Friday, June 18, 2004
Venality and Incompetence: So many examples of each- sometimes it’s the former, sometimes the latter, sometimes both. This time?
9/11 Commission: What we knew...
Analysis from the New York Times’ Douglas Jehl:
For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.
Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.
Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.
In the face of those findings, Mr. Bush stood firm, disputing the particular finding in a staff report that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization. "There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush declared. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18assess.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Cheney Doesn’t Let Go: (David Sanger, Robin Toner):
Mr. Cheney returned to the subject of the Times's coverage later in his appearance on CNBC when Ms. Borger began saying, "But the press is making a distinction between 9/11 and . . ."
"No, they're not," Mr. Cheney said. "The New York Times does not. `The Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Ties,' " he said, quoting the headline. "That's what it says. That's the vaunted New York Times. Numerous — I've watched a lot of the coverage on it and the fact of the matter is they don't make a distinction. They fuzz it up. Sometimes it's through ignorance. Sometimes its malicious. But you'll take a statement that's geared specifically to say there's no connection in relations to the 9/11 attack and then say, `Well, obviously there's no case here.' And then jump over to challenge the president's credibility or my credibility."
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not alone in responding yesterday to the commission's findings. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, also charged that the media had distorted the findings of the commission about links between Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Hussein. He sad the report showed the two men were "developing a relationship."
"That relationship could have led to dire consequences for the United States," Mr. Hastert said, adding that the two men "are cut from the same cloth." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18DEBA.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Timely CNN Report: Saddam planning terrorism
Fascinating that this emerges today…
Russian intelligence services warned Washington several times that Saddam Hussein's regime planned terrorist attacks against the United States, President Vladimir Putin has said.
The warnings were provided after September 11, 2001 and before the start of the Iraqi war, Putin said Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.
The planned attacks were targeted both inside and outside the United States, said Putin, who made the remarks during a visit to Kazakhstan.
However, Putin said there was no evidence that Saddam's regime was involved in any terrorist attacks. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/18/russia.warning/
What’s Happening, Iraq: Bombings. Deaths.
Kerry: The Danger: Without progressive positions and without pressure from the Left, he endangers himself and marginalizes progressives. Bob Kuttner warns:
The bipartisan elite has convinced itself that the main challenge for the next generation is reducing the federal deficit. That's what passes for courage in Beltway Washington, as it has for two decades. No wonder voters are tuning out.
Let me amend that. Potentially progressive voters like those Sanders supporters tune out. Wall Street voters are entirely tuned in, to an insider debate between those who would cut taxes and not worry about deficits (Bush) and those who would cut deficits and give up on all but token social investment (the fiscal conservatives advising Kerry). Some debate. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/06/16/americas_hidden_issue_of_poverty/
(yet,) Kerry Waking Up?
Reports coming in from the Trail, of more outspokenness. The Washington Post’s Lois Romano uses words like “populist” and passionate”. Our John?
"I'm running for president to put America back to work...I'm running for president because health care is not a benefit just for the wealthy or the elected or the connected...I'm running for president because I know that we could be a hell of a lot stronger in the world if we were to secure our freedom..."
Both the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson and the New York Times' Robin Toner sat upright for another part of Kerry's sizzling New Jersey speech:
"Our tax code has gone from 14 pages to 17,000 pages. Any of you get your own page? Enron's got its own page. Exxon's got its own page. Looks to me like Halliburton's got its own chapter." "You know who the White House thinks should pay for their deficit? They think it ought to be children in Head Start, women with young babies who need nutritional help, veterans who need health care. . . . And if you think that's compassionate conservatism, then Dick Cheney is Mr. Rogers." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44661-2004Jun15.html
Major Paper Endorsement for Kerry: The Philadelphia Daily News:
KERRY FOR PREZ: WHY HIM, WHY NOW
AND HOW TO PUT HIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE
LAST WEEK, the nation looked to the past with the death of President Ronald Reagan.
This week, the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, suspended out of respect to the deceased 40th president, start fresh.
In that spirit, this newspaper, the first in the nation, endorses John Kerry for president. Unlike the current White House occupant, Kerry can lead America to a brighter, better future. He has shown the personal courage, compassion, intellect and skill to lead this country in a time of war abroad and economic troubles at home. He is a serious man for a serious time.
Why make this endorsement now, when the election is months away?
Because this race promises to be close and Pennsylvania is one of 18 swing states that can go to either candidate. For Kerry supporters to prevail they must do more than just vote, they must bring a ringer into this contest: the more than a million people in the region who did not vote in the last presidential election. We believe these non-voters - who will have to be mobilized over the next few months - are the key to victory.
On the next page, we outline a strategy to make sure Pennsylvania lands in the Kerry win column. We will further make the case for Kerry in future editorials.
