The New York Times
November 5, 2005
Spending Inquiry for Top Official on Broadcasting
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 - Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees, officials involved in that examination said on Friday.
Mr. Tomlinson was ousted from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on Thursday after its inspector general concluded an investigation that was critical of him. That examination looked at his efforts as chairman of the corporation to seek more conservative programs on public radio and television.
But Mr. Tomlinson remains an important official as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The board, whose members include the secretary of state, plays a central role in public diplomacy. It supervises the government's foreign broadcasting operations, including Radio Martí, Radio Sawa and al-Hurra; transmits programs in 61 languages; and says it has more than 100 million listeners each week.
The board has been troubled lately over deep internal divisions and criticism of its Middle East broadcasts. Members of the Arab news media have said its broadcasts are American propaganda.
People involved in the inquiry said that investigators had already interviewed a significant number of officials at the agency and that, if the accusations were substantiated, they could involve criminal violations.
Last July, the inspector general at the State Department opened an inquiry into Mr. Tomlinson's work at the board of governors after Representative Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, forwarded accusations of misuse of money.
The lawmakers requested the inquiry after Mr. Berman received complaints about Mr. Tomlinson from at least one employee at the board, officials said. People involved in the inquiry said it involved accusations that Mr. Tomlinson was spending federal money for personal purposes, using board money for corporation activities, using board employees to do corporation work and hiring ghost employees or improperly qualified employees.
Through an aide at the broadcasting board, Mr. Tomlinson declined to comment Friday about the State Department inquiry.
In recent weeks, State Department investigators have seized records and e-mail from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, officials said. They have shared some material with the inspector general at the corporation, including e-mail traffic between Mr. Tomlinson and White House officials including Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President Bush and a close friend of Mr. Tomlinson.
Mr. Rove and Mr. Tomlinson became friends in the 1990's when they served on the Board for International Broadcasting, the predecessor agency to the board of governors. Mr. Rove played an important role in Mr. Tomlinson's appointment as chairman of the broadcasting board.
The content of the e-mail between the two officials has not been made public but could become available when the corporation's inspector general sends his report to members of Congress this month.
That inspector general examined several contracts that were approved by Mr. Tomlinson but not disclosed to board members. The contracts provided for payments to a researcher who monitored the political content of several shows, including "Now" with Bill Moyers, and payments to two Republican lobbyists who were retained to help defeat a proposal in Congress that would have required greater representation of broadcasters on the corporation's board.
The inspector general also examined the role of a White House official, Mary C. Andrews, in Mr. Tomlinson's creation of an ombudsman's office to monitor the political balance of programs.
Mr. Tomlinson has said he took those steps to counter what he called a clear liberal tilt of public broadcasting. But broadcasting executives and critics of the corporation say the steps violated the corporation's obligations to insulate broadcasting from politics.
On Thursday Mr. Tomlinson was forced to step down from the corporation, which directs nearly $400 million in federal money to public radio and television, after the board was briefed about the conclusions by its inspector general. In that inquiry, examiners looked at accusations that Mr. Tomlinson improperly used corporation money to promote more conservative programming.
State Department officials said on Friday that al-Hurra, the Arabic language satellite television network set up by the board of governors, was also being examined by the inspector general for possibly problematic procurement practices. That audit was first disclosed on Friday by The Financial Times.
The audit began at the request of al-Hurra, the officials said. A statement by the broadcasting board said that the agency had "no indication of any wrongdoing."
The network, which receives nearly $50 million in federal financing and is broadcast in 22 countries, was set up to compete with al-Jazeera and other Arab news media. One State Department official said Karen P. Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy, had been briefed on the subject and "awaits the findings of the inspector general's audit."
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting for this article.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Friday, November 04, 2005
Breast Cancer Stamps
We need those of you who are great at forwarding on information with your e-mail network. Please read and pass this on. It would be wonderful if 2005 were the year a cure for breast cancer was found!!!!
This is one email you should be glad to pass on. The notion that we could raise $35 million by buying a book of stamps is powerful! As you may be aware, the US Postal Service recently released its new "Fund the Cure" stamp to help fund breast cancer research. The stamp was designed by Ethel Kessler of Bethesda, Maryland. It is important that we take a stand against this disease that affects so many of our Mothers, Sisters and Friends.
Instead of the normal 37 cents for a stamp, this one costs 40 cents The additional 3 cents will go to breast cancer research A "normal" book costs $7.40. This one is only $8.00. It takes a few minutes in line at the Post Office and means so much. If all stamps are sold, it will raise an additional $35,000,000 for this vital research. Just as important as the money is our support. What a statement it would make if the stamp outsold the lottery this week. What a statement it would make that we care.
< STRONG>I urge you to do two things TODAY:
1. Go out and purchase some of these stamps.
2. E-mail your friends to do the same.
Many of us know women and their families whose lives are turned upside-down by breast cancer.
It takes so little to do so much in this drive.
We can all afford the $0.60. Please! help & pass it on.
This is one email you should be glad to pass on. The notion that we could raise $35 million by buying a book of stamps is powerful! As you may be aware, the US Postal Service recently released its new "Fund the Cure" stamp to help fund breast cancer research. The stamp was designed by Ethel Kessler of Bethesda, Maryland. It is important that we take a stand against this disease that affects so many of our Mothers, Sisters and Friends.
Instead of the normal 37 cents for a stamp, this one costs 40 cents The additional 3 cents will go to breast cancer research A "normal" book costs $7.40. This one is only $8.00. It takes a few minutes in line at the Post Office and means so much. If all stamps are sold, it will raise an additional $35,000,000 for this vital research. Just as important as the money is our support. What a statement it would make if the stamp outsold the lottery this week. What a statement it would make that we care.
< STRONG>I urge you to do two things TODAY:
1. Go out and purchase some of these stamps.
2. E-mail your friends to do the same.
Many of us know women and their families whose lives are turned upside-down by breast cancer.
It takes so little to do so much in this drive.
We can all afford the $0.60. Please! help & pass it on.
DeLay aide's memo betrays the playbook
by VirginiaDem
Thu Nov 03, 2005 at 09:55:53 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- kos)
How anybody could vote Republican until they do a full fumigation to get rid of DeLay and Co. is beyond me. Check out what (indicted) DeLay aide Mike Scanlon says here:
"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."
The article explains the strategy we've come to know all too well:
Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.
Well, here's their plan finally in black and white. This should piss off the wackos. It should anger the public. We're already fuming. If this quote is run as a DNC ad in every district in the country, we win both chambers in a landslide.
Thu Nov 03, 2005 at 09:55:53 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- kos)
How anybody could vote Republican until they do a full fumigation to get rid of DeLay and Co. is beyond me. Check out what (indicted) DeLay aide Mike Scanlon says here:
"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."
The article explains the strategy we've come to know all too well:
Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.
Well, here's their plan finally in black and white. This should piss off the wackos. It should anger the public. We're already fuming. If this quote is run as a DNC ad in every district in the country, we win both chambers in a landslide.
Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives
Agence France-Presse
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005
WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."
He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.
Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.
He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.
He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.
Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005
WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."
He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.
Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.
He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.
He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.
Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.
First Casualty of War
by Eric Alterman
It is just a coincidence, but fortuitous nevertheless, that the Democrats forced the Senate into a special secret session to discuss how we got into the war in Iraq during the same week that we finally learned the nation was deliberately misled about the famous "Tonkin intercepts" that helped lead us into Vietnam more than 40 years ago.
What worried the Democrats about Iraq turns out to be exactly what happened in Vietnam. We know now, thanks to one brave and dogged historian at the National Security Agency, that after the famed Gulf of Tonkin "incident" on Aug. 4, 1964 — in which North Vietnam allegedly attacked two American destroyers — National Security Council officials doctored the evidence to support President Johnson's false charge in a speech to the nation that night of "open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America."
In fact, no real evidence for those attacks has ever been found. The entire case rested on the alleged visual sightings of an inexperienced 23-year-old sonar operator. Nevertheless, Johnson took the opportunity to order the bombing of North Vietnam that night and set the nation inexorably on a path toward the "wider war" he promised he did not seek. And administration bigwigs never admitted publicly that they might have acted in haste and without giving contradictory signals their proper weight.
On the contrary, military and national security officials scrambled wildly to support the story. The media cooperated, with lurid reports of the phony battle inspired by fictional updates like the one Johnson gave to congressional leaders: "Some of our boys are floating around in the water."
The new study apparently solves a mystery that has long bedeviled historians of the war: What was in those famous (but classified) North Vietnamese "intercepts" that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was always touting to Congress, which allegedly proved the attack took place? Until recently, most assumed that McNamara and others had simply misread the date on the communications and attributed conversations between the North Vietnamese about an earlier Tonkin incident on Aug. 2, 1964, (when the destroyer Maddox was briefly and superficially under fire) to Aug. 4, the day of the phony attack. But, according to the New York Times, NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok has concluded that the evidence was deliberately falsified: there were translation mistakes that were not corrected, intelligence that was selectively cited and intercept times that were altered.
In revealing the story Monday, the Times reported that Hanyok's efforts to have his classified findings made public had been rejected by higher-level agency policymakers who, beginning in 2003, "were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq."
And rightly so. The parallels between the Tonkin episode and the war in Iraq are far too powerful for political comfort. In both cases, top U.S. national security officials frequently asserted a degree of certainty about the alleged actions and capabilities of an adversary that could not possibly be supported by the available evidence. In both cases, it's possible that the president might have been honestly misguided rather than deliberately deceptive — at least at first. But in neither case would anyone admit the possibility of an honest mistake.
Johnson does not appear to have known that he was retaliating for an imaginary attack when he ordered U.S. planes to take off on the evening of Aug. 4. But, according to Alexander Haig, who was at work at the Pentagon that night, "Everyone on duty wanted to make it possible for the president to do what he wanted to do." The director of the U.S. Information Agency, Carl Rowan, wondered: "Do we know for a fact that the North Vietnamese provocation took place? Can we nail down exactly what happened? We must be prepared to be accused of fabricating the incident." McNamara said they would know for sure the next morning. But the speech couldn't hold.
The phony Tonkin incident alone did not cause the Vietnam War. But the fact that the war was initially inspired by an attack that was, in fact, fabricated after the fact made the experience far more bitter for its victims. Doubts about the incident arose almost immediately. A 1966 article in the magazine Ramparts on Tonkin and the war caught the flavor of the times with its title, "The Whole Damn Thing Was a Lie."
The Bush administration's desire to keep secret the story of a 40-year-old deception — a set of official lies, phony documents and trumped-up data that led the country into a debilitating, counterproductive and deceptive war — simply to protect its own misdeeds is despicable, however typical. But thanks to Hanyok's willingness to go public against the administration's wishes, we know who was lying vis-à-vis Vietnam.
One day we may learn the truth about Iraq. Let's hope for the sake of a future president who finds himself similarly tempted to mislead the nation into conflict that the warnings of history will be viewed with humility rather than hubris, and that the nation will be spared yet another war based on official lies.
It is just a coincidence, but fortuitous nevertheless, that the Democrats forced the Senate into a special secret session to discuss how we got into the war in Iraq during the same week that we finally learned the nation was deliberately misled about the famous "Tonkin intercepts" that helped lead us into Vietnam more than 40 years ago.
What worried the Democrats about Iraq turns out to be exactly what happened in Vietnam. We know now, thanks to one brave and dogged historian at the National Security Agency, that after the famed Gulf of Tonkin "incident" on Aug. 4, 1964 — in which North Vietnam allegedly attacked two American destroyers — National Security Council officials doctored the evidence to support President Johnson's false charge in a speech to the nation that night of "open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America."
In fact, no real evidence for those attacks has ever been found. The entire case rested on the alleged visual sightings of an inexperienced 23-year-old sonar operator. Nevertheless, Johnson took the opportunity to order the bombing of North Vietnam that night and set the nation inexorably on a path toward the "wider war" he promised he did not seek. And administration bigwigs never admitted publicly that they might have acted in haste and without giving contradictory signals their proper weight.
On the contrary, military and national security officials scrambled wildly to support the story. The media cooperated, with lurid reports of the phony battle inspired by fictional updates like the one Johnson gave to congressional leaders: "Some of our boys are floating around in the water."
The new study apparently solves a mystery that has long bedeviled historians of the war: What was in those famous (but classified) North Vietnamese "intercepts" that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was always touting to Congress, which allegedly proved the attack took place? Until recently, most assumed that McNamara and others had simply misread the date on the communications and attributed conversations between the North Vietnamese about an earlier Tonkin incident on Aug. 2, 1964, (when the destroyer Maddox was briefly and superficially under fire) to Aug. 4, the day of the phony attack. But, according to the New York Times, NSA historian Robert J. Hanyok has concluded that the evidence was deliberately falsified: there were translation mistakes that were not corrected, intelligence that was selectively cited and intercept times that were altered.
In revealing the story Monday, the Times reported that Hanyok's efforts to have his classified findings made public had been rejected by higher-level agency policymakers who, beginning in 2003, "were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq."
And rightly so. The parallels between the Tonkin episode and the war in Iraq are far too powerful for political comfort. In both cases, top U.S. national security officials frequently asserted a degree of certainty about the alleged actions and capabilities of an adversary that could not possibly be supported by the available evidence. In both cases, it's possible that the president might have been honestly misguided rather than deliberately deceptive — at least at first. But in neither case would anyone admit the possibility of an honest mistake.
Johnson does not appear to have known that he was retaliating for an imaginary attack when he ordered U.S. planes to take off on the evening of Aug. 4. But, according to Alexander Haig, who was at work at the Pentagon that night, "Everyone on duty wanted to make it possible for the president to do what he wanted to do." The director of the U.S. Information Agency, Carl Rowan, wondered: "Do we know for a fact that the North Vietnamese provocation took place? Can we nail down exactly what happened? We must be prepared to be accused of fabricating the incident." McNamara said they would know for sure the next morning. But the speech couldn't hold.
The phony Tonkin incident alone did not cause the Vietnam War. But the fact that the war was initially inspired by an attack that was, in fact, fabricated after the fact made the experience far more bitter for its victims. Doubts about the incident arose almost immediately. A 1966 article in the magazine Ramparts on Tonkin and the war caught the flavor of the times with its title, "The Whole Damn Thing Was a Lie."
The Bush administration's desire to keep secret the story of a 40-year-old deception — a set of official lies, phony documents and trumped-up data that led the country into a debilitating, counterproductive and deceptive war — simply to protect its own misdeeds is despicable, however typical. But thanks to Hanyok's willingness to go public against the administration's wishes, we know who was lying vis-à-vis Vietnam.
