An apology.

I haven't been writing much here at Howard Beale's Ghost of late. Why?

Politics.

With the huge growth of the Kerry campaign in the last few weeks I've been swept up in working on various projects connected with it along with posting here and there on the campaign's official blog.

Look over in the link to your right. Note the newest one that takes you to a site that I created with my MSN account. It's called VALLEY FOR KERRY and is a meeting spot on the internet for those grassroots folks working here in the San Fernando Valley to get Kerry the Democratic nomination and then the White House come the next election.

Please visit the site to learn more about Kerry. This site is geared for those living in the S.F.V. area and will feature Kerry campaign activities happening specifically for this area. It's nothing special when compared to many websites. Yet. I just wanted to get something up (I'm a newbie at creating websites) to establish a pressence for the Valley on the web concerning Kerry.

Oh, and then I do have other career projects in various stages of production. As a writer there's always something baking in the oven, being kneaded on the table or mixed up in the bowl called my brain.

Shhh, don't tell anyone. Yes, I have a life. I'm getting ready to go over to Burbank for two gatherings today (Saturday) with some friends and have a wonderful day of great food, great beer (one of my friends is the top beer consultant for the largest importer of such in Los Angeles, and thus, the world!) and great friends.

But I should have some good news for this site soon (graphics are coming). More later.

Sam Park

Let's review.



GEORGE W. BUSH RESUME
The White House, USA


ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:


I attacked and took over two countries.

I spent the U.S. surplus and bankrupted the Treasury.

I shattered the record for biggest annual deficit in history.

I have removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any
other president in US history.

I set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock
market.

I am the first president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.

I am the first president in US history to enter office with a criminal
record.

In my first year in office I set the all-time record for most days on
vacation by any president in US history.

After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, I presided
over the worst security failure in US history.

I set the record for most campaign fund raising trips by any president
in US history.

In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.

I cut unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any
other president in US history.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than
any president in US history.

I set the record for the fewest press conferences of any president
since the advent of TV.

I signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than
any other president in US history.

I presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to
intervene when corruption was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused
to use the national reserves as past presidents have.

I cut health care benefits for war veterans.

I dissolved more international treaties than any president in US
history.

I've made my presidency the most secretive and unaccountable of any in
US history.

Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US
history.

(The 'poorest' multimillionaire, Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil
tanker named after her).

I presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud in any market
in any country in the history of the world.

I am the first president in US history to order a US attack and
military occupation of a sovereign nation, and I did so against the
will of the United Nations and the world community.

I have created the largest government department bureaucracy in the
history of the United States.

I set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases,
more than any other president in US history.

I am the first president in US history to have the United Nations
remove the US from the Human Rights Commission.

I am the first president in US history to have the United Nations
remove the US from the Elections Monitoring Board.

I removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of
congressional oversight than any presidential administration in US
history.

I rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.

I withdrew from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by
default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.

I am the first president in US history to refuse United Nations
election inspectors access during the 2002 US elections.

I am the all-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate
campaign donations.

The biggest lifetime contributor to my campaign, who is also one of my
best friends, presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy
frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).

I am the first US president to establish a secret shadow government.

I took the world's sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a
year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the
biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).

I am the first US president in history to have a majority of the people
of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace
and stability.

I changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded
government contracts.

I set the all-time record for number of administration appointees who
violated US law by not selling their huge investments in corporations
bidding for government contracts.

I entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less
than two years turned every single economic category heading straight
down.


RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

I have at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas
driving record has been erased and is not available).

I was AWOL from the National Guard and deserted the military during a
time of war. I refuse to take a drug test or even answer any questions
about drug use.

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away
to my father's library, sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public
view.

All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or
bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public
view.

All minutes of meetings of any public corporation for which I served on
the board are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding
public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public
review.


PERSONAL REFERENCES: For personal references, please speak to my dad or
uncle James Baker (They can be reached in their offices at the Carlyle
Group where they are helping to divide up the spoils of the US-Iraq war
and plan for the next one.)


President Bush Ranks Lowest IQ in 50 Years of US Presidents. In a
report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton,
Pennsylvania, detailed its findings of a four-month study of the
intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the
Lovenstein Institute has published its research to the educational
community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report
among others. There have been twelve presidents over the past 50 years,
from F.D. Roosevelt to G.W. Bush, who were rated based on scholarly
achievements, writings that they produced without aid of staff, their
ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors,
which were then scored using the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence
ranking.


The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to
within five percentage points:


In IQ order:


182 .. William J. Clinton (D)

175 .. James E. Carter (D)

174 .. John F. Kennedy (D)

155 .. Richard M. Nixon (R)

147 .. Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)

132 .. Harry Truman (D)

126 .. Lyndon B. Johnson (D)

122 .. Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)

121 .. Gerald Ford (R)

105 .. Ronald Reagan (R)

098 ..George Bush (R)

091 .. George W. Bush (R)


The six Republican presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of
115.5, with President Nixon having the highest at 155. President G.W.
Bush rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. The six
Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President
Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was
rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. No president
other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176. Among comments
made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low
ratings are due to his apparently difficult command of the English
language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500
words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents),
his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an
absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual
basis. The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to
arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and
voice stress confidence analysis.


"All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under
their belt, and most had written several white papers during their
education or early careers. Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein
said. "He has no published works or writings, which made it more
difficult to arrive at an assessment. We relied more heavily on
transcripts of his unscripted public speaking." The Lovenstein
Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high caliber
historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior,
and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein,
world-renowned psychologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a
world-respected psychiatrist.





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I'm not the ONLY one seeing these rosy White House headlines on our economy floating around everytime a bad one is coughed up.



August 15, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST NY TIMES

Twilight Zone Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN


For about 20 months the U.S. economy has been operating in a twilight zone: growing too fast to meet the classic definition of a recession, but too slowly to meet the usual criteria for economic recovery. There's nothing particularly mysterious about our situation. But recent news coverage and commentary — in particular, the enthusiastic headlines that followed a modest increase in growth and a modest decline in jobless claims — suggest that some people still don't get it. So here's a brief refresher course on twilight zone Economics 101.

Since November 2001 — which the National Bureau of Economic Research, in a controversial decision, has declared the end of the recession — the U.S. economy has grown at an annual rate of about 2.6 percent. That may not sound so bad, but when it comes to jobs there has been no recovery at all. Nonfarm payrolls have fallen by, on average, 50,000 per month since the "recovery" began, accounting for 1 million of the 2.7 million jobs lost since March 2001.

Meanwhile, employment is chasing a moving target because the working-age population continues to grow. Just to keep up with population growth, the U.S. needs to add about 110,000 jobs per month. When it falls short of that, jobs become steadily harder to find. At this point conditions in the labor market are probably the worst they have been for almost 20 years. (The measured unemployment rate isn't all that high, but that's largely because many people have given up looking for work.)

All this leads to a great deal of suffering — not just lost income, but also the anxiety and humiliation that come with long-term unemployment. Is relief in sight?

Over the last few weeks two numbers have led to a spate of optimistic pronouncements. One is the preliminary estimate of second-quarter growth, which came in at a 2.4 percent annual rate — about one point higher than expected. The other is the rate of new applications for unemployment insurance, which has fallen slightly below 400,000 per week.

But while the growth and new claims numbers were good news, they didn't tell us that the economy is improving. All they said is that things are getting worse more slowly.

This should be obvious when it comes to growth. I saw headlines saying that in the second quarter growth "soared," even "rocketed." Huh? That 2.4 percent growth rate was a bit less than the average during our job-loss recovery. Just to stabilize the labor market in its present dismal state would probably take growth of at least 3.5 percent; it would take much more than that to return the economy to anything resembling full employment.

Meanwhile, about those unemployment claims: somehow that 400,000-per-week benchmark has acquired a lot more significance in people's minds than it deserves. For example, claims came in at 398,000 yesterday — and this was treated as good news because it was (barely) below the magic number.

Well, here's some perspective: since November 2001 new claims have averaged 414,000 per week. A number a bit lower than that might mean stable or slightly rising payroll employment — but as we've just seen, that's not nearly good enough. For comparison, in 2000 — a year of good but not great employment growth — weekly claims averaged 305,000. My conclusion is that the state of the unemployed won't improve unless claims fall a lot further than they have.

