Wonkette
Our deepest condolences to Tom DeLay, who ended the portion of his political career that relied on convincing people to vote for him in order to embark on that much more lucrative portion in which he just makes a shitload of money and exercises roughly the same amount of power and influence (depending, of course, on his legal situation — but we don’t think a little jail time will really stop the checks from flowing in for work in defense of Christianity).
Yeah, we’ll miss the old bastard — he knew how to be a majority leader, dammit. It’s about taking the R.J. Reynolds corporate jet to your arraignment and not giving a shit, not being famous for your goddamn tan like some dimestore George Hamilton. It’s about multiple admonishments from the House ethics committee, comparing yourself to Jesus, flashing a shit-eating grin in your mugshot, money-laundering, calling for violent retribution against activist judges, and contacting six federal agencies to trail Texas Democrats! Boehner — you have some mighty big shoes to fill. And Tom — we’ll miss you. We hope you keep up the shamelessness, wherever you end up.
Asked if he had done anything illegal or unethical in public office, DeLay replied curtly, “No.” Asked if he’d done anything immoral, he said with a laugh, “We’re all sinners.”
Oh, we could parse that “we” (Republicans? Congressmen? House Majority Leaders? Texans? Members of the DeLay family?), but we’d rather just accept it in the spirit in which it was offered. Tom, from those of us equally proud of being sinners, we thank you. While you were running things around here we laughed a little, we cried a little, and we learned a lot.
All that said, we’re still pretty relieved that not armed.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Standing Up To Bush
Published on Monday, April 3, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Editorial
President Bush's secret intercepts of American citizens' communications are ''more serious abuses" than President Nixon perpetrated in Watergate, according to an informed observer. John Dean, counsel to Nixon during Watergate, was on target when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday that Congress should fight back when a president ignores laws it has passed.
Dean argues that Bush's program of electronic surveillance without the court warrants required by law is probably much broader than Nixon's trampling on civil liberties as he sought to find dirt on his perceived political enemies.
Senator Lindsey Graham countered at the hearing that Nixon's motive was base self-interest, while Bush is seeking to strengthen national security. This is a worthwhile distinction from the South Carolina Republican, but it only underlines the cavalier manner in which Bush brushes off congressional actions and mandates. For if Bush can offer a good reason for the eavesdropping he has ordered, he will easily get a warrant from the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 precisely to advance national security.
Instead, Bush has ignored the clear mandate of that law. This is part of a growing trend by Bush toward unilateralism in domestic as well as foreign policy. Examples include his recent use of novel signing statements announcing that, even though he has just signed a piece of legislation into law, he may not feel bound by parts of it.
Earlier last week, the Supreme Court gave encouraging signs that it will stand up to efforts by Bush to undercut its powers, at least in some cases. Five judges loudly challenged the administration's contention that it could deny some supposedly terror-related detainees a forum to assert their innocence. Some justices also questioned whether Congress could take away that right. But the outcome of that case will not be known for weeks.
In the meantime, Congress has shown itself to be all too pliant to Bush's steady consolidation of power.
Dean's appearance came as the Judiciary Committee took up a resolution from Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to have the Senate censure Bush for ''unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans. . . ."
Only three senators, all Democrats, support censure. But the Republican chairman of the committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said that, while the resolution has no merit, ''it provides a forum for the discussion of issues which really ought to be considered in greater depth than they have been."
It should not take a censure resolution to get the members of Congress to stick up for themselves. If they do not, they are as culpable as Bush.
Editorial
President Bush's secret intercepts of American citizens' communications are ''more serious abuses" than President Nixon perpetrated in Watergate, according to an informed observer. John Dean, counsel to Nixon during Watergate, was on target when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday that Congress should fight back when a president ignores laws it has passed.
Dean argues that Bush's program of electronic surveillance without the court warrants required by law is probably much broader than Nixon's trampling on civil liberties as he sought to find dirt on his perceived political enemies.
Senator Lindsey Graham countered at the hearing that Nixon's motive was base self-interest, while Bush is seeking to strengthen national security. This is a worthwhile distinction from the South Carolina Republican, but it only underlines the cavalier manner in which Bush brushes off congressional actions and mandates. For if Bush can offer a good reason for the eavesdropping he has ordered, he will easily get a warrant from the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 precisely to advance national security.
Instead, Bush has ignored the clear mandate of that law. This is part of a growing trend by Bush toward unilateralism in domestic as well as foreign policy. Examples include his recent use of novel signing statements announcing that, even though he has just signed a piece of legislation into law, he may not feel bound by parts of it.
Earlier last week, the Supreme Court gave encouraging signs that it will stand up to efforts by Bush to undercut its powers, at least in some cases. Five judges loudly challenged the administration's contention that it could deny some supposedly terror-related detainees a forum to assert their innocence. Some justices also questioned whether Congress could take away that right. But the outcome of that case will not be known for weeks.
In the meantime, Congress has shown itself to be all too pliant to Bush's steady consolidation of power.
Dean's appearance came as the Judiciary Committee took up a resolution from Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to have the Senate censure Bush for ''unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans. . . ."
Only three senators, all Democrats, support censure. But the Republican chairman of the committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said that, while the resolution has no merit, ''it provides a forum for the discussion of issues which really ought to be considered in greater depth than they have been."
It should not take a censure resolution to get the members of Congress to stick up for themselves. If they do not, they are as culpable as Bush.
Down Goes Delay!
by Cenk Uygur
Down goes DeLay! Down goes DeLay! Down goes DeLay!
The Hammer is down and out! It's a good day to be an American.
If I sound festive, that's because I am. One of the cornerstones of Republican corruption and fundamentalism has been knocked out. Greed is not good. Justice does prevail. There is hope in the world.
For six long years, a lot of us have been asking, "How long can this go on?" It seemed like there was never going to be any check on these out of control Republicans running the country into the ground. Now, it looks like the American system does work after all.
Let me be the first to say -- before DeLay even announces his resignation -- that he is not resigning because he wants to spend more time with his family. It might very well be because he needs to spend more time in prison.
Last week, prosecutors were singing the praises of Jack Abramoff in open court, telling a judge in one of his cases how cooperative he has been with federal prosecutors. They weren't that enthused because he had turned over Bob frickin' Ney.
No way DeLay steps down unless they've nailed him. What, he was afraid of a tough electoral fight in November? It's inconceivable that would scare him away.
No matter what the reason though, today is indisputably a good day in America. I am most proud of the local and federal prosecutors who were not shy in pursuing these cases of corruption no matter where they led. They were not deterred by significant political intimidation. It appears they fought for justice and the American way, and in so doing, preserved those ideals.
It's great to see that there are men of honor left in the country. When all is said and done, real American heroes are going to found out of the rubble of this administration. The Justice Department lawyers that stepped down rather than follow illegal orders. Military commanders who retired early rather than carry out loathsome commands. Prosecutors who insisted on following the law and enforcing the American justice system.
With Libby, Abramoff, Safavian and DeLay out for the count, justice is on the comeback trail. Now, it's America 4, Bad Guys 6 (Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Rove, Frist, Cheney, Bush). But give us time. I hear the sweet sound of justice rolling down the road. And it sounds like music to my ears.
Down goes DeLay! Down goes DeLay! Down goes DeLay!
The Hammer is down and out! It's a good day to be an American.
If I sound festive, that's because I am. One of the cornerstones of Republican corruption and fundamentalism has been knocked out. Greed is not good. Justice does prevail. There is hope in the world.
For six long years, a lot of us have been asking, "How long can this go on?" It seemed like there was never going to be any check on these out of control Republicans running the country into the ground. Now, it looks like the American system does work after all.
Let me be the first to say -- before DeLay even announces his resignation -- that he is not resigning because he wants to spend more time with his family. It might very well be because he needs to spend more time in prison.
Last week, prosecutors were singing the praises of Jack Abramoff in open court, telling a judge in one of his cases how cooperative he has been with federal prosecutors. They weren't that enthused because he had turned over Bob frickin' Ney.
No way DeLay steps down unless they've nailed him. What, he was afraid of a tough electoral fight in November? It's inconceivable that would scare him away.
No matter what the reason though, today is indisputably a good day in America. I am most proud of the local and federal prosecutors who were not shy in pursuing these cases of corruption no matter where they led. They were not deterred by significant political intimidation. It appears they fought for justice and the American way, and in so doing, preserved those ideals.
It's great to see that there are men of honor left in the country. When all is said and done, real American heroes are going to found out of the rubble of this administration. The Justice Department lawyers that stepped down rather than follow illegal orders. Military commanders who retired early rather than carry out loathsome commands. Prosecutors who insisted on following the law and enforcing the American justice system.
