks. Yet Mr. Bush wants tens of millions of Americans to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, what does any of this have to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole thing: saving Social Security?
Here's the senior official again: "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security." The government would have to borrow huge sums up front to create the personal accounts - $4.5 trillion in the first two decades - but it would supposedly make up for all that borrowing with offsetting cuts in account holders' benefits many decades later.
Color me skeptical: will retirees with private accounts that performed badly really be forced to repay their loans in full? Even if they are, private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?
The answer, presumably, is that his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic. (Thanks, M. Voltaire.)
Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Gambling With Your Retirement
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 4, 2005
A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains.
Advertisement
Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual.
Here's the money quote: "In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."
Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real interest rate of 3 percent.
Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution got it exactly right: "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan."
For years, privatizers - including Mr. Bush - have claimed that people would do better with private accounts than with traditional Social Security even if they played it safe and invested in U.S. government bonds (which yield 3 percent after inflation).
But the official at the briefing made it clear that his boss was fibbing: if you invested your private account in government bonds, you would face benefit cuts equal in value to your investment, so you would be no better off than under the current system.
The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.
So people are expected to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad.
Experts usually tell people to plan for their retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. They disapprove strongly of speculation on margin: borrowing to buy stocks. Yet Mr. Bush wants tens of millions of Americans to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, what does any of this have to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole thing: saving Social Security?
Here's the senior official again: "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security." The government would have to borrow huge sums up front to create the personal accounts - $4.5 trillion in the first two decades - but it would supposedly make up for all that borrowing with offsetting cuts in account holders' benefits many decades later.
Color me skeptical: will retirees with private accounts that performed badly really be forced to repay their loans in full? Even if they are, private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?
The answer, presumably, is that his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic. (Thanks, M. Voltaire.)
Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Private accounts in Chile! Disaster
Bloglines | My FeedsChile's Retirees Find Shortfall in Private Plan
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.
Tomás Munita for The New York Times
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: January 27, 2005
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Paying for Pensions
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SANTIAGO, Chile - Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled.
Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer.
But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
For all the program's success in economic terms, the government continues to direct billions of dollars to a safety net for those whose contributions were not large enough to ensure even a minimum pension approaching $140 a month. Many others - because they earned much of their income in the underground economy, are self-employed, or work only seasonally - remain outside the system altogether. Combined, those groups constitute roughly half the Chilean labor force. Only half of workers are captured by the system.
Even many middle-class workers who contributed regularly are finding that their private accounts - burdened with hidden fees that may have soaked up as much as a third of their original investment - are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they had stayed in the old system.
Dagoberto Sáez, for example, is a 66-year-old laboratory technician here who plans, because of a recent heart attack, to retire in March. He earns just under $950 a month; his pension fund has told him that his nearly 24 years of contributions will finance a 20-year annuity paying only $315 a month.
"Colleagues and friends with the same pay grade who stayed in the old system, people who work right alongside me," he said, "are retiring with pensions of almost $700 a month - good until they die. I have a salary that allows me to live with dignity, and all of a sudden I am going to be plunged into poverty, all because I made the mistake of believing the promises they made to us back in 1981."
With many Chileans finding themselves in a situation much like that of Mr. Sáez, people are still looking to the government, not private pension funds, to ensure a secure retirement.
"It is evident the system requires reform," the minister of labor and social security, Ricardo Scolari, said in an interview here. Chile's current approach based on private pension funds has "important strengths," he said, but "it is absolutely impossible to think that a system of this nature is going to resolve the income needs of Chileans when they reach old age."
In formulating proposals in the United States for individual accounts, advocates of partial privatization of Social Security have sought to overcome some of the problems in Chile. They have suggested, for example, setting low limits on the fees that fund managers will be allowed to charge and continuing to provide a major part of retirement income through the traditional system of guaranteed payments.
The program in Chile differs from the voluntary model that President Bush is considering. Participation here has been not voluntary for people entering the labor force since 1981.
On the other hand, Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.
The Chilean example also makes clear that introducing private accounts does not solve a lot of the problems faced in the United States, Europe and Japan, where pay-as-you-go systems remain the principal means of government retirement support.
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.
Tomás Munita for The New York Times
Dagoberto Sáez, retiring as a lab technician, is studying podiatry to supplement a pension of $315 a month.