So is a real, unambiguous recovery just around the corner? Recent economic reports have had a "good news"-"bad news" feel to them. Businesses are starting to buy some equipment; that's good. But they seem to be engaging in replacement investment, not capacity expansion; that's bad. Consumers are spending; that's good. But rising interest rates seem to have ended the refinancing boom that put cash in consumers' pockets; that's bad. And so on.

The best guess is that growth in the second half of the year will be faster than in the first half, possibly high enough to create some jobs, but not high enough to make jobs easier to find. In other words, in terms of what matters most, the economy will continue to deteriorate.

All this is, of course, an indictment of our economic policy — a policy that has managed the remarkable trick of generating immense budget deficits without giving the economy much stimulus. But that's a subject for another day.






________________________________________________________________________

Okay, so we know THE VILLAGE VOICE is gaa-gaa over Dean in a big wet liberal way. All the liberals are (except me). Here's more evidence of how deluded they are by that raging shill for the right (just kidding), Ted Rall. So who really IS more honest?

John Kerry. More honest. More experienced. More humble by a moral standard forged on the battlefields of Viet Nam.



LOVE ME, I'M (NOT REALLY) A LIBERAL
Wed Aug 13, 8:03 PM ET
By Ted Rall

Liberal Democrats Project Their Desires onto Howard Dean


MONTPELIER, VERMONT--Howard Dean, media-anointed Lord of the Left and Prince Protector of Progressivism, is surfing a tsunami of Democratic discontent that could carry him to the White House. But as Vermonters tell anyone who's willing to listen, the former governor they call "Ho-Ho" is at best a leftie-come-lately. "The Howard Dean you are seeing on the national scene is not the Dean that we saw around here for the last decade. He's moved sharply left," says John McClaughry of the Ethan Allen Institute, a rightie think tank, of Dean's campaign rhetoric.

Vermont created proto-gay marriage "civil unions" during Dean's term--but that was the state Supreme Court's doing, not his. Even though Vermont's constitution didn't require him to balance the budget, he was a fierce deficit hawk who vetoed proposed Democratic spending. He sided with ski resort owners over environmentalists. And when big business called, he always picked up the phone. "We would meet privately with him three to four times a year to discuss our issues, and his secretary of commerce would call me once a week just to see how things were going," gushes IBM's John O'Kane.

According to Vermonters, Dean is a shrewd operator who saw millions of anti-Iraq (news - web sites) war demonstrators last spring for what they were: untapped Democratic primary voters. A few well-placed verbal broadsides spread his reputation as the only presidential contender willing to go after Bush while other Democrats remained silent or supported his war. His opportunistic Bush-bashing attracted liberal voters tired of being taken for granted and disgusted by do-nothing "Republican Lite" Dems.

Liberals are driving Dean's come-from-nowhere campaign, but they don't share his take on most issues. "If he gets the nomination, he'll run back to the center and be more mainstream," predicts Republican resort owner Bill Stenger. "He was not a left-wing wacko."

Even as Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) berates Dean for pulling the Democratic Party too far left, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich attacks him from the left, as nothing more than another Clinton--a Democrat in name only. "If someone wants to be a fiscal conservative, a good place to start is the Pentagon (news - web sites) budget and he's already taken it off the table," rages Kucinich. (Dean on the military: "I don't think you can cut the defense budget.") "How in the world can you be for peace when you won't touch a Pentagon budget that needs war to expand, that needs war in order to justify itself?"

Dean's supporters don't believe what they're told. They hear what they want to believe, and Dean provides the strident vagaries that fuel their self-delusion. "We need to know what the president knew and when he knew it," he spat when Bush got caught lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in his State of the Union address. That reference to the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings affirmed many Democrats' belief that Bush deserves serious punishment for lying about Iraq, but will President Dean turn over Bush to the International War Crimes Tribunal? Not bloody likely. And how can antiwar types reconcile Dean's support for Bush's invasion of Afghanistan (news - web sites)?

Clinton played libbies the same way in 1992. The pro-business Arkansas governor promised to stand up for workers--without naming specifics. But when he moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Clinton approved pro-corporate, GOP-authored "free trade" agreements that robbed Americans of millions of high-paying jobs, trashed the environment and did almost zilch to improve employee rights.

There's plenty of ideological self-delusion to go around. On the Republican side, George W. Bush transformed a $4 trillion federal budget surplus (over 10 years) into a $6 trillion deficit. He created an extravagantly wasteful cabinet-level bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, whose sole function is the issuance of color-coded press releases. How do fiscal conservatives justify a guy who argues that wasting $10,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter?

Political projection.

Never mind that Bush is the biggest tax and spender of any nation that has ever existed in human history; in their wacko fantasy world, he's still a "conservative."

If elected, Dean says, he plans "to do what Clinton did in 1993. We need to make a genuine effort to start to balance the budget to restore investor confidence. The second thing I would do is to support the small-business community." Some leftie! Like Clinton, he'll clean up the Republican deficit, making it impossible to fund Democratic social programs. He's pro-defense and pro-business. He's committed to the environment but he'll likely disappoint liberals on health care, taxes and trade.

Dean doesn't lie about his intentions. "I'll govern the same way I did in Vermont," he promises. So he's not the Great Left Hope. But anybody-but-Bush Democrats desperately need a hero, and Dean's elected.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)





______________________________________________________________________________

Here's a recent VILLAGE VOICE article on Dean and Arnold.

Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
What Presidential Race?
In Arnold's Shadow, Dean Could Strengthen Lead
The Village Voice /August 12th, 2003 12:00 PM



THE VILLAGE VOICE says things like, "Dean is surging ahead!" "Dean is a monster!", says THE VILLAGE VOICE.

Let's step back from the adoring liberal frenzy and look at the reality behind THE VILLAGE VOICE during the last election and apply as you will to what kind of journalism it brings to the current Dean stories it publishes. It's classic cornpone, "The come out of nowhere Cinderella story and the savior of the Little Man" Hollywood fantasy stuff.


Who was THE VILLAGE VOICE's 2000 Presidential endorsement?

RALPH NADER. Wow. Look at what that kind of pie in the sky thinking (by some pretty intelligent folks) that was. Now, think about the results.

Here are some articles done by THE VILLAGE VOICE at the time on Ralph Nader and his campaign.

Note how the slant is applied to the above article. Here are some quotes. Charles Foster Kane couldn't have written it better. It almost reads like Bill Macy's crazed horse race sportscaster in SEABISCUIT.



With Nader hovering between 6 and 8 percent in the national polls (and up to 9 percent in California), Al Gore and his team are a-frettin'. Gore doesn't want Nader included in the presidential debates, which begin October 3 (remember how Perot jumped in the polls after he was included?). The wooden man who claims to have a green heart may be undone not by a strong Republican bid but by a scold who says Gore can't truly have an environmentally friendly heart if he supports NAFTA and the WTO. The margin between Bush and Gore in polls is only 2 percent, so the "spoiler" issue weighs heavily on the minds of undecided voters and disenchanted Democrats. The Greens aim to get 5 percent of the vote, a likely possibility, which would qualify them for the ballot in 2004 and federal matching funds of about $12 million. But, given the spread, that same margin could make Gore lose. Nader isn't concerned. "Why are people asking whether I'm siphoning votes from Al Gore, rather than whether Al Gore is siphoning votes from Ralph Nader?" (Ah, how right they were and how wrong your were, Ralph)


At campaign headquarters in Washington, D.C., Nader is sequestered upstairs doing a phone interview with Newsweek...

...Nader's campaign staff—35 people and growing—includes twentysomething alumni of Seattle and D.C. organizing efforts, a filmmaker, a punk rocker. His campaign manager, Theresa Amato, 36, comes from Public Citizen. New to the team is Bill Hillsman, media adviser to Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura's campaign. One idea Hillsman likes for a Naderite slogan: "Bush and Gore make me want to Ralph."

...the Green Party in the 1996 presidential election—and won about 1 percent of the vote, roughly 700,000 votes, on a $5000 budget. But they didn't run much of a campaign then. This time, they're serious. Their campaign is not just a gesture of protest—it's about transforming the two-party system, entering the belly to change the beast...