One day we may learn the truth about Iraq. Let's hope for the sake of a future president who finds himself similarly tempted to mislead the nation into conflict that the warnings of history will be viewed with humility rather than hubris, and that the nation will be spared yet another war based on official lies.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
You Mean There's Hope For The Red States and The Fundamentalists?
washingtonpost.com
Bush's Integrity Is Questioned, According to Post-ABC Poll
By Richard Morin and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 3, 2005; 6:44 PM
For the first time in his presidency, a majority of Americans question the integrity of President Bush, and growing doubts about his leadership have left him with record negative ratings on the economy, Iraq and even the war on terrorism, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
On virtually every key measure of presidential character and performance, the new survey found that Bush has never been less popular with the American people. Currently 39 percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 60 percent disapprove of his performance in office -- the highest level of disapproval ever recorded for Bush in Post-ABC polls.
Virtually the only possible bright spot for Bush in the survey was generally favorable, if not quite enthusiastic, early reaction to his latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel A. Alito Jr. Half of Americans say he should be confirmed by the Senate and fewer than a third view him as too conservative, the poll found.
Overall, the survey underscores how several pillars of Bush's presidency have begun to crumble under the combined weight of events and mistakes by the White House. Bush's approval ratings have been in decline for months, but on issues of personal trust, honesty and values, Bush has suffered some of his most notable declines. Moreover, Bush has always retained majority support on his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism -- until now, when 51 percent registered disapproval.
The CIA leak case has apparently contributed to a withering decline in how Americans view Bush personally. The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy -- a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly six in 10 -- 58 percent -- said they had doubts about Bush's honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity.
The indictment Friday of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, in the CIA case added to the burden of an administration already reeling from a failed Supreme Court nomination, public dissatisfaction with the economy and continued bloodshed in Iraq. According to the survey, 52 percent say the charges against Libby signal the presence of deeper ethical wrongdoing in the administration. Half believe Karl Rove, the president's top political hand and deputy chief of staff, also did something wrong in the case -- and roughly six in 10 say Rove, should resign his White House post.
Beyond the leak case, Americans give the administration low ratings on ethics, according to the survey, with 67 percent rating the administration negatively on handling ethical matters, while just 32 percent give the administration positive marks. Four in 10 -- 43 percent -- say the level of ethics and honesty in the federal government has fallen during Bush's presidency, while 17 percent say it has risen.
Faced with its cascade of recent setbacks, the White House is hoping the latest court nomination can rally disaffected conservatives and score the president a victory akin to the one he enjoyed in the nomination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Alito begins the confirmation process with the support of 49 percent of the public while 29 percent currently say he should not be confirmed, the poll found. One in five Americans -- 22 percent -- didn't yet know enough about him to make a judgment.
The dissatisfaction with Bush flows in part out of broad concerns about the overall direction of the country. Nearly seven in 10 -- 68 percent -- currently believe the country is seriously off-course while only 30 percent are optimistic, the lowest level in more than nine years. Only three in 10 express high levels of confidence in Bush while half say they have little or no confidence in this administration.
Just 35 percent of those surveyed rated the economy as either excellent or good, with 65 percent describing it as not so good or poor. Although the government reported last week that gross domestic product rose 3.8 percent in the last quarter, despite the effects of Hurricane Katrina, 29 percent of those surveyed said they regarded the economy as poor, the highest recorded during Bush's presidency.
Attitudes toward Bush are sharply polarized by party, as they have been throughout his presidency. Almost eight in 10 -- 78 percent -- of Republicans support the president, while just 11 percent of Democrats rate him positively. Overwhelming Republican support has long been the key to Bush's overall strength, but Bush has suffered some defections since the beginning of the year, when 91 percent approved of the way he was handling his job.
Among independents, Bush's approval has plummeted since the beginning of the year. In the latest poll, 33 percent of independents approved of his performance, while 66 disapproved. In January, independents were evenly divided, with 49 percent approving and an equal percentage disapproving.
The intensity of Bush's support has changed since his reelection a year ago, with opponents deepening their hostility toward the administration. In the latest survey, 47 percent said they strongly disapproved of the way he was performing in office, compared with 35 percent who expressed strong disapproval in January. At the same time, the percentage who say they strongly approve of his performance has fallen from 33 percent last January to 20 percent today.
Iraq remains a significant drag on Bush's presidency, with dissatisfaction over the situation there continuing to grow and with rising suspicion over whether administration officials misled the country in the run up to the invasion more than two years ago.
Nearly two-thirds disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation there, while barely a third approve, a new low. Six in 10 now believe the United States was wrong to invade Iraq, a 7-point increase in just over two months, with almost half the country saying they strongly believe it was wrong.
About three in four -- 73 percent -- said there have been an unacceptable level of casualties in Iraq. More than half -- 52 percent -- said the war with Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States.
A bare majority -- 52 percent -- say the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored, and only about one in five -- 18 percent -- said the U.S. should withdraw its forces immediately. In the week after U.S. deaths in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark, a majority of those surveyed -- 55 percent -- said the U.S. is not making significant progress toward stabilizing the country.
The war has taken a toll on the administration's credibility, with a clear majority -- 55 percent -- now say the administration deliberately mislead the country in making its case for war with Iraq -- a conflict that an even larger majority say was not worth the cost.
The president's handling of terrorism was widely regarded among strategists as the key to his winning a second term last year. But questions about Bush's effectiveness on other fronts have also depreciated this asset. His 48 percent approval now compares to 61 percent approval on this issue at the time of his second inaugural, and from a 2004 high of 66 percent.
Bush also set new lows in the latest Post-ABC News poll for his management of the economy, where disapproval topped 60 percent for the first time in his presidency. And six in 10 are critical of the way Bush is dealing with health care -- a double-digit increase since March. On gasoline prices, Bush's numbers have increased slightly over the past two months, but still remain highly negative, with just 26 percent rating him positively.
The survey suggests a rapidly widening gulf between Bush and the American people/Two in three say Bush doesn't understand the problems of people like them, a 10 percentage-point increase since January.
Nearly six in 10 -- 58 percent -- doubt Bush shares their values while 40 percent say he does, another new low for this president. For the first time since he took office, fewer than half -- 47 percent -- currently say Bush is a strong leader, and Americans divide equally over whether Bush can be trusted in a crisis.
Told of the poll results, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said Bush would rally support through such issues as education reform, changes to the tax code, and a new energy strategy to show the public that he "will continue to push for changes in our government to serve the American people."
A total of 1,202 randomly selected adults were interviewed Oct 30-Nov. 2 for this survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Assistant polling director Claudia Deane contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Bush's Integrity Is Questioned, According to Post-ABC Poll
By Richard Morin and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 3, 2005; 6:44 PM
For the first time in his presidency, a majority of Americans question the integrity of President Bush, and growing doubts about his leadership have left him with record negative ratings on the economy, Iraq and even the war on terrorism, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
On virtually every key measure of presidential character and performance, the new survey found that Bush has never been less popular with the American people. Currently 39 percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 60 percent disapprove of his performance in office -- the highest level of disapproval ever recorded for Bush in Post-ABC polls.
Virtually the only possible bright spot for Bush in the survey was generally favorable, if not quite enthusiastic, early reaction to his latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel A. Alito Jr. Half of Americans say he should be confirmed by the Senate and fewer than a third view him as too conservative, the poll found.
Overall, the survey underscores how several pillars of Bush's presidency have begun to crumble under the combined weight of events and mistakes by the White House. Bush's approval ratings have been in decline for months, but on issues of personal trust, honesty and values, Bush has suffered some of his most notable declines. Moreover, Bush has always retained majority support on his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism -- until now, when 51 percent registered disapproval.
The CIA leak case has apparently contributed to a withering decline in how Americans view Bush personally. The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy -- a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly six in 10 -- 58 percent -- said they had doubts about Bush's honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity.
The indictment Friday of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, in the CIA case added to the burden of an administration already reeling from a failed Supreme Court nomination, public dissatisfaction with the economy and continued bloodshed in Iraq. According to the survey, 52 percent say the charges against Libby signal the presence of deeper ethical wrongdoing in the administration. Half believe Karl Rove, the president's top political hand and deputy chief of staff, also did something wrong in the case -- and roughly six in 10 say Rove, should resign his White House post.
Beyond the leak case, Americans give the administration low ratings on ethics, according to the survey, with 67 percent rating the administration negatively on handling ethical matters, while just 32 percent give the administration positive marks. Four in 10 -- 43 percent -- say the level of ethics and honesty in the federal government has fallen during Bush's presidency, while 17 percent say it has risen.
Faced with its cascade of recent setbacks, the White House is hoping the latest court nomination can rally disaffected conservatives and score the president a victory akin to the one he enjoyed in the nomination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Alito begins the confirmation process with the support of 49 percent of the public while 29 percent currently say he should not be confirmed, the poll found. One in five Americans -- 22 percent -- didn't yet know enough about him to make a judgment.
The dissatisfaction with Bush flows in part out of broad concerns about the overall direction of the country. Nearly seven in 10 -- 68 percent -- currently believe the country is seriously off-course while only 30 percent are optimistic, the lowest level in more than nine years. Only three in 10 express high levels of confidence in Bush while half say they have little or no confidence in this administration.
Just 35 percent of those surveyed rated the economy as either excellent or good, with 65 percent describing it as not so good or poor. Although the government reported last week that gross domestic product rose 3.8 percent in the last quarter, despite the effects of Hurricane Katrina, 29 percent of those surveyed said they regarded the economy as poor, the highest recorded during Bush's presidency.
Attitudes toward Bush are sharply polarized by party, as they have been throughout his presidency. Almost eight in 10 -- 78 percent -- of Republicans support the president, while just 11 percent of Democrats rate him positively. Overwhelming Republican support has long been the key to Bush's overall strength, but Bush has suffered some defections since the beginning of the year, when 91 percent approved of the way he was handling his job.
Among independents, Bush's approval has plummeted since the beginning of the year. In the latest poll, 33 percent of independents approved of his performance, while 66 disapproved. In January, independents were evenly divided, with 49 percent approving and an equal percentage disapproving.
The intensity of Bush's support has changed since his reelection a year ago, with opponents deepening their hostility toward the administration. In the latest survey, 47 percent said they strongly disapproved of the way he was performing in office, compared with 35 percent who expressed strong disapproval in January. At the same time, the percentage who say they strongly approve of his performance has fallen from 33 percent last January to 20 percent today.
Iraq remains a significant drag on Bush's presidency, with dissatisfaction over the situation there continuing to grow and with rising suspicion over whether administration officials misled the country in the run up to the invasion more than two years ago.
Nearly two-thirds disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation there, while barely a third approve, a new low. Six in 10 now believe the United States was wrong to invade Iraq, a 7-point increase in just over two months, with almost half the country saying they strongly believe it was wrong.
About three in four -- 73 percent -- said there have been an unacceptable level of casualties in Iraq. More than half -- 52 percent -- said the war with Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States.
A bare majority -- 52 percent -- say the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored, and only about one in five -- 18 percent -- said the U.S. should withdraw its forces immediately. In the week after U.S. deaths in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark, a majority of those surveyed -- 55 percent -- said the U.S. is not making significant progress toward stabilizing the country.
The war has taken a toll on the administration's credibility, with a clear majority -- 55 percent -- now say the administration deliberately mislead the country in making its case for war with Iraq -- a conflict that an even larger majority say was not worth the cost.
The president's handling of terrorism was widely regarded among strategists as the key to his winning a second term last year. But questions about Bush's effectiveness on other fronts have also depreciated this asset. His 48 percent approval now compares to 61 percent approval on this issue at the time of his second inaugural, and from a 2004 high of 66 percent.
Bush also set new lows in the latest Post-ABC News poll for his management of the economy, where disapproval topped 60 percent for the first time in his presidency. And six in 10 are critical of the way Bush is dealing with health care -- a double-digit increase since March. On gasoline prices, Bush's numbers have increased slightly over the past two months, but still remain highly negative, with just 26 percent rating him positively.
The survey suggests a rapidly widening gulf between Bush and the American people/Two in three say Bush doesn't understand the problems of people like them, a 10 percentage-point increase since January.
Nearly six in 10 -- 58 percent -- doubt Bush shares their values while 40 percent say he does, another new low for this president. For the first time since he took office, fewer than half -- 47 percent -- currently say Bush is a strong leader, and Americans divide equally over whether Bush can be trusted in a crisis.
Told of the poll results, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said Bush would rally support through such issues as education reform, changes to the tax code, and a new energy strategy to show the public that he "will continue to push for changes in our government to serve the American people."
A total of 1,202 randomly selected adults were interviewed Oct 30-Nov. 2 for this survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Assistant polling director Claudia Deane contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Screw The Poor! They Didn't Contribute To Our Campaign!
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund and Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Press Release - National Women's Law Center
President Threatens Veto If Senate Reduces Giveaways to Health Care
Threat Could Mean Deeper Cuts to Medicaid and Other Programs for Poor Families
Related Links
National Women's Law Center website
More on poverty/welfare
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 2, 2005
Ranit Schmelzer, Jenice Robinson
202-588-5180
(Washington, D.C.) President Bush threatened to veto the budget bill currently being debated by the Senate because it would trim financial incentives for mammoth health insurance companies under the Medicare prescription drug plan. This is a rejection of the Senate's effort to make less draconian cuts to services vital to low-income women and their families, the National Women's Law Center said today.
"This veto threat dismisses the Senate's effort to ease excessive cuts to programs such as Medicaid that benefit poor women and families," said Nancy Duff Campbell, Co-President of the National Women's Law Center. "The President's action makes it even more likely that the poor will bear the brunt of budget cuts designed to make way for $70 billion in new tax breaks for the wealthy."
The Senate and House are working on budget bills that would cut $39 billion and $50 billion, respectively, from various federal programs. The Senate bill is not as painful for poor Americans. It attempts to reduce cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health care for poor Americans, by spreading the cuts over a broader range of programs. One provision in the Senate bill would reduce financial giveaways to insurance companies that offer prescription drug benefits under the controversial new Medicare prescription drug plan. The modest cut to incentives for insurance companies would mean less harsh cuts to the Medicaid program; however, President Bush has said he would veto any such measure.
"Only a few weeks ago, President Bush pledged to confront poverty with bold action," Campbell said. "Now, the President is ruling out cuts that might touch the rich and powerful corporations and encouraging cuts that target the poor. This isn't bold and it's no way to tackle poverty."
The House bill proposes deeper cuts to Medicaid while leaving Medicare bonuses for insurance companies untouched. More than 53 million Americans rely on Medicaid for health coverage. Medicaid beneficiaries have severely limited financial means and already spend significantly more of their income on health care than middle-income people with private coverage. The increased costs they would bear under the House bill would discourage them from getting the care they need for themselves and their children.