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: January 27, 2005
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Paying for Pensions
Graphic: Paying for Pensions
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SANTIAGO, Chile - Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled.
Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer.
But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
For all the program's success in economic terms, the government continues to direct billions of dollars to a safety net for those whose contributions were not large enough to ensure even a minimum pension approaching $140 a month. Many others - because they earned much of their income in the underground economy, are self-employed, or work only seasonally - remain outside the system altogether. Combined, those groups constitute roughly half the Chilean labor force. Only half of workers are captured by the system.
Even many middle-class workers who contributed regularly are finding that their private accounts - burdened with hidden fees that may have soaked up as much as a third of their original investment - are failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received if they had stayed in the old system.
Dagoberto Sáez, for example, is a 66-year-old laboratory technician here who plans, because of a recent heart attack, to retire in March. He earns just under $950 a month; his pension fund has told him that his nearly 24 years of contributions will finance a 20-year annuity paying only $315 a month.
"Colleagues and friends with the same pay grade who stayed in the old system, people who work right alongside me," he said, "are retiring with pensions of almost $700 a month - good until they die. I have a salary that allows me to live with dignity, and all of a sudden I am going to be plunged into poverty, all because I made the mistake of believing the promises they made to us back in 1981."
With many Chileans finding themselves in a situation much like that of Mr. Sáez, people are still looking to the government, not private pension funds, to ensure a secure retirement.
"It is evident the system requires reform," the minister of labor and social security, Ricardo Scolari, said in an interview here. Chile's current approach based on private pension funds has "important strengths," he said, but "it is absolutely impossible to think that a system of this nature is going to resolve the income needs of Chileans when they reach old age."
In formulating proposals in the United States for individual accounts, advocates of partial privatization of Social Security have sought to overcome some of the problems in Chile. They have suggested, for example, setting low limits on the fees that fund managers will be allowed to charge and continuing to provide a major part of retirement income through the traditional system of guaranteed payments.
The program in Chile differs from the voluntary model that President Bush is considering. Participation here has been not voluntary for people entering the labor force since 1981.
On the other hand, Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.
The Chilean example also makes clear that introducing private accounts does not solve a lot of the problems faced in the United States, Europe and Japan, where pay-as-you-go systems remain the principal means of government retirement support.
Can American go bankrupt?
Bloglines | My FeedsOh yes, it can happen here
By Robert Kuttner | January 26, 2005
''How did you go bankrupt?"
''Two Ways. Gradually, and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
ADVERTISEMENT
COUNTRIES GO broke gradually, by borrowing so much money that creditors lose confidence in their ability to pay the debt back. Then, they go broke suddenly as creditors stop lending.
This has happened to more than a dozen Third World nations, who had the additional misfortune of having to borrow in dollars. As their own currency lost the confidence of world markets, they lost value against the dollar. This only increased their real debt burden. The optimists say, ''It can't happen here."
First, we're the people who print dollars. So if the dollar is losing value, it just means the money that we owe the rest of the world is getting cheaper. Lucky us.
Second, we enjoy a codependency with our creditors. For instance, China, which keeps lending us money to finance our deficits, may be accumulating dollar credits that are losing their real worth. But China needs us to keep absorbing their products, so China will go right on lending.
And third, the United States remains the anchor of the world economy. So even though other nations may not like America's immense trade and budget deficits, nobody is going to risk pushing the world into depression by crashing the dollar.
That, as I say, is the optimistic view. Well, dream on.
Yesterday, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, possibly the last intellectually honest government agency in George Bush's Washington, reported that our fiscal situation is even worse than expected.
According to the CBO's latest ''Budget and Economic Outlook," the projected deficit for 2005 will be about $400 billion. The CBO declares, politely but unmistakably, that it doesn't buy the Bush administration's budgetary gimmickry of trying to keep anticipated military outlays out of the official budget.
''The absence of further appropriations for activities in Iraq and Afghanistan," CBO states, ''masks a further deterioration in budget projections over the [next] ten years."
Specifically, the deficit for the next decade is $504 billion worse than anticipated in CBO's previous estimate last September.
The agency goes on to warn that other challenges not currently itemized in official administration projections, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, will only increase future deficits. And, of course, if the Bush administration succeeds either in making permanent his major tax reductions (most of which sunset after 10 years), or in adding $2 trillion of borrowing to privatize Social Security, the fiscal situation would go from merely disastrous to catastrophic.