...For a campaign that's raised only $1.1 million—though it has hopes for $5 million more—the thousands of volunteers are as critical as the celebrities who help raise the cash. A Paul Newman house party brought in nearly $40,000; Phil Donahue, Susan Sarandon, and Warren Beatty make up some of Nader's Hollywood connection...

...Nader embarked on a grueling 50-state tour prior to the Green convention in June, and now will likely limit his travel to the West Coast, New England, and spot visits to the Midwest...

...With a flurry Nader comes down the stairs, and we hustle into the car that CNN has sent for him...

...Nader settles into the isolation of the remote-satellite room, where his image will be beamed to Atlanta for CNN's TalkBack Live, and from there into the living room of the everyman, for whom he says he speaks...

...Almost five months into the campaign, there are some choice issues he'd like to convey, he tells the Voice, not least among them that he intends to raise funds sans PACs and soft contributions. He'll rail against corporate welfare ("What are we doing giving Microsoft a $20 billion tax break?") and offer a plan to use the national surplus to alleviate child poverty and initiate a public works project that would reinvigorate mass transit, health clinics, and schools. How might he accomplish this? Through massive citizen mobilization, he says...

Onscreen, Nader lifts his head when given the signal that the commercial break is over. A viewer question comes in: "Are you a Marxist?" Nader replies: "No. I think big corporations are destroying capitalism. Ask a lot of small businesses around the country how they're pressed and exploited and deprived by their big-business predators."

...Beneath Nader's image on the TV, e-mailed comments stream across the screen: "At least Nader pulls his own strings. There's no real difference between Gore and Bush." "I hope all you liberals vote for him so we can have Bush." "Buchanan is the only patriot running." "Finally a true champion who won't desert us."...

...he commands attention when he walks into a room, and his people-centered solutions, delivered with an armory of stats and anecdotes, draw in those who have a chance to hear him speak....

(And here's the part that I think sells the slant the most)

...A CNN poll taken at the end of the show tallies 86 percent of viewers saying they'd vote for a third-party candidate. Even the control-room director, who had initially scoffed, is converted. It's no wonder Nader and the Greens want in on the debates...

...What Nader and the Greens hope to build is a vital progressive movement. While there are currently 78 Greens in elected office, at least 117 are running for office this year in various state and local elections. Their future depends, in part, on their ability to maintain momentum and money...

...Nader's not worried about a Democratic loss of the White House. "If half the voters stayed home in 1996, that tells you something," he says. "The two parties aren't doing their job." But wouldn't a Bush victory bring about the nomination of pro-life judges to the Supreme Court? No, Nader says, it's not that simple...

And now something from Nader and THE VILLAGE VOICE in December 2000.

Scoundrel. Spoiler. Narcissist. This fall the left warred over whether a vote for Nader was a vote for progress, a vote in protest, or worse, a vote for Bush. As Gore lost Florida, Nader's critics charged that his 97,000 or so votes in that state had cost the Democrats the election. Never mind Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush and his cousin at Fox news, uncounted African American votes, the Florida courts, and finally, the U.S. Supreme Court. And never mind Gore himself. No, it all comes back to Ralph Nader. The Voice asked him to respond.



So. That's the story on the crack team of political journalists working for you at THE VILLAGE VOICE.

That last quote above pretty well sums up what a Dean run is going to be like for the White House. Same as with McCarthy. Same as with McGovern. The symbol for the Democratic Party is a mule. A mule is a beast that never learns from its mistakes and is so stubborn it will sit down on a busy street and get run over by a truck. A truck driven by an elephant. An elephant that never forgets.




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Welcome to the Bush world of tax-cuts and gimmicks so the rich don't have to pay taxes. Everyone suffers. Especially our military. Only John Kerry's deep understanding of our government and the military will get us out of this GOP mess.



August 12, 2003
NY TIMES
Thanks for the M.R.E.'s
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A few days ago I talked to a soldier just back from Iraq. He'd been in a relatively calm area; his main complaint was about food. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, his unit was still eating the dreaded M.R.E.'s: meals ready to eat. When Italian troops moved into the area, their food was "way more realistic" — and American troops were soon trading whatever they could for some of that Italian food.

Other stories are far worse. Letters published in Stars and Stripes and e-mail published on the Web site of Col. David Hackworth (a decorated veteran and Pentagon critic) describe shortages of water. One writer reported that in his unit, "each soldier is limited to two 1.5-liter bottles a day," and that inadequate water rations were leading to "heat casualties." An American soldier died of heat stroke on Saturday; are poor supply and living conditions one reason why U.S. troops in Iraq are suffering such a high rate of noncombat deaths?

The U.S. military has always had superb logistics. What happened? The answer is a mix of penny-pinching and privatization — which makes our soldiers' discomfort a symptom of something more general.

Colonel Hackworth blames "dilettantes in the Pentagon" who "thought they could run a war and an occupation on the cheap." But the cheapness isn't restricted to Iraq. In general, the "support our troops" crowd draws the line when that support might actually cost something.

The usually conservative Army Times has run blistering editorials on this subject. Its June 30 blast, titled "Nothing but Lip Service," begins: "In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately." The article goes on to detail a series of promises broken and benefits cut.

Military corner-cutting is part of a broader picture of penny-wise-pound-foolish government. When it comes to tax cuts or subsidies to powerful interest groups, money is no object. But elsewhere, including homeland security, small-government ideology reigns. The Bush administration has been unwilling to spend enough on any aspect of homeland security, whether it's providing firefighters and police officers with radios or protecting the nation's ports. The decision to pull air marshals off some flights to save on hotel bills — reversed when the public heard about it — was simply a sound-bite-worthy example. (Air marshals have told MSNBC.com that a "witch hunt" is now under way at the Transportation Security Administration, and that those who reveal cost-cutting measures to the media are being threatened with the Patriot Act.)

There's also another element in the Iraq logistical snafu: privatization. The U.S. military has shifted many tasks traditionally performed by soldiers into the hands of such private contractors as Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. The Iraq war and its aftermath gave this privatized system its first major test in combat — and the system failed.

According to the Newhouse News Service, "U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up." Not surprisingly, civilian contractors — and their insurance companies — get spooked by war zones. The Financial Times reports that the dismal performance of contractors in Iraq has raised strong concerns about what would happen in a war against a serious opponent, like North Korea.

Military privatization, like military penny-pinching, is part of a pattern. Both for ideological reasons and, one suspects, because of the patronage involved, the people now running the country seem determined to have public services provided by private corporations, no matter what the circumstances. For example, you may recall that in the weeks after 9/11 the Bush administration and its Congressional allies fought tooth and nail to leave airport screening in the hands of private security companies, giving in only in the face of overwhelming public pressure. In Iraq, reports The Baltimore Sun, "the Bush administration continues to use American corporations to perform work that United Nations agencies and nonprofit aid groups can do more cheaply."

In short, the logistical mess in Iraq isn't an isolated case of poor planning and mismanagement: it's telling us what's wrong with our current philosophy of government.





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The hangover for cutting taxes and expecting miracles when no money is available. Here's to the Jarvis tax-cutting gimmicks that started this mess.

Golden State just reflects nation's ills
Jay Bookman The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
E-mail:jbookman@ajc.com

These days, volunteering to be governor of California seems as foolhardy as volunteering to serve as captain of the Titanic.

AFTER the Titanic hit the iceberg.

The state is a mess. Its budget is a patched-together disaster, its political culture has collapsed, its economy is in a tailspin, and for the first time in recorded history more people are fleeing the Golden State than coming in.

And yet scores of people -- a millionaire, a movie star, a columnist, a porno king ... everybody but the Professor and Mary Anne -- are apparently eager to take responsibility for all that.

It's funny in a way, at least for those of us safely watching the three-ring circus from the grandstands. Many people around the country even seem to be taking a certain glee in the woes of a state that for so long has been the subject of envy.

But that's a dangerous attitude. California has long been our leading cultural, political and economic indicator. The sun may rise in the east and move westward, but trends, like storm systems, tend to move in the other direction, rising first in the West and moving to the East.