Besides Medicaid, the House bill would cut spending deeply for other programs vital to low- and middle-income women and their families such as Food Stamps, child support enforcement, foster care, student loans, and other services.
If the bills pass the Senate and House, differences will have to be resolved in conference. The President's veto threat means any bill that emerges is likely to resemble the House version. The Senate is expected to vote on its bill tomorrow; the House is expected to vote next week.
"Congress must get its priorities straight, and it must be honest with the American people," Campbell said. "Cutting programs for low- and middle-income Americans while giving lavish benefits and tax breaks to special interests and the very wealthy is no way to help hurricane survivors, prepare for an outbreak of avian flu, or rein in the deficit - and Congress and the President should not try to sell it as such."
Featured Member: AARP
© 2002 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights / LCCR Education Fund
Press Release - National Women's Law Center
President Threatens Veto If Senate Reduces Giveaways to Health Care
Threat Could Mean Deeper Cuts to Medicaid and Other Programs for Poor Families
Related Links
National Women's Law Center website
More on poverty/welfare
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 2, 2005
Ranit Schmelzer, Jenice Robinson
202-588-5180
(Washington, D.C.) President Bush threatened to veto the budget bill currently being debated by the Senate because it would trim financial incentives for mammoth health insurance companies under the Medicare prescription drug plan. This is a rejection of the Senate's effort to make less draconian cuts to services vital to low-income women and their families, the National Women's Law Center said today.
"This veto threat dismisses the Senate's effort to ease excessive cuts to programs such as Medicaid that benefit poor women and families," said Nancy Duff Campbell, Co-President of the National Women's Law Center. "The President's action makes it even more likely that the poor will bear the brunt of budget cuts designed to make way for $70 billion in new tax breaks for the wealthy."
The Senate and House are working on budget bills that would cut $39 billion and $50 billion, respectively, from various federal programs. The Senate bill is not as painful for poor Americans. It attempts to reduce cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health care for poor Americans, by spreading the cuts over a broader range of programs. One provision in the Senate bill would reduce financial giveaways to insurance companies that offer prescription drug benefits under the controversial new Medicare prescription drug plan. The modest cut to incentives for insurance companies would mean less harsh cuts to the Medicaid program; however, President Bush has said he would veto any such measure.
"Only a few weeks ago, President Bush pledged to confront poverty with bold action," Campbell said. "Now, the President is ruling out cuts that might touch the rich and powerful corporations and encouraging cuts that target the poor. This isn't bold and it's no way to tackle poverty."
The House bill proposes deeper cuts to Medicaid while leaving Medicare bonuses for insurance companies untouched. More than 53 million Americans rely on Medicaid for health coverage. Medicaid beneficiaries have severely limited financial means and already spend significantly more of their income on health care than middle-income people with private coverage. The increased costs they would bear under the House bill would discourage them from getting the care they need for themselves and their children.
Besides Medicaid, the House bill would cut spending deeply for other programs vital to low- and middle-income women and their families such as Food Stamps, child support enforcement, foster care, student loans, and other services.
If the bills pass the Senate and House, differences will have to be resolved in conference. The President's veto threat means any bill that emerges is likely to resemble the House version. The Senate is expected to vote on its bill tomorrow; the House is expected to vote next week.
"Congress must get its priorities straight, and it must be honest with the American people," Campbell said. "Cutting programs for low- and middle-income Americans while giving lavish benefits and tax breaks to special interests and the very wealthy is no way to help hurricane survivors, prepare for an outbreak of avian flu, or rein in the deficit - and Congress and the President should not try to sell it as such."
Featured Member: AARP
© 2002 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights / LCCR Education Fund
Press Secretary on Trial in the Briefing Room
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - It is I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who is under indictment in the C.I.A. leak case. And it is Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, who remains under investigation. But it is Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, whose credibility is already on trial amid the rough justice of the briefing room.
More than two years ago, Mr. McClellan did what press secretaries are paid to do: He vigorously defended the president's men - specifically, Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove and Elliott Abrams, a national security aide who was never implicated in the case - against speculation that they had a hand in the disclosure of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency officer.
"They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved," Mr. McClellan said at his televised briefing on Oct. 7, 2003, one of several instances in which he denied that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were responsible for the leak.
As events have unfolded and the grand jury has heard testimony that both Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove had conversations with journalists that touched on the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. McClellan's reputation has been left dangling in the glare of the television lights.
Though Mr. Libby has not been convicted of charges that he lied in the investigation and was not accused of leaking the agent's identity, and Mr. Rove has not been charged with any wrongdoing, Mr. McClellan's broad assurance that they were "not involved" now seems, based on what is known publicly about the case, to have been misleading if not downright false.
Under a barrage of sometimes angry questions from a press corps that feels it was lied to, he has been unwilling or unable to acknowledge that his previous statements are, to use a phrase famously invoked by a predecessor, inoperative. Yet he has offered no defense of them either, and has instead appealed to the better instincts of his journalistic inquisitors, a risky strategy in the midst of a criminal inquiry that has reached into the top ranks of the White House, but perhaps the only one available to him.
"I'm very confident in the relationship that we have in this room, and the trust that has been established between us," he said at his daily briefing on Monday, in response to questions from David Gregory of NBC News about whether his credibility with reporters and the public was in doubt.
Mr. McClellan said he was constrained from responding more fully because the investigation continues and because Mr. Libby now faces trial, and that "it's not a question of whether or not I'd like to talk more about this."
The outlines of his most logical defense - that he was misled by Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove and was relying on their assurances in stating that they had not been involved - seem clear. But whether he can keep the problem from dogging him and the White House in the meantime remains less clear.
It is possible that any statements made by Mr. Libby to Mr. McClellan asserting that he was not involved would be of interest to the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who accused Mr. Libby of a pattern of obscuring his role in the matter. Mr. Fitzgerald could also be interested in any similar statements made by Mr. Rove to Mr. McClellan.
Mr. McClellan has been criticized by Democrats as a mouthpiece for an administration that fails to level with the American public, and a number of his other statements regarding the leak investigation have come under scrutiny.
"If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration," he said on Sept. 29, 2003, speaking of how Mr. Bush would deal with any official found to have played a role in leaking classified information - a definition that some Democrats say could now be applied to Mr. Rove.
"Is redemption available to everyone in Washington today? Absolutely yes," said Joe Lockhart, who was President Bill Clinton's spokesman during much of the Monica Lewinsky affair. "It's that kind of town. But any press secretary caught in this particular bind needs to find a way to demonstrate that they can simultaneously serve both masters, the press and the president. Scott McClellan can do it, but it's hard."
Among other things, for Mr. McClellan to state openly that he was misled would put him publicly at odds with Mr. Rove, whose power in the White House and the Republican Party remains immense, not to mention Mr. Libby, who was Mr. Cheney's alter ego until resigning after his indictment on Friday.
Mr. McClellan's plight is illustrative of a broader issue that has left the entire White House off balance as the leak investigation has progressed. The case is almost never discussed openly among senior officials. Those who have been questioned by the prosecutor have apparently not shared their testimony with others, leaving senior officials guessing at where the case is heading.
It is unclear to anyone except Mr. Bush's very inner circle, if to them, how much the president knows about the investigation, what he was told by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby and what role Mr. Cheney played in the events.
Mr. McClellan took over as press secretary from Ari Fleischer on July 15, 2003, the day after Ms. Wilson's identity was disclosed by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak. A member of a prominent Texas political family, he was viewed by many reporters when he took the job as genial and straightforward but difficult to knock off the White House's talking points.
Although many White House reporters have grown increasingly frustrated with what they consider the lack of hard information that Mr. McClellan is willing to provide at briefings, there is little personal animus toward him. Mr. Gregory of NBC, one of his most dogged tormentors when the cameras are on, said on CNBC's "Hardball" on Monday night that Mr. McClellan still had a "sterling" reputation.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - It is I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who is under indictment in the C.I.A. leak case. And it is Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, who remains under investigation. But it is Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, whose credibility is already on trial amid the rough justice of the briefing room.
More than two years ago, Mr. McClellan did what press secretaries are paid to do: He vigorously defended the president's men - specifically, Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove and Elliott Abrams, a national security aide who was never implicated in the case - against speculation that they had a hand in the disclosure of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency officer.
"They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved," Mr. McClellan said at his televised briefing on Oct. 7, 2003, one of several instances in which he denied that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were responsible for the leak.
As events have unfolded and the grand jury has heard testimony that both Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove had conversations with journalists that touched on the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. McClellan's reputation has been left dangling in the glare of the television lights.
Though Mr. Libby has not been convicted of charges that he lied in the investigation and was not accused of leaking the agent's identity, and Mr. Rove has not been charged with any wrongdoing, Mr. McClellan's broad assurance that they were "not involved" now seems, based on what is known publicly about the case, to have been misleading if not downright false.
Under a barrage of sometimes angry questions from a press corps that feels it was lied to, he has been unwilling or unable to acknowledge that his previous statements are, to use a phrase famously invoked by a predecessor, inoperative. Yet he has offered no defense of them either, and has instead appealed to the better instincts of his journalistic inquisitors, a risky strategy in the midst of a criminal inquiry that has reached into the top ranks of the White House, but perhaps the only one available to him.
"I'm very confident in the relationship that we have in this room, and the trust that has been established between us," he said at his daily briefing on Monday, in response to questions from David Gregory of NBC News about whether his credibility with reporters and the public was in doubt.
Mr. McClellan said he was constrained from responding more fully because the investigation continues and because Mr. Libby now faces trial, and that "it's not a question of whether or not I'd like to talk more about this."
The outlines of his most logical defense - that he was misled by Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove and was relying on their assurances in stating that they had not been involved - seem clear. But whether he can keep the problem from dogging him and the White House in the meantime remains less clear.
It is possible that any statements made by Mr. Libby to Mr. McClellan asserting that he was not involved would be of interest to the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who accused Mr. Libby of a pattern of obscuring his role in the matter. Mr. Fitzgerald could also be interested in any similar statements made by Mr. Rove to Mr. McClellan.
Mr. McClellan has been criticized by Democrats as a mouthpiece for an administration that fails to level with the American public, and a number of his other statements regarding the leak investigation have come under scrutiny.
"If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration," he said on Sept. 29, 2003, speaking of how Mr. Bush would deal with any official found to have played a role in leaking classified information - a definition that some Democrats say could now be applied to Mr. Rove.
"Is redemption available to everyone in Washington today? Absolutely yes," said Joe Lockhart, who was President Bill Clinton's spokesman during much of the Monica Lewinsky affair. "It's that kind of town. But any press secretary caught in this particular bind needs to find a way to demonstrate that they can simultaneously serve both masters, the press and the president. Scott McClellan can do it, but it's hard."
Among other things, for Mr. McClellan to state openly that he was misled would put him publicly at odds with Mr. Rove, whose power in the White House and the Republican Party remains immense, not to mention Mr. Libby, who was Mr. Cheney's alter ego until resigning after his indictment on Friday.
Mr. McClellan's plight is illustrative of a broader issue that has left the entire White House off balance as the leak investigation has progressed. The case is almost never discussed openly among senior officials. Those who have been questioned by the prosecutor have apparently not shared their testimony with others, leaving senior officials guessing at where the case is heading.
It is unclear to anyone except Mr. Bush's very inner circle, if to them, how much the president knows about the investigation, what he was told by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby and what role Mr. Cheney played in the events.
Mr. McClellan took over as press secretary from Ari Fleischer on July 15, 2003, the day after Ms. Wilson's identity was disclosed by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak. A member of a prominent Texas political family, he was viewed by many reporters when he took the job as genial and straightforward but difficult to knock off the White House's talking points.
Although many White House reporters have grown increasingly frustrated with what they consider the lack of hard information that Mr. McClellan is willing to provide at briefings, there is little personal animus toward him. Mr. Gregory of NBC, one of his most dogged tormentors when the cameras are on, said on CNBC's "Hardball" on Monday night that Mr. McClellan still had a "sterling" reputation.
Abramoff's Last Stand
by ARI BERMAN
Even in Washington, the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff is breathtaking. At his peak he commanded $750-an-hour lobbying fees and maintained impeccable ties to the leaders of the conservative movement, where he was known as the "godfather" of Tom DeLay's lobbying network. DeLay himself once called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends."
Now Abramoff is perhaps the most radioactive figure in the nation's capital, thanks to the revelations last year that he and partner Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide, defrauded a half-dozen Indian tribes of $82 million in lobbying fees between 2001 and 2004. He is the subject of a wide-ranging interagency criminal probe in Washington and has been indicted in Florida on wire fraud and conspiracy charges in the purchase of SunCruz Casinos, whose previous owner was shot dead months after Abramoff acquired the company.
The Indian probe, focused on the exorbitant fees tribes were charged by Abramoff and Scanlon to lobby on Indian gaming issues, has implicated DeLay, House Administration Committee chairman Bob Ney, antitax activist Grover Norquist and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, among others. The government's top procurement official, David Safavian, was arrested in September for obstructing the Justice Department's investigation into Abramoff. Bush's nominee for Deputy Attorney General, Tyco executive Timothy Flanigan, withdrew his nomination after disclosing that Abramoff had lobbied on Tyco's behalf.
The Senate's Committee on Indian Affairs, chaired by John McCain, has prompted a flurry of headlines about Abramoff since its investigation began in September 2004. It has opened a window into Abramoff and Scanlon's lurid world of bogus Christian front groups, self-enriching charitable organizations, expletive-filled e-mails and lavish Congressional junkets, all seemingly driven by Gordon Gekko's famous mantra from the movie Wall Street: "Greed is good." The investigation has provided a dizzying insight into how Washington works--or doesn't. Abramoff, as the chairman of the Coushatta tribe of Lousiana testified Wednesday, "is the golden-boy-gone-bad of the American political system." (For the full backstory, see Michael Crowley's "A Lobbyist in Full.")
Wednesday marked the last of four scheduled committee hearings, and the first time a high-ranking Bush Administration official, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior Steven Griles, has been caught in the committee's crosshairs--a precursor, perhaps, of things to come. A GOP source involved in the federal investigation called his testimony "a big deal, a really big deal."
According to earlier reporting by the Washington Post and testimony Wednesday by Michael Rossetti, former counsel to Interior Secretary Gail Norton, Abramoff repeatedly lobbied Griles in 2002 and 2003 to deny land rights to the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, whose plan to build a casino in Louisiana threatened the livelihood of the neighboring Coushatta tribe, which Abramoff eventually milked for $36 million in lobbying fees.
Griles, like so many Washington insiders enmeshed in this scandal, immediately sought to distance himself from Abramoff. "My relationship with Mr. Abramoff was the same as with other lobbyists, nothing more and nothing less," he testified Wednesday.