But back to our story, ''It Can't Happen Here." America's deteriorating fiscal situation, unfortunately, is not lost either on world money markets or on the Federal Reserve. Although no world leader would willfully plunge the world into depression, that's not how markets work. Markets are purely self-interested.
Lately, markets, with good reason, have been betting against the dollar. As the US trade deficit approaches a staggering 7 percent, it's not clear how much longer foreign investors will keep investing in dollars and dollar-securities, such as corporate stocks and government bonds.
As for the Chinese, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, formerly a senior trade negotiator in the Reagan administration, offers the following scenario: In a future crisis involving the tense China-Taiwan relationship, the Chinese ambassador suggests to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that maybe the United States would like to move its warships 500 miles away from Taiwan. Rice demurs. The next day, the Bank of China sells a few --just a very few to get our attention -- US Treasury securities. Money markets reel.
Would the Chinese play such a risky game? They have their own interests, geopolitical as well as economic. They are certainly not an American pawn, less so with every passing year. Miscalculations have happened in world economic relations before, and with calamitous results.
The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, is increasingly worried about inflation, largely of the imported variety due to the weak dollar. The Fed is steadily raising interest rates. With every quarter-point hike, consumers pay more for mortgage and credit card loans, investors in stocks become more wary, and the air goes out of the economy. Alan Greenspan kept rates very low long enough to get George W. Bush reelected. Now he is reverting to type.
The Bush administration is putting itself, and America's economic future, in grave jeopardy. The only good news is that all this bad news makes Social Security privatization, or permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, less than an even bet.
By Robert Kuttner | January 26, 2005
''How did you go bankrupt?"
''Two Ways. Gradually, and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
ADVERTISEMENT
COUNTRIES GO broke gradually, by borrowing so much money that creditors lose confidence in their ability to pay the debt back. Then, they go broke suddenly as creditors stop lending.
This has happened to more than a dozen Third World nations, who had the additional misfortune of having to borrow in dollars. As their own currency lost the confidence of world markets, they lost value against the dollar. This only increased their real debt burden. The optimists say, ''It can't happen here."
First, we're the people who print dollars. So if the dollar is losing value, it just means the money that we owe the rest of the world is getting cheaper. Lucky us.
Second, we enjoy a codependency with our creditors. For instance, China, which keeps lending us money to finance our deficits, may be accumulating dollar credits that are losing their real worth. But China needs us to keep absorbing their products, so China will go right on lending.
And third, the United States remains the anchor of the world economy. So even though other nations may not like America's immense trade and budget deficits, nobody is going to risk pushing the world into depression by crashing the dollar.
That, as I say, is the optimistic view. Well, dream on.
Yesterday, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, possibly the last intellectually honest government agency in George Bush's Washington, reported that our fiscal situation is even worse than expected.
According to the CBO's latest ''Budget and Economic Outlook," the projected deficit for 2005 will be about $400 billion. The CBO declares, politely but unmistakably, that it doesn't buy the Bush administration's budgetary gimmickry of trying to keep anticipated military outlays out of the official budget.
''The absence of further appropriations for activities in Iraq and Afghanistan," CBO states, ''masks a further deterioration in budget projections over the [next] ten years."
Specifically, the deficit for the next decade is $504 billion worse than anticipated in CBO's previous estimate last September.
The agency goes on to warn that other challenges not currently itemized in official administration projections, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, will only increase future deficits. And, of course, if the Bush administration succeeds either in making permanent his major tax reductions (most of which sunset after 10 years), or in adding $2 trillion of borrowing to privatize Social Security, the fiscal situation would go from merely disastrous to catastrophic.
But back to our story, ''It Can't Happen Here." America's deteriorating fiscal situation, unfortunately, is not lost either on world money markets or on the Federal Reserve. Although no world leader would willfully plunge the world into depression, that's not how markets work. Markets are purely self-interested.
Lately, markets, with good reason, have been betting against the dollar. As the US trade deficit approaches a staggering 7 percent, it's not clear how much longer foreign investors will keep investing in dollars and dollar-securities, such as corporate stocks and government bonds.
As for the Chinese, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, formerly a senior trade negotiator in the Reagan administration, offers the following scenario: In a future crisis involving the tense China-Taiwan relationship, the Chinese ambassador suggests to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that maybe the United States would like to move its warships 500 miles away from Taiwan. Rice demurs. The next day, the Bank of China sells a few --just a very few to get our attention -- US Treasury securities. Money markets reel.