For now, let's concentrate on the current president and why he must be defeated.
THE CASE AGAINST BUSH
George W. Bush received - and deserved - praise for his leadership during the dark days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But since then, the Bush administration has been marked by failure - failure to shepherd the country through a tough economic downturn, failure to keep the nation focused on the true enemies to our security.
He has failed in even the one challenge he set out for himself at the beginning of his administration - to bring the country together. His has been one of the most ideologically driven and divisive administrations in recent times.
Instead of moving forward, the country has been on the wrong track. These last four years have been wasted… http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/opinion/8933725.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Post Reagan: From The Pew Survey: Somewhat of a bump for Bush. Higher ratings re Iraq involvement, approval of Bush, etc., and it’s back to even with Kerry. But, it’s only June.
Bush Courts McCain
With Kerry having ‘lost’ McCain as a possible VP, Bush is seeking to bring McCain back into the fold.The Washington Post (Dan Balz, Mike Allen)
After being courted by John F. Kerry to consider joining the Democratic presidential ticket, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will join President Bush on Air Force One on Friday and introduce him at a campaign event in Reno, Nev., campaign officials said yesterday.
Bush and McCain have had a frosty relationship ever since competing for the Republican nomination in 2000, and Bush aides have fumed at McCain's occasional barbs in televised interviews during which he was asked repeatedly about the vice presidency. McCain's trip with Bush grew out of a meeting this spring between White House senior adviser Karl Rove and John Weaver, a top adviser to McCain, who became a Democratic consultant after the bitter campaign between Bush and McCain. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48029-2004Jun16.html
Corporate Tax: “Helping Us Compete”- that’s the mantra for the latest. We gotta end this borrowing ($270 billion on this one) which keeps burdening ordinary tax payers and digs a bigger hole for Kerry… as he will then feel trapped into replaying Clinton’s first term by shelving social activism in favor of deficit trimming.
A number of Democrats helped give Republicans the margin of victory as the House of Representatives passed a $155 billion bill to cut taxes for manufacturers, overhaul international tax rules and let U.S. multinationals bring home overseas income at a 5.25% rate.
But other Democrats criticized the bill's inclusion of a plan to pay tobacco farmers to give up a federal program that shores up crop prices, saying it was merely a political ploy designed to win Southern support for the larger measure that would rewrite the nation's corporate tax code. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108749784874340301,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore et al as Nazis
Celebrity reviewer Tina Brown critiques the Michael Moore movie:
Those squeamish about Michael Moore's methodology, however, should check out the other documentary that opened last night, "The Hunting of the President," produced by Clinton friend Harry Thomason. It tracks the network of Arkansas dirt-diggers who peddled Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Whitewater to the manipulative right-wing fringe. Thomason's movie, with its revelations of how Susan McDougal was pressured to lie to incriminate Hillary Clinton, is substantively more damning than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Moore fans can say his prosecution of Bush only employs the same paranoid technique of reasoning by juxtaposition that the Vince-Foster-was-murdered brigade used to torture the Clintons all those years. That is true, but it doesn't appeal to the Democrats less emotionally overwrought than Leonardo DiCaprio.
Hollywood agent and Kerry supporter Tom Baer told me, "Kerry should flee Moore's movie. It's Goebbels all over again." And former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz put it this way: "I hold my guys to a higher standard," he said quietly. "That's why they're my guys." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48059-2004Jun16.html
Bill O’Reilly: After calling liberal journalist Eric Alterman “another Fidel Castro confidant” and Molly Ivins a “socialist”, he compared Bill Moyers to Mao Zedong, and added, “All right. I mean he’s a Far Left bomb-thrower who actually runs a foundation that funds left-wing organizations. I mean the guy’s a joke. Get out of the news business, Bill.” Then he invoked Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister.
Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi regime and whose very famous quote was, "If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth." All right? "If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth."
And that's what Stuart Smalley [O'Reilly regularly refers to [Al] Franken as Stuart Smalley, a character Franken created on Saturday Night Live], and Michael Moore and all of these guys do. They just run around.
So who turns out for the screening of this movie [Fahrenheit 9/11] last night? You ready? Now, here are the celebrities that turn out. Here are the people who would turn out to see Josef Goebbels convince you that Poland invaded the Third Reich. It's the same thing, by the way. Propaganda is propaganda. OK?
Billy Crystal. Martin Sheen. Leonardo DiCaprio. Ellen DeGeneres. David Duchovny. Sharon Stone. Meg Ryan. Ashton Kutcher. Demi Moore. Norman Lear. Rob Reiner. Jodie Foster. Chris Rock. Larry David. Jack Black. Matthew Perry. Diane Lane.