Rossetti flatly disagreed. "I am aware that Mr. Griles in late 2003 became very interested in the decision-making process and the Secretary's meetings with respect to the Jena's in Louisiana," he testified. A series of e-mails released by the committee back Rosetti up. "We have e-mails and e-mails and e-mails where Abramoff says he is meeting with you," the committee's ranking Democrat, Byron Dorgan, told Griles. At one point Griles allegedly accepted a thick binder of anti-Jena literature from Abramoff. Not only did Abramoff meet with Griles at Interior; he also offered him a job, possibly in violation of federal conflict-of-interest statutes.
"This cannot be shared with anyone not on this distribution list," Abramoff wrote in an email to colleagues with the subject head "Griles." I met with him tonight. He is ready to leave Interior and will most likely be coming to join us." Griles, a former lobbyist who spent half his time at Interior under internal investigation for steering favors to former clients in the energy sector, ended up becoming a partner in a different lobbying firm, a prime example of a revolving-door culture between government and special interests that has spun wildly out of control. "Clearly, lobbying reform is one of those issues that will be addressed" after the investigation, said McCain.
Abramoff's conduit to Griles was Italia Federici, president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), a pro-industry front group founded by Norton and Norquist in 1998. Thus far, Norton has not been implicated in any of the wrongdoing. To woo Interior, Abramoff convinced three tribes to donate $225,000 to Federici's organization, whose tax-exempt status is now in jeopardy. (Federici dodged a subpoena Wednesday but will likely appear before the committee next week.) When Abramoff held a fundraiser for CREA at his restaurant, Signatures, Griles personally invited colleagues at Interior. The circumstances of that dinner will be one of the many questions Federici, publicly, and Abramoff, privately, will soon be forced to explain.
"All we did is follow the money," McCain said after the hearing. His investigation is a testament to how much Congress can accomplish when it simply does its job.
Even in Washington, the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff is breathtaking. At his peak he commanded $750-an-hour lobbying fees and maintained impeccable ties to the leaders of the conservative movement, where he was known as the "godfather" of Tom DeLay's lobbying network. DeLay himself once called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends."
Now Abramoff is perhaps the most radioactive figure in the nation's capital, thanks to the revelations last year that he and partner Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide, defrauded a half-dozen Indian tribes of $82 million in lobbying fees between 2001 and 2004. He is the subject of a wide-ranging interagency criminal probe in Washington and has been indicted in Florida on wire fraud and conspiracy charges in the purchase of SunCruz Casinos, whose previous owner was shot dead months after Abramoff acquired the company.
The Indian probe, focused on the exorbitant fees tribes were charged by Abramoff and Scanlon to lobby on Indian gaming issues, has implicated DeLay, House Administration Committee chairman Bob Ney, antitax activist Grover Norquist and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, among others. The government's top procurement official, David Safavian, was arrested in September for obstructing the Justice Department's investigation into Abramoff. Bush's nominee for Deputy Attorney General, Tyco executive Timothy Flanigan, withdrew his nomination after disclosing that Abramoff had lobbied on Tyco's behalf.
The Senate's Committee on Indian Affairs, chaired by John McCain, has prompted a flurry of headlines about Abramoff since its investigation began in September 2004. It has opened a window into Abramoff and Scanlon's lurid world of bogus Christian front groups, self-enriching charitable organizations, expletive-filled e-mails and lavish Congressional junkets, all seemingly driven by Gordon Gekko's famous mantra from the movie Wall Street: "Greed is good." The investigation has provided a dizzying insight into how Washington works--or doesn't. Abramoff, as the chairman of the Coushatta tribe of Lousiana testified Wednesday, "is the golden-boy-gone-bad of the American political system." (For the full backstory, see Michael Crowley's "A Lobbyist in Full.")
Wednesday marked the last of four scheduled committee hearings, and the first time a high-ranking Bush Administration official, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior Steven Griles, has been caught in the committee's crosshairs--a precursor, perhaps, of things to come. A GOP source involved in the federal investigation called his testimony "a big deal, a really big deal."
According to earlier reporting by the Washington Post and testimony Wednesday by Michael Rossetti, former counsel to Interior Secretary Gail Norton, Abramoff repeatedly lobbied Griles in 2002 and 2003 to deny land rights to the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, whose plan to build a casino in Louisiana threatened the livelihood of the neighboring Coushatta tribe, which Abramoff eventually milked for $36 million in lobbying fees.
Griles, like so many Washington insiders enmeshed in this scandal, immediately sought to distance himself from Abramoff. "My relationship with Mr. Abramoff was the same as with other lobbyists, nothing more and nothing less," he testified Wednesday.
Rossetti flatly disagreed. "I am aware that Mr. Griles in late 2003 became very interested in the decision-making process and the Secretary's meetings with respect to the Jena's in Louisiana," he testified. A series of e-mails released by the committee back Rosetti up. "We have e-mails and e-mails and e-mails where Abramoff says he is meeting with you," the committee's ranking Democrat, Byron Dorgan, told Griles. At one point Griles allegedly accepted a thick binder of anti-Jena literature from Abramoff. Not only did Abramoff meet with Griles at Interior; he also offered him a job, possibly in violation of federal conflict-of-interest statutes.
"This cannot be shared with anyone not on this distribution list," Abramoff wrote in an email to colleagues with the subject head "Griles." I met with him tonight. He is ready to leave Interior and will most likely be coming to join us." Griles, a former lobbyist who spent half his time at Interior under internal investigation for steering favors to former clients in the energy sector, ended up becoming a partner in a different lobbying firm, a prime example of a revolving-door culture between government and special interests that has spun wildly out of control. "Clearly, lobbying reform is one of those issues that will be addressed" after the investigation, said McCain.
Abramoff's conduit to Griles was Italia Federici, president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), a pro-industry front group founded by Norton and Norquist in 1998. Thus far, Norton has not been implicated in any of the wrongdoing. To woo Interior, Abramoff convinced three tribes to donate $225,000 to Federici's organization, whose tax-exempt status is now in jeopardy. (Federici dodged a subpoena Wednesday but will likely appear before the committee next week.) When Abramoff held a fundraiser for CREA at his restaurant, Signatures, Griles personally invited colleagues at Interior. The circumstances of that dinner will be one of the many questions Federici, publicly, and Abramoff, privately, will soon be forced to explain.
"All we did is follow the money," McCain said after the hearing. His investigation is a testament to how much Congress can accomplish when it simply does its job.
FEMA E-Mails Shed Light on Brown's Katrina Response
Former Director Discussed Clothing as Floods Ravaged New Orleans
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - E-mails sent as Hurricane Katrina raged reveal that FEMA's then-director, Michael Brown, discussed his clothing and his need for a dog sitter but left unanswered urgent messages.
Michael Brown (Getty) ''If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god.''
-- Michael Brown e-mailed the day of the storm.
A House committee investigating the response to Katrina released about 1,000 e-mails as members complained that the Bush administration had failed to provide copies of communications among high-level officials, including White House chief of staff Andy Card and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Deputy White House press secretary Trent Duffy said, "The White House staff is working on that information collection."
The newly released e-mails depict an official who "made few decisions and seemed out of touch," said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.
Last month at a Senate hearing, Marty Bahamonde, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's only employee in New Orleans when Katrina struck Aug. 29, said he e-mailed Brown on Aug. 31, "Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical ... many will die." Brown replied, "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
An e-mail offering critical medical equipment got no response for four days.
Brown resigned two weeks after Katrina hit.
E-mail excerpts:
· Aug. 29, 7:19 a.m., Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs to Brown, about his shirt as he appeared on NBC's Today: "My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous — and I'm not talking the makeup."
· Brown, 7:52 a.m.: "I got it at Nordsstroms ... Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"
· Aug. 30, 10:52 p.m. Brown to assistant Tillie James: "Do you know of anyone who dog-sits?"
· Sept. 2, 8:37 a.m. Brown to acquaintance Betty Guhman, on his pre-Katrina plans to leave FEMA: "Last hurrah was supposed to have been Labor Day. I'm trapped now, please rescue me."
Andy Lester, Brown's lawyer, said the committee "ought to focus" on FEMA's budget and other issues and not on e-mails that he characterized as efforts to boost morale among stressed staff and deal with family matters.
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - E-mails sent as Hurricane Katrina raged reveal that FEMA's then-director, Michael Brown, discussed his clothing and his need for a dog sitter but left unanswered urgent messages.
Michael Brown (Getty) ''If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god.''
-- Michael Brown e-mailed the day of the storm.
A House committee investigating the response to Katrina released about 1,000 e-mails as members complained that the Bush administration had failed to provide copies of communications among high-level officials, including White House chief of staff Andy Card and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Deputy White House press secretary Trent Duffy said, "The White House staff is working on that information collection."
The newly released e-mails depict an official who "made few decisions and seemed out of touch," said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.
Last month at a Senate hearing, Marty Bahamonde, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's only employee in New Orleans when Katrina struck Aug. 29, said he e-mailed Brown on Aug. 31, "Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical ... many will die." Brown replied, "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
An e-mail offering critical medical equipment got no response for four days.
Brown resigned two weeks after Katrina hit.
E-mail excerpts:
· Aug. 29, 7:19 a.m., Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs to Brown, about his shirt as he appeared on NBC's Today: "My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous — and I'm not talking the makeup."
· Brown, 7:52 a.m.: "I got it at Nordsstroms ... Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"
· Aug. 30, 10:52 p.m. Brown to assistant Tillie James: "Do you know of anyone who dog-sits?"
· Sept. 2, 8:37 a.m. Brown to acquaintance Betty Guhman, on his pre-Katrina plans to leave FEMA: "Last hurrah was supposed to have been Labor Day. I'm trapped now, please rescue me."
Andy Lester, Brown's lawyer, said the committee "ought to focus" on FEMA's budget and other issues and not on e-mails that he characterized as efforts to boost morale among stressed staff and deal with family matters.
Buckley says this is a serious matter
". . . [The focus should be on] the root cause of the disturbance. This had to do with revealing that Valerie Plame Wilson was secretly in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, using a cover employer to disguise her affiliation.We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal.
But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay -- that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company. In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted."
But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay -- that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company. In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted."
Only Good Enough To Die In War
washingtonpost.com
Food Stamp Cuts Are On Table
House Plan Would Affect 300,000
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 3, 2005; A01
House Republicans are pushing to cut tens of thousands of legal immigrants off food stamps, partially reversing President Bush's efforts to win Latino votes by restoring similar cuts made in the 1990s.
The food stamp measure is just one of several provisions in an expansive congressional budget-cutting package that critics say unfairly targets the poor and disadvantaged, especially poor children.
The battle will be joined today when the House Budget Committee is scheduled to fold eight budget-cutting bills saving $50 billion through 2010 into a single measure and then send it to the floor for a vote next week. The Senate is also set to vote on its version of the budget-cutting package, which would not cut food stamps. The smaller measure, with $39 billion in savings, has broad reach, affecting Medicare, Medicaid, agriculture programs, private pension plans and energy.
The Senate action will feature a showdown over a bid to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, as well as confrontations over limits to agriculture subsidies, Medicaid payments and Hurricane Katrina relief.
While concerns about runaway spending for the war and disaster relief have dominated the debate over the budget until now, lawmakers in both chambers have been quietly drafting changes to major spending and entitlement programs that would affect millions of Americans, including the fast-growing immigrant population.
The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those immigrants would lose their benefits because the House measure would require legal immigrants to live in the United States for seven years before becoming eligible to receive food stamps, rather than the current five years.
About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the CBO estimated.
The food stamp cuts, if approved, will especially affect 11 states, including Maryland, that used the changes in the food stamp law -- approved with Bush's support in 2002 -- to expand eligibility and to simplify the application process. Under the House measure, eligibility for food stamps would be tightened to exclude some recipients who qualify for nutritional support simply because they qualify for other anti-poverty programs funded by the federal welfare program, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Richard Larson, policy research director for the Maryland Department of Human Resources, said the state took advantage of the 2002 changes in the law to simplify the lives of Maryland's poor and to reduce the onerous paperwork involved in meeting the different qualifications for various anti-poverty programs. If a family qualifies for one program, such as Maryland's family-preservation services, it qualifies for food stamps automatically.
By eliminating such "categorical eligibility," the House measure would especially hurt those moving off of welfare, who may have incomes that exceed the basic food stamp threshold but who also have higher expenses, such as for child care and out-of-pocket health insurance, that come with work, Larson said.
White House officials have refused to disparage the House proposal, but they have made it clear that the savings from programs under the Agriculture Department can be achieved without food stamp cuts, as the Senate and the president have shown.
Such issues have created deep divisions between the conservatives pushing the cuts and Republican moderates, who fear the measure is going too far. A separate House measure would scale back federal administrative aid to state child-support enforcement programs, saving the federal government nearly $5 billion over five years but potentially cutting child-support collections even more.
Still another House provision would roll back a court-ordered expansion of foster care support, denying foster care payments to relatives who take in children removed from their parents' homes by court order. That provision would reduce the coverage of foster care payments to about 4,000 children a month and cut $397 million from the program through 2010, the CBO said.
"Why would we want to do anything to discourage a family member from taking in a child who has been abandoned or neglected by his birth family?" asked Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), who has told House leaders she cannot support the legislation.
House GOP leaders say the broad measure would root out government inefficiency and waste, while confronting the hard choices posed by the stubbornly high budget deficits and the costs of war and natural disasters. Even $50 billion is just a 0.6 percent nick out of the $7.8 trillion in federal entitlement spending expected over the next five years.
"We're cutting, but we're also changing things to try to make them fit today's needs better," House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said yesterday.
But some Republicans worry that social service cuts, though relatively small, might have outsized political ramifications, especially when Republicans move in the coming weeks to cut taxes for the fifth time in as many years. Those tax cuts, totaling $70 billion over five years, would more than offset the deficit reduction that would result from the budget cuts.
"The problem is the interrelationship between cutting taxes, which no matter what you do will be viewed as cutting taxes for the rich, and reducing programs for the poor," said moderate Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). "It's that simple."
When Bush secured the restoration of food stamps for thousands of legal immigrants in the huge 2002 farm bill, he pointed to the provision as proof that the measure was a "compassionate bill."
At $844 million over five years, the House's proposed food stamp cuts would account for less than half a percent of the total food stamp budget over that time. But Jennifer Ng'andu, a health and social policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, highlighted the symbolism of the provision: It is the only item in the budget measure targeted at immigrants.