Would the Chinese play such a risky game? They have their own interests, geopolitical as well as economic. They are certainly not an American pawn, less so with every passing year. Miscalculations have happened in world economic relations before, and with calamitous results.
The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, is increasingly worried about inflation, largely of the imported variety due to the weak dollar. The Fed is steadily raising interest rates. With every quarter-point hike, consumers pay more for mortgage and credit card loans, investors in stocks become more wary, and the air goes out of the economy. Alan Greenspan kept rates very low long enough to get George W. Bush reelected. Now he is reverting to type.
The Bush administration is putting itself, and America's economic future, in grave jeopardy. The only good news is that all this bad news makes Social Security privatization, or permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, less than an even bet.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Love for Sale
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com! : Words
January 27th, 2005 8:12 pm
Love for Sale
By Maureen Dowd / New York Times
I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite.
I'm joining up with the conservative media elite. They get paid better.
First comes news that Armstrong Williams got $240,000 from the Education Department to plug the No Child Left Behind Act.
The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good publicity? Priceless.
Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr. Thomas's personal assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the future Supreme Court justice was gutting policies that would help blacks, gleefully attacked Professor Hill, saying, "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street Journal "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity."
Now we learn from the media reporter Howard Kurtz that the syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and Human Services Department to work on material promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned her money, even praising Mr. Bush in print as a "genius" at playing "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel your pain," she wrote in 2002. "Daddies give you confidence that you can ignore the pain and get on with life."
Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they would be happy to do for free - just to be friends with benefits, getting access that tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles Krauthammer, who went to the White House on Jan. 10 for what The Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the inaugural speech and then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as "revolutionary," says Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.
I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a message to the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE.
I could write about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend Torture Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind readers of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security before 9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" as a credible threat? - not to mention her indefatigable energy obscuring information that undercut the vice president's dementia on Iraq.
My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost effective, compared with the $80 billion he needs to train more Iraqi security forces to be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a doozy of a column promoting Rummy's phantasmagoric policies.
What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the number of people who died in traffic accidents in California last Memorial Day. The president set the right tone, avoiding pathos when asked about the crash. "Obviously," he said, "any time we lose life it is a sad moment."
Who can blame Rummy for carrying out torture policies? We're in an information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you the intelligence you want, you must customize to get the intelligence you want to hear.
That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own C.I.A. A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include "notorious figures," whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if revealed, according to The Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious figure like Rummy recruit notorious figures?
I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call hearings into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just jealous because Rummy's sexy enough to play James Bond.
The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said.
And why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why should W. have to bone up on his own foreign policy?
Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters and other stuff. I could make that case, if the price were right.
January 27th, 2005 8:12 pm
Love for Sale
By Maureen Dowd / New York Times
I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite.
I'm joining up with the conservative media elite. They get paid better.
First comes news that Armstrong Williams got $240,000 from the Education Department to plug the No Child Left Behind Act.
The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good publicity? Priceless.
Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr. Thomas's personal assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the future Supreme Court justice was gutting policies that would help blacks, gleefully attacked Professor Hill, saying, "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street Journal "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity."
Now we learn from the media reporter Howard Kurtz that the syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and Human Services Department to work on material promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned her money, even praising Mr. Bush in print as a "genius" at playing "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel your pain," she wrote in 2002. "Daddies give you confidence that you can ignore the pain and get on with life."
Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they would be happy to do for free - just to be friends with benefits, getting access that tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles Krauthammer, who went to the White House on Jan. 10 for what The Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the inaugural speech and then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as "revolutionary," says Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.
I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a message to the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE.
I could write about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend Torture Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind readers of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security before 9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" as a credible threat? - not to mention her indefatigable energy obscuring information that undercut the vice president's dementia on Iraq.
My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost effective, compared with the $80 billion he needs to train more Iraqi security forces to be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a doozy of a column promoting Rummy's phantasmagoric policies.
What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the number of people who died in traffic accidents in California last Memorial Day. The president set the right tone, avoiding pathos when asked about the crash. "Obviously," he said, "any time we lose life it is a sad moment."
Who can blame Rummy for carrying out torture policies? We're in an information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you the intelligence you want, you must customize to get the intelligence you want to hear.