In fact, California's crisis is the natural culmination of two trends already visible in the country as a whole.

First, we increasingly treat politics not as a means of self-government but as a bloodsport fought both to entertain the masses and to vent our deep-seated cultural resentments against each other. Politics has always been brutal, of course, but it was brutal like boxing was brutal. There were still rules, with a referee and a set of rules and a patina of civil behavior.

No longer. Politics in California and elsewhere has devolved into a cage fight from which only the winner emerges alive, and victory justifies any tactic. Governing is far less important than getting the chance to gouge out the other guy's eyeball.

The second trend at work is fiscal irresponsibility. Californians are angry at Gov. Gray Davis and other leaders because they're finally being forced to confront the yawning chasm that has developed between the services that they demand from their government and their unwillingness to tax themselves enough to finance those services.

On the federal level, a similar chasm exists between what we demand of government and what resources we are willing to provide to meet those demands. The true magnitude of that gap has been hard to envision, though, because measures such as the national debt and deficit only measure what the gap used to be, not what it will be.

Recently, however, two economists for the conservative American Enterprise Institute decided to compare what the federal government is already obligated to spend in the future against the revenue that Uncle Sam can expect to collect, based on current policies. The results, published in a paper last month, were stunning.

According to Jagadeesh Gohkale and Kent Smetters, the federal government faces a future fiscal imbalance of $44.2 trillion. (For comparison purposes, the total national debt, incurred since the nation began, is a mere $6.75 trillion.)

And with the baby boom generation set to ease into retirement soon, almost all of that fiscal imbalance can be attributed to looming Social Security and Medicare costs. As the two AEI economists note, today's generations will enjoy the benefits of that spending while our kids and children not yet born will get stuck with the bill.

"In the absence of economic or demographic developments dramatically different from anything anticipated, massive tax increases or benefit reductions are inevitable," AEI President Christopher Demuth writes in a foreword to the Gohkale and Smetters report.

And unfortunately, because of a civic laziness in which the sober duties of citizenship and self-government are shrugged off in favor of talk-radio shtick, we lack the ability to address that problem responsibly.

To paraphrase that old song, "California, here we come. . . ."




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It's happening from Texas to California. The GOP is trying to usurp the law to take over governments it could not win by the ballot.



Page 11A

Conservatives wrongly seek 'government by tantrum'

By Ross K. Baker

How ironic it is that American conservatives, who once argued so vigorously that the United States was not a democracy but a representative republic, should now be in the vanguard of those eager to bypass representative institutions and have voters write laws and remove officials in the voting booth.

More paradoxically, California Republicans, in their campaign to recall Gov. Gray Davis, find themselves in strange ideological company. By pushing direct democracy to its limits, they're in league with the counterculture leaders of the 1960s and '70s who argued for participatory democracy.

These troubling ideas are the same: Cut out the middleman. Let people rule without elected intermediaries. That it is happening in California, which often is a model for the rest of the country, is more unsettling. It would be ruinous for other states if they followed California's example.

Direct democracy is a venerable practice. In ancient Greece, citizens would meet to pass the laws that would govern them. In New England towns, residents gather to pass budgets and adopt ordinances. But even on New England's modest scale, direct democracy operates in an indifferent fashion. The highest civic value is usually keeping property taxes low.

Put in broader terms

Translated to as large and complex a place as California, direct democracy results in wild policy gyrations, hasty actions that courts must correct and damage to institutions. Term limits for California Assembly and Senate members have, for example, forced out lawmakers just as they're beginning to comprehend the complexity of the policies they must enact, and magnified the influence of lobbyists.

Californians have, by initiative and referendum, capped property taxes, reduced local governments to mendicants, denied health care to illegal immigrants and will now likely vote to recall an unpopular governor and set in motion a scramble to choose his successor.

The Oct. 7 ballot has come to resemble the cast of a Hollywood epic. The headliners and bit players range from actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and columnist Arianna Huffington to a sumo wrestler and porn magnate Larry Flynt.

California is far too important to be manipulated by political pitchmen. From Howard Jarvis and his tax-cutting gimmicks to Darrell Issa and his feel-good remedy for popular dissatisfaction with Davis, these hucksters unleash on Californians an avalanche of advertising designed to gull the public. If direct democracy California style is presented as a way to curb the influence of special interests, it is pure, undiluted snake oil.

Where idea began

California's noble idea of direct democracy came just before World War I. It was one of those populist surges, when legislators, even governors, were in the clutch of railroads and other industrial giants; so initiative, referendum and recall were instituted to take back the reins of government.

Used in moderation, these devices usually produced positive results. But when used as blunt instruments, they threatened the very institutions they were designed to safeguard. Much of California's current quagmire can be blamed on previous unwise ballot measures, especially stripping the legislature of its most experienced members, which probably contributed to this year's disastrous budget impasse.

So what's the alternative? Do we accept that all such places are ungovernable, or do we perform the kind of radical surgery California did 92 years ago, when it instituted the recall?

Neither response addresses the heart of the problem. The problem is with a public that is apathetic or outraged, sullen or rebellious. Popular anger focuses only intermittently on state government.

The framers of the Constitution bequeathed us a federal system, an early recognition that one size does not fit all and that a country destined to be vast and diverse needed expansion joints for healthy growth. To the states, then, were reserved important powers to do everything from educate our children to license hairdressers.

What states, governors and legislatures do may not always please us. But they're too important to be subjected to the whimsy of self-interested panacea peddlers.

Government by tantrum is unworthy of a free people.

Ross K. Baker is a political science professor at Rutgers University.






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Al's words bear a closer examination (and yes, he's right about how Bush is leading the nation down a twisted path into darkness).


August 11, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Art of the False Impression
By BOB HERBERT

Al Gore slipped into Manhattan last week and gave a rousing speech downtown before a very young audience at New York University. He got some coverage, but Mr. Gore has never been mistaken for an entertainer. In the superamplified media din created by the likes of Arnold and Kobe and Ben and Jen, it's very difficult for the former vice president, a certified square, to break into the national conversation.

That says a lot about us and the direction we're headed in as a nation. You can agree with Mr. Gore's politics or not, but some of the points he's raising, especially with regard to President Bush's credibility on such crucial issues as war and terror and the troubled economy, deserve much closer attention.

"Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country, and that some important American values are being placed at risk," said Mr. Gore.

Keeping his language polite, the former vice president asserted that the Bush administration had allowed "false impressions" to somehow make their way into the public's mind. Enormous numbers of Americans thus came to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks and was actively supporting Al Qaeda; that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat, and Iraq was on the verge of building nuclear weapons; that U.S. troops would be welcomed with open arms, and there was little danger of continued casualties in a prolonged guerrilla war.

The essence of Mr. Gore's speech was that these corrosive false impressions were part of a strategic pattern of distortion that the Bush administration used to create support not just for the war, but for an entire ideologically driven agenda that overwhelmingly favors the president's wealthy supporters and is driving the federal government toward a long-term fiscal catastrophe.

What if Mr. Gore is right? There's something at least a little crazy about an environment in which people are literally stumbling over one another to hear what Arnold Schwarzenegger has to say about the budget crisis in California (short answer: nothing), while ignoring what a thoughtful former vice president has to say about the budget and the economy of the U.S.

Voters with children and grandchildren who may someday have to shoulder the backbreaking debt that is being piled up by the Bush crowd might want to carefully examine some of the points Mr. Gore is raising. The Bush administration would have you believe he is talking nonsense. But what if he's not?

"Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs — net losses for three years in a row," said Mr. Gore. "That hasn't happened since the Great Depression." He then looked at the audience and deadpanned, to tremendous laughter: "As I've noted before, I was the first one laid off."

Credibility is the Bush administration's Achilles' heel. If the public comes to believe that it cannot trust the administration about its reasons for going to war, about the real costs of the war in human lives and American dollars, about the actual state of the nation's defenses against terror and about the real beneficiaries of its economic policies, the Bush II presidency will be crippled, if not doomed.

This is an administration that is particularly sensitive to light. It prefers to do business behind closed doors, with the curtains and shades drawn. Enormous taxpayer-financed contracts are handed out to a favored few without competitive bidding. We still don't know what went on at the secret meetings between Dick Cheney and top energy industry executives at the very beginning of the Bush reign.