With Libby, Abramoff, Safavian and DeLay out for the count, justice is on the comeback trail. Now, it's America 4, Bad Guys 6 (Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Rove, Frist, Cheney, Bush). But give us time. I hear the sweet sound of justice rolling down the road. And it sounds like music to my ears.
What happens next? A short FAQ
by Farhad Manjoo
Tom DeLay's resignation sets in motion a series of events in the Texas's 22nd Congressional District, so let's look at the what could/may/might happen next. One caveat: Nobody really knows anything right now, so much of this is bloggy speculation. Of course, that's what makes it so much fun.
Which Republicans hope to replace DeLay? Two candidates have already jumped in: Tom Campbell, an attorney who won 30 percent of the vote against DeLay in the March primary race (DeLay won 62 percent), and David G. Wallace, the mayor of Sugar Land, DeLay's hometown.
DeLay says that he'll support any Republican in the race, but there's no love lost between him and Campbell. Before the primary, DeLay's campaign manager said this of Campbell: "Clearly, Mr. Campbell is no conservative.... Every day he proves he's nothing more than an outsider who isn't concerned with conservative issues or fighting for the priorities of Texas taxpayers. He's not qualified to run for Republican precinct chair, let alone represent hundreds and thousands of Republican voters in Congress." (Emphasis added because it will be fun to ask DeLay about statements like this if Campbell becomes the candidate.)
Despite these claims, Campbell looks no less conservative than DeLay. The Houston Chronicle's editorial board, which endorsed him in the race against DeLay, billed Campbell as "a clean Tom DeLay, someone who shares the staunch Republican values of his district but who recognizes that special interest influence in Congress must be reined in and stronger ethics and disclosure rules promulgated." (A "clean Tom DeLay" -- sounds much like a creature of legend, as impossible as a musically gifted Kevin Federline.)
About David Wallace, there's a lot less to say. His job as mayor is part-time; in his day job, Wallace is a real estate developer and investment banker, the New York Times reports. Wallace has a campaign Website, but it is "under construction" at the moment. The city's Website features a short bio and resume.
There will be no primary to choose which of these two will face Democrat Nick Lampson in November. Instead, according to some local Republican officials quoted in the press, a committee of GOP officials will choose which person will replace Delay on the ballot.
Will there be a special election? If Delay leaves his post soon (as he says he will do), Texas may hold a special election to determine who will fill his seat for the remainder of Delay's current term. It isn't clear, though, whether the state is required to fill this seat; this means is that before November's election, there could be another race in Texas's 22nd, or there could not.
There's yet more confusion: Some bloggers point out that if there is a special election in the 22nd, the winner may need a majority -- rather than a mere plurality -- to win the seat under Texas's election law (see the relevant statues in PDF format here and here.) Because there may be several candidates who'd split the left-leaning vote and only one on the right (whichever one the Republicans settle on, if they can do that), Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos says that the majority-vote rule would help the GOP in the special election. It goes without saying that the winner of the special election will have an enormous advantage in November's race.
How does this affect Nick Lampson?
Two theories: 1) He's toast, because the liberals will now pull back all they'd been pouring into his race, and he'll face a candidate who will likely appeal to many in the district, or 2), He's golden, because now he may challenge a candidate who's weaker than DeLay, and the lefty hordes will only strengthen their support of his effort if only to spite DeLay.
Of course, nobody knows. Left-leaning blogs, though, are already encouraging readers to step up their support of Lampson. And Lampson says he'll take whatever the Republicans can throw at him. "From day one I have been running because this district needs a congressman who will make headlines for the right reasons and work for the mainstream values I share with the people of this district," Lampson said in a statement. "No matter who I face in the general election, I am going to fight hard and I am going to win in November."
Tom DeLay's resignation sets in motion a series of events in the Texas's 22nd Congressional District, so let's look at the what could/may/might happen next. One caveat: Nobody really knows anything right now, so much of this is bloggy speculation. Of course, that's what makes it so much fun.
Which Republicans hope to replace DeLay? Two candidates have already jumped in: Tom Campbell, an attorney who won 30 percent of the vote against DeLay in the March primary race (DeLay won 62 percent), and David G. Wallace, the mayor of Sugar Land, DeLay's hometown.
DeLay says that he'll support any Republican in the race, but there's no love lost between him and Campbell. Before the primary, DeLay's campaign manager said this of Campbell: "Clearly, Mr. Campbell is no conservative.... Every day he proves he's nothing more than an outsider who isn't concerned with conservative issues or fighting for the priorities of Texas taxpayers. He's not qualified to run for Republican precinct chair, let alone represent hundreds and thousands of Republican voters in Congress." (Emphasis added because it will be fun to ask DeLay about statements like this if Campbell becomes the candidate.)
Despite these claims, Campbell looks no less conservative than DeLay. The Houston Chronicle's editorial board, which endorsed him in the race against DeLay, billed Campbell as "a clean Tom DeLay, someone who shares the staunch Republican values of his district but who recognizes that special interest influence in Congress must be reined in and stronger ethics and disclosure rules promulgated." (A "clean Tom DeLay" -- sounds much like a creature of legend, as impossible as a musically gifted Kevin Federline.)
About David Wallace, there's a lot less to say. His job as mayor is part-time; in his day job, Wallace is a real estate developer and investment banker, the New York Times reports. Wallace has a campaign Website, but it is "under construction" at the moment. The city's Website features a short bio and resume.
There will be no primary to choose which of these two will face Democrat Nick Lampson in November. Instead, according to some local Republican officials quoted in the press, a committee of GOP officials will choose which person will replace Delay on the ballot.
Will there be a special election? If Delay leaves his post soon (as he says he will do), Texas may hold a special election to determine who will fill his seat for the remainder of Delay's current term. It isn't clear, though, whether the state is required to fill this seat; this means is that before November's election, there could be another race in Texas's 22nd, or there could not.
There's yet more confusion: Some bloggers point out that if there is a special election in the 22nd, the winner may need a majority -- rather than a mere plurality -- to win the seat under Texas's election law (see the relevant statues in PDF format here and here.) Because there may be several candidates who'd split the left-leaning vote and only one on the right (whichever one the Republicans settle on, if they can do that), Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos says that the majority-vote rule would help the GOP in the special election. It goes without saying that the winner of the special election will have an enormous advantage in November's race.
How does this affect Nick Lampson?
Two theories: 1) He's toast, because the liberals will now pull back all they'd been pouring into his race, and he'll face a candidate who will likely appeal to many in the district, or 2), He's golden, because now he may challenge a candidate who's weaker than DeLay, and the lefty hordes will only strengthen their support of his effort if only to spite DeLay.
Of course, nobody knows. Left-leaning blogs, though, are already encouraging readers to step up their support of Lampson. And Lampson says he'll take whatever the Republicans can throw at him. "From day one I have been running because this district needs a congressman who will make headlines for the right reasons and work for the mainstream values I share with the people of this district," Lampson said in a statement. "No matter who I face in the general election, I am going to fight hard and I am going to win in November."
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Woodward and Reality
Woodward and Reality
by David Corn
A newly disclosed secret memo shows Woodward's insider account of an important Bush-Blair prewar meeting missed the best (and most critical) stuff.
by David Corn
A newly disclosed secret memo shows Woodward's insider account of an important Bush-Blair prewar meeting missed the best (and most critical) stuff.
A Strategy For Censure
by georgia10
Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 11:16:29 AM PDT
Yesterday's Senate Judiciary hearing on censure marks a turning point in the debate over Presidential accountability. Over at Firedoglake, Christy and others are simmering with disgust over the fact not all committee Democrats attended the hearing. I've witnessed comments throughout the blogosphere expressing outrage that either Democrats didn't show up, or that they have yet to sign on to censure. Obviously, I'm disappointed, but I'd like to shift the focus a bit.
When Senator Feingold first introduced his resolution, Republicans said it was a "gift." Well, it is a gift--for Democrats. It is a bold move destined to fail (sorry folks, the numbers don't lie) but it succeeds in forcing Republicans to defend the indefensible: a failed President who is not trusted by the American people.
While some were focused on the empty chairs in the hearing, I was focused on the tone of the rhetoric on the right. Republicans fiercly defended the President, and in doing so, made some remarkable statements. Take Senator Sessions, who emphatically declared the following:
"Our President is an honest man. A candid man, a strong leader. And the people of America know it."
Now, if Sessions were up for re-elction, that clip would pure gold. Can you imagine the campaign ad? Sessions frothing at the mouth, defending his Dear Leader, followed by a clip of the President saying he's not concerned about bin Laden, or his famous Mission Accomplished speech. Close the ad with "Senator Sessions has spent the last six years rubber-stamping the President's failures. Can we trust his judgment anymore? Can we afford to?" You get the idea.