That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own C.I.A. A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include "notorious figures," whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if revealed, according to The Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious figure like Rummy recruit notorious figures?
I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call hearings into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just jealous because Rummy's sexy enough to play James Bond.
The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said.
And why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why should W. have to bone up on his own foreign policy?
Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters and other stuff. I could make that case, if the price were right.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
http://altahemp.com/nomorebushit.html
Bloglines | My Feeds
No More BUSHIT printed on a short or long sleeve natural 100% organic cotton T-shirt. If George W. Bush not one of your favorite people then this anti- Bush T-shirt really tells it like it is - anti-Bush T-shirts - No More Bushit Sizes S - XX
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No More BUSHIT printed on a short or long sleeve natural 100% organic cotton T-shirt. If George W. Bush not one of your favorite people then this anti- Bush T-shirt really tells it like it is - anti-Bush T-shirts - No More Bushit Sizes S - XX
http://altahemp.com/nomorebushit.html
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Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Dem Lays Out Case Against Bush's Ohio Win
Bloglines | My Feeds
January 5th, 2005 7:43 pm
Dem Lays Out Case Against Bush's Ohio Win
New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee protested President Bush's re-election Wednesday with a new report claiming serious election irregularities and ``significant disenfranchisement'' of voters in Ohio.
The report by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan says Congress should challenge the Electoral College vote when it is tallied Thursday in the House of Representatives and investigate all claims of voter problems in Ohio.
``We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election,'' the report said. ``There are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the state of Ohio.''
Ohio's 20 electoral votes were critical for Bush's defeat of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. A recount last week showed Bush winning Ohio by 118,457 votes over Kerry, according to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press.
The 102-page report titled ``Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?'' lists such problems as unusually long lines, a shortage of voting machines in Democratic-leaning areas, confusion over provisional ballot rules and computer problems.
The report also contends there were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation, improper purging of voter registration lists, a lack of inspection for about 93,000 ballots where no vote was cast for president, and vote totals not matching registration numbers or exit poll data.
``In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio,'' the report said.
Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell, called the report ``ludicrous'' and a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.
``There are absolutely no grounds for challenging Ohio's electors,'' LoParo said.
Meanwhile, a small group of House Democrats were looking for a Democratic senator to co-sponsor their challenge of Ohio's 20 electoral votes. A single senator supporting the effort would require the two chambers to meet separately and consider the objection. That scenario, however, would still ensure Bush's re-election because both bodies are controlled by Republicans.
Conyers and a few other Democrats have likened the Ohio results to the contested but much closer vote in Florida four years ago when Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore for the White House.
A small number of House Democrats challenged Florida's electoral votes in January 2001 but could not persuade a senator to join them.
January 5th, 2005 7:43 pm
Dem Lays Out Case Against Bush's Ohio Win
New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee protested President Bush's re-election Wednesday with a new report claiming serious election irregularities and ``significant disenfranchisement'' of voters in Ohio.
The report by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan says Congress should challenge the Electoral College vote when it is tallied Thursday in the House of Representatives and investigate all claims of voter problems in Ohio.
``We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election,'' the report said. ``There are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the state of Ohio.''
Ohio's 20 electoral votes were critical for Bush's defeat of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. A recount last week showed Bush winning Ohio by 118,457 votes over Kerry, according to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press.
The 102-page report titled ``Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?'' lists such problems as unusually long lines, a shortage of voting machines in Democratic-leaning areas, confusion over provisional ballot rules and computer problems.
The report also contends there were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation, improper purging of voter registration lists, a lack of inspection for about 93,000 ballots where no vote was cast for president, and vote totals not matching registration numbers or exit poll data.
``In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio,'' the report said.
Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell, called the report ``ludicrous'' and a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.
``There are absolutely no grounds for challenging Ohio's electors,'' LoParo said.
Meanwhile, a small group of House Democrats were looking for a Democratic senator to co-sponsor their challenge of Ohio's 20 electoral votes. A single senator supporting the effort would require the two chambers to meet separately and consider the objection. That scenario, however, would still ensure Bush's re-election because both bodies are controlled by Republicans.
Conyers and a few other Democrats have likened the Ohio results to the contested but much closer vote in Florida four years ago when Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore for the White House.
A small number of House Democrats challenged Florida's electoral votes in January 2001 but could not persuade a senator to join them.
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