"Going back on this is a reversal of all the achievements Bush has made with immigrants," she said. "These are lawful residents, good enough to die for our country in Iraq but not good enough to get food stamps."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Food Stamp Cuts Are On Table
House Plan Would Affect 300,000
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 3, 2005; A01
House Republicans are pushing to cut tens of thousands of legal immigrants off food stamps, partially reversing President Bush's efforts to win Latino votes by restoring similar cuts made in the 1990s.
The food stamp measure is just one of several provisions in an expansive congressional budget-cutting package that critics say unfairly targets the poor and disadvantaged, especially poor children.
The battle will be joined today when the House Budget Committee is scheduled to fold eight budget-cutting bills saving $50 billion through 2010 into a single measure and then send it to the floor for a vote next week. The Senate is also set to vote on its version of the budget-cutting package, which would not cut food stamps. The smaller measure, with $39 billion in savings, has broad reach, affecting Medicare, Medicaid, agriculture programs, private pension plans and energy.
The Senate action will feature a showdown over a bid to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, as well as confrontations over limits to agriculture subsidies, Medicaid payments and Hurricane Katrina relief.
While concerns about runaway spending for the war and disaster relief have dominated the debate over the budget until now, lawmakers in both chambers have been quietly drafting changes to major spending and entitlement programs that would affect millions of Americans, including the fast-growing immigrant population.
The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those immigrants would lose their benefits because the House measure would require legal immigrants to live in the United States for seven years before becoming eligible to receive food stamps, rather than the current five years.
About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the CBO estimated.
The food stamp cuts, if approved, will especially affect 11 states, including Maryland, that used the changes in the food stamp law -- approved with Bush's support in 2002 -- to expand eligibility and to simplify the application process. Under the House measure, eligibility for food stamps would be tightened to exclude some recipients who qualify for nutritional support simply because they qualify for other anti-poverty programs funded by the federal welfare program, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Richard Larson, policy research director for the Maryland Department of Human Resources, said the state took advantage of the 2002 changes in the law to simplify the lives of Maryland's poor and to reduce the onerous paperwork involved in meeting the different qualifications for various anti-poverty programs. If a family qualifies for one program, such as Maryland's family-preservation services, it qualifies for food stamps automatically.
By eliminating such "categorical eligibility," the House measure would especially hurt those moving off of welfare, who may have incomes that exceed the basic food stamp threshold but who also have higher expenses, such as for child care and out-of-pocket health insurance, that come with work, Larson said.
White House officials have refused to disparage the House proposal, but they have made it clear that the savings from programs under the Agriculture Department can be achieved without food stamp cuts, as the Senate and the president have shown.
Such issues have created deep divisions between the conservatives pushing the cuts and Republican moderates, who fear the measure is going too far. A separate House measure would scale back federal administrative aid to state child-support enforcement programs, saving the federal government nearly $5 billion over five years but potentially cutting child-support collections even more.
Still another House provision would roll back a court-ordered expansion of foster care support, denying foster care payments to relatives who take in children removed from their parents' homes by court order. That provision would reduce the coverage of foster care payments to about 4,000 children a month and cut $397 million from the program through 2010, the CBO said.
"Why would we want to do anything to discourage a family member from taking in a child who has been abandoned or neglected by his birth family?" asked Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), who has told House leaders she cannot support the legislation.
House GOP leaders say the broad measure would root out government inefficiency and waste, while confronting the hard choices posed by the stubbornly high budget deficits and the costs of war and natural disasters. Even $50 billion is just a 0.6 percent nick out of the $7.8 trillion in federal entitlement spending expected over the next five years.
"We're cutting, but we're also changing things to try to make them fit today's needs better," House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said yesterday.
But some Republicans worry that social service cuts, though relatively small, might have outsized political ramifications, especially when Republicans move in the coming weeks to cut taxes for the fifth time in as many years. Those tax cuts, totaling $70 billion over five years, would more than offset the deficit reduction that would result from the budget cuts.
"The problem is the interrelationship between cutting taxes, which no matter what you do will be viewed as cutting taxes for the rich, and reducing programs for the poor," said moderate Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). "It's that simple."
When Bush secured the restoration of food stamps for thousands of legal immigrants in the huge 2002 farm bill, he pointed to the provision as proof that the measure was a "compassionate bill."
At $844 million over five years, the House's proposed food stamp cuts would account for less than half a percent of the total food stamp budget over that time. But Jennifer Ng'andu, a health and social policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, highlighted the symbolism of the provision: It is the only item in the budget measure targeted at immigrants.
"Going back on this is a reversal of all the achievements Bush has made with immigrants," she said. "These are lawful residents, good enough to die for our country in Iraq but not good enough to get food stamps."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The CIA leak investigation: Bigger fish, deeper water
· · Vol 26 · Issue 1300 · PUBLISHED 11/2/2005
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1300/article13827.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald isn't finished with the Bush White House yet
by Steve Perry
Winston Churchill once said that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed," and last Friday afternoon a lot of Bush partisans were buoyed by the same sentiment. Writing at Power Line, John Hinderaker mused, "Having now read 15 or 20 news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration...I couldn't help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore's chief of staff was when he was vice-president? My guess is that the large majority of people who read these stories are asking themselves, 'Scooter who?'"
He's right. On its own, the public fallout from Libby's indictment on five counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice will be minimal. One could even add that the indictment of Karl Rove would make less difference in the court of popular opinion than most followers of the case think. Poll after poll has shown that only about half of Americans have ever heard of Rove. The gravity of his loss would be strategic: Without him, the great orchestra of White House staffers, congressional GOP foot soldiers, and the Washington press corps would be without a conductor. Meantime, only a very few pundits of the right made mention of the shoe that has not yet dropped. Proving again that crazy is not the same as stupid, Ann Coulter told CNN that the extension of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation "is, like, the worst possible outcome." She is right, too.
Where is Fitzgerald's case headed now? The arc of Plame leak coverage in the press underscores the futility of reading too much into any particular leak from the grand jury. As recently as last Friday, the New York Times and Washington Post were diametrically opposed on the very basic question of whether the probe would continue. (The Times said yes, the Post no.) The trouble is that all the leaks seem to be coming from defense attorneys close to the case, and criminal lawyers a) don't know Fitzgerald's theory of the case, only what he has said to them regarding their clients; and b) are duty-bound, wherever possible, to spin any disclosures they make so as to aid their clients.
But there is one point on which every major news outlet, and presumably every leaker, has fallen into accord in the past week or two. Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal put it concisely: "With the grand jury in the CIA leak case expected to vote as soon as today to bring charges against White House officials, the two-year probe appears to be focused on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects and defenders of the administration's Iraq war policy." The accent belongs on the last clause. Cheney's office is the Pandora's Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up the CIA for its unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented the CIA by setting up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing stooge, Ahmed Chalabi.
At this point it's altogether unclear where or when Fitzgerald's investigation will conclude--or simply run into a wall he can't break through. But there's little need to speculate as to how far he's reaching. The investigative reporter Jason Leopold, a former Dow-Jones Newswire reporter who has put the Raw Story website on the map in a new way with his Plame leak reporting, points out that a court filing posted at Fitzgerald's DoJ website refers to subpoenas issued regarding "conversations between [NYT reporter Judith] Miller and a specified government official occurring between on or about July 6, 2003 and on or about July 13, 2003, concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium." [emphasis added]
The implication is that Fitzgerald's inquiry is now looking all the way back to the claims about Saddam, uranium, and Niger that were touted in a pair of 2001 forged documents that turned up in Italy. This jibes with a little-noted story filed by veteran UPI editor Martin Walker on October 23. In what may be the first major leak in the case not disseminated by criminal defense lawyers, Walker cited "NATO intelligence sources" as saying, "Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair.... This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated."
All we know for sure now is that, as the dolorous Coulter saw too well, every outcome remains on the table. It's entirely possible that no more indictments in the case will be forthcoming--though unless the leaks last week about conferences between Fitzgerald and Rove attorney Robert Luskin were pure hooey, that seems doubtful. On the other hand, it is also possible that this investigation will dog Cheney from now until 2008 and raise him to the status of unindicted co-conspirator, or beyond. If that is where Fitzgerald means to go, there's every reason to suppose he'll find ample cooperation from the ranks of CIA and State Department officialdom whose advice was spurned or subverted en route to war. The list starts with former CIA director George Tenet, who was first pressured to disregard the word of his own analysts and then made to fall on his sword for having done so, and also includes Colin Powell and a host of folks most of us have never heard of. One of them, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, wrote a fairly breathtaking op-ed titled "The White House Cabal" in the L.A. Times on October 25. I've never read anything remotely like it from a former member of a sitting administration:
In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security--including vital decisions about postwar Iraq--were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less....
The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet....
Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White). It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.
These are the sorts of folk the Bush White House's pursuit of the Iraq war has left waiting in the wings with scores to settle. Time will tell whether Fitzgerald can work his way to them, but knowing they are out there cannot be good for Dick Cheney's heart, or his sleep.
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1300/article13827.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald isn't finished with the Bush White House yet
by Steve Perry
Winston Churchill once said that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed," and last Friday afternoon a lot of Bush partisans were buoyed by the same sentiment. Writing at Power Line, John Hinderaker mused, "Having now read 15 or 20 news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration...I couldn't help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore's chief of staff was when he was vice-president? My guess is that the large majority of people who read these stories are asking themselves, 'Scooter who?'"
He's right. On its own, the public fallout from Libby's indictment on five counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice will be minimal. One could even add that the indictment of Karl Rove would make less difference in the court of popular opinion than most followers of the case think. Poll after poll has shown that only about half of Americans have ever heard of Rove. The gravity of his loss would be strategic: Without him, the great orchestra of White House staffers, congressional GOP foot soldiers, and the Washington press corps would be without a conductor. Meantime, only a very few pundits of the right made mention of the shoe that has not yet dropped. Proving again that crazy is not the same as stupid, Ann Coulter told CNN that the extension of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation "is, like, the worst possible outcome." She is right, too.
Where is Fitzgerald's case headed now? The arc of Plame leak coverage in the press underscores the futility of reading too much into any particular leak from the grand jury. As recently as last Friday, the New York Times and Washington Post were diametrically opposed on the very basic question of whether the probe would continue. (The Times said yes, the Post no.) The trouble is that all the leaks seem to be coming from defense attorneys close to the case, and criminal lawyers a) don't know Fitzgerald's theory of the case, only what he has said to them regarding their clients; and b) are duty-bound, wherever possible, to spin any disclosures they make so as to aid their clients.
But there is one point on which every major news outlet, and presumably every leaker, has fallen into accord in the past week or two. Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal put it concisely: "With the grand jury in the CIA leak case expected to vote as soon as today to bring charges against White House officials, the two-year probe appears to be focused on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects and defenders of the administration's Iraq war policy." The accent belongs on the last clause. Cheney's office is the Pandora's Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up the CIA for its unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented the CIA by setting up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing stooge, Ahmed Chalabi.
At this point it's altogether unclear where or when Fitzgerald's investigation will conclude--or simply run into a wall he can't break through. But there's little need to speculate as to how far he's reaching. The investigative reporter Jason Leopold, a former Dow-Jones Newswire reporter who has put the Raw Story website on the map in a new way with his Plame leak reporting, points out that a court filing posted at Fitzgerald's DoJ website refers to subpoenas issued regarding "conversations between [NYT reporter Judith] Miller and a specified government official occurring between on or about July 6, 2003 and on or about July 13, 2003, concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium." [emphasis added]
The implication is that Fitzgerald's inquiry is now looking all the way back to the claims about Saddam, uranium, and Niger that were touted in a pair of 2001 forged documents that turned up in Italy. This jibes with a little-noted story filed by veteran UPI editor Martin Walker on October 23. In what may be the first major leak in the case not disseminated by criminal defense lawyers, Walker cited "NATO intelligence sources" as saying, "Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair.... This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated."
All we know for sure now is that, as the dolorous Coulter saw too well, every outcome remains on the table. It's entirely possible that no more indictments in the case will be forthcoming--though unless the leaks last week about conferences between Fitzgerald and Rove attorney Robert Luskin were pure hooey, that seems doubtful. On the other hand, it is also possible that this investigation will dog Cheney from now until 2008 and raise him to the status of unindicted co-conspirator, or beyond. If that is where Fitzgerald means to go, there's every reason to suppose he'll find ample cooperation from the ranks of CIA and State Department officialdom whose advice was spurned or subverted en route to war. The list starts with former CIA director George Tenet, who was first pressured to disregard the word of his own analysts and then made to fall on his sword for having done so, and also includes Colin Powell and a host of folks most of us have never heard of. One of them, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, wrote a fairly breathtaking op-ed titled "The White House Cabal" in the L.A. Times on October 25. I've never read anything remotely like it from a former member of a sitting administration:
In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security--including vital decisions about postwar Iraq--were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less....
The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet....
Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White). It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.
These are the sorts of folk the Bush White House's pursuit of the Iraq war has left waiting in the wings with scores to settle. Time will tell whether Fitzgerald can work his way to them, but knowing they are out there cannot be good for Dick Cheney's heart, or his sleep.
Reid declares victory in Senate closure
Bill Frist is grumbling about a "stunt," but Democrats are claiming that their move to put the Senate in closed session this afternoon has resulted in the outcome they wanted: a promise from Republicans to move forward on a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
"After months and months and months of begging, cajoling and writing letters, we're finally going to have Phase II of the investigation into how the intelligence was used to lead us into this intractable war in Iraq," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said a few minutes ago.
Reid said that the Republican leadership has agreed to provide Democrats a "phase by phase plan" for completing the long-delayed investigation by Nov. 14. Republicans say they were moving forward anyway. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, who said in March that continuing the investigation would be a "monumental waste of time," insisted today that his committee has been working on Phase II of the investigation all along.
Reid scoffed at such claims and dismissed Frist's complaints about the Democrats' maneuvering today. "The only way we've been able to get their attention is to spend three and a half hours in closed session," Reid said. Asked about Frist's characterization of the unannounced Senate closure as a "slap in the face" to the Republican leadership, Reid said: "It's a slap in the face to the American people that this investigation has been stymied, stopped, obstructions thrown up every step of the way. That's the real slap in the face."
"After months and months and months of begging, cajoling and writing letters, we're finally going to have Phase II of the investigation into how the intelligence was used to lead us into this intractable war in Iraq," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said a few minutes ago.
Reid said that the Republican leadership has agreed to provide Democrats a "phase by phase plan" for completing the long-delayed investigation by Nov. 14. Republicans say they were moving forward anyway. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, who said in March that continuing the investigation would be a "monumental waste of time," insisted today that his committee has been working on Phase II of the investigation all along.