And that is what we should be extracting from the censure debate. When Republicans launch into their odes to the President, most of us tune out or sit on our hands to refrain from throwing something at the TV. But we should be cataloging every statement lauding the President's trustworthiness, every clip where a Republican praises the President's judgment.
A case study: Mike DeWine. Senator DeWine has been clamoring to distance himself from Bush, embracing a campaign theme of "independence". An all-together predictable approach, given that the President's approval ratings are at all time lows. In the latest WSJ poll, Democrat Sherrod Brown has pulled ahead of DeWine by about nine points. Good news, to be sure, but certainly not enough to calm my nerves about that race.
So how can we use censure to increase Brown's lead in the Ohio race? DeWine, if you recall, has sponsored the "Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006", which legalizes the President's illegal conduct. Obviously, DeWine trusts the President. So let him go on record. He should be bombarded with questions about it, over and over again until he is painted into a corner, forced to declare, like Sessions, that he "trusts" the President and that the President has been doing a magnificent job. Cannon-fodder for campaigns, that's what censure can be.
I know it's difficult to focus on the right instead of the left side of the aisle when it comes to censure. But we have just six months to win back six seats in the Senate, and 15 in the House. We should be upset that Democrats have not jumped aboard a clearly appropriate resolution, but we can't let that frustration cloud our singular goal: winning back Congress.
This censure resolution can help us achieve that victory in November. It succeeds in putting Republicans on the defensive, forcing them to go on record as to whether they trust the President and how much they approve of his performance. At a time when vulnerable incumbents are scampering away from Mr. 33%, this censure resolution allows us to grab them by the tail and drag them back to the debate. It provokes over-the-top rhetoric which we can use in our campaigns to solidify them as nothing more than rubber-stamp Republicans unworthy of another term in office.
And if the censure resolution accomplishes that, if it helps us shackle Republicans to the sinking anchor of Bush's Presidency, then Feingold's move will truly be a success--no matter how many Democrats sign on to it.
Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 11:16:29 AM PDT
Yesterday's Senate Judiciary hearing on censure marks a turning point in the debate over Presidential accountability. Over at Firedoglake, Christy and others are simmering with disgust over the fact not all committee Democrats attended the hearing. I've witnessed comments throughout the blogosphere expressing outrage that either Democrats didn't show up, or that they have yet to sign on to censure. Obviously, I'm disappointed, but I'd like to shift the focus a bit.
When Senator Feingold first introduced his resolution, Republicans said it was a "gift." Well, it is a gift--for Democrats. It is a bold move destined to fail (sorry folks, the numbers don't lie) but it succeeds in forcing Republicans to defend the indefensible: a failed President who is not trusted by the American people.
While some were focused on the empty chairs in the hearing, I was focused on the tone of the rhetoric on the right. Republicans fiercly defended the President, and in doing so, made some remarkable statements. Take Senator Sessions, who emphatically declared the following:
"Our President is an honest man. A candid man, a strong leader. And the people of America know it."
Now, if Sessions were up for re-elction, that clip would pure gold. Can you imagine the campaign ad? Sessions frothing at the mouth, defending his Dear Leader, followed by a clip of the President saying he's not concerned about bin Laden, or his famous Mission Accomplished speech. Close the ad with "Senator Sessions has spent the last six years rubber-stamping the President's failures. Can we trust his judgment anymore? Can we afford to?" You get the idea.
And that is what we should be extracting from the censure debate. When Republicans launch into their odes to the President, most of us tune out or sit on our hands to refrain from throwing something at the TV. But we should be cataloging every statement lauding the President's trustworthiness, every clip where a Republican praises the President's judgment.
A case study: Mike DeWine. Senator DeWine has been clamoring to distance himself from Bush, embracing a campaign theme of "independence". An all-together predictable approach, given that the President's approval ratings are at all time lows. In the latest WSJ poll, Democrat Sherrod Brown has pulled ahead of DeWine by about nine points. Good news, to be sure, but certainly not enough to calm my nerves about that race.
So how can we use censure to increase Brown's lead in the Ohio race? DeWine, if you recall, has sponsored the "Terrorist Surveillance Act of 2006", which legalizes the President's illegal conduct. Obviously, DeWine trusts the President. So let him go on record. He should be bombarded with questions about it, over and over again until he is painted into a corner, forced to declare, like Sessions, that he "trusts" the President and that the President has been doing a magnificent job. Cannon-fodder for campaigns, that's what censure can be.
I know it's difficult to focus on the right instead of the left side of the aisle when it comes to censure. But we have just six months to win back six seats in the Senate, and 15 in the House. We should be upset that Democrats have not jumped aboard a clearly appropriate resolution, but we can't let that frustration cloud our singular goal: winning back Congress.
This censure resolution can help us achieve that victory in November. It succeeds in putting Republicans on the defensive, forcing them to go on record as to whether they trust the President and how much they approve of his performance. At a time when vulnerable incumbents are scampering away from Mr. 33%, this censure resolution allows us to grab them by the tail and drag them back to the debate. It provokes over-the-top rhetoric which we can use in our campaigns to solidify them as nothing more than rubber-stamp Republicans unworthy of another term in office.
And if the censure resolution accomplishes that, if it helps us shackle Republicans to the sinking anchor of Bush's Presidency, then Feingold's move will truly be a success--no matter how many Democrats sign on to it.
We Need Alexander Hamilton
We Need Alexander Hamilton
How unfettered trade and poor policy are endangering our economic future, and what we should do about it.
By Ernest C. Hollings
How unfettered trade and poor policy are endangering our economic future, and what we should do about it.
By Ernest C. Hollings
The Endgame in Iraq
April 2, 2006
New York Times Editorial
Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support, let alone occupy. The nation as a whole is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefs. The rights of women are evaporating. The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror.
The Bush administration will not acknowledge the desperate situation. But it is, at least, pushing in the right direction, trying to mobilize all possible leverage in a frantic effort to persuade the leading Shiite parties to embrace more inclusive policies and support a broad-based national government.
One vital goal is to persuade the Shiites to abort their disastrous nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Jaafari is unable to form a broadly inclusive government and has made no serious effort to rein in police death squads. Even some Shiite leaders are now calling on him to step aside. If his nomination stands and is confirmed by Parliament, civil war will become much harder to head off. And from the American perspective, the Iraqi government will have become something that no parent should be asked to risk a soldier son or daughter to protect.
Unfortunately, after three years of policy blunders in Iraq, Washington may no longer have the political or military capital to prevail. That may be hard for Americans to understand, since it was the United States invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and helped the Shiite majority to power. Some 140,000 American troops remain in Iraq, more than 2,000 American servicemen and servicewomen have died there so far and hundreds of billions of American dollars have been spent.
Yet Shiite leaders have responded to Washington's pleas for inclusiveness with bristling hostility, personally vilifying Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and criticizing American military operations in the kind of harsh language previously heard only from Sunni leaders. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the radically anti-American cleric and militia leader, has maneuvered himself into the position of kingmaker by providing decisive support for Mr. Jaafari's candidacy to remain prime minister.
It was chilling to read Edward Wong's interview with the Iraqi prime minister in The Times last week, during which Mr. Jaafari sat in the palace where he now makes his home, complained about the Americans and predicted that the sectarian militias that are currently terrorizing Iraqi civilians could be incorporated into the army and police. The stories about innocent homeowners and storekeepers who are dragged from their screaming families and killed by those same militias are heartbreaking, as is the thought that the United States, in its hubris, helped bring all this to pass.
It is conceivable that the situation can still be turned around. Mr. Khalilzad should not back off. The kind of broadly inclusive government he is trying to bring about offers the only hope that Iraq can make a successful transition from the terrible mess it is in now to the democracy that we all hoped would emerge after Saddam Hussein's downfall. It is also the only way to redeem the blood that has been shed by Americans and Iraqis alike.
New York Times Editorial
Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support, let alone occupy. The nation as a whole is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefs. The rights of women are evaporating. The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror.
The Bush administration will not acknowledge the desperate situation. But it is, at least, pushing in the right direction, trying to mobilize all possible leverage in a frantic effort to persuade the leading Shiite parties to embrace more inclusive policies and support a broad-based national government.
One vital goal is to persuade the Shiites to abort their disastrous nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Jaafari is unable to form a broadly inclusive government and has made no serious effort to rein in police death squads. Even some Shiite leaders are now calling on him to step aside. If his nomination stands and is confirmed by Parliament, civil war will become much harder to head off. And from the American perspective, the Iraqi government will have become something that no parent should be asked to risk a soldier son or daughter to protect.