And from the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel:
I think it's [the effort by some Hollywood celebrities to help defeat President George W. Bush] more organized than ever before and I think they [anti-Bush Hollywood celebrities] have more access to the media than ever before because the celebrity media, as I said, is so profitable and pervasive. So now it becomes a Leni Riefenstahl Third Reich propaganda proposition where what they say and do is put in everybody's face. http://www.ofrankenfactor.com
Interfaith Group Apologizes to Arab viewers.
Their idea: to run a t.v. ad apologizing for Abu Ghraib. It was created by faithful america.org, and is running on Al Jazerra and Al Arabiya.
Venezuela: Chavez Faces Recall:
One rumor: Venezuela is buying voting machines …from Florida!
How many political lives does Venezuela's Hugo Chávez have? The former paratrooper won a landslide presidential election victory in 1998 just a few years
after being released from prison for leading a failed coup against the government in 1992. He was ousted from power himself in 2002 by a loosely knit
opposition of business, military, and labor leaders, but returned triumphantly to his post two days later after mass protests and military supporters forced his rivals
to back down.
Now, Chávez, 49, faces another big test. After months of struggle, his opponents -- who have banded together in a coalition called Democratic Coordinator -- have collected enough signatures to force a recall vote on Aug. 15. On June 3, Venezuela's National Electoral Council declared that more than the required 2.4 million signatures were valid. That marked a breakthrough for the opposition, since Chávez had earlier alleged that many signatures were fraudulent and the CNE required the opposition to get more than 1 million people to sign petitions again. http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/04_25/b3888142_mz058.htm?gb
-R
9/11 Commission: What we knew...
Analysis from the New York Times’ Douglas Jehl:
For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.
Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration's response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.
Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.
In the face of those findings, Mr. Bush stood firm, disputing the particular finding in a staff report that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization. "There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush declared. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18assess.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
Cheney Doesn’t Let Go: (David Sanger, Robin Toner):
Mr. Cheney returned to the subject of the Times's coverage later in his appearance on CNBC when Ms. Borger began saying, "But the press is making a distinction between 9/11 and . . ."
"No, they're not," Mr. Cheney said. "The New York Times does not. `The Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Ties,' " he said, quoting the headline. "That's what it says. That's the vaunted New York Times. Numerous — I've watched a lot of the coverage on it and the fact of the matter is they don't make a distinction. They fuzz it up. Sometimes it's through ignorance. Sometimes its malicious. But you'll take a statement that's geared specifically to say there's no connection in relations to the 9/11 attack and then say, `Well, obviously there's no case here.' And then jump over to challenge the president's credibility or my credibility."
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not alone in responding yesterday to the commission's findings. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, also charged that the media had distorted the findings of the commission about links between Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Hussein. He sad the report showed the two men were "developing a relationship."
"That relationship could have led to dire consequences for the United States," Mr. Hastert said, adding that the two men "are cut from the same cloth." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18DEBA.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Timely CNN Report: Saddam planning terrorism
Fascinating that this emerges today…
Russian intelligence services warned Washington several times that Saddam Hussein's regime planned terrorist attacks against the United States, President Vladimir Putin has said.
The warnings were provided after September 11, 2001 and before the start of the Iraqi war, Putin said Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.
The planned attacks were targeted both inside and outside the United States, said Putin, who made the remarks during a visit to Kazakhstan.
However, Putin said there was no evidence that Saddam's regime was involved in any terrorist attacks. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/18/russia.warning/
What’s Happening, Iraq: Bombings. Deaths.
Kerry: The Danger: Without progressive positions and without pressure from the Left, he endangers himself and marginalizes progressives. Bob Kuttner warns:
The bipartisan elite has convinced itself that the main challenge for the next generation is reducing the federal deficit. That's what passes for courage in Beltway Washington, as it has for two decades. No wonder voters are tuning out.
Let me amend that. Potentially progressive voters like those Sanders supporters tune out. Wall Street voters are entirely tuned in, to an insider debate between those who would cut taxes and not worry about deficits (Bush) and those who would cut deficits and give up on all but token social investment (the fiscal conservatives advising Kerry). Some debate. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/06/16/americas_hidden_issue_of_poverty/
(yet,) Kerry Waking Up?
Reports coming in from the Trail, of more outspokenness. The Washington Post’s Lois Romano uses words like “populist” and passionate”. Our John?
"I'm running for president to put America back to work...I'm running for president because health care is not a benefit just for the wealthy or the elected or the connected...I'm running for president because I know that we could be a hell of a lot stronger in the world if we were to secure our freedom..."