Reid scoffed at such claims and dismissed Frist's complaints about the Democrats' maneuvering today. "The only way we've been able to get their attention is to spend three and a half hours in closed session," Reid said. Asked about Frist's characterization of the unannounced Senate closure as a "slap in the face" to the Republican leadership, Reid said: "It's a slap in the face to the American people that this investigation has been stymied, stopped, obstructions thrown up every step of the way. That's the real slap in the face."
President Pushover
washingtonpost.com
By David S. Broder
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A21
Under other circumstances, President Bush's choice of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court would have been seen as a bold move by a strong president with a clear policy objective. By choosing a man of superior intellectual heft and an indelible record of conservative views on major social issues, Bush would have been challenging his critics on the Democratic side to test their arguments in an arena where everything favored him: a Republican Senate.
But after the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination and the other reversals of recent days and weeks, the Alito nomination inevitably looks like a defensive move, a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president to secure what is left of his political base. Instead of a consistent and principled approach to major decision making, Bush's efforts look like off-balance grabs for whatever policy rationales he can find. The president's opponents are emboldened by this performance, and his fellow partisans must increasingly wonder if they can afford to march to his command.
None of this is to suggest that Judge Alito will be -- or should be -- blocked from elevation to the seat of Sandra Day O'Connor. His record entitles him to the serious consideration and questioning he will undoubtedly receive from the Judiciary Committee. But after Bush acquiesced in the conservative movement's uproar denying Miers her chance for an up-or-down Senate vote, or even a hearing in that committee, there is no plausible way the White House can insist that every major judicial nominee deserves such a vote.
That was the rationale behind the threatened "nuclear option" in the Senate, the mid-session rule change that would have banned judicial filibusters. If the mass of Democrats and a few Republicans who may be dismayed by Alito's stands on abortion and other issues can muster the 41 votes needed to sustain a filibuster under current rules, they now have precedent for using their power.
The conservative screamers who shot down Miers can argue that they were fighting only for a "qualified" nominee, though it is plain that many of them wanted more -- a guarantee that Miers would do their bidding and overrule Roe v. Wade . But whatever the rationale, the fact is that they short-circuited the confirmation process by raising hell with Bush. Certainly there can be no greater sin in a sizable bloc of sitting senators using long-standing Senate rules to stymie a nomination than a cabal of outsiders -- a lynching squad of right-wing journalists, self-sanctified religious and moral organizations, and other frustrated power-brokers -- rolling over the president they all ostensibly support.
But the message that has been sent is that this president is surprisingly easy to roll. He came out of his election victory proclaiming that Social Security reform was his No. 1 priority. For six months he stumped the country trying to sell his ideas -- and failed. In retrospect, even Republicans said he misjudged the temper of the public by emphasizing privatization over solvency as the chief goal. He tried to isolate senior citizens from the battle, only to see them in the front lines. And he managed to unite the Democrats in opposition -- something their own leaders rarely can manage.
Next came Hurricane Katrina, which showed the whole country a case study in mismanagement by a White House supposedly under Harvard Business School-level discipline. Bush's first decision post-Katrina was to suspend the law guaranteeing prevailing wages for reconstruction work. But that decision too was quickly reversed, in the face of pressure from Democrats, moderate Republicans and even the supposedly enfeebled labor movement.
And then came the Miers fiasco, with the dagger held by the president's staunchest allies. It made a shambles of any consistent claim that Bush employs serious principles in picking judges. A system that veers from an accomplished and studiously nonideological John Roberts to a marginally credentialed and often confused-sounding Harriet Miers to an intellectual and experienced Samuel Alito with pronounced ideological views is no system at all.
Politically, the president probably had no choice but to reach back for his conservative base in making the Alito nomination. At his current levels of support, he has no place else to go. But the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll contains a clear warning. Self-described conservatives made up only 31 percent of the electorate. Moderates numbered 44 percent. And the moderates were nearly exact opposites of the conservatives in their views toward Bush, disapproving of his job performance by a 38 to 61 percent margin, while conservatives approved 61 to 39.
The risks of a Supreme Court showdown fight are at least as great for Bush as for the Democrats.
davidbroder@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
By David S. Broder
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A21
Under other circumstances, President Bush's choice of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court would have been seen as a bold move by a strong president with a clear policy objective. By choosing a man of superior intellectual heft and an indelible record of conservative views on major social issues, Bush would have been challenging his critics on the Democratic side to test their arguments in an arena where everything favored him: a Republican Senate.
But after the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination and the other reversals of recent days and weeks, the Alito nomination inevitably looks like a defensive move, a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president to secure what is left of his political base. Instead of a consistent and principled approach to major decision making, Bush's efforts look like off-balance grabs for whatever policy rationales he can find. The president's opponents are emboldened by this performance, and his fellow partisans must increasingly wonder if they can afford to march to his command.
None of this is to suggest that Judge Alito will be -- or should be -- blocked from elevation to the seat of Sandra Day O'Connor. His record entitles him to the serious consideration and questioning he will undoubtedly receive from the Judiciary Committee. But after Bush acquiesced in the conservative movement's uproar denying Miers her chance for an up-or-down Senate vote, or even a hearing in that committee, there is no plausible way the White House can insist that every major judicial nominee deserves such a vote.
That was the rationale behind the threatened "nuclear option" in the Senate, the mid-session rule change that would have banned judicial filibusters. If the mass of Democrats and a few Republicans who may be dismayed by Alito's stands on abortion and other issues can muster the 41 votes needed to sustain a filibuster under current rules, they now have precedent for using their power.
The conservative screamers who shot down Miers can argue that they were fighting only for a "qualified" nominee, though it is plain that many of them wanted more -- a guarantee that Miers would do their bidding and overrule Roe v. Wade . But whatever the rationale, the fact is that they short-circuited the confirmation process by raising hell with Bush. Certainly there can be no greater sin in a sizable bloc of sitting senators using long-standing Senate rules to stymie a nomination than a cabal of outsiders -- a lynching squad of right-wing journalists, self-sanctified religious and moral organizations, and other frustrated power-brokers -- rolling over the president they all ostensibly support.
But the message that has been sent is that this president is surprisingly easy to roll. He came out of his election victory proclaiming that Social Security reform was his No. 1 priority. For six months he stumped the country trying to sell his ideas -- and failed. In retrospect, even Republicans said he misjudged the temper of the public by emphasizing privatization over solvency as the chief goal. He tried to isolate senior citizens from the battle, only to see them in the front lines. And he managed to unite the Democrats in opposition -- something their own leaders rarely can manage.
Next came Hurricane Katrina, which showed the whole country a case study in mismanagement by a White House supposedly under Harvard Business School-level discipline. Bush's first decision post-Katrina was to suspend the law guaranteeing prevailing wages for reconstruction work. But that decision too was quickly reversed, in the face of pressure from Democrats, moderate Republicans and even the supposedly enfeebled labor movement.
And then came the Miers fiasco, with the dagger held by the president's staunchest allies. It made a shambles of any consistent claim that Bush employs serious principles in picking judges. A system that veers from an accomplished and studiously nonideological John Roberts to a marginally credentialed and often confused-sounding Harriet Miers to an intellectual and experienced Samuel Alito with pronounced ideological views is no system at all.
Politically, the president probably had no choice but to reach back for his conservative base in making the Alito nomination. At his current levels of support, he has no place else to go. But the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll contains a clear warning. Self-described conservatives made up only 31 percent of the electorate. Moderates numbered 44 percent. And the moderates were nearly exact opposites of the conservatives in their views toward Bush, disapproving of his job performance by a 38 to 61 percent margin, while conservatives approved 61 to 39.
The risks of a Supreme Court showdown fight are at least as great for Bush as for the Democrats.
davidbroder@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Progressives Can Do Better
AlterNet
Democrats Fiddling as the World Burns
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on November 1, 2005, Printed on November 1, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/27639/
By the time Richard Milhous Nixon goes on trial in the Senate, the only real reason for trying him will be to understand how he ever became president of the United States at all ... and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American Political System. -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1973.
The top three political leaders in America are in the legal hot seat.
George Bush's White House has been served with an indictment on five counts against the chief of staff to the Vice President. Tom DeLay's trial is under way. And Bill Frist is the subject of a formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling off his family's stock.
And there are more investigations against Republicans lurking just below the surface. Powerful House member Bob Ney is wrapped up tightly with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; Congressman Randy Cunningham is in bed with a defense contractor; House Republican Richard Pombo, who chairs the House Resources Committee, has gone on travel junkets paid for by a shady private foundation.
Outside of D.C. there's Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher, who is going down for having a GOP-only hiring practice. And the Ohio Republican Party has collapsed: Governor Bob Taft has been reprimanded and fined for playing golf on lobbyists' tabs, and big-time donor Tom Noe has been indicted for funneling cash into George Bush's re-election and stealing from the public purse to pour money into his rare coin investments.
Each crime is a fitting symbol of each Republican's particular brand of political criminality: George Bush's team got busted in a smear attempt against an Iraq war opponent -- but the entire case for war was a crime if there ever were one. DeLay's case is about him funneling corporate money to political causes to scorch Texas' political landscape with R's in every district -- but he's done nothing but funnel money from corporations for pork and political advantage every year he's been in Congress. Richard Pombo was found to have taken money from a group funded by whalers, mink farmers and veal barons -- poetic justice for a guy who has tried to sell off our national parks to mining and lumber interests. And so on.
It's time for the Democrats to seize the political advantage, right? Every single political branch in D.C. is on fire. The world is also on fire, or drowning: the American public has clear, massive majority positions on Iraq, Katrina, our $8 trillion national debt, world poverty, $3 gallon gas and rapid climate change. Yet what we've gotten so far from the Democratic leadership is meaningless sloganeering.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and power-hungry Hillary Clinton's big rhetorical banner for 2006 -- as good an indicator to the Democrats' predictions of where all this scandal and disaster is going to take them in the next election as any -- is, America Can Do Better.
Here's where I part from those who have taken the time to criticize the D.C. Democrats for such a feckless response. Step back and look at the political climate for a moment before passing judgment on America Can Do Better. The legal investigations listed above have been the driving engine of the political process for months now. Political advantage is currently determined by the ups and downs of pending cases; we're bringing the courts into the political process on a comprehensive scale far beyond what we saw with Ken Starr in the '90s -- a trend that, if treated by political leaders as appropriate politics, as the Roman historian Tacitus attested, is proof of a deceased republic.
Democrats and their partisan supporters are relying on prosecutors to do what they couldn't at the ballot box. Patrick Fitzgerald would not be in the spotlight today if John Kerry hadn't been such a squeamish collaborator in our rush to war in Iraq, and such an unrepentant coward leading up to the 2004 election (and he still is a year later).
And there's a price to pay for making prosecutors like Fitzgerald the hero of the moment; it gives further incentive for the Democratic Party in Washington, wraith of the New Deal coalition that it is, to languish and let legal investigations do their "work" for them.
America Can Do Better is the fitting and perfect motto for the Democratic political class. What's sillier are the expectations of slogans about Iraq, corporations or the environment, given the sick state of our political system. This hasn't been lost on the public, which, despite giving an approval rating of 40 percent to congressional Republicans during these months of scandal, gives the opposition a rating that hovers under 50. Is it fair to expect that the public will view Scooter Libby as simply a Bush-serving Republican villain when it comes to light that he was a lawyer for Clinton pardonee Marc Rich?
What if, magically, we were able to investigate and prosecute George Bush for lying us into Iraq, as many have called for? Not only do the congressional Republicans who abetted him deserve investigation, so do the Democrats and previous White House administrations, which are complicit in this too. We've been driving Iraq into the ground for 14 years. Bush's Iraq policies picked up the torch from the Clinton foreign policy team, which in turn took its pointers from the staff of George H.W. Bush.
As AlterNet's recent editorial on the 2,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq argued, the number of deaths in that country was far higher during Bill Clinton's eight years: "[The death totals in Iraq since Bush's invasion] are dwarfed by the number of dead -- by some estimates over a million -- caused by the U.N sanctions that started with Bush I, and continued under President Bill Clinton, whose Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once described the effects of the sanctions on Iraq's children as 'worth it.'"
Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq's weapons programs, recently spoke in a public forum about the U.S. crimes done to Iraq: "This is about a failure of not only the Bush Administration but of the United States of America, and we have to look in the mirror and recognize that, well, all the Bush Administration did is take advantage of a systemic failure on the part of the United States as a whole, a failure that not only involves the executive, but it involves the legislative branch, Congress."
We're at a moment in D.C. just like the one that Hunter Thompson saw in 1973 -- nothing has really changed. Are we going to wonder how Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay got away with their crimes, or how they got where they are in the first place?
If we pick the former, then, yeah, America can do better. If we go with the latter, we're going to start talking about how corruption isn't a measure of how much a politician steals from the purse or breaks the law, but rather the degree of civic apathy. We'll talk about how it's insane that we have a 218-year-old Constitution that has been little more than amended (Thomas Jefferson suggested we completely rewrite it every 20 years), and an equally ancient federal instrument that has ballooned but not evolved with the country's rapid expansion in size and population and major technological advances.
And we'll surely discuss the danger that centralized power has not only for the health of a republic but our own safety. As Thompson observed, it's the American political system that deserves a trial. Let us be the jury and the judge.
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/27639/
Democrats Fiddling as the World Burns
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on November 1, 2005, Printed on November 1, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/27639/
By the time Richard Milhous Nixon goes on trial in the Senate, the only real reason for trying him will be to understand how he ever became president of the United States at all ... and the real defendant, at that point, will be the American Political System. -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1973.
The top three political leaders in America are in the legal hot seat.
George Bush's White House has been served with an indictment on five counts against the chief of staff to the Vice President. Tom DeLay's trial is under way. And Bill Frist is the subject of a formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling off his family's stock.
And there are more investigations against Republicans lurking just below the surface. Powerful House member Bob Ney is wrapped up tightly with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; Congressman Randy Cunningham is in bed with a defense contractor; House Republican Richard Pombo, who chairs the House Resources Committee, has gone on travel junkets paid for by a shady private foundation.
Outside of D.C. there's Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher, who is going down for having a GOP-only hiring practice. And the Ohio Republican Party has collapsed: Governor Bob Taft has been reprimanded and fined for playing golf on lobbyists' tabs, and big-time donor Tom Noe has been indicted for funneling cash into George Bush's re-election and stealing from the public purse to pour money into his rare coin investments.
Each crime is a fitting symbol of each Republican's particular brand of political criminality: George Bush's team got busted in a smear attempt against an Iraq war opponent -- but the entire case for war was a crime if there ever were one. DeLay's case is about him funneling corporate money to political causes to scorch Texas' political landscape with R's in every district -- but he's done nothing but funnel money from corporations for pork and political advantage every year he's been in Congress. Richard Pombo was found to have taken money from a group funded by whalers, mink farmers and veal barons -- poetic justice for a guy who has tried to sell off our national parks to mining and lumber interests. And so on.