Unfortunately, after three years of policy blunders in Iraq, Washington may no longer have the political or military capital to prevail. That may be hard for Americans to understand, since it was the United States invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and helped the Shiite majority to power. Some 140,000 American troops remain in Iraq, more than 2,000 American servicemen and servicewomen have died there so far and hundreds of billions of American dollars have been spent.
Yet Shiite leaders have responded to Washington's pleas for inclusiveness with bristling hostility, personally vilifying Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and criticizing American military operations in the kind of harsh language previously heard only from Sunni leaders. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the radically anti-American cleric and militia leader, has maneuvered himself into the position of kingmaker by providing decisive support for Mr. Jaafari's candidacy to remain prime minister.
It was chilling to read Edward Wong's interview with the Iraqi prime minister in The Times last week, during which Mr. Jaafari sat in the palace where he now makes his home, complained about the Americans and predicted that the sectarian militias that are currently terrorizing Iraqi civilians could be incorporated into the army and police. The stories about innocent homeowners and storekeepers who are dragged from their screaming families and killed by those same militias are heartbreaking, as is the thought that the United States, in its hubris, helped bring all this to pass.
It is conceivable that the situation can still be turned around. Mr. Khalilzad should not back off. The kind of broadly inclusive government he is trying to bring about offers the only hope that Iraq can make a successful transition from the terrible mess it is in now to the democracy that we all hoped would emerge after Saddam Hussein's downfall. It is also the only way to redeem the blood that has been shed by Americans and Iraqis alike.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
John Dean to Senate: Censure is Necessary
Published on Saturday, April 1, 2006 by The Nation
by John Nichols
"[The] president needs to be reminded that separation of powers does not mean an isolation of powers," former White House counsel John Dean told the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday. "He needs to be told he cannot simply ignore a law with no consequences."
Arguing in favor of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold's motion to censure President Bush for illegally authorizing the warrantless wiretapping of the phone conversations of Americans, the man who broke with former President Richard Nixon to challenge the abuses of the Watergate era told the committee that Bush's wrongs were in many senses worse than those of Nixon.
"I recall a morning – and it was just about this time in the morning and it was exactly this time of the year – March 21, 1973 – that I tried to warn a president of the consequences of staying his course. I failed to convince President Nixon that morning, and the rest, as they say, is history," Dean, who famously told Nixon that there was "a cancer growing" on his presidency, explained in testimony submitted to the committee. "I certainly do not claim to be prescient. Then or now. But actions have consequences, and to ignore them is merely denial. Today, it is very obvious that history is repeating itself. It is for that reason I have crossed the country to visit with you, and that I hope that the collective wisdom of this committee will prevail, and you will not place the president above the law by inaction. As I was gathering my thoughts yesterday to respond to the hasty invitation, it occurred to me that had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it."
Republicans on the committee attempted to dismiss Feingold's motion as a partisan gesture, rather than a necessary reassertion of the system of checks and balances that has so decayed since Congress ceded its oversight role in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch was particularly aggressive in echoing Republican National Committee talking points, denouncing Feingold's motion as nothing more than an attempt to "score political points."
But Dean rejected that claim, as did Bruce Fein, a lawyer who served in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and who joined Dean in testifying in favor of the censure motion.
"To me, this is not really and should not be a partisan question,'' said Dean, who served as chief counsel for the Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee before joining the Nixon White House. "I think it's a question of institutional pride of this body, of the Congress of the United States.''
Feingold went even further, suggesting that Congress has a duty to hold president's to account for authorizing a secretive domestic spying program that operates without legal authorization, in clear violation the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"If we in the Congress don't stand up for ourselves and the American people, we become complicit in the lawbreaking,'' Feingold said. ``The resolution of censure is the appropriate response.''
Predictably, Hatch and several of the more aggressive defenders of the Bush administration on the committee fell back on the "talking points" argument that it would be inappropriate to censure Bush while the country is at war in Iraq. "Wartime is not a time to weaken the commander-in-chief,'' growled the Utah Republican.
But Feingold rejected the suggestion that Congress should surrender its oversight responsibilities in wartime.
"Under this theory, we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government, we have a monarchy," explained the senator, who added that, "We can fight terrorism without breaking the law. The rule of law is central to who we are as a people, and the President must return to the law. He must acknowledge and be held accountable for his illegal actions and for misleading the American people, both before and after the program was revealed."
by John Nichols
"[The] president needs to be reminded that separation of powers does not mean an isolation of powers," former White House counsel John Dean told the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday. "He needs to be told he cannot simply ignore a law with no consequences."
Arguing in favor of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold's motion to censure President Bush for illegally authorizing the warrantless wiretapping of the phone conversations of Americans, the man who broke with former President Richard Nixon to challenge the abuses of the Watergate era told the committee that Bush's wrongs were in many senses worse than those of Nixon.
"I recall a morning – and it was just about this time in the morning and it was exactly this time of the year – March 21, 1973 – that I tried to warn a president of the consequences of staying his course. I failed to convince President Nixon that morning, and the rest, as they say, is history," Dean, who famously told Nixon that there was "a cancer growing" on his presidency, explained in testimony submitted to the committee. "I certainly do not claim to be prescient. Then or now. But actions have consequences, and to ignore them is merely denial. Today, it is very obvious that history is repeating itself. It is for that reason I have crossed the country to visit with you, and that I hope that the collective wisdom of this committee will prevail, and you will not place the president above the law by inaction. As I was gathering my thoughts yesterday to respond to the hasty invitation, it occurred to me that had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it."
Republicans on the committee attempted to dismiss Feingold's motion as a partisan gesture, rather than a necessary reassertion of the system of checks and balances that has so decayed since Congress ceded its oversight role in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch was particularly aggressive in echoing Republican National Committee talking points, denouncing Feingold's motion as nothing more than an attempt to "score political points."
But Dean rejected that claim, as did Bruce Fein, a lawyer who served in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and who joined Dean in testifying in favor of the censure motion.
"To me, this is not really and should not be a partisan question,'' said Dean, who served as chief counsel for the Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee before joining the Nixon White House. "I think it's a question of institutional pride of this body, of the Congress of the United States.''
Feingold went even further, suggesting that Congress has a duty to hold president's to account for authorizing a secretive domestic spying program that operates without legal authorization, in clear violation the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"If we in the Congress don't stand up for ourselves and the American people, we become complicit in the lawbreaking,'' Feingold said. ``The resolution of censure is the appropriate response.''
Predictably, Hatch and several of the more aggressive defenders of the Bush administration on the committee fell back on the "talking points" argument that it would be inappropriate to censure Bush while the country is at war in Iraq. "Wartime is not a time to weaken the commander-in-chief,'' growled the Utah Republican.
But Feingold rejected the suggestion that Congress should surrender its oversight responsibilities in wartime.
"Under this theory, we no longer have a constitutional system consisting of three co-equal branches of government, we have a monarchy," explained the senator, who added that, "We can fight terrorism without breaking the law. The rule of law is central to who we are as a people, and the President must return to the law. He must acknowledge and be held accountable for his illegal actions and for misleading the American people, both before and after the program was revealed."
The President's "good faith" defense
Saturday, April 01, 2006
By Anonymous Liberal
In its article covering Friday's censure hearing, the New York Times reports:
Several Republicans argued that whatever the legal status of the spying program, it did not deserve punishment because, unlike Nixon, Mr. Bush had acted in good faith.
"This is apples and oranges," Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told Mr. Dean. "Anybody who believes that Richard Nixon was relying on some inherent-authority argument is recreating history."
Oh really.
Here's a passage from the same 1969 TIME Magazine article Glenn highlighted yesterday:
If anything, the Nixon Administration has been less than apologetic about the practice. Last month, in a memorandum filed during the Chicago trial of eight men charged with conspiring to incite acts of violence during the Democratic National Convention, the Justice Department claimed the inherent right to bug or wiretap-without court orders-any time it felt that the "national security" was in jeopardy.
As authority for this broad power, the Government cited the President's oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" from domestic subversion as well as foreign enemies. Contending that every President since Franklin Roosevelt had permitted such wiretaps, the Government went on to imply that they were even more important now because of the growing violence and rioting in the nation's cities and on its campuses.
Not only did Nixon rely on an inherent authority argument, but he had an infinitely stronger case because Congress had not yet passed FISA. Nice try, though, Senator Graham.
I also want to take a moment to address the emerging "good faith" defense of the President, which is being advanced by Republicans like Senators Graham and Specter who are clearly skeptical of the NSA program's legality. The argument seems to be that while Bush may have acted illegally, he did so based on a good faith belief that his actions were legal, and therefore he does not deserve harsh criticism or Congressional sanction.