Both the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson and the New York Times' Robin Toner sat upright for another part of Kerry's sizzling New Jersey speech:
"Our tax code has gone from 14 pages to 17,000 pages. Any of you get your own page? Enron's got its own page. Exxon's got its own page. Looks to me like Halliburton's got its own chapter." "You know who the White House thinks should pay for their deficit? They think it ought to be children in Head Start, women with young babies who need nutritional help, veterans who need health care. . . . And if you think that's compassionate conservatism, then Dick Cheney is Mr. Rogers." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44661-2004Jun15.html
Major Paper Endorsement for Kerry: The Philadelphia Daily News:
KERRY FOR PREZ: WHY HIM, WHY NOW
AND HOW TO PUT HIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE
LAST WEEK, the nation looked to the past with the death of President Ronald Reagan.
This week, the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, suspended out of respect to the deceased 40th president, start fresh.
In that spirit, this newspaper, the first in the nation, endorses John Kerry for president. Unlike the current White House occupant, Kerry can lead America to a brighter, better future. He has shown the personal courage, compassion, intellect and skill to lead this country in a time of war abroad and economic troubles at home. He is a serious man for a serious time.
Why make this endorsement now, when the election is months away?
Because this race promises to be close and Pennsylvania is one of 18 swing states that can go to either candidate. For Kerry supporters to prevail they must do more than just vote, they must bring a ringer into this contest: the more than a million people in the region who did not vote in the last presidential election. We believe these non-voters - who will have to be mobilized over the next few months - are the key to victory.
On the next page, we outline a strategy to make sure Pennsylvania lands in the Kerry win column. We will further make the case for Kerry in future editorials.
For now, let's concentrate on the current president and why he must be defeated.
THE CASE AGAINST BUSH
George W. Bush received - and deserved - praise for his leadership during the dark days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But since then, the Bush administration has been marked by failure - failure to shepherd the country through a tough economic downturn, failure to keep the nation focused on the true enemies to our security.
He has failed in even the one challenge he set out for himself at the beginning of his administration - to bring the country together. His has been one of the most ideologically driven and divisive administrations in recent times.
Instead of moving forward, the country has been on the wrong track. These last four years have been wasted… http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/opinion/8933725.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Post Reagan: From The Pew Survey: Somewhat of a bump for Bush. Higher ratings re Iraq involvement, approval of Bush, etc., and it’s back to even with Kerry. But, it’s only June.
Bush Courts McCain
With Kerry having ‘lost’ McCain as a possible VP, Bush is seeking to bring McCain back into the fold.The Washington Post (Dan Balz, Mike Allen)
After being courted by John F. Kerry to consider joining the Democratic presidential ticket, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will join President Bush on Air Force One on Friday and introduce him at a campaign event in Reno, Nev., campaign officials said yesterday.
Bush and McCain have had a frosty relationship ever since competing for the Republican nomination in 2000, and Bush aides have fumed at McCain's occasional barbs in televised interviews during which he was asked repeatedly about the vice presidency. McCain's trip with Bush grew out of a meeting this spring between White House senior adviser Karl Rove and John Weaver, a top adviser to McCain, who became a Democratic consultant after the bitter campaign between Bush and McCain. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48029-2004Jun16.html
Corporate Tax: “Helping Us Compete”- that’s the mantra for the latest. We gotta end this borrowing ($270 billion on this one) which keeps burdening ordinary tax payers and digs a bigger hole for Kerry… as he will then feel trapped into replaying Clinton’s first term by shelving social activism in favor of deficit trimming.
A number of Democrats helped give Republicans the margin of victory as the House of Representatives passed a $155 billion bill to cut taxes for manufacturers, overhaul international tax rules and let U.S. multinationals bring home overseas income at a 5.25% rate.
But other Democrats criticized the bill's inclusion of a plan to pay tobacco farmers to give up a federal program that shores up crop prices, saying it was merely a political ploy designed to win Southern support for the larger measure that would rewrite the nation's corporate tax code. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108749784874340301,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore et al as Nazis
Celebrity reviewer Tina Brown critiques the Michael Moore movie:
Those squeamish about Michael Moore's methodology, however, should check out the other documentary that opened last night, "The Hunting of the President," produced by Clinton friend Harry Thomason. It tracks the network of Arkansas dirt-diggers who peddled Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Whitewater to the manipulative right-wing fringe. Thomason's movie, with its revelations of how Susan McDougal was pressured to lie to incriminate Hillary Clinton, is substantively more damning than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Moore fans can say his prosecution of Bush only employs the same paranoid technique of reasoning by juxtaposition that the Vince-Foster-was-murdered brigade used to torture the Clintons all those years. That is true, but it doesn't appeal to the Democrats less emotionally overwrought than Leonardo DiCaprio.