It's time for the Democrats to seize the political advantage, right? Every single political branch in D.C. is on fire. The world is also on fire, or drowning: the American public has clear, massive majority positions on Iraq, Katrina, our $8 trillion national debt, world poverty, $3 gallon gas and rapid climate change. Yet what we've gotten so far from the Democratic leadership is meaningless sloganeering.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and power-hungry Hillary Clinton's big rhetorical banner for 2006 -- as good an indicator to the Democrats' predictions of where all this scandal and disaster is going to take them in the next election as any -- is, America Can Do Better.
Here's where I part from those who have taken the time to criticize the D.C. Democrats for such a feckless response. Step back and look at the political climate for a moment before passing judgment on America Can Do Better. The legal investigations listed above have been the driving engine of the political process for months now. Political advantage is currently determined by the ups and downs of pending cases; we're bringing the courts into the political process on a comprehensive scale far beyond what we saw with Ken Starr in the '90s -- a trend that, if treated by political leaders as appropriate politics, as the Roman historian Tacitus attested, is proof of a deceased republic.
Democrats and their partisan supporters are relying on prosecutors to do what they couldn't at the ballot box. Patrick Fitzgerald would not be in the spotlight today if John Kerry hadn't been such a squeamish collaborator in our rush to war in Iraq, and such an unrepentant coward leading up to the 2004 election (and he still is a year later).
And there's a price to pay for making prosecutors like Fitzgerald the hero of the moment; it gives further incentive for the Democratic Party in Washington, wraith of the New Deal coalition that it is, to languish and let legal investigations do their "work" for them.
America Can Do Better is the fitting and perfect motto for the Democratic political class. What's sillier are the expectations of slogans about Iraq, corporations or the environment, given the sick state of our political system. This hasn't been lost on the public, which, despite giving an approval rating of 40 percent to congressional Republicans during these months of scandal, gives the opposition a rating that hovers under 50. Is it fair to expect that the public will view Scooter Libby as simply a Bush-serving Republican villain when it comes to light that he was a lawyer for Clinton pardonee Marc Rich?
What if, magically, we were able to investigate and prosecute George Bush for lying us into Iraq, as many have called for? Not only do the congressional Republicans who abetted him deserve investigation, so do the Democrats and previous White House administrations, which are complicit in this too. We've been driving Iraq into the ground for 14 years. Bush's Iraq policies picked up the torch from the Clinton foreign policy team, which in turn took its pointers from the staff of George H.W. Bush.
As AlterNet's recent editorial on the 2,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq argued, the number of deaths in that country was far higher during Bill Clinton's eight years: "[The death totals in Iraq since Bush's invasion] are dwarfed by the number of dead -- by some estimates over a million -- caused by the U.N sanctions that started with Bush I, and continued under President Bill Clinton, whose Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once described the effects of the sanctions on Iraq's children as 'worth it.'"
Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq's weapons programs, recently spoke in a public forum about the U.S. crimes done to Iraq: "This is about a failure of not only the Bush Administration but of the United States of America, and we have to look in the mirror and recognize that, well, all the Bush Administration did is take advantage of a systemic failure on the part of the United States as a whole, a failure that not only involves the executive, but it involves the legislative branch, Congress."
We're at a moment in D.C. just like the one that Hunter Thompson saw in 1973 -- nothing has really changed. Are we going to wonder how Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay got away with their crimes, or how they got where they are in the first place?
If we pick the former, then, yeah, America can do better. If we go with the latter, we're going to start talking about how corruption isn't a measure of how much a politician steals from the purse or breaks the law, but rather the degree of civic apathy. We'll talk about how it's insane that we have a 218-year-old Constitution that has been little more than amended (Thomas Jefferson suggested we completely rewrite it every 20 years), and an equally ancient federal instrument that has ballooned but not evolved with the country's rapid expansion in size and population and major technological advances.
And we'll surely discuss the danger that centralized power has not only for the health of a republic but our own safety. As Thompson observed, it's the American political system that deserves a trial. Let us be the jury and the judge.
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/27639/
Blinded By The Right
Rhetoric Meets Reality in the Budget Season
By Jonathan Weisman
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; A23
It was unfortunate political timing for House Republicans: On Friday, as the Agriculture Committee was drafting budget-cutting legislation that could knock 295,000 people off food stamps, the Agriculture Department released findings that 529,000 more Americans went hungry last year than in 2003.
The juxtaposition neatly encapsulated the problems that Republicans will have this week and next when they try to put their rhetorical zeal for spending restraint into legislative action.
The Senate took up far-reaching legislation yesterday that would slice $39 billion over the next five years from a slew of entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and agriculture subsidies, while raising revenue by opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A final vote is due Thursday.
The House will go further. Most likely by Thursday, the House Budget Committee will take up eight different bills from eight different committees saving at least $50 billion over five years. In so doing, the legislation will rewrite welfare laws, curb federal support of state child-support enforcement, reverse a court-mandated expansion of foster-care programs, and make significant changes to Medicaid, such as allowing states to add co-payments and premiums for families just above the poverty line. The full House is expected to take up the measure next week.
Even $50 billion is just a 0.6 percent nick out of the $7.8 trillion in federal entitlement spending expected over the next five years. At $844 million over five years, the embattled food-stamp cuts account for less than half a percent of the total food-stamp budget over that time, said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.).
But Democrats will emphasize that even that level of cuts will mean real pain for real people. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, neither the House nor the Senate bills will actually trim projected budget deficits, since they will be followed by a package of tax-cut extensions that would cost the Treasury $70 billion over five years.
Under complex congressional budget rules, the skids should be greased for passage. Since both the budget cuts and the tax cuts were mandated by a budget resolution, narrowly approved this spring, neither package can be filibustered in the Senate, so a simple 51-vote majority will do.
The Senate package is gaining kudos from some unlikely sources. Liberal budget and anti-poverty groups say the Senate budget-cutting legislation largely avoids cuts that will hit low-income beneficiaries, although they still oppose the bill because they say it will facilitate deeper, House-driven cuts. "We do need to commend the senators that worked hard to make sure [the measure] avoids these kind of cuts," said Deborah Stein, federal policy director of Voices for America's Children.
But final passage is anything but secure. House Republican moderates have grown increasingly queasy about what one of their leaders, Rep. Michael N. Castle (Del.), calls an unbalanced package, too weighted toward cutting programs for the poor. Before they take an organized stand, moderate Republicans will meet today with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) to discuss what will be in the tax-cut package that could follow as soon as two weeks from now, said Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.).
But they have not been shy about expressing their misgivings. Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) last week voted against the House Energy and Commerce Committee's piece of the bill, cutting Medicaid by $11 billion.
"I don't think it serves the people I came here to represent. I have told the leadership I am opposed," she said.
By Jonathan Weisman
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; A23
It was unfortunate political timing for House Republicans: On Friday, as the Agriculture Committee was drafting budget-cutting legislation that could knock 295,000 people off food stamps, the Agriculture Department released findings that 529,000 more Americans went hungry last year than in 2003.
The juxtaposition neatly encapsulated the problems that Republicans will have this week and next when they try to put their rhetorical zeal for spending restraint into legislative action.
The Senate took up far-reaching legislation yesterday that would slice $39 billion over the next five years from a slew of entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and agriculture subsidies, while raising revenue by opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A final vote is due Thursday.
The House will go further. Most likely by Thursday, the House Budget Committee will take up eight different bills from eight different committees saving at least $50 billion over five years. In so doing, the legislation will rewrite welfare laws, curb federal support of state child-support enforcement, reverse a court-mandated expansion of foster-care programs, and make significant changes to Medicaid, such as allowing states to add co-payments and premiums for families just above the poverty line. The full House is expected to take up the measure next week.
Even $50 billion is just a 0.6 percent nick out of the $7.8 trillion in federal entitlement spending expected over the next five years. At $844 million over five years, the embattled food-stamp cuts account for less than half a percent of the total food-stamp budget over that time, said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.).
But Democrats will emphasize that even that level of cuts will mean real pain for real people. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, neither the House nor the Senate bills will actually trim projected budget deficits, since they will be followed by a package of tax-cut extensions that would cost the Treasury $70 billion over five years.
Under complex congressional budget rules, the skids should be greased for passage. Since both the budget cuts and the tax cuts were mandated by a budget resolution, narrowly approved this spring, neither package can be filibustered in the Senate, so a simple 51-vote majority will do.
The Senate package is gaining kudos from some unlikely sources. Liberal budget and anti-poverty groups say the Senate budget-cutting legislation largely avoids cuts that will hit low-income beneficiaries, although they still oppose the bill because they say it will facilitate deeper, House-driven cuts. "We do need to commend the senators that worked hard to make sure [the measure] avoids these kind of cuts," said Deborah Stein, federal policy director of Voices for America's Children.
But final passage is anything but secure. House Republican moderates have grown increasingly queasy about what one of their leaders, Rep. Michael N. Castle (Del.), calls an unbalanced package, too weighted toward cutting programs for the poor. Before they take an organized stand, moderate Republicans will meet today with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) to discuss what will be in the tax-cut package that could follow as soon as two weeks from now, said Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.).
But they have not been shy about expressing their misgivings. Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) last week voted against the House Energy and Commerce Committee's piece of the bill, cutting Medicaid by $11 billion.
"I don't think it serves the people I came here to represent. I have told the leadership I am opposed," she said.
Here Comes the Judge -- Beyond Roe v. Wade
by Larry Beinhart
The first question to ask the new nominee to the Supreme Court is: "Will you be an honest judge?"
This is not a question that is normally asked, straight up, to a Supreme Court nominee. But we are asking about something a little more subtle than "would you take a bribe to throw a case?"
In the year 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of the Florida vote and threw the election to George Bush. This is old news. But judging from the Roberts' hearings and the punditry, the issues have been forgotten. They've faded into the fog.
Ignoring the fact that the man with fewer votes got to be president, what is most notable about the decision was that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Conner did not vote according to what they believed the law to be. They voted for Bush because they wanted a Republican president.
We can say that because they have a track record and their votes in Bush v. Gore went against their own established principles. If Gore had been ahead and he asked them to stop the recount, on the very same grounds, it is a virtual certainty that those same five judges would have voted the other way.
The justices violated a judicial principle that is even more profound and runs even deeper than the Constitution itself, that the law will be applied fairly.
Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and O'Connor stopped the recount on the grounds that because different counties would use different standards it would violate equal protection.
But that was already true of the original voting. Machines were different, their maintenance levels were different, the way they were set was different, and ballot designs were different. How could a recount -- a closer examination of flaws -- increase the inequality of protection?
To stop something, the court has to find that there will be harm in letting it go forward. That harm has to be greater than any harm created by stopping the procedure. Preferably, the harm should be otherwise irreparable. In this case the court held that Bush would be harmed because the recount would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election.
Huh?
Presuming he would have still won after the votes were recounted, that would make the vote seem doubly legitimate, not cast doubts on it. If the recount showed that he lost, surely the harm done to Al Gore, to the voters of Florida, and to the people of the United States -- to be governed by a man who lost the election -- would be greater harm than the doubts that exist anyway about George Bush's election.
It was a laughable decision on the face of it.
But that's not what is important in judging the justices. What is important is that these five had always interpreted the equal protection amendment as narrowly as possible. They were also on record as favoring the power of the individual states rather than extending the power of the federal government. This was a reversal of that stance as well.
As to their attitude about harm, these were justices who had refused to stay the executions of prisoners who had cases on appeal, who were then put to death before their cases could be heard. These are judges who did not consider death a harm irreparable enough to issue a stay.
This was not a situation in which they suddenly woke up and changed judicial philosophies, which might be legitimate. They were changing just for this decision and they intended to change back and they even said the decision was, "limited to the present circumstances ..."
The question to ask the new nominee is if he would give a liberal Democrat equal justice to a conservative Republican?
He will automatically say, "Of course."
The next question is, "The other conservative Republican appointees put party interests ahead of principle, how are you different than they are? Tell us how we are to know that you are better than Scalia?"
This is a very different question than "How will you vote on Roe v. Wade?" A fair portion of the American people -- and possibly even a Republican Senator -- might think fair justice and justice with integrity is more important than any single issue.
The next question is, "Do you believe that the Constitution applies to everyone?"
We now have a class of people -- anyone who is named as an "enemy combatant" or a terrorist -- who can be picked up, carted away, kept in confinement and tortured. They have no right to attorney or to face their accuser or to be a trial. This is fairly extreme given that the constitution says:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury ..."
"... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
After that, we should ask, "Do you believe that everyone is equal before the law or are there people above the law?"
There is a reason this has to be asked. When this administration decided they wanted to torture people they understood that torture is a crime. It is a common crime and it is a crime in a state of war, both in international law and according to the United States code, specifically sections 2340 and 2340A.
Jay Bybee, when he was at the White House with Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the president is wearing his commander-in-chief outfit, he is above the law. The law against torture doesn't apply to him because it would interfere with his "constitutional power to conduct a military campaign." If anyone committed a war crime under his orders, they too would be protected.
We figure that none of us would ever be called a terrorist or an "enemy combatant" and be stripped of our rights. We're too respectable. We assume that the president would never have one of us, personally, tortured, as he is too respectable. So we don't feel immediately threatened. But there is no technical difference between the way Jose Padilla was treated and the way you and I could be treated tomorrow.
Unless we remember that we had a revolution so that we would not have a king. Then we established a democracy. We wrote a constitution. We put in certain guarantees. We declared ourselves to be a nation of laws. In which no man was above the law. Or beneath it.
It is fair to ask if any judicial nominee understands that and agrees with it.
The first question to ask the new nominee to the Supreme Court is: "Will you be an honest judge?"
This is not a question that is normally asked, straight up, to a Supreme Court nominee. But we are asking about something a little more subtle than "would you take a bribe to throw a case?"
In the year 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of the Florida vote and threw the election to George Bush. This is old news. But judging from the Roberts' hearings and the punditry, the issues have been forgotten. They've faded into the fog.
Ignoring the fact that the man with fewer votes got to be president, what is most notable about the decision was that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Conner did not vote according to what they believed the law to be. They voted for Bush because they wanted a Republican president.
We can say that because they have a track record and their votes in Bush v. Gore went against their own established principles. If Gore had been ahead and he asked them to stop the recount, on the very same grounds, it is a virtual certainty that those same five judges would have voted the other way.
The justices violated a judicial principle that is even more profound and runs even deeper than the Constitution itself, that the law will be applied fairly.
Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and O'Connor stopped the recount on the grounds that because different counties would use different standards it would violate equal protection.