I can see why Republicans like Graham and Specter have gravitated toward this argument. It allows them to express their genuine skepticism about the legality of the program without having to criticize the President for authorizing it.
But there's a major problem. Everything the administration has done for the past four and a half years indicates that it does NOT have a good faith believe in its own legal arguments. If Bush administration officials had any confidence whatsoever in their legal theories, they could at any point seek judicial blessing of the NSA program. All they would have to do is try to introduce evidence obtained via warrantless surveillance in court, either in a criminal prosecution or in an application for a FISA warrant. Either move would force the court to address the legality of the NSA program. In the latter context, the administration would have the benefit of being able to present its case ex parte and in secret.
But they are unwilling to do this, and for one simple reason: they are pretty certain they will lose. This paragraph from a U.S. News & World Report story last week is particularly revealing:
White House lawyers, in particular, Vice President Cheney's counsel David Addington (who is now Cheney's chief of staff), pressed Mueller to use information from the NSA program in court cases, without disclosing the origin of the information, and told Mueller to be prepared to drop prosecutions if judges demanded to know the sourcing, according to several government officials.
So they were willing to deceive judges and to drop entire prosecutions rather than test their legal theories in court. If that's not good faith, what is? The article goes on to make the obvious point:
[John] Martin, who has handled more intelligence-oriented criminal cases than anyone else at the Justice Department, puts the issue in stark terms: "The failure to allow it [information obtained from warrantless surveillance] to be used in court is a concession that it is an illegal surveillance."
But that's not the only evidence that the administration doesn't have much confidence in its own legal theories. The administration has worked feverishly to scuttle any further investigation into its activities and to challenge the standing of litigants (like the ACLU) who have sought to have the legality of the NSA program adjudicated in court.
And, perhaps most glaringly of all, there's the fact that the administration's primary legal argument was apparently conceived years after the program was first authorized. It's pretty hard to have a good faith belief in the merits of an argument you haven't even thought up yet. The administration is so confident in the merits of its legal theories that it won't even release the relevant OLC legal opinions, despite repeated requests.
No, despite what "several Republicans" argue, this administration does not and has never had a good faith belief that its legal theories will prevail in court.
But, you may protest, perhaps Bush did have a good faith believe that his actions would help prevent terrorism, even if he knew they were probably illegal. Isn't this a mitigating factor? Sure, if it's true. And for all I know it is. But there are two points we must not lose sight of.
First, because this surveillance is taking place in secret and without judicial review, we have no way of knowing who is actually being spied upon and why. We must simply take the administration's word. But history has shown that a president's word isn't worth a whole lot in this area. Surveillance authority was abused not only by the Nixon administration, but by his Democratic predecessors. The whole point of FISA was so we wouldn't have to take the president's word anymore. Even if you trust Bush to use this power only on terrorists and never on anyone else, can you really say the same about all future presidents?
Second, even if Bush's motives are as pure as the driven snow, it doesn't justify knowingly violating the law, at least outside of very extreme and short-term emergency scenarios. The viability of our system of constitutional government depends on the willingness of our leaders, particularly the president, to take seriously the concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances embodied in our Constitution. Subverting these concepts is dangerous.
As John Dean said at Friday's hearing:
"I must add that never before have I felt the slightest reason to fear our government. Nor do I frighten easily. But I do fear the Bush/Cheney government (and the precedents they are creating) because this administration is caught up in the rectitude of its own self-righteousness, and for all practical purposes this presidency has remained largely unchecked by its constitutional coequals."
Amen to that.
By Anonymous Liberal
In its article covering Friday's censure hearing, the New York Times reports:
Several Republicans argued that whatever the legal status of the spying program, it did not deserve punishment because, unlike Nixon, Mr. Bush had acted in good faith.
"This is apples and oranges," Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told Mr. Dean. "Anybody who believes that Richard Nixon was relying on some inherent-authority argument is recreating history."
Oh really.
Here's a passage from the same 1969 TIME Magazine article Glenn highlighted yesterday:
If anything, the Nixon Administration has been less than apologetic about the practice. Last month, in a memorandum filed during the Chicago trial of eight men charged with conspiring to incite acts of violence during the Democratic National Convention, the Justice Department claimed the inherent right to bug or wiretap-without court orders-any time it felt that the "national security" was in jeopardy.
As authority for this broad power, the Government cited the President's oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" from domestic subversion as well as foreign enemies. Contending that every President since Franklin Roosevelt had permitted such wiretaps, the Government went on to imply that they were even more important now because of the growing violence and rioting in the nation's cities and on its campuses.
Not only did Nixon rely on an inherent authority argument, but he had an infinitely stronger case because Congress had not yet passed FISA. Nice try, though, Senator Graham.
I also want to take a moment to address the emerging "good faith" defense of the President, which is being advanced by Republicans like Senators Graham and Specter who are clearly skeptical of the NSA program's legality. The argument seems to be that while Bush may have acted illegally, he did so based on a good faith belief that his actions were legal, and therefore he does not deserve harsh criticism or Congressional sanction.
I can see why Republicans like Graham and Specter have gravitated toward this argument. It allows them to express their genuine skepticism about the legality of the program without having to criticize the President for authorizing it.
But there's a major problem. Everything the administration has done for the past four and a half years indicates that it does NOT have a good faith believe in its own legal arguments. If Bush administration officials had any confidence whatsoever in their legal theories, they could at any point seek judicial blessing of the NSA program. All they would have to do is try to introduce evidence obtained via warrantless surveillance in court, either in a criminal prosecution or in an application for a FISA warrant. Either move would force the court to address the legality of the NSA program. In the latter context, the administration would have the benefit of being able to present its case ex parte and in secret.
But they are unwilling to do this, and for one simple reason: they are pretty certain they will lose. This paragraph from a U.S. News & World Report story last week is particularly revealing:
White House lawyers, in particular, Vice President Cheney's counsel David Addington (who is now Cheney's chief of staff), pressed Mueller to use information from the NSA program in court cases, without disclosing the origin of the information, and told Mueller to be prepared to drop prosecutions if judges demanded to know the sourcing, according to several government officials.
So they were willing to deceive judges and to drop entire prosecutions rather than test their legal theories in court. If that's not good faith, what is? The article goes on to make the obvious point:
[John] Martin, who has handled more intelligence-oriented criminal cases than anyone else at the Justice Department, puts the issue in stark terms: "The failure to allow it [information obtained from warrantless surveillance] to be used in court is a concession that it is an illegal surveillance."
But that's not the only evidence that the administration doesn't have much confidence in its own legal theories. The administration has worked feverishly to scuttle any further investigation into its activities and to challenge the standing of litigants (like the ACLU) who have sought to have the legality of the NSA program adjudicated in court.
And, perhaps most glaringly of all, there's the fact that the administration's primary legal argument was apparently conceived years after the program was first authorized. It's pretty hard to have a good faith belief in the merits of an argument you haven't even thought up yet. The administration is so confident in the merits of its legal theories that it won't even release the relevant OLC legal opinions, despite repeated requests.
No, despite what "several Republicans" argue, this administration does not and has never had a good faith belief that its legal theories will prevail in court.
But, you may protest, perhaps Bush did have a good faith believe that his actions would help prevent terrorism, even if he knew they were probably illegal. Isn't this a mitigating factor? Sure, if it's true. And for all I know it is. But there are two points we must not lose sight of.
First, because this surveillance is taking place in secret and without judicial review, we have no way of knowing who is actually being spied upon and why. We must simply take the administration's word. But history has shown that a president's word isn't worth a whole lot in this area. Surveillance authority was abused not only by the Nixon administration, but by his Democratic predecessors. The whole point of FISA was so we wouldn't have to take the president's word anymore. Even if you trust Bush to use this power only on terrorists and never on anyone else, can you really say the same about all future presidents?
Second, even if Bush's motives are as pure as the driven snow, it doesn't justify knowingly violating the law, at least outside of very extreme and short-term emergency scenarios. The viability of our system of constitutional government depends on the willingness of our leaders, particularly the president, to take seriously the concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances embodied in our Constitution. Subverting these concepts is dangerous.
As John Dean said at Friday's hearing:
"I must add that never before have I felt the slightest reason to fear our government. Nor do I frighten easily. But I do fear the Bush/Cheney government (and the precedents they are creating) because this administration is caught up in the rectitude of its own self-righteousness, and for all practical purposes this presidency has remained largely unchecked by its constitutional coequals."
Amen to that.
Friday, March 31, 2006
The Road to Dubai - New York Times
The New York Times
March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Road to Dubai
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican
Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those
who
want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common
is mean-spiritedness.