Hollywood agent and Kerry supporter Tom Baer told me, "Kerry should flee Moore's movie. It's Goebbels all over again." And former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz put it this way: "I hold my guys to a higher standard," he said quietly. "That's why they're my guys." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48059-2004Jun16.html
Bill O’Reilly: After calling liberal journalist Eric Alterman “another Fidel Castro confidant” and Molly Ivins a “socialist”, he compared Bill Moyers to Mao Zedong, and added, “All right. I mean he’s a Far Left bomb-thrower who actually runs a foundation that funds left-wing organizations. I mean the guy’s a joke. Get out of the news business, Bill.” Then he invoked Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister.
Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi regime and whose very famous quote was, "If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth." All right? "If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth."
And that's what Stuart Smalley [O'Reilly regularly refers to [Al] Franken as Stuart Smalley, a character Franken created on Saturday Night Live], and Michael Moore and all of these guys do. They just run around.
So who turns out for the screening of this movie [Fahrenheit 9/11] last night? You ready? Now, here are the celebrities that turn out. Here are the people who would turn out to see Josef Goebbels convince you that Poland invaded the Third Reich. It's the same thing, by the way. Propaganda is propaganda. OK?
Billy Crystal. Martin Sheen. Leonardo DiCaprio. Ellen DeGeneres. David Duchovny. Sharon Stone. Meg Ryan. Ashton Kutcher. Demi Moore. Norman Lear. Rob Reiner. Jodie Foster. Chris Rock. Larry David. Jack Black. Matthew Perry. Diane Lane.
And from the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel:
I think it's [the effort by some Hollywood celebrities to help defeat President George W. Bush] more organized than ever before and I think they [anti-Bush Hollywood celebrities] have more access to the media than ever before because the celebrity media, as I said, is so profitable and pervasive. So now it becomes a Leni Riefenstahl Third Reich propaganda proposition where what they say and do is put in everybody's face. http://www.ofrankenfactor.com
Interfaith Group Apologizes to Arab viewers.
Their idea: to run a t.v. ad apologizing for Abu Ghraib. It was created by faithful america.org, and is running on Al Jazerra and Al Arabiya.
Venezuela: Chavez Faces Recall:
One rumor: Venezuela is buying voting machines …from Florida!
How many political lives does Venezuela's Hugo Chávez have? The former paratrooper won a landslide presidential election victory in 1998 just a few years
after being released from prison for leading a failed coup against the government in 1992. He was ousted from power himself in 2002 by a loosely knit
opposition of business, military, and labor leaders, but returned triumphantly to his post two days later after mass protests and military supporters forced his rivals
to back down.
Now, Chávez, 49, faces another big test. After months of struggle, his opponents -- who have banded together in a coalition called Democratic Coordinator -- have collected enough signatures to force a recall vote on Aug. 15. On June 3, Venezuela's National Electoral Council declared that more than the required 2.4 million signatures were valid. That marked a breakthrough for the opposition, since Chávez had earlier alleged that many signatures were fraudulent and the CNE required the opposition to get more than 1 million people to sign petitions again. http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/04_25/b3888142_mz058.htm?gb
-R
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Incompetence:
The NY Times ran this one on Sunday; I didn’t have the heart to …
The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.
The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Overstatement? Don’t think so
Krugman: Ashcroft the worst AG ever.
For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html
Tom Powers: Neocons and their boy Bush “caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history” Powers is no radical.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in Washington -- an all-out war between the White House and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/14/coup/index.html
Pfaff on Torture: Impeachment, no?
The highly-regarded journalist for (International Herald Tribune) asks the obvious, but avoided question.
Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.
Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department…
The American operation in Iraq, and apparently in Afghanistan before, has been haphazard, planned and run by people mostly without serious knowledge of these countries and their societies. The administration has gone in for wholesale arrests and interrogations, sweeping people up virtually at random, because it doesn't know what else to do.
This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil. The nearly universal uselessness of torture is well-known in intelligence and special warfare circles. Even if you have a key figure who does possess useful information, and you eventually get him (or her) to tell you what you want, what actual good is it?..
All of this is a ghastly scandal, one of the worst in American history. It is evident cause for impeachment of this president, if Congress has the courage to do it, and for prosecution of cabinet figures and certain commanders. However in view of the partisan alignment in Congress, quite possibly nothing will happen before the November election.
What then? It also is quite possible that George W. Bush will be elected to a second term. In that case, the American electorate will have made these practices its own. Now that is something for our children to think about. http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=524502.html
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Independence? Interim Government vs Contractors
Interim Government Resists U.S. Proposal to Exempt Foreigners From Iraqi Law
Edward Cody of the Washington Post notes a harbinger:
In an early test of its imminent sovereignty, Iraq's new government has been resisting a U.S. demand that thousands of foreign contractors here be granted immunity from Iraqi law, in the same way as U.S. military forces are now immune, according to Iraqi sources. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39159-2004Jun13.html
Saddam: From Al Jazeera:
”Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, currently in US custody, is to be handed over to the interim government within two weeks.” …. I was reminded of a comment a year ago by a member of the then governing Council who said that once they take over on July 1, Saddam will be toast. “He will be dealt with on July 1.” So much for the rule of law in Democratic Iraq.”
Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night.
”Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them." http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CC95D495-E992-42B5-A9B6-CCBCA1A26DEB.htm
Who is Allawi?
Iyad Allawi is now considered the prime minister of the “new” and interim Iraqi government. But consider his history: he was a Ba’thist from 1961 to 1971, and very close to Saddam—so close that he walked with a sidearm firing it in the air when he didn’t get his way. He was the typical Ba’thist brute.
”Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, a California-based gynecologist and US citizen who went to school with Allawi, wrote a column on February 12 in the London-based al-Arab newspaper in which she questioned Allawi’s moral authority as an Iraqi leader. “The Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorising the medical students, was a poor student and chose to spend his time standing in the school courtyard or chasing female students to their homes,” she wrote.
”According to al-Azawi, while in England studying, Allawi “spent his time dealing with assassins, doing the dirty work for the Iraqi government, until his time was up and he became their target.” www.Islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/Iraq_Aftermath/2004/06/article_05.shtml
Running Out of Oil? Let’s Get Into Coal!
Despite the obvious environmental concerns, coal is flourishing. The increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere is amongst the most vile contributions of this Administration.
Colorado, once a backwater of coal production in the shadow of giants like West Virginia and Wyoming, has stumbled into unexpected wealth. China is exporting less coal and keeping more for its own use, thus pinching supply. Appalachian coal, especially the cleaner burning lower-sulfur variety that Colorado's coal competes with, has gotten scarcer and more expensive, and soaring natural gas prices have compelled electricity-generating companies to scramble for alternatives.
This year through June 5, coal output in Colorado rose more than in any other major coal-producing state, up 16 percent from the same period in 2003, according to federal energy figures, pushing Colorado from the eighth-largest producing state to the sixth…
Many environmentalists are dismayed at coal's new luster and have begun a campaign against new power plants, including a coal-fired plant proposed by Xcel Energy for Pueblo, two hours south of Denver.
"Coal should be a part of the past, not the future," said Mark Detsky, an energy lawyer at Environment Colorado, a conservation group in Denver. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/national/16coal.html?pagewanted=2
Fahrenheit 9/11:
Moore’s movie is garnering interest from all but Bill O’Reilly who reportedly left long before it ended. It’s unleashed a campaign from a conservative group, that writes that Moore’s movie is “an advertisement against the war on terrorism, our troops and President Bush.”
So why on earth are ANY movie theaters showing this film? “Fahrenheit 9/11” should be shown as a recruiting video for Al-Qaeda, not in our movie theaters.
Please join us in telling the movie theater companies below your opinion as it relates to their attempt to profit from the showing of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Since we are the customers of the American movie theatres it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema.
We need these executives to be overwhelmed with letters, phone calls and FAXes… in addition to emails. Sending an email alone is not enough – since in some cases an aide can easily click “DELETE.”
We would like to thank those individuals at Lions Gate Entertainment and IFC Films who support our efforts. http://www.moveamericaforward.org/MichaelMoore/
BTW: It ain’t working… But the movie received an “R” rating. Moore, who is seeking the PG-13 so as to broaden the audience.
Kerry as Bush’s ‘twin’?
It’s increasingly recognized that Kerry refuses to separate himself from Bush on Iraq policy. He risks alienating Democrats who didn’t think invading Iraq was a swell idea. The Bush campaign has taken this into consideration and changed their strategy. E.J. Dionne notes Bush’s “Him-Too” strategy.
In the past several weeks, there has been a remarkable shift in President Bush's strategy for reelection. Bush once wanted to highlight his differences with John Kerry over Iraq and national security. Now the president is trying to blur them.
The change reflects the Bush campaign's response to a widespread loss of public confidence in the administration's handling of Iraq. What Bush's lieutenants had once hoped would be a large plus in this year's campaign is turning into a negative that Bush is trying to minimize. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=849a96c50378f09325b20b1e59f3470a&lat=1087307868&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW5RH05B34581CEBA439543FF8041C0
Cheney: Still the Al-Qaeda-Saddam connection
Cheney is still pushing this, and on Tuesday Bush agreed.
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had ‘long-established ties’ with al Qaeda, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.”
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, countered that the Bush administration had "a sorry record in the war on terror." Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke Sunday in a conference call arranged by John Kerry's presidential campaign in anticipation of Cheney's speech.