But that was already true of the original voting. Machines were different, their maintenance levels were different, the way they were set was different, and ballot designs were different. How could a recount -- a closer examination of flaws -- increase the inequality of protection?
To stop something, the court has to find that there will be harm in letting it go forward. That harm has to be greater than any harm created by stopping the procedure. Preferably, the harm should be otherwise irreparable. In this case the court held that Bush would be harmed because the recount would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election.
Huh?
Presuming he would have still won after the votes were recounted, that would make the vote seem doubly legitimate, not cast doubts on it. If the recount showed that he lost, surely the harm done to Al Gore, to the voters of Florida, and to the people of the United States -- to be governed by a man who lost the election -- would be greater harm than the doubts that exist anyway about George Bush's election.
It was a laughable decision on the face of it.
But that's not what is important in judging the justices. What is important is that these five had always interpreted the equal protection amendment as narrowly as possible. They were also on record as favoring the power of the individual states rather than extending the power of the federal government. This was a reversal of that stance as well.
As to their attitude about harm, these were justices who had refused to stay the executions of prisoners who had cases on appeal, who were then put to death before their cases could be heard. These are judges who did not consider death a harm irreparable enough to issue a stay.
This was not a situation in which they suddenly woke up and changed judicial philosophies, which might be legitimate. They were changing just for this decision and they intended to change back and they even said the decision was, "limited to the present circumstances ..."
The question to ask the new nominee is if he would give a liberal Democrat equal justice to a conservative Republican?
He will automatically say, "Of course."
The next question is, "The other conservative Republican appointees put party interests ahead of principle, how are you different than they are? Tell us how we are to know that you are better than Scalia?"
This is a very different question than "How will you vote on Roe v. Wade?" A fair portion of the American people -- and possibly even a Republican Senator -- might think fair justice and justice with integrity is more important than any single issue.
The next question is, "Do you believe that the Constitution applies to everyone?"
We now have a class of people -- anyone who is named as an "enemy combatant" or a terrorist -- who can be picked up, carted away, kept in confinement and tortured. They have no right to attorney or to face their accuser or to be a trial. This is fairly extreme given that the constitution says:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury ..."
"... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
After that, we should ask, "Do you believe that everyone is equal before the law or are there people above the law?"
There is a reason this has to be asked. When this administration decided they wanted to torture people they understood that torture is a crime. It is a common crime and it is a crime in a state of war, both in international law and according to the United States code, specifically sections 2340 and 2340A.
Jay Bybee, when he was at the White House with Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the president is wearing his commander-in-chief outfit, he is above the law. The law against torture doesn't apply to him because it would interfere with his "constitutional power to conduct a military campaign." If anyone committed a war crime under his orders, they too would be protected.
We figure that none of us would ever be called a terrorist or an "enemy combatant" and be stripped of our rights. We're too respectable. We assume that the president would never have one of us, personally, tortured, as he is too respectable. So we don't feel immediately threatened. But there is no technical difference between the way Jose Padilla was treated and the way you and I could be treated tomorrow.
Unless we remember that we had a revolution so that we would not have a king. Then we established a democracy. We wrote a constitution. We put in certain guarantees. We declared ourselves to be a nation of laws. In which no man was above the law. Or beneath it.
It is fair to ask if any judicial nominee understands that and agrees with it.
CBS' Mary Mapes, in 'Vanity Fair,' Defends Role in 'RatherGate'
Published: October 31, 2005 8:20 PM ET
NEW YORK In the upcoming December issue of Vanity Fair, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer who lost her job after the disputed "60 Minutes II" Bush/National Guard report, writes, "I must answer the bloggers, the babblers and blabbers, and the true believers who have called me everything from 'feminazi' to an 'elitist liberal' to an 'idiot.'
"If I was an idiot, it was for believing in a free press that is able to do its job without fear or favor. ...I didn't know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run national political campaign, because that is what it was: a political campaign."
The December article, not yet generally available, is an excerpt from Mapes' soon-to-be-published book, "Truth and Duty" (St. Martin's) on her career and the episode often called Rathergate. Vanity Fair says Mapes sets out to "answer her critics."
Mapes writes that she had felt the Guard segment was a big success after airing on Sept. 8, 2004, until the following morning at 11 a.m. when she learned that a bunch of "far-right" Web sites were claiming that documents were forged.
That same day about 3 p.m. she recalls staring at the Drudge Report and seeing a big picture of Rather at the top and a headline saying that he was "shaken" and hiding in his office. The phone rang and it was Rather, telling her he'd just heard about the Drudge headline and he wanted to assure her that he was not "shaken" and was not even in his office.
He signed off with a favorite expression of his: "FTA" for "---- them all."
She writes that what she didn't know at the time was that the attack on the "60 Minutes" piece was just part of the Bushites "sliming" of those who raised questions about the president.
After detailing the unraveling of the Guard segment, Mapes describes crying her eyes out at an airport bathroom after Rather tells her by phone that CBS was going to apologize for the report and appoint a committee to investigate what went wrong. Rather also told her to get a lawyer.
Finally, she details how in that probe the question of how "liberal" she was became paramount. She likens it to the days of Sen. Joe McCarthy and charges that it was ironic that the same network that stood up to McCarthy with the Edward R. Murrow broadcasts was now caving in to similar tactics now: "Suspected liberals had become the new 'Communists...What in the world would Edward R. Murrow think of his network now?"
In the end she observes that the outside panel that probed the report and found correct procedures were lacking did not investigate the legitimacy of the documents. She claims that a researcher has since shown her typography on other documents from the period Bush was in the Guard that suggest that the memos she obtained cannot be easily dismissed "as being forgeries."
She also calls one of the co-leaders of that probe, Dick Thornburgh, worse than an "empty suit...He was completely full if it."
Throughout the article, Vanity Fair frequently cuts away for bracketed response from others involved in the episode who answer or rebut some of her charges.
At one point, for example, she asserts that CBS News chief Andrew Heyward said that if the bloggers could come up with "lousy analysts" to attack the authenticity of the memos CBS could find its own "lousy analysts."
In an e-mail to Vanity Fair, Heyward denied this.
NEW YORK In the upcoming December issue of Vanity Fair, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer who lost her job after the disputed "60 Minutes II" Bush/National Guard report, writes, "I must answer the bloggers, the babblers and blabbers, and the true believers who have called me everything from 'feminazi' to an 'elitist liberal' to an 'idiot.'
"If I was an idiot, it was for believing in a free press that is able to do its job without fear or favor. ...I didn't know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run national political campaign, because that is what it was: a political campaign."
The December article, not yet generally available, is an excerpt from Mapes' soon-to-be-published book, "Truth and Duty" (St. Martin's) on her career and the episode often called Rathergate. Vanity Fair says Mapes sets out to "answer her critics."
Mapes writes that she had felt the Guard segment was a big success after airing on Sept. 8, 2004, until the following morning at 11 a.m. when she learned that a bunch of "far-right" Web sites were claiming that documents were forged.
That same day about 3 p.m. she recalls staring at the Drudge Report and seeing a big picture of Rather at the top and a headline saying that he was "shaken" and hiding in his office. The phone rang and it was Rather, telling her he'd just heard about the Drudge headline and he wanted to assure her that he was not "shaken" and was not even in his office.
He signed off with a favorite expression of his: "FTA" for "---- them all."
She writes that what she didn't know at the time was that the attack on the "60 Minutes" piece was just part of the Bushites "sliming" of those who raised questions about the president.
After detailing the unraveling of the Guard segment, Mapes describes crying her eyes out at an airport bathroom after Rather tells her by phone that CBS was going to apologize for the report and appoint a committee to investigate what went wrong. Rather also told her to get a lawyer.
Finally, she details how in that probe the question of how "liberal" she was became paramount. She likens it to the days of Sen. Joe McCarthy and charges that it was ironic that the same network that stood up to McCarthy with the Edward R. Murrow broadcasts was now caving in to similar tactics now: "Suspected liberals had become the new 'Communists...What in the world would Edward R. Murrow think of his network now?"
In the end she observes that the outside panel that probed the report and found correct procedures were lacking did not investigate the legitimacy of the documents. She claims that a researcher has since shown her typography on other documents from the period Bush was in the Guard that suggest that the memos she obtained cannot be easily dismissed "as being forgeries."
She also calls one of the co-leaders of that probe, Dick Thornburgh, worse than an "empty suit...He was completely full if it."
Throughout the article, Vanity Fair frequently cuts away for bracketed response from others involved in the episode who answer or rebut some of her charges.
At one point, for example, she asserts that CBS News chief Andrew Heyward said that if the bloggers could come up with "lousy analysts" to attack the authenticity of the memos CBS could find its own "lousy analysts."
In an e-mail to Vanity Fair, Heyward denied this.
What the 'Shield' Covered Up
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?
In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005."
Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.
As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having reporters testify. The journalistic "shield" was converted into a shield for the Bush administration's coverup.
Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. They pray that Libby will be the only official facing legal charges and that political interest in the case will dissipate.
You can tell the president worries that this won't work, because yesterday he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of a court of appeals and a strong right-wing reputation. This guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that "unites the base" and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for Bush.
That is why Senate Democrats -- and one hopes they might be joined by some brave Republicans -- should insist that before Alito's nomination is voted on, Bush and Cheney have some work to do.
The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame.
Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years.
The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.
Fitzgerald has made clear that he wants to keep this case going if doing so will bring us closer to the truth. Lawyers not involved in the case suggest that the indictment was written in a way that could encourage Libby, facing up to 30 years in prison, to cooperate in that effort.
But there is a catch. If Libby, through nods and winks, knows that at the end of Bush's term, the president will issue an unconditional pardon, he will have no interest in helping Fitzgerald, and every interest in shutting up. If Bush truly wants the public to know all the facts in the leak case, as he has claimed in the past, he will announce now that he will not pardon Libby. That would let Fitzgerald finish his work unimpeded, and we would all have a chance, at last, to learn how and why this sad affair came to pass.
postchat@aol.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Advertising Links What's this?
Save on All Your Calls with Vonage
When looking for local regional and long distance calling, use Vonage to make calls to all 50 states and Canada. Get voicemail, great international rates and more. Sign up today.
www.vonage.com
MyCashNow - $100 - $1,500 Overnight
Payday Loan Cash goes in your account overnight. Very low fees. Fast decisions. Direct deposit is not required. No credit check. Confidential - secure.
www.mycashnow.com
$160,000 Mortgage for $633/mo
Refinance rates are at record lows. Compare rates – free service.
www.lowermybills.com
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; A25
Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?
In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005."
Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.
As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having reporters testify. The journalistic "shield" was converted into a shield for the Bush administration's coverup.
Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. They pray that Libby will be the only official facing legal charges and that political interest in the case will dissipate.
You can tell the president worries that this won't work, because yesterday he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of a court of appeals and a strong right-wing reputation. This guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that "unites the base" and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for Bush.
That is why Senate Democrats -- and one hopes they might be joined by some brave Republicans -- should insist that before Alito's nomination is voted on, Bush and Cheney have some work to do.
The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame.
Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years.
The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.
Fitzgerald has made clear that he wants to keep this case going if doing so will bring us closer to the truth. Lawyers not involved in the case suggest that the indictment was written in a way that could encourage Libby, facing up to 30 years in prison, to cooperate in that effort.
But there is a catch. If Libby, through nods and winks, knows that at the end of Bush's term, the president will issue an unconditional pardon, he will have no interest in helping Fitzgerald, and every interest in shutting up. If Bush truly wants the public to know all the facts in the leak case, as he has claimed in the past, he will announce now that he will not pardon Libby. That would let Fitzgerald finish his work unimpeded, and we would all have a chance, at last, to learn how and why this sad affair came to pass.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?
In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005."
Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.
As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having reporters testify. The journalistic "shield" was converted into a shield for the Bush administration's coverup.
Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. They pray that Libby will be the only official facing legal charges and that political interest in the case will dissipate.
You can tell the president worries that this won't work, because yesterday he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of a court of appeals and a strong right-wing reputation. This guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that "unites the base" and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for Bush.
That is why Senate Democrats -- and one hopes they might be joined by some brave Republicans -- should insist that before Alito's nomination is voted on, Bush and Cheney have some work to do.
The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame.
Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years.
The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.
Fitzgerald has made clear that he wants to keep this case going if doing so will bring us closer to the truth. Lawyers not involved in the case suggest that the indictment was written in a way that could encourage Libby, facing up to 30 years in prison, to cooperate in that effort.
But there is a catch. If Libby, through nods and winks, knows that at the end of Bush's term, the president will issue an unconditional pardon, he will have no interest in helping Fitzgerald, and every interest in shutting up. If Bush truly wants the public to know all the facts in the leak case, as he has claimed in the past, he will announce now that he will not pardon Libby. That would let Fitzgerald finish his work unimpeded, and we would all have a chance, at last, to learn how and why this sad affair came to pass.
postchat@aol.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Advertising Links What's this?
Save on All Your Calls with Vonage
When looking for local regional and long distance calling, use Vonage to make calls to all 50 states and Canada. Get voicemail, great international rates and more. Sign up today.
www.vonage.com
MyCashNow - $100 - $1,500 Overnight
Payday Loan Cash goes in your account overnight. Very low fees. Fast decisions. Direct deposit is not required. No credit check. Confidential - secure.
www.mycashnow.com
$160,000 Mortgage for $633/mo
Refinance rates are at record lows. Compare rates – free service.
www.lowermybills.com
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005; A25
Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?
In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005."
Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.
As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having reporters testify. The journalistic "shield" was converted into a shield for the Bush administration's coverup.
Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. They pray that Libby will be the only official facing legal charges and that political interest in the case will dissipate.
You can tell the president worries that this won't work, because yesterday he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of a court of appeals and a strong right-wing reputation. This guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that "unites the base" and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for Bush.
That is why Senate Democrats -- and one hopes they might be joined by some brave Republicans -- should insist that before Alito's nomination is voted on, Bush and Cheney have some work to do.
The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about Plame.
Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to condemn in the Clinton years.
The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.
Fitzgerald has made clear that he wants to keep this case going if doing so will bring us closer to the truth. Lawyers not involved in the case suggest that the indictment was written in a way that could encourage Libby, facing up to 30 years in prison, to cooperate in that effort.
But there is a catch. If Libby, through nods and winks, knows that at the end of Bush's term, the president will issue an unconditional pardon, he will have no interest in helping Fitzgerald, and every interest in shutting up. If Bush truly wants the public to know all the facts in the leak case, as he has claimed in the past, he will announce now that he will not pardon Libby. That would let Fitzgerald finish his work unimpeded, and we would all have a chance, at last, to learn how and why this sad affair came to pass.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)