But immigration remains a difficult issue for liberals. Let me say a bit
more about the subject of my last column, the uncomfortable economics of
immigration,
then turn to what really worries me: the political implications of a large
nonvoting work force.
About the economics: the crucial divide isn't between legal and illegal
immigration; it's between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants.
High-skilled
immigrants - say, software engineers from South Asia - are, by any criterion
I can think of, good for America. But the effects of low-skilled immigration
are mixed at best.
True, there are large benefits for the low-skilled migrants, who may find
even a minimum-wage U.S. job a big step up. Immigration also raises the
total
income of native-born Americans, although reasonable estimates suggest that
these gains amount to no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
But low-skilled immigration depresses the wages of less-skilled native-born
Americans. And immigrants increase the demand for public services, including
health care and education. Estimates indicate that low-skilled immigrants
don't pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of providing these services.
All of these effects, except for the gains for the immigrants themselves,
are fairly small. Some of my friends say that's the point I should stress:
immigration
is a wonderful thing for the immigrants, and claims that immigrants are
undermining American workers and taxpayers are hugely overblown - end of
story.
But it's important to be intellectually honest, even when it hurts.
Moreover, what really worries me isn't the narrow economics - it's the
political economy,
the effects of having a disenfranchised labor force.
Imagine, for a moment, a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or
Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of
illegal immigrants
or foreigners on temporary visas - and neither group has the right to vote.
Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals, of government of
the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in which many
workers don't count is likely to ignore workers' interests: it's likely to
have a
weak social safety net and to spend too little on services like health care
and education.
This isn't idle speculation. Countries with high immigration tend, other
things equal, to have less generous welfare states than those with low
immigration.
U.S. cities with ethnically diverse populations - often the result of
immigration - tend to have worse public services than those with more
homogeneous
populations.
Of course, America isn't Dubai. But we're moving in that direction. As of
2002, according to the Urban Institute, 14 percent of U.S. workers, and 20
percent
of low-wage workers, were immigrants. Only a third of these immigrant
workers were naturalized citizens. So we already have a large
disenfranchised work
force, and it's growing rapidly. The goal of immigration reform should be to
reverse that trend.
So what do I think of the Senate Judiciary Committee's proposal, which is
derived from a plan sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy? I'm all in
favor
of one provision: offering those already here a possible route to permanent
residency and citizenship. Since we aren't going to deport more than 10
million
people, we need to integrate those people into our society.
But I'm puzzled by the plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one
that would admit 400,000 more workers a year (and you know that business
interests
would immediately start lobbying for an increase in that number). Isn't
institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force a big step away from
democracy?
For a hard-line economic conservative like Mr. McCain, the advantages to
employers of a cheap work force may be more important than the violation of
democratic
principles. But why would someone like Mr. Kennedy go along? Is the point to
help potential immigrants, or is it to buy support from business interests?
Either way, it's a dangerous route to go down. America's political system is
already a lot less democratic in practice than it is on paper, and creating
a permanent nonvoting working class would make things worse. The road to
Dubai may be paved with good intentions.
Postd by Miriam Vieni
Immigration Follies
Immigration Follies
by Robert B. Reich
One way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants would be to enforce existing labor laws.
by Robert B. Reich
One way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants would be to enforce existing labor laws.
What Bush knew, when he knew it
by Michael Scherer
Back in the summer of 2003, advisors to President Bush bent over backward to tell America that the boss knew nothing about intelligence disagreements over Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) nuclear program. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker," announced White House communications director Dan Bartlett.
That was the official line anyway. Today, the National Journal reports that Bush was "personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration."
The warning apparently came in the form of a one-page summary of the National Intelligence Estimate that Bush received in October 2002. It told the president about a dispute within the U.S. government about whether Iraq was using aluminum tubes for conventional or nuclear purposes. Nonetheless, Bush would mention the tubes as nuclear devices, without qualification, in his State of the Union address three months later.
Presidential advisor Karl Rove, according to the article, made it a priority to keep this fact secret until after the 2004 election.
Rove pulled it off.
Back in the summer of 2003, advisors to President Bush bent over backward to tell America that the boss knew nothing about intelligence disagreements over Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) nuclear program. "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker," announced White House communications director Dan Bartlett.
That was the official line anyway. Today, the National Journal reports that Bush was "personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration."
The warning apparently came in the form of a one-page summary of the National Intelligence Estimate that Bush received in October 2002. It told the president about a dispute within the U.S. government about whether Iraq was using aluminum tubes for conventional or nuclear purposes. Nonetheless, Bush would mention the tubes as nuclear devices, without qualification, in his State of the Union address three months later.
Presidential advisor Karl Rove, according to the article, made it a priority to keep this fact secret until after the 2004 election.
Rove pulled it off.
"Saddam chose to deny inspectors"
Bush repeated this bald-faced lie recently. The cowering press still lets him get away with it, but the public is no longer fooled.
By Joe Conason
Mar. 31, 2006 Slowly but inexorably, as more and more information emerges, the conventional wisdom about the events leading to war in Iraq is shifting. The American public has joined the rest of the civilized world in questioning the arguments and motives of the war makers. Commentators who have habitually fashioned excuses for the White House seem to find that task increasingly burdensome and humiliating. The old lies no longer have much traction.
Yet even now, President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war's origins -- perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it.
At his most recent press conference, that strange impulse to utter a ridiculous lie seemed to seize the president. It happened when he called on Hearst columnist Helen Thomas.
"I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime," said the venerable correspondent in her confrontational style. "Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?"
Bush responded by denying that he wanted war, a pro forma assertion that nobody believes. He blathered on for a while about Sept. 11, the Taliban, al-Qaida and protecting America from terrorism.
And when Thomas reminded him that she had asked about Iraq, he said, "I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the [United Nations] Security Council; that's why it was important to pass [Resolution] 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences -- and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose [emphasis added], then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."
The official transcript notes "laughter" at that moment.
What was so funny? Were her colleagues laughing at Thomas, whose monopoly on testicular fortitude has shamed them all for so long? In the days that followed, the bully boys of the right-wing media enthusiastically abused Thomas, which was predictable enough. But have the rest of the reporters in the press room become so accustomed to presidential prevarication that they literally cannot hear a stunning falsehood that is repeated over and over again?
For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there.
But forget about whether the weapons were there for a moment. The inspectors definitely went to Iraq. They left only because the United States warned them to get out before the bombs started to fall on March 19, 2003. But for some reason the president of the United States keeps saying -- in public and on the record -- that the inspectors weren't there.
Keeping the facts segregated from the myriad falsehoods isn't easy with this regime, so let's review the two previous occasions when Bush made that startling claim.
The first incident was on July 14, 2003, at a White House press conference with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who diplomatically declined to contradict him. At that time, the Bush administration was reeling from the impact of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's Op-Ed essay about the Niger uranium fiasco in the New York Times, which had appeared a few days earlier.
Asked by reporters about the questionable intelligence on Iraq that had distorted his speeches and decisions, the president bristled. He clearly believed such questions impertinent and unimportant. He preferred to talk about the big picture. In his concluding remarks that afternoon, Bush said: "The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in [emphasis added]. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful."
As the Washington Post noted the following day, "the president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective." That was putting it rather blandly (as I suggested here). The POTUS had denied reality, and the press corps blinked. The New York Times didn't even report his bizarre statement, and the rest of the media followed along meekly.
(Let me pause here to note how the treatment of these incidents contrasts with that notorious occasion when Bush's predecessor uttered an obvious lie as the cameras rolled. Bill Clinton's denial of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was played back over and over and over again.)
Perhaps aware that he could put over this nonsense on a lazy and intimidated press corps, Bush did it again six months later. On Jan. 27, 2004, he met briefly with reporters, accompanied by the visiting Polish president, Alexander Kwasniewski. The subject of the absent arsenal came up again because David Kay, the administration's handpicked weapons inspector, had confessed that nine months after the invasion the Iraq Survey Group had found nothing, zip, zero, and that he no longer expected they ever would.
"Don't you owe the American people an explanation?" a reporter asked. "Well, I think the Iraq Survey Group must do its work," Bush replied. "Again, I appreciate David Kay's contribution. I said in the run-up to the war against Iraq that -- first of all, I hoped the international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United Nations would enforce its resolutions, one of many. And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in" (emphasis added).
Is it necessary to mention that this falsehood again went unnoticed in the mainstream media (although I took exception)? Historians will wonder someday how a free press permitted the world's most important official to say such things without contradiction. Meanwhile we can hope that next time, Jon Stewart will play back the tape on "The Daily Show" while bugging his eyes in disbelief. Then we will be reassured that reality still exists, even when the media and the president prefer to pretend otherwise.