The State Department said last week it was wrong in stating that terrorism declined worldwide last year in a report that the Bush administration initially cited as evidence it was succeeding against terrorism, Graham noted. Both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department acknowledged. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/06/14/cheney.terrorism.ap/index.html
U.S. as doing Israel’s bidding:
Many will be discomforted by this Time magaine summary of James Bamford’s highly regarded new book, A Pretext for War.
Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366-2,00.html
Nukes: Taking Care of the Next Generation
Well, North Korea is supposed to be a threat…
Senate renewed its support Tuesday for research into a new generation of nuclear weapons, overcoming opposition from Democrats who said they feared that the Bush administration had already decided to develop such arms. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/politics/16nukes.html
Reagan Lives! French Fries are “Fresh vegetables”!
South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel reports on Fries joining ketchup as a balanced meal.
Anyone trying to add more fruits and vegetables to their diet may have just gotten an unlikely assist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Based on a little-noticed change to obscure federal rules, the USDA defines frozen french fries as "fresh vegetables."
As bizarre as it may sound, a federal judge in Texas last week endorsed the USDA's rules in a court case, saying the term "fresh vegetables" was ambiguous.
The USDA quietly changed the regulations last year at the behest of the french fry industry, which has spent the past five decades pushing for a revision to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA). The law was passed by Congress in 1930 to protect fruit and vegetable farmers in the event that their customers went out of business without paying for their produce. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-afries15jun15,0,202707.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
-R
The NY Times ran this one on Sunday; I didn’t have the heart to …
The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.
The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Overstatement? Don’t think so
Krugman: Ashcroft the worst AG ever.
For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html
Tom Powers: Neocons and their boy Bush “caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history” Powers is no radical.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in Washington -- an all-out war between the White House and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/14/coup/index.html
Pfaff on Torture: Impeachment, no?
The highly-regarded journalist for (International Herald Tribune) asks the obvious, but avoided question.
Documents recently obtained by the press reveal White House anxiety about how to protect President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet from going to prison for ordering, authorizing or deliberately permitting systematic torture of persons in their control, but technically outside formal American legal jurisdiction. The question put to lawyers was how the president and the others could commit war crimes and get away with it.
Thus, according to these reports, the president last year obtained from his lawyers an opinion that he is not bound by U.S. laws or by international engagements prohibiting torture and that Americans committing torture under his authority cannot be prosecuted by the Justice Department…
The American operation in Iraq, and apparently in Afghanistan before, has been haphazard, planned and run by people mostly without serious knowledge of these countries and their societies. The administration has gone in for wholesale arrests and interrogations, sweeping people up virtually at random, because it doesn't know what else to do.
This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil. The nearly universal uselessness of torture is well-known in intelligence and special warfare circles. Even if you have a key figure who does possess useful information, and you eventually get him (or her) to tell you what you want, what actual good is it?..
All of this is a ghastly scandal, one of the worst in American history. It is evident cause for impeachment of this president, if Congress has the courage to do it, and for prosecution of cabinet figures and certain commanders. However in view of the partisan alignment in Congress, quite possibly nothing will happen before the November election.
What then? It also is quite possible that George W. Bush will be elected to a second term. In that case, the American electorate will have made these practices its own. Now that is something for our children to think about. http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=524502.html
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Independence? Interim Government vs Contractors
Interim Government Resists U.S. Proposal to Exempt Foreigners From Iraqi Law
Edward Cody of the Washington Post notes a harbinger:
In an early test of its imminent sovereignty, Iraq's new government has been resisting a U.S. demand that thousands of foreign contractors here be granted immunity from Iraqi law, in the same way as U.S. military forces are now immune, according to Iraqi sources. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39159-2004Jun13.html
Saddam: From Al Jazeera:
”Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, currently in US custody, is to be handed over to the interim government within two weeks.” …. I was reminded of a comment a year ago by a member of the then governing Council who said that once they take over on July 1, Saddam will be toast. “He will be dealt with on July 1.” So much for the rule of law in Democratic Iraq.”
Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night.
”Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them." http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CC95D495-E992-42B5-A9B6-CCBCA1A26DEB.htm
Who is Allawi?
Iyad Allawi is now considered the prime minister of the “new” and interim Iraqi government. But consider his history: he was a Ba’thist from 1961 to 1971, and very close to Saddam—so close that he walked with a sidearm firing it in the air when he didn’t get his way. He was the typical Ba’thist brute.
”Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, a California-based gynecologist and US citizen who went to school with Allawi, wrote a column on February 12 in the London-based al-Arab newspaper in which she questioned Allawi’s moral authority as an Iraqi leader. “The Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorising the medical students, was a poor student and chose to spend his time standing in the school courtyard or chasing female students to their homes,” she wrote.
”According to al-Azawi, while in England studying, Allawi “spent his time dealing with assassins, doing the dirty work for the Iraqi government, until his time was up and he became their target.” www.Islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/Iraq_Aftermath/2004/06/article_05.shtml
Running Out of Oil? Let’s Get Into Coal!
