Monday, June 14, 2004
O beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life
America, America
May God the gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain devine
He didn’t ignore tyrannize Central America, ignore AIDS, enrich the wealthy. Jon Pareles and Bernard Weinraub said it well in the NY Times obit:
Ray Charles, Bluesy Essence of Soul, Is Dead at 73Ray Charles, the piano man with the bluesy voice who reshaped American music for a half-century, bringing the essence of soul to country, jazz, rock, standards and every other style of music he touched.
Polls:
Kerry up 49-43- without Nader- in the Fox national poll
Kerry leads comfortably in Illinois, 7 points up in Ohio; Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire are too close to call
Bush leads in Missouri and Kentucky
Reagan:
Too many, such as Cokie and Tom Brokaw, waxed sentimental about the simpler, virtually non-partisan era. Don’t think so.
One highlight was hearing both Bush, Sr. and Reagan Jr. roast Junior. Haven’t heard media folk lift their collective eyebrow over GHW Bush saying that though Reagan took controversial positions, he did not polarize the country nor engender personal animosity. Unlike?? And, Ron spoke the following
Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.
Bush, the Peace President
It’s time for a new identity:
Indeed, the President is privately telling aides that after leading the nation to war in his first term, he wants to spend his next four years being "a peace President." Officials in the Administration contend he has more credibility as a diplomat now that he has shown a willingness to use force to back his principles. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646350,00.html
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Targeting of civilian leaders- an assassination a day; good news (for Bush?) that al Sadr has reportedly called off his insurgency. Iyad Allawi, the one-time CIA agent, now appointed president, did his press conference in English! And, there are reports of thousands who are 'missing' in the Iraqi prison system. Yikes. The Observer summarized it: “The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an "invisible" network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the "war on terror" began.”
Prison Abuse: The Telegraph (Julian Coman) reminds us that the higher ups are being implicated. The Washington Post (R. Jeffrey Smith, Josh White) chips in:
Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.
The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.
According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/13/wguan13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/13/ixworld.html
General Granted Latitude At Prison
Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html
Letter urges Bush's defeat
The Times buried it on A16; the LA Times, Washington Post and Aljazeera gave it more prominence.
The letter - an unusually strident public critique signed by 26 former military and foreign service officials - says Bush's policies have proved ineffective and left the United States isolated internationally, according to the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post on Sunday. Angered by Bush administration policies they contend endanger national security, 26 retired American diplomats and military officers are urging Americans to vote President Bush out of office in November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, does not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry for president in its campaign, which will start officially on Wednesday at a Washington news conference. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/politics/campaign/14diplomats.html
Health Care
Like the others, it’s all but expunged from the public realm, even though the system is in such dire shape. So, we should acknowledge.
Health Benefits To Decrease Over Next 10 Years, American Benefits Council Report Finds
Health and retirement benefits for U.S. workers will decrease over the next 10 years, regardless of whether their wages increase, as more companies seek to reduce costs… The report forecasts that fewer companies over the next 10 years will offer health benefits to retirees. According to the report, the percentage of companies that offered retiree health benefits decreased to 11% in 2000 from 20% in 1997. In addition, the report suggests that fewer companies over the next 10 years will offer workers older than age 55 health benefit extras for retirement because the "labor pool will tighten and employers will not try to encourage early retirement with the benefits… http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f87381b25bc62ed74da568e798d1712f&lat=1087217496&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2ephilly%2ecom%2fmld%2finquirer%2fbusiness%2f8884483%2ehtm
Bush to Pope: More Activism on my behalf, please
They are going ‘all-out.’ While Presidents regularly meet with Popes and talk about political / moral issues, this is beyond the pale. Since when is the Vatican enlisted in a political campaign?
In his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.
In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/13george.html?ex=1402459200&en=0f985b5469faef04&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
-R
6/10
In D.C.
Was without internet access for several days...quite odd. Otherwise,
Reagan:
It’s a tad tougher being here, with the City closing down. But at least the lionizing has slowed and some balanced reporting and pointed letters-to-the-editor have appeared. And, some of the ongoing ‘news’ has reappeared.
The Bush campaign is going all-out to establish the tie to the beloved Ronnie. Their web site has morphed from anti-Kerry to a Reagan tribute.
Yet, Reagan’s landslide over Mondale makes us forget that he never was THAT popular; again, an aggressive, conservative press has accounted for that distortion. FAIR notes that
”"Ronald Reagan was the most popular president ever to leave office," explained ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas (6/6/04). "His approval ratings were higher than any other at the end of his second term." Though the claim was repeated by many news outlets, it is not true; Bill Clinton's approval ratings when he left office were actually higher than Reagan's, at 66 percent versus Reagan's 63 percent (Gallup, 1/10-14/01). Franklin Delano Roosevelt also topped Reagan with a 66 percent approval rating at the time of his death in office after three and a half terms.