By Joe Conason
Mar. 31, 2006 Slowly but inexorably, as more and more information emerges, the conventional wisdom about the events leading to war in Iraq is shifting. The American public has joined the rest of the civilized world in questioning the arguments and motives of the war makers. Commentators who have habitually fashioned excuses for the White House seem to find that task increasingly burdensome and humiliating. The old lies no longer have much traction.
Yet even now, President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war's origins -- perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it.
At his most recent press conference, that strange impulse to utter a ridiculous lie seemed to seize the president. It happened when he called on Hearst columnist Helen Thomas.
"I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime," said the venerable correspondent in her confrontational style. "Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?"
Bush responded by denying that he wanted war, a pro forma assertion that nobody believes. He blathered on for a while about Sept. 11, the Taliban, al-Qaida and protecting America from terrorism.
And when Thomas reminded him that she had asked about Iraq, he said, "I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the [United Nations] Security Council; that's why it was important to pass [Resolution] 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences -- and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose [emphasis added], then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."
The official transcript notes "laughter" at that moment.
What was so funny? Were her colleagues laughing at Thomas, whose monopoly on testicular fortitude has shamed them all for so long? In the days that followed, the bully boys of the right-wing media enthusiastically abused Thomas, which was predictable enough. But have the rest of the reporters in the press room become so accustomed to presidential prevarication that they literally cannot hear a stunning falsehood that is repeated over and over again?
For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there.
But forget about whether the weapons were there for a moment. The inspectors definitely went to Iraq. They left only because the United States warned them to get out before the bombs started to fall on March 19, 2003. But for some reason the president of the United States keeps saying -- in public and on the record -- that the inspectors weren't there.
Keeping the facts segregated from the myriad falsehoods isn't easy with this regime, so let's review the two previous occasions when Bush made that startling claim.
The first incident was on July 14, 2003, at a White House press conference with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who diplomatically declined to contradict him. At that time, the Bush administration was reeling from the impact of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's Op-Ed essay about the Niger uranium fiasco in the New York Times, which had appeared a few days earlier.
Asked by reporters about the questionable intelligence on Iraq that had distorted his speeches and decisions, the president bristled. He clearly believed such questions impertinent and unimportant. He preferred to talk about the big picture. In his concluding remarks that afternoon, Bush said: "The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in [emphasis added]. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful."
As the Washington Post noted the following day, "the president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective." That was putting it rather blandly (as I suggested here). The POTUS had denied reality, and the press corps blinked. The New York Times didn't even report his bizarre statement, and the rest of the media followed along meekly.
(Let me pause here to note how the treatment of these incidents contrasts with that notorious occasion when Bush's predecessor uttered an obvious lie as the cameras rolled. Bill Clinton's denial of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was played back over and over and over again.)
Perhaps aware that he could put over this nonsense on a lazy and intimidated press corps, Bush did it again six months later. On Jan. 27, 2004, he met briefly with reporters, accompanied by the visiting Polish president, Alexander Kwasniewski. The subject of the absent arsenal came up again because David Kay, the administration's handpicked weapons inspector, had confessed that nine months after the invasion the Iraq Survey Group had found nothing, zip, zero, and that he no longer expected they ever would.
"Don't you owe the American people an explanation?" a reporter asked. "Well, I think the Iraq Survey Group must do its work," Bush replied. "Again, I appreciate David Kay's contribution. I said in the run-up to the war against Iraq that -- first of all, I hoped the international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United Nations would enforce its resolutions, one of many. And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in" (emphasis added).
Is it necessary to mention that this falsehood again went unnoticed in the mainstream media (although I took exception)? Historians will wonder someday how a free press permitted the world's most important official to say such things without contradiction. Meanwhile we can hope that next time, Jon Stewart will play back the tape on "The Daily Show" while bugging his eyes in disbelief. Then we will be reassured that reality still exists, even when the media and the president prefer to pretend otherwise.
Five minutes to midnight
The New York Times
March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq at the 11th Hour
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking — and that is where Iraq is heading.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported last Sunday in this paper about Mohannad al-Azawi, a quiet Sunni pet shop owner in Baghdad who was abducted from his store and found murdered the next morning. His skin was covered with purple welts, and his face and legs had drill holes in them. His brother Hassan, the story noted, "carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a pistol. 'I cannot live without vengeance,' he said."
Once embedded, this cycle of fear and revenge is almost impossible to break. People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is a militia from their own sect, not the police or the army. Then these militias, which come to life to protect the neighborhood, take on a life of their own. They develop protection rackets, feel the thrill of power and, as that happens, start to do all they can to prevent the government from restoring its authority. Finally, as the BBC noted in a recent report from Baghdad, some Iraqi politicians are now concluding that "they can gain more power and influence from building on sectarian loyalties than from appeals for national unity." When politicians decide they can get ahead by appealing more to fear than to hope, national reconciliation goes up in smoke.
A Baghdad blogger, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com, gave a vivid description of his neighborhood: "The confusion and conflict between the Americans, the army and the Ministry of Interior is producing a situation where the citizens don't know anymore whether the security personnel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is especially true for the 'Sunni'-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are nonexistent, although we see them everywhere.
"I don't know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. ... I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded. ... What is happening is Baghdad is something really awful."
Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — Sunni Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with one common agenda: America and its Iraqi allies must fail; they must not be allowed to build Iraq into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.
The Iraqi Shiite community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three years. But that restraint is over. It's now clear that some Shiite militias are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.
Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq — because there is no center.
There is only one hope for halting this slide and that is the formation — immediately — of a national unity government in Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds sharing power, and the deployment on the streets — immediately — of massive numbers of troops and police, both Iraqi and American, to prevent more of these tribal killings. If a national unity government is not formed soon, and if these identity-card murderers gain more momentum, any hope for building a decent Iraq will vanish.
It is five minutes to midnight.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq at the 11th Hour
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking — and that is where Iraq is heading.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported last Sunday in this paper about Mohannad al-Azawi, a quiet Sunni pet shop owner in Baghdad who was abducted from his store and found murdered the next morning. His skin was covered with purple welts, and his face and legs had drill holes in them. His brother Hassan, the story noted, "carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a pistol. 'I cannot live without vengeance,' he said."
Once embedded, this cycle of fear and revenge is almost impossible to break. People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is a militia from their own sect, not the police or the army. Then these militias, which come to life to protect the neighborhood, take on a life of their own. They develop protection rackets, feel the thrill of power and, as that happens, start to do all they can to prevent the government from restoring its authority. Finally, as the BBC noted in a recent report from Baghdad, some Iraqi politicians are now concluding that "they can gain more power and influence from building on sectarian loyalties than from appeals for national unity." When politicians decide they can get ahead by appealing more to fear than to hope, national reconciliation goes up in smoke.
A Baghdad blogger, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com, gave a vivid description of his neighborhood: "The confusion and conflict between the Americans, the army and the Ministry of Interior is producing a situation where the citizens don't know anymore whether the security personnel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is especially true for the 'Sunni'-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are nonexistent, although we see them everywhere.
"I don't know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. ... I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded. ... What is happening is Baghdad is something really awful."
Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — Sunni Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with one common agenda: America and its Iraqi allies must fail; they must not be allowed to build Iraq into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.
The Iraqi Shiite community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three years. But that restraint is over. It's now clear that some Shiite militias are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.
Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq — because there is no center.
There is only one hope for halting this slide and that is the formation — immediately — of a national unity government in Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds sharing power, and the deployment on the streets — immediately — of massive numbers of troops and police, both Iraqi and American, to prevent more of these tribal killings. If a national unity government is not formed soon, and if these identity-card murderers gain more momentum, any hope for building a decent Iraq will vanish.
It is five minutes to midnight.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Poll: Opposition to Gay Marriage Declining
By WILL LESTER
WASHINGTON (AP) - The public backlash over gay marriage has receded since a controversial decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2003 to legalize those marriages stirred strong opposition, says a poll released Wednesday.
Gay marriage remains a divisive issue, with 51 percent opposing it, the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found. But almost two-thirds, 63 percent, opposed gay marriage in February 2004.
``Most Americans still oppose gay marriage, but the levels of opposition are down and the number of strong opponents are down,'' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. ``This has some implications for the midterm elections if this trend is maintained. There are gay marriage ballot initiatives in numerous states.''
Gay marriage got intense media coverage in 2004 after the Massachusetts court case, the decision by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to issue thousands of marriage licenses to gay couples and similar cases. But the intense focus on gay marriage has declined in the last year.