"It seems obvious," said Mr. Gore, "that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first pre-emptive war in U.S. history should have been covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people, before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes — and the die — were cast."

The Bush administration has managed to dodge the hard questions and benefit from an atmosphere in which the media and much of the public would rather contemplate Jennifer's navel and Arnold's fading pecs than pursue a possible pattern of deceit at the highest levels of government.




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The GOP talking heads continue to beat the drum for Dean, their official candidate and the one the Bush Political Machine is salivating to run against. Sam Tanenhaus, a Tailgunner Joe McCarthy witchhunt apologist and upcoming author of a William F. Buckley biography (can you be more rightwing than that and he also works for the wealthy elitist rag, VANITY FAIR), is happy to report that "radicals" like Dean (yeah, like McCarthy and McGovern were considered "radical candidates" in their day) will actually be good for the Democratic Party. Sheesh! I predicted this covert cheerleading was kicking into gear when George Will (the slick "WILLie" of the GOP media gang) started up the band. Scrol down to see that article listed on August 7th below.



August 11, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR NY TIMES
How the 'Radicals' Can Save the Democrats
By SAM TANENHAUS

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — A battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has broken out, pitting a predominantly liberal field of presidential hopefuls against moderate party leaders and political strategists. While Howard Dean and John Kerry have been stirring up crowds plainly eager to have at President Bush, Democratic officials have been trying to tamp the fervor down, warning that "extremists" will take the party back to the dark ages of 1972 and 1984.

True, with Mr. Bush looking formidable and the Republicans in control of Congress, the urge toward moderation may seem sensible. But it ignores a glaring fact: Republicans have repeatedly won elections in recent decades largely by taking the opposite approach: giving free rein to their raucous base and choosing candidates who excite the party's rank and file. And isn't that, after all, what political parties are supposed to do?

Certainly, none of the top Democratic contenders are truly radical. Mr. Kerry, who happens to be the wealthiest member of the Senate, perhaps went overboard when he read aloud the pay packages of several business executives at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. event the other day. But if he's an extremist, so was Franlin D. Roosevelt, who railed against "unscrupulous money changers" in 1933. And to exaggerate the threat of an imminent "far left" takeover of the party — as Senator Evan Bayh, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, recently did — really implies a repudiation of much of the party's traditional beliefs.

Besides, it is not at all clear that far-left ideology was the cause of past Democratic defeats — or that ideology plays a truly decisive role in presidential elections. While political strategists and pundits tend think in terms of sharply delineated issues, most voters do not. "The American Voter," the landmark study by University of Michigan researchers published in 1960 and still a very useful guide to its subject, found that only one-fourth of the electorate held a clear opinion on most issues and identified those positions with one party or the other. A mere 2 percent could be classified as holding a consistently "ideological" position on overall policy.

And to judge from recent elections, little has changed. In the 1980's the public supported the anti-Soviet, anti-government views of Ronald Reagan. In the 1990's the same public favored the globalist, pro-government politics of Bill Clinton. And neither president was held to the bar of consistency, whether it was the conservative Mr. Reagan creating huge deficits or the liberal Mr. Clinton dismantling welfare.

So, too, with President Bush, who now seems a small-government conservative (tax cuts for the rich), now a big-government liberal (prescription drug benefits), now a social liberal (favoring some types of affirmative action), now a social conservative (opposed to gay marriage).

But if abstract ideology plays a limited role in presidential races, the importance of ideologues and extremists — that is, of people who cling to strong beliefs — can't be overstated. It is they who bring passion and energy to politics, as Dr. Dean's Web-linked legions are now doing. Without these "radicals," parties can lose their way.

The Republican establishment learned this lesson almost despite itself in the 1964 election. Democrats would do well to study that campaign, too, since its circumstances were remarkably similar to those unfolding today.

Back then, of course, the positions were reversed. A strong Democratic incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, was buoyed by a national crisis that rallied the public behind him: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Republican Party chieftains, facing almost certain defeat, wanted to anoint a moderate candidate like Nelson Rockefeller or William Scranton, who could at least make a respectable showing.

But the party rank and file, tired of me-too politics and demanding "a choice, not an echo," ardently backed the conservative Barry Goldwater. Party moderates, sounding just like today's worried Democrats, warned that Goldwater was an extremist whose nomination might marginalize the party for decades to come. They mounted a last-minute offensive to stop him, but Goldwater squeaked through, shocking his adversaries (and thrilling his followers) when he declared in his acceptance speech: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." After that, most agreed, he was finished. And indeed he was trounced by Johnson.

But for Republicans this was not the devastating setback it appeared. On the contrary, it was the crucial first step toward a historic victory. Goldwater's "extremism" turned out, on closer inspection, to be a form of idealism that revitalized the conservative movement in the years ahead. Youthful veterans of the Goldwater movement — including Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation and Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus — help set a new policy agenda. Richard Viguerie, a member of the pro-Goldwater group Young Americans for Freedom, became an innovative fund-raiser. Patrick Buchanan, another Goldwaterite, helped formulate the more conservative components of Richard Nixon's agenda as a White House speechwriter.

Over time the party shed its "me too" approach and developed a more sophisticated ideological style, which culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory. Today it is Lyndon Johnson's big-government heirs whom centrist Democrats say are on the fringes, while the Goldwater-influenced conservatives plausibly claim to occupy the mainstream.

The Republican Party would never again underestimate the uses of zeal and continues to exploit it. In fact, even as the Democratic Leadership Council sounded its alarm in Philadelphia, some 1,000 young right-wing firebrands assembled at the Republican college convention in Washington. They excitedly discussed Ann Coulter's new book "Treason," which depicts liberals as the enemy within, and heard from a prominent lobbyist who described Democrats as "the ascension of evil, the bad guys, the Bolsheviks." Other highlights were speeches by Tom DeLay, the vociferous House majority leader, and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political maestro, who looked delighted by the enthusiasm of these extremists.

Our two major parties seem to have swapped identities. The Republican establishment, presumably allied with the rich and privileged, embraces its populist core of hard-edged activists, while the Democratic elite, supposed champions of "the people," evidently fears them. Only one party has learned the lesson of 1964 — that extremists should not be lectured to but listened to, because they may have something important to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.





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Something is happening in the Midwest when the CHICAGO TRIBUNE prints a perspective on Bush as a slick liar and his administration is filled with the same. Here is an excellent breakdown on the immoral lying and corrupt manipulation of the Bush administration in regards to the events leading up to the Iraq war.


Administration's argument long on drama, short on facts

By Michael McConnell. Michael McConnell is regional director of the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago

August 3, 2003 CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Defending the invasion of Iraq, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently declared that the United States, in light of Sept. 11, has the right to attack other nations, even on the basis of "murky intelligence." Unable to defend the quality of evidence used for the Iraq war, the Bush administration now wants to defend its ambiguity. Sept. 11, like a good religious savior, absolves us of all sins.

Murky data is itself a dubious, even immoral rationale for war, but the evidence presented by the Bush administration for war in Iraq was not even "murky." It was exaggerated, distorted, selective and fabricated evidence masquerading as absolute certainty.

In the months leading up to the war, the Bush administration portrayed the Iraq threat as certain, imminent and frightening. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice imagined a mushroom cloud. President Bush dramatized links to Al Qaeda, conjuring up smallpox epidemics. Last October he even hyped Iraq's aerial drones as capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction to the U.S., while conveniently omitting that they had a range of only 300 miles.

Kicking off the campaign for war on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000--it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."

Linking this massive destruction to Sept. 11 was so effective that a Knight Ridder poll showed that 50 percent of respondents believed that some Iraqis were among the hijackers on board the planes that hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when none was.

Knowledge and certainty

The message from the Bush administration was constantly one of knowledge and certainty based on secret intelligence. In September, Bush told the UN, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

In a February radio address, the president declared with equal certainty, "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons." Even 10 days into the war, Rumsfeld, speaking of the weapons, told ABC News, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

No doubts, no questions, rather absolute certainty and frightening threats have been the currency of the Bush administration--long on drama and assertion, short on facts. The evidence mounts that this was an unnecessary and manufactured war based on deceptive arguments and outright lies claiming an Iraq nuclear threat, links to Al Qaeda and huge stores of biological and chemical weapons.