In general, Reagan's popularity during his two terms tends to be overstated. “
But, our penchant for denial, specifically the ‘oh, he can’t be that awful’ was evident with Reagan as it is with Bush, Junior. And our generosity makes us too often conclude that his warped policies were early evidence of his Alzheimer’s, not heartless policies that rewarded the very wealthy. Who wants to focus on his coldness toward his children, his winking to white supremacists when he declared for president in Philadelphia, Miss, the site of the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Why focus on the indebtedness wrought by that era’s fiscal policies when you can see it as “morning in America.’ Instead the inventions and over-simplified policy statements were seen as cute, at worst idiosyncratic, and not reflecting the disastrous or cruel policies behind the comments.
Otherwise:
Had the good fortune to sit in on (actually stand/lean) another Ashcroft hearing. The Only Person to Lose an Election to a Dead Man was defending the leaked memo as to torture of al-Qaeda suspects being legally defensible. His non-answering is an art form. Kennedy, Biden and Chuck Schumer were particularly effective in addressing who is responsible for setting guidelines for interrogations. While Bush’s name was rarely noted, the Washington Post provided suitable coverage in raising questions as to his being accountable. Elsewhere?
Meanwhile: Back to post 9/11 and those Saudis…From the St. Petersburg Times:
Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
And, seems like What’s Happening in Iraq is that there are now more coordinated sabotage attacks on fuel and transmission lines, i.e. targeting infrastructure, plus, of course, more deaths; And, the Kurds are upset re the lack of protection for ‘minority rights’ in that UN Security Council resolution. More at www.juancole.com
Winning the “War on Terror”?
…Some belated acknowledging that we’re not. Apparently terrorism increased in 2003. From the LA Times via Yahoo:
The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=716&e=28&u=/latimests/20040609/ts_latimes/uswillrevisedataonterror
ELECTION:
Polls: Nationally, Kerry up by 3 – 6 points; Bush ahead in Wisconsin, Kerry in Ohio, Florida even (!), Kerry up by 25% in Mass. (surprise!) But, it’s only June.
VP: Gov Vilsack of Iowa still being talked about; zip name recognition; have yet to hear the ‘up side.’
-R
In liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life
America, America
May God the gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain devine
He didn’t ignore tyrannize Central America, ignore AIDS, enrich the wealthy. Jon Pareles and Bernard Weinraub said it well in the NY Times obit:
Ray Charles, Bluesy Essence of Soul, Is Dead at 73Ray Charles, the piano man with the bluesy voice who reshaped American music for a half-century, bringing the essence of soul to country, jazz, rock, standards and every other style of music he touched.
Polls:
Kerry up 49-43- without Nader- in the Fox national poll
Kerry leads comfortably in Illinois, 7 points up in Ohio; Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire are too close to call
Bush leads in Missouri and Kentucky
Reagan:
Too many, such as Cokie and Tom Brokaw, waxed sentimental about the simpler, virtually non-partisan era. Don’t think so.
One highlight was hearing both Bush, Sr. and Reagan Jr. roast Junior. Haven’t heard media folk lift their collective eyebrow over GHW Bush saying that though Reagan took controversial positions, he did not polarize the country nor engender personal animosity. Unlike?? And, Ron spoke the following
Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.
Bush, the Peace President
It’s time for a new identity:
Indeed, the President is privately telling aides that after leading the nation to war in his first term, he wants to spend his next four years being "a peace President." Officials in the Administration contend he has more credibility as a diplomat now that he has shown a willingness to use force to back his principles. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646350,00.html
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Targeting of civilian leaders- an assassination a day; good news (for Bush?) that al Sadr has reportedly called off his insurgency. Iyad Allawi, the one-time CIA agent, now appointed president, did his press conference in English! And, there are reports of thousands who are 'missing' in the Iraqi prison system. Yikes. The Observer summarized it: “The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an "invisible" network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the "war on terror" began.”
Prison Abuse: The Telegraph (Julian Coman) reminds us that the higher ups are being implicated. The Washington Post (R. Jeffrey Smith, Josh White) chips in:
Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.
The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.
According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/13/wguan13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/13/ixworld.html
General Granted Latitude At Prison
Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html
Letter urges Bush's defeat
The Times buried it on A16; the LA Times, Washington Post and Aljazeera gave it more prominence.