In 2004, opponents of gay marriage were able to pass ballot initiatives banning the practice in 11 states, from Georgia to Oregon. Those gay marriage initiatives also helped conservatives rally their voters to the polls.
The number of people who say they strongly oppose gay marriage has dropped from 42 percent in early 2004 to 28 percent now. Strong opposition has dropped sharply among senior citizens and Republicans.
People are now evenly split on allowing adoptions by gay couples and six in 10 now favor allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
Legal challenges of laws on gay marriage could result in more court decisions that stir public opinion, but this midterm election year is starting with far less public anxiety about one of the nation's most volatile social issues.
The telephone poll of 1,405 adults was conducted March 8-12 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The public backlash over gay marriage has receded since a controversial decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2003 to legalize those marriages stirred strong opposition, says a poll released Wednesday.
Gay marriage remains a divisive issue, with 51 percent opposing it, the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found. But almost two-thirds, 63 percent, opposed gay marriage in February 2004.
``Most Americans still oppose gay marriage, but the levels of opposition are down and the number of strong opponents are down,'' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. ``This has some implications for the midterm elections if this trend is maintained. There are gay marriage ballot initiatives in numerous states.''
Gay marriage got intense media coverage in 2004 after the Massachusetts court case, the decision by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to issue thousands of marriage licenses to gay couples and similar cases. But the intense focus on gay marriage has declined in the last year.
In 2004, opponents of gay marriage were able to pass ballot initiatives banning the practice in 11 states, from Georgia to Oregon. Those gay marriage initiatives also helped conservatives rally their voters to the polls.
The number of people who say they strongly oppose gay marriage has dropped from 42 percent in early 2004 to 28 percent now. Strong opposition has dropped sharply among senior citizens and Republicans.
People are now evenly split on allowing adoptions by gay couples and six in 10 now favor allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
Legal challenges of laws on gay marriage could result in more court decisions that stir public opinion, but this midterm election year is starting with far less public anxiety about one of the nation's most volatile social issues.
The telephone poll of 1,405 adults was conducted March 8-12 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Moment of Truth
by ROBERT SCHEER
[posted online on March 29, 2006]
There is no immigration crisis--other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes. So it has always been throughout the history of this country when anti-immigrant hysteria periodically reigns during low ebbs in our national sense of security and vision.
The script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the "flood" or "tidal wave" or "river" sneaking across our porous borders--be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War. Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don't let any more in.
Luckily, although it sometimes takes years or even decades, saner voices eventually prevail, acknowledging that the continued influx of immigrants has always fueled America's astonishing economic and cultural rise ever since the original natives were bum-rushed off their turf. Immigration laws are liberalized, compromises are reached, amnesties are offered, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service bureaucracy grinds on.
Having intermittently covered this issue for the Los Angeles Times over thirty years, I can well recall the peaks of panic in which we reporters were dispatched to the border and out into the fields to witness the arrest of people desperate to find work--only to be embarrassed by the hunted eyes and clutched crosses of the enemy discovered.
Such frenzied attention was inevitably followed by a lull in which most Americans were quite happy to eat the food harvested by those same harassed and abused workers as well as entrusting the "illegals" with the care of American homes and children. On no other issue is there such an extreme disconnect between attitudes and actions.
When Wal-Mart was busted for hiring undocumented workers, did anybody boycott the company for it? Of course not; consumers value price and aren't concerned, for the most part, about how a company accomplishes cheapness. If, however, people do really care about keeping all jobs open to American citizens, then there is only one effective strategy: Level the playing field by enforcing labor laws.
Some 2 million immigrant workers now earn less than the minimum wage and millions more work without the occupational safety, workers' compensation, overtime pay and other protections legal status offers. Consequently, when the president says that immigrants perform work that legal residents are unwilling to do, he may be right--but we don't know. The only way to test that hypothesis is to bring this black market labor pool above ground.
That approach has been tried in California with some success. Jose Millan, who until this year ran such an enforcement program as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's labor commissioner and before that for Republican Governor Pete Wilson, told me that legalization of undocumented workers is essential to improving the situation for everybody.
"I am in favor of anything that brings these workers out of the shadows and into the sunlight; it's very easy to exploit a population when they're afraid," Millan told me Monday. "We would be a better country if we recognized the fact that there are 10 million undocumented workers in our midst, and we would be better off if they were granted the benefits and responsibilities of a legal existence."
This current xenophobia is no more warranted than it has been in the past. The number of claimed "illegal aliens" as a percentage of the population is clearly absorbable by the job market as our low unemployment rate demonstrates. Yet, the Republican Party and the Congress it dominates are currently teetering between driving undocumented workers further underground or taking a saner compromise approach.
The former, a draconian bill already passed by the House of Representatives, would legalize witch-hunts of undocumented workers, by reclassifying them as felons; their employers would be subject to a year or more in prison and punitive fines; as would even church and nonprofit organizations who offer succor to them.
Because employers are not trained to play cop, they will simply be driven to discriminate against job applicants based on "foreignness" determined by ethnicity or accent. The more reasonable alternative co-authored by Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, and embraced as the heart of the proposal adopted by the Judiciary Committee on Monday, shuns the criminalization of the undocumented, instead offering paths--albeit long, arduous and uncertain ones--to legal status for undocumented workers already here.
This is a moment of truth for America. It is time we acknowledged that we need the immigrant workers as much as they need us and began to treat them with the respect they deserve.
[posted online on March 29, 2006]
There is no immigration crisis--other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes. So it has always been throughout the history of this country when anti-immigrant hysteria periodically reigns during low ebbs in our national sense of security and vision.
The script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the "flood" or "tidal wave" or "river" sneaking across our porous borders--be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War. Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don't let any more in.
Luckily, although it sometimes takes years or even decades, saner voices eventually prevail, acknowledging that the continued influx of immigrants has always fueled America's astonishing economic and cultural rise ever since the original natives were bum-rushed off their turf. Immigration laws are liberalized, compromises are reached, amnesties are offered, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service bureaucracy grinds on.
Having intermittently covered this issue for the Los Angeles Times over thirty years, I can well recall the peaks of panic in which we reporters were dispatched to the border and out into the fields to witness the arrest of people desperate to find work--only to be embarrassed by the hunted eyes and clutched crosses of the enemy discovered.
Such frenzied attention was inevitably followed by a lull in which most Americans were quite happy to eat the food harvested by those same harassed and abused workers as well as entrusting the "illegals" with the care of American homes and children. On no other issue is there such an extreme disconnect between attitudes and actions.
When Wal-Mart was busted for hiring undocumented workers, did anybody boycott the company for it? Of course not; consumers value price and aren't concerned, for the most part, about how a company accomplishes cheapness. If, however, people do really care about keeping all jobs open to American citizens, then there is only one effective strategy: Level the playing field by enforcing labor laws.
Some 2 million immigrant workers now earn less than the minimum wage and millions more work without the occupational safety, workers' compensation, overtime pay and other protections legal status offers. Consequently, when the president says that immigrants perform work that legal residents are unwilling to do, he may be right--but we don't know. The only way to test that hypothesis is to bring this black market labor pool above ground.
That approach has been tried in California with some success. Jose Millan, who until this year ran such an enforcement program as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's labor commissioner and before that for Republican Governor Pete Wilson, told me that legalization of undocumented workers is essential to improving the situation for everybody.
"I am in favor of anything that brings these workers out of the shadows and into the sunlight; it's very easy to exploit a population when they're afraid," Millan told me Monday. "We would be a better country if we recognized the fact that there are 10 million undocumented workers in our midst, and we would be better off if they were granted the benefits and responsibilities of a legal existence."
This current xenophobia is no more warranted than it has been in the past. The number of claimed "illegal aliens" as a percentage of the population is clearly absorbable by the job market as our low unemployment rate demonstrates. Yet, the Republican Party and the Congress it dominates are currently teetering between driving undocumented workers further underground or taking a saner compromise approach.
The former, a draconian bill already passed by the House of Representatives, would legalize witch-hunts of undocumented workers, by reclassifying them as felons; their employers would be subject to a year or more in prison and punitive fines; as would even church and nonprofit organizations who offer succor to them.
Because employers are not trained to play cop, they will simply be driven to discriminate against job applicants based on "foreignness" determined by ethnicity or accent. The more reasonable alternative co-authored by Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, and embraced as the heart of the proposal adopted by the Judiciary Committee on Monday, shuns the criminalization of the undocumented, instead offering paths--albeit long, arduous and uncertain ones--to legal status for undocumented workers already here.
This is a moment of truth for America. It is time we acknowledged that we need the immigrant workers as much as they need us and began to treat them with the respect they deserve.
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