The nuclear threat argument started last September when Rice said on television that the only use for aluminum tubes that Iraq recently had obtained was for uranium centrifuges needed for nuclear weapons. Bush reiterated the tube argument in his September address to the UN. Many intelligence analysts were appalled because a debate was raging inside the intelligence community about their use. Many analysts concluded they were for conventional rockets, a viewpoint confirmed by British intelligence.

The Niger uranium purchase, based on forged documents, has been equally discredited. A former ambassador who investigated the purchase claim told The New Republic, "They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive."

Bulletproof?

The links to Al Qaeda, central to the fear mongering of the Bush administration, were even more tenuous. In September, Rumsfeld said there was "bulletproof evidence" of a Hussein-Al Qaeda link.

The big evidence was a meeting between an Iraqi agent and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Czech Republic, based on one unreliable source. Hard evidence of receipts and travel documents put Atta in the U.S. at the time.

Another strand to the claim was that Al Qaeda members were being sheltered in Iraq and had set up a camp to provide training in the use of poison weapons. Not mentioned was that the camp was in northern Iraq, an area controlled by the Kurds, not by Hussein. When U.S. troops reached the camp, they found no chemical or biological traces.

But in June, the UN Committee on Terrorism concluded that nothing had been found indicating such a link. On the chemical and biological weapons front, the Bush administration campaigned to discredit the UN inspectors when they found nothing. Now with free reign in the country and Iraqi scientists free to talk--the two conditions the U.S. insisted were necessary to find weapons--no weapons have been uncovered.

In addition to stonewalling the Sept. 11 investigation and the contrived Pfc. Jessica Lynch "rescue," a litany of assertions gone sour characterizes the Bush administration over the past few months. In May, Bush declared that they had found weapons of mass destruction in the form of two trailers. Independent international scientists quickly disproved that assertion.

Rumsfeld refused to answer about the cost of the war and then gave figures that grossly underestimated the tab to taxpayers. They purported to have a solid plan for postwar Iraq but now admit it was based on faulty assumptions. Rumsfeld insisted that no guerrilla war existed in Iraq, only to have Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, proclaim that indeed such a war was raging.

Since Bush's jet landing on the aircraft carrier declaring, "mission accomplished," more than 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed, with more dying daily. This adds up to a pattern of half-truths, deceptions and outrageous hyperbole that go far beyond a mere 16 words in the State of the Union address.

Trying to mesmerize

The Bush administration knows neither shame nor remorse over any of these errors. In the face of the unfolding reality in Iraq, the president simply reiterates the false claims of Iraq's danger without even trying to justify them. Constantly repeating the past stock answers, he wants to mesmerize us into forgetting that he is avoiding the real questions.

The Iraq war has cost the lives of more than 160 U.S. soldiers and several thousand innocent Iraqi civilians. Will those deaths now justify Iraq's future use of "murky intelligence" to attack others?

The majority of the people in the United States backed the Iraq war because of the certainty of the administration's rationale and a deep trust in the president. It is time to determine whether he and his administration merited that trust. The credibility and integrity of the United States of America are at stake.

We deserve a congressionally appointed independent commission to investigate the justifications for war. How high up does the deception go? What did the president know and when did he know it? A democracy, in matters of war and death, must have standards higher than "murky." We cannot settle for anything less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help us God.






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The White House's handling of the Wilson revelations is not only disgusting, it's criminal and immoral. Worse, it's an act of treason. Here's a President and his administration willing to tar a CIA agent over its own bad judgement and in the process risk the lives of other CIA agents. They should find the bastards that "outed" this agent and throw the book at them (it's certified treason). How much do you want to bet that Bush pardons the White House people responsible for this like his old man did with all the Iran Contra gang? And this boob ran on the platform of bringing "honor and intigrity" back to the White House. The only thing he brought with him to the job was a spoiled, stupid rich kid's sense of entitlement and a false feeling of superiority to reality.

August 8, 2003
WEAPONS INTELLIGENCE
Iraq Arms Critic Reacts to Report on Wife
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 — Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador who was a secret envoy of the Bush administration to Africa and who publicly voiced doubts about a reported Iraqi weapons program, says he has become a target of a campaign to discourage others like him from going public.

In the prewar effort to uncover information about weapons in Iraq, Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency. His findings challenged contentions in an unsubstantiated document that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear-weapons material from the West African country.

But it was not until after Mr. Wilson made his account public last month in an op-ed article in The New York Times, to the intense discomfort of President Bush's aides, that the White House acknowledged that it had erred in including the disputed accusations in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address in January.

Days after the column, another chapter opened. Mr. Wilson's wife was identified by name as a covert C.I.A. operative in a column by the conservative columnist Robert Novak, a disclosure that Mr. Novak has attributed to senior administration officials.

Officials are barred by law from disclosing the identities of Americans who work undercover for the C.I.A. That provision is intended to protect the security of operatives whose lives might be jeopardized if their identities are known.

Among those who have cried foul are several Democratic senators, including Charles E. Schumer of New York, who have said that if the accusation is true and if senior administration officials were its source, law enforcement authorities should seek to identify the officials who appeared to have violated the law. Mr. Schumer has asked Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to look into the case.

Mr. Wilson, who as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad in 1990 was the last American diplomat to meet President Saddam Hussein, said the events were evidence of distressing American heavy-handedness.

"The issue was never about her," Mr. Wilson said of his wife in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "The issue was about who so badly staffed the president of the United States that they would put into a State of the Union address something that was so transparently unsubstantiable, and this from an administration that came to office saying it wanted to restore dignity and honor to the White House. It wasn't to intimidate me, because I'd already said my piece. Clearly, this was to keep others from stepping forward."

White House officials have said they would not condone disclosing any undercover C.I.A. operative.

In the run-up to the war, Mr. Wilson appeared frequently on television as an expert on Iraq. He freely offered his opinion that the best American policy would be to postpone any war and focus on intense international inspections to find weapons of mass destruction.

That opinion certainly won him no friends in the administration, which was arguing that the moment for inspections had passed.

The fact that a retired American envoy had traveled to Niger to look into an Iraqi connection was acknowledged by the administration this year. But Mr. Wilson said he had decided to discuss his role publicly early last month after concluding that efforts by senior administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to pass off his findings as having been shared just with low-ranking intelligence officials were "simply inconsistent" with the facts that he knew.

"It was pretty clear that it had gotten to the right people," Mr. Wilson said in the interview.

The deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, has publicly taken responsibility for the inclusion in the State of the Union speech of 16 words that repeated the disputed reports about Iraq's efforts to obtain nuclear material from Niger.

Mr. Wilson, who had told the C.I.A. and the State Department after his visit that there was no basis for that report, said in the interview that he had "tried to avoid taking a victory lap" after his comments prompted the White House acknowledgments. But he had begun to speak out again, in television interviews including one on "Today" on NBC, "until such time as you got those lowlifes over there deciding they would take some whacks at my wife."

Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is known to friends as an energy industry analyst. In the interview, Mr. Wilson said he had no doubt that those who sought to bring his wife into the controversy intended to sound a warning to others who might take on the White House on the charged issue of whether intelligence about Iraq was reshaped or ignored to fit a political agenda.

Mr. Novak cited administration officials as saying Mr. Wilson was chosen for the Niger mission because of Ms. Plame's connection to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Wilson said his qualifications — as an Africa expert, a former ambassador to Gabon and the senior director for African affairs on the staff of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton — made him more than amply suited for the task.

The broad issue of whether intelligence information about Iraq, its weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism was subjected to undue influence is under investigation by the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence.

Among current intelligence analysts questioned by the committee staffs, just one, Christian P. Westermann of the State Department, has been identified by name as having said Mr. Wilson perceived political pressure in his work on Iraq. Some other former and current intelligence officials who have spoken to reporters have made broadly similar charges.