The letter - an unusually strident public critique signed by 26 former military and foreign service officials - says Bush's policies have proved ineffective and left the United States isolated internationally, according to the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post on Sunday. Angered by Bush administration policies they contend endanger national security, 26 retired American diplomats and military officers are urging Americans to vote President Bush out of office in November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, does not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry for president in its campaign, which will start officially on Wednesday at a Washington news conference. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/politics/campaign/14diplomats.html
Health Care
Like the others, it’s all but expunged from the public realm, even though the system is in such dire shape. So, we should acknowledge.
Health Benefits To Decrease Over Next 10 Years, American Benefits Council Report Finds
Health and retirement benefits for U.S. workers will decrease over the next 10 years, regardless of whether their wages increase, as more companies seek to reduce costs… The report forecasts that fewer companies over the next 10 years will offer health benefits to retirees. According to the report, the percentage of companies that offered retiree health benefits decreased to 11% in 2000 from 20% in 1997. In addition, the report suggests that fewer companies over the next 10 years will offer workers older than age 55 health benefit extras for retirement because the "labor pool will tighten and employers will not try to encourage early retirement with the benefits… http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=f87381b25bc62ed74da568e798d1712f&lat=1087217496&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2ephilly%2ecom%2fmld%2finquirer%2fbusiness%2f8884483%2ehtm
Bush to Pope: More Activism on my behalf, please
They are going ‘all-out.’ While Presidents regularly meet with Popes and talk about political / moral issues, this is beyond the pale. Since when is the Vatican enlisted in a political campaign?
In his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.
In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/13george.html?ex=1402459200&en=0f985b5469faef04&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
-R
6/10
In D.C.
Was without internet access for several days...quite odd. Otherwise,
Reagan:
It’s a tad tougher being here, with the City closing down. But at least the lionizing has slowed and some balanced reporting and pointed letters-to-the-editor have appeared. And, some of the ongoing ‘news’ has reappeared.
The Bush campaign is going all-out to establish the tie to the beloved Ronnie. Their web site has morphed from anti-Kerry to a Reagan tribute.
Yet, Reagan’s landslide over Mondale makes us forget that he never was THAT popular; again, an aggressive, conservative press has accounted for that distortion. FAIR notes that
”"Ronald Reagan was the most popular president ever to leave office," explained ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas (6/6/04). "His approval ratings were higher than any other at the end of his second term." Though the claim was repeated by many news outlets, it is not true; Bill Clinton's approval ratings when he left office were actually higher than Reagan's, at 66 percent versus Reagan's 63 percent (Gallup, 1/10-14/01). Franklin Delano Roosevelt also topped Reagan with a 66 percent approval rating at the time of his death in office after three and a half terms.
In general, Reagan's popularity during his two terms tends to be overstated. “
But, our penchant for denial, specifically the ‘oh, he can’t be that awful’ was evident with Reagan as it is with Bush, Junior. And our generosity makes us too often conclude that his warped policies were early evidence of his Alzheimer’s, not heartless policies that rewarded the very wealthy. Who wants to focus on his coldness toward his children, his winking to white supremacists when he declared for president in Philadelphia, Miss, the site of the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Why focus on the indebtedness wrought by that era’s fiscal policies when you can see it as “morning in America.’ Instead the inventions and over-simplified policy statements were seen as cute, at worst idiosyncratic, and not reflecting the disastrous or cruel policies behind the comments.
Otherwise:
Had the good fortune to sit in on (actually stand/lean) another Ashcroft hearing. The Only Person to Lose an Election to a Dead Man was defending the leaked memo as to torture of al-Qaeda suspects being legally defensible. His non-answering is an art form. Kennedy, Biden and Chuck Schumer were particularly effective in addressing who is responsible for setting guidelines for interrogations. While Bush’s name was rarely noted, the Washington Post provided suitable coverage in raising questions as to his being accountable. Elsewhere?
Meanwhile: Back to post 9/11 and those Saudis…From the St. Petersburg Times:
Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
And, seems like What’s Happening in Iraq is that there are now more coordinated sabotage attacks on fuel and transmission lines, i.e. targeting infrastructure, plus, of course, more deaths; And, the Kurds are upset re the lack of protection for ‘minority rights’ in that UN Security Council resolution. More at www.juancole.com
Winning the “War on Terror”?
…Some belated acknowledging that we’re not. Apparently terrorism increased in 2003. From the LA Times via Yahoo:
The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=716&e=28&u=/latimests/20040609/ts_latimes/uswillrevisedataonterror
ELECTION:
Polls: Nationally, Kerry up by 3 – 6 points; Bush ahead in Wisconsin, Kerry in Ohio, Florida even (!), Kerry up by 25% in Mass. (surprise!) But, it’s only June.
VP: Gov Vilsack of Iowa still being talked about; zip name recognition; have yet to hear the ‘up side.’
-R