Mr. Wilson said the Niger trip was prompted by an inquiry from Vice President Dick Cheney to a C.I.A. briefer. The conclusion that there was no basis to the report on nuclear materials was also reached by the United States Embassy in Niamey, the capital, and by an American general who visited there about the same time.




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Need the facts? Here's a QuickTime movie showcasing the odyssey of John Kerry's journey seeking the Democratic nomination for President.

Look to the right in the LINKS section for The COURAGE of JOHN KERRY and click on the link.

See the images and hear the words of the most qualified person running for President today and the only one that can beat Bush and the vicious GOP machine that will stop at nothing to keep the White House in the hands of the wealthiest and most powerful elite in the world. John Kerry has the steel in his backbone, tempered by battle in war and hard-nosed debate of our country's leading institutions of government, to take on the monied interests who have co-opted our democracy with a slick Madison Avenue PR front.

Bookmark this link with its call to COURAGE from John Kerry and view it when you need to understand the depth of the man's convictions and his lifetime of service to our country. Pass it along to others who are seeking to find a candidate worthy of their trust in these troubled times.

No other candidate can compare to JOHN KERRY.

The GOP media machine

I keep seeing these rosey reports exaggerating the economy's upside at Yahoo! News. You have to hand it to this White House for understanding how the news media competes for stories and that current headlines trump the one posted five minutes earlier. It keeps its media machine pumping out the slanted headlines over the real stuff by the second. Especially dealling with the economy. You'll read how the jobless rate has dropped in a headline but it won't mention how that rate is still at the bottom of the barrel for the first time since the last Bush administration. You'll see how less people are filing for unemployment in those White House manufactured headlines but you won't see mentioned that's because millions of people have given up on finding a job.

This is one of the most unreported on but most important stories of this GOP (I hesistate to call it a Bush-run administration) Machine that is running this White House. The GOP elite (both the ones IN government and those from the corporate boardrooms that finance and control the party) have an incredible band of media specialists working to tweak the news or take it over completely if only by winning the battle of competing headlines. This is the Madison Avenue crowd that has the best and the brightest money can hire to run its focus groups and come from polling and advertising backgrounds. They are in place at the White House and actually re-write reporters' stories when submitted to clarify certain techincial or policy fine points. They even own a network, Fox, and run its news under cover of "fair and balanced" reporting and use the disclaimer, "you decide", to get them off the hook on their slanted news. Hell, the GOP has even taken to forcing corporations to put GOP activists in as their lobbyists so as to keep the party line sacrosaint.

We're a democracy in name only today. Orwell's warnings play on deaf ears, drowned out by all those rosy commentaries on the TV and radio while the same headlines blind the print media.





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It's Official, Dean Is GOP's Dream

It's official. The GOP is pushing for Dean to get the nomination. When George Will starts writing Dean up as a potential "threat" you know the GOP has started its stealth campaign in the media. Will, if you remember your election history, worked with a stolen Carter debating points primer to coach Reagan before a national debate. Then Will went on national TV to perform "unbiased" analysis of that debate and declared Reagan the winner. Later the facts came out that Will was involved with the stolen material and the coaching. Did he ever apologize or fess up for being a liar? What do you think? The underhanded Will is a proven shill for the GOP political elite who have the media talking heads starting the drumbeat. Watch for Rush and the rest to follow suit over the next few weeks.





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Karl Rove is such a craven soulless sort of character that he hardly seems to be a real human being. It's as if he fell out of a lost story by Charles Dickens.


August 6, 2003 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Karl Rove's Water Policy

It's hardly news that Karl Rove, President Bush's political strategist, keeps a hawklike eye on domestic policies emerging from the executive branch, the better to make sure that everything meshes with his boss's political interests and those of the Republican Party. Yet rarely have Mr. Rove's efforts to bend policy to politics been more transparent than his intervention in a seemingly remote dispute involving water rights in Oregon's Klamath River basin. As detailed in a Wall Street Journal report last week, Mr. Rove has worked almost obsessively behind the scenes to ensure that the outcome satisfies the party's agricultural base at the expense of conservationists and Indian tribes.

At issue is a long-simmering dispute over water flows in the Klamath River, which runs through southern Oregon and Northern California. Even in good years these flows can barely satisfy rival claims. Farmers want water for irrigation, while conservationists and Indian tribes want it for endangered fish species, including downriver salmon. The farmers have prevailed at almost every step of the way. In March 2002, the administration staged an elaborate ceremony in Klamath Falls to release irrigation water that had been held back to help the fish. In May, it unveiled a 10-year plan widely seen as pro-farmer. The fish have done less well. Last year, 33,000 salmon died in the lower Klamath, in one of the country's biggest fish kills. A subsequent report by the state of California blamed federal policies. Two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that the 10-year plan itself contained flawed science.

The farmers clearly owe a considerable debt to Mr. Rove. He has journeyed to Oregon twice in the past 19 months to solicit their views, and early last year he showed up at a Fish and Wildlife Service retreat to make clear that agricultural interests came first. The Interior Department insists that Mr. Rove did not order any particular "outcome," though it would have been hard to miss the message.

The distressing thing here is that the administration is spending so much time on politics that it is ignoring obvious win-win solutions that could benefit all stakeholders. One idea is to have the federal government buy land from willing sellers, thus reducing agricultural demand for water and freeing up reliable supplies for everyone. That could provide a more lasting gift to the region than Mr. Rove's shortsighted politics can possibly confer.




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Dowd lays it out. Bush is a dullard dragged by his nose by the neocons. What do you expect from a Midland hick who used his brain for nothing more than keeping baseball statistics in it for 50 years?

August 6, 2003
Neocon Coup at the Department d'Etat
By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES

WASHINGTON

Let others fight over whether the war in Iraq was a neocon vigilante action disrupting diplomacy. The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy.

The audacious ones have saddled up their pre-emptive steeds and headed off to force a regime change at Foggy Bottom.

President Bush staged a Texan tableau vivant last night, playing host at his ranch to the secretary of state, his wife, Alma, and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Mr. Bush wanted to show solidarity after a Washington Post story on Monday that said that Colin Powell, under pressure from his wife, said he would not be part of a second Bush term, nor would Mr. Armitage.

Mr. Bush might be trying to signal his respect for Mr. Powell, but the president is not always privy to the start of a grandiose neocon scheme.

The scene was reminiscent of last August in Crawford, when Mr. Bush dismissed press "churning" that the administration was on the verge of striking Iraq, saying, "When I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man and that we will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us, and diplomacy and intelligence."

We all know how that turned out.

When the neocons want something done, they'll get it done, no matter what Mr. Bush thinks. And they think Mr. Powell has downgraded the top cabinet post into a human resources job, making nicey-nice with the U.N. and assorted bad guys instead of pursuing the neocon blueprint for world domination through what James Woolsey calls World War IV (World War III being the cold war.)

Countering the Post story, Mr. Powell's posse claimed that neither the secretary of state nor his deputy had ever said they intended to step down, and charged that the neocons were leaking a canard to turn the two men they consider lame doves into lame ducks.

"This is the revenge of the neocons for two months of bad news, looking like they're falling all over themselves in Iraq," said a Powell confidant, noting that Alma Powell was furious she had been dragged in.

In The Post, nearly all of the names of those who could move up if Mr. Powell moves out are Iraq hawks: Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich were mentioned as candidates for secretary of state; Wolfie, Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Condi deputy Steve Hadley, who may be radioactive after the uranium mistake, were mentioned for national security chief.

Mr. Wolfowitz has been tacitly campaigning for the jobs. He told Charlie Rose about his vice-regal trip to Iraq, where he said at last grateful Iraqis were thronging. "As we would drive by, little kids would run up to the road and give us a thumbs up sign," he said. (At least he thought it was the thumb.)

The move against the popular Powell had all the earmarks of the neocons' pre-emptive strike on Iraq.

1.) Demonize. Reiterating his speech trashing Foggy Bottom last April for propping up dictators and coddling the corrupt, Mr. Gingrich — a Rummy ally who serves on the Defense Policy Board — called for "top-to-bottom reform and culture shock" at State in an article in the July Foreign Policy magazine.

2.) Sex-up the intelligence. The leakers spread word that Mr. Armitage told Condi that he and Mr. Powell would leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration. "Nonsense," said Mr. Powell. "Nonsense," said Mr. Armitage.

3.) Create a false rationale. Everyone knew the pair might not stay for a second term. But the neocons were impatient to give them a push, blaming poor Alma Powell for henpecking her husband when they were.

4.) Bring about regime change.

5.) Fail to prepare for the aftermath. "Newt as secretary of state?" sneered one Powell pal. "Hel-lo?"

6.) Make sure it's good for Ariel Sharon. Just as the neocons made their move on Mr. Powell, pro-Israel hawks scorned the secretary for not being on their team in the peace process. Israel's supporters scoffed at the new threat to cut loan guarantees as a State Department policy, not a White House policy.

7.) Ignore the real threat. While the neocons are preoccupying the country with Iraq and a coup at the department d'état, Al Qaeda may have blown up a Marriott in Indonesia and are plotting attacks here.

8.) Change the subject. Next stop, North Korea.




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Bush is out to shrink the Federal government at all costs. He's giving huge tax cuts to the rich so he can downsize everything including our national security. Oh, sure. He runs up trillons in debt on wasteful defense spending (did you hear how incredibly huge the salaries of the CEOs of the defense industries salaries went up in the last few years?) but gives nothing to our cops, firemen, air marshalls and everyone else on the front lines here at home.

August 6, 2003 NY TIMES EDITORIAL
Shortchanging Security

The Associated Press headline picked up by newspapers across the country last week said it all: "Air Marshal Program Could Be Cut, Despite Hijacking Threat." That was not exactly welcome news to millions of Americans at the height of the summer travel season, and the ensuing uproar helped kill the proposed spending cuts. Yet sadly enough, the story line was all too familiar. The Bush administration and Congressional leaders in Washington have been too reluctant to devote enough resources to protect the nation against terrorism.

A sense of complacency at this time would be inexcusable under any circumstances, but it is reckless when intelligence points to the likelihood of more terrorist attacks on aviation. President Bush called it a "real threat" at his press conference last week. The government is so concerned, it now requires travelers who need a visa to visit the United States to obtain one when merely changing planes here, say, en route to Paris from Rio.

Federal airport screeners and airlines have also been put on notice that Al Qaeda terrorists may be adapting cameras or other electronic devices into weapons. Aviation security has been substantially upgraded since the Sept. 11 attacks, but airliners remain the most alluring terrorist target all the same.

That is why it would be so wrong to roll back the air marshal program now. As the mounting threats were disclosed, a leaked memo from an official with the federal air marshal service cited budgetary concerns in urging regional offices to drop flights requiring overnight stays. The war on terror, apparently, must be waged on a day trip.

On Sunday, appearing on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," Tom Ridge, Homeland Security Secretary, conceded that the juxtaposition of proposed spending cuts and new threats amounted to an "unusual sequence of events." We'll say. He then reassured viewers that there would be no curtailment in the air marshal program that puts thousands of undercover law-enforcement agents on an undisclosed number of flights.

Mr. Ridge did not address the budgetary constraints faced by the Transportation Security Administration, the agency within his department established in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The agency has received nearly $1 billion less than it has sought from Congress, forcing layoffs and the postponement of air marshal training.

Inadequate resources have also been devoted to the securing of airport perimeters and cargo facilities, not to mention ports and energy plants. These needs must be addressed.





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Can the inept political manipulation of this bumbling and corrupt administration be more damning?!!!



The Pentagon has some explaining to do
By KAREN KWIATKOWSKI
The Houston Chronicle / Aug. 3, 2003, 12:03AM

After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.

Those observations changed everything.

What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of "intelligence" found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I can identify three prevailing themes.

*Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and active-duty military professionals assigned to the USDP/NESA and SP were noticeably uninvolved in key areas of interest to Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. These included Israel, Iraq and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia.

When The New York Times broke the story last summer of Richard Perle's invitation to Laurent Muraviec to brief the Defense Policy Board on Saudi Arabia as the next enemy of the United States, this briefing was news to the Saudi desk officer. He even had some difficulty getting a copy of it, while receiving assignments related to it.

In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees, in the case of Israel a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and in the case of Iraq, Abe Shulsky and several other appointees. These personnel may be exceptionally qualified; Shulsky authored a 1993 textbook Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence. But the human resource depth made possible through broad-based teamwork with the professional policy and intelligence corps was never established, and apparently never wanted by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld organization.

* Cross-agency cliques: Much has been written about the role of the founding members of the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy and the American Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the Bush administration. Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are expected to congregate, and that an overwhelming number of these appointees have such organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership across the various agencies -- in particular the State Department, the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President.

Within the Central Intelligence Agency, it was less clear to me who the appointees were, if any. This might explain the level of interest in the CIA taken by the Office of the Vice President. In any case, I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel. This cliquishness is cause for amusement in such movies as Never Been Kissed or The Hot Chick. In the development and implementation of war planning it is neither amusing nor beneficial for American security because opposing points of view and information that doesn't "fit" aren't considered.

* Groupthink. Defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view," groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted "fact," and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view.

The result of groupthink has been extensively studied in the history of American foreign policy, and it will have a prominent role when the history of the Bush administration is written. Groupthink, in this most recent case leading to invasion and occupation of Iraq, will be found, I believe, to have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.

I am now retired. Shortly before my retirement I was allowed to return to my primary office of assignment, having served in NESA as a desk officer backfill for 10 months. The transfer was something I had sought, but my wish was granted only after I made a particular comment to my superior, in response to my reading of a February Secretary of State cable answering a long list of questions from a Middle Eastern country regarding U.S. planning for the aftermath in Iraq. The answers had been heavily crafted by the Pentagon, and to me, they were remarkably inadequate, given the late stage of the game. I suggested to my boss that if this was as good as it got, some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Saddam Hussein in the war crimes tribunals.

Saddam is not yet sitting before a war crimes tribunal. Nor have the key decision-makers in the Pentagon been forced to account for the odd set of circumstances that placed us as a long-term occupying force in the world's nastiest rat's nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan. Neither may ever be required to answer their accusers, thanks to this administration's military as well as publicity machine, and the disgraceful political compromises already made by most of the Congress. Ironically, only Saddam Hussein, buried under tons of rubble or in hiding, has a good excuse.

Kwiatkowski is a recently retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who spent most of her final three years of military service in the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Under Secretariat for Policy.





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Here's another issue that requires someone with a strong military record to counter the GOP's command on the issue going into the election. Kerry has a proven record IN government chairing Senate committees of and working on the top issues of foreign policy and military preparedness. Not to mention that he's a decorated war hero whose photos from that conflict can NOT be ridiculed nor give veterans pause for giving him their full support. He's fought in combat. He knows battle and when faced with an unjust war he's also worked for peace. This is a key voting factor for conservative Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans.

But beyond all this we need a seasoned leader who has a reasoned world view for dealing with the unthinkable move by our and other nation's military leaders to EXPAND nuclear weapons and making the world a more dangerous place. We need a candidate that can BEAT BUSH!

Kerry is that man.



Facing a Second Nuclear Age
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

This week, ten minutes by car south of Omaha, Neb., the United States Strategic Command is holding a little-advertised meeting at which the Bush administration is to solidify its plans for acquiring a new generation of nuclear arms. Topping the wish list are weapons meant to penetrate deep into the earth to destroy enemy bunkers. The Pentagon believes that more than 70 nations, big and small, now have some 1,400 underground command posts and sites for ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the Defense Department wants bomb makers to develop a class of relatively small nuclear arms — ranging from a fraction the size of the Hiroshima bomb to several times as large — that could pierce rock and reinforced concrete and turn strongholds into radioactive dust.

"With an effective earth penetrator, many buried targets could be attacked," the administration said in its Nuclear Posture Review, which it sent to Congress last year.

Welcome to the second nuclear age and the Bush administration's quiet responses to the age's perceived dangers.

While initiatives like pre-emptive war have gotten most of the headlines (understandably, given the invasion of Iraq and its shaky aftermath), the administration is hard at work on other ways to counteract the spread of weapons like nuclear arms. Federal and private experts agree that with the notable exception of North Korea, diplomacy and arms control, for now, have taken a back seat to muscle flexing...




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