Despite the obvious environmental concerns, coal is flourishing. The increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere is amongst the most vile contributions of this Administration.
Colorado, once a backwater of coal production in the shadow of giants like West Virginia and Wyoming, has stumbled into unexpected wealth. China is exporting less coal and keeping more for its own use, thus pinching supply. Appalachian coal, especially the cleaner burning lower-sulfur variety that Colorado's coal competes with, has gotten scarcer and more expensive, and soaring natural gas prices have compelled electricity-generating companies to scramble for alternatives.
This year through June 5, coal output in Colorado rose more than in any other major coal-producing state, up 16 percent from the same period in 2003, according to federal energy figures, pushing Colorado from the eighth-largest producing state to the sixth…
Many environmentalists are dismayed at coal's new luster and have begun a campaign against new power plants, including a coal-fired plant proposed by Xcel Energy for Pueblo, two hours south of Denver.
"Coal should be a part of the past, not the future," said Mark Detsky, an energy lawyer at Environment Colorado, a conservation group in Denver. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/national/16coal.html?pagewanted=2
Fahrenheit 9/11:
Moore’s movie is garnering interest from all but Bill O’Reilly who reportedly left long before it ended. It’s unleashed a campaign from a conservative group, that writes that Moore’s movie is “an advertisement against the war on terrorism, our troops and President Bush.”
So why on earth are ANY movie theaters showing this film? “Fahrenheit 9/11” should be shown as a recruiting video for Al-Qaeda, not in our movie theaters.
Please join us in telling the movie theater companies below your opinion as it relates to their attempt to profit from the showing of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Since we are the customers of the American movie theatres it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema.
We need these executives to be overwhelmed with letters, phone calls and FAXes… in addition to emails. Sending an email alone is not enough – since in some cases an aide can easily click “DELETE.”
We would like to thank those individuals at Lions Gate Entertainment and IFC Films who support our efforts. http://www.moveamericaforward.org/MichaelMoore/
BTW: It ain’t working… But the movie received an “R” rating. Moore, who is seeking the PG-13 so as to broaden the audience.
Kerry as Bush’s ‘twin’?
It’s increasingly recognized that Kerry refuses to separate himself from Bush on Iraq policy. He risks alienating Democrats who didn’t think invading Iraq was a swell idea. The Bush campaign has taken this into consideration and changed their strategy. E.J. Dionne notes Bush’s “Him-Too” strategy.
In the past several weeks, there has been a remarkable shift in President Bush's strategy for reelection. Bush once wanted to highlight his differences with John Kerry over Iraq and national security. Now the president is trying to blur them.
The change reflects the Bush campaign's response to a widespread loss of public confidence in the administration's handling of Iraq. What Bush's lieutenants had once hoped would be a large plus in this year's campaign is turning into a negative that Bush is trying to minimize. http://65.54.186.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=849a96c50378f09325b20b1e59f3470a&lat=1087307868&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW5RH05B34581CEBA439543FF8041C0
Cheney: Still the Al-Qaeda-Saddam connection
Cheney is still pushing this, and on Tuesday Bush agreed.
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had ‘long-established ties’ with al Qaeda, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.”
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, countered that the Bush administration had "a sorry record in the war on terror." Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke Sunday in a conference call arranged by John Kerry's presidential campaign in anticipation of Cheney's speech.
The State Department said last week it was wrong in stating that terrorism declined worldwide last year in a report that the Bush administration initially cited as evidence it was succeeding against terrorism, Graham noted. Both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department acknowledged. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/06/14/cheney.terrorism.ap/index.html
U.S. as doing Israel’s bidding:
Many will be discomforted by this Time magaine summary of James Bamford’s highly regarded new book, A Pretext for War.
Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366-2,00.html
Nukes: Taking Care of the Next Generation
Well, North Korea is supposed to be a threat…
Senate renewed its support Tuesday for research into a new generation of nuclear weapons, overcoming opposition from Democrats who said they feared that the Bush administration had already decided to develop such arms. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/politics/16nukes.html
Reagan Lives! French Fries are “Fresh vegetables”!
South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel reports on Fries joining ketchup as a balanced meal.
Anyone trying to add more fruits and vegetables to their diet may have just gotten an unlikely assist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Based on a little-noticed change to obscure federal rules, the USDA defines frozen french fries as "fresh vegetables."
As bizarre as it may sound, a federal judge in Texas last week endorsed the USDA's rules in a court case, saying the term "fresh vegetables" was ambiguous.
The USDA quietly changed the regulations last year at the behest of the french fry industry, which has spent the past five decades pushing for a revision to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA). The law was passed by Congress in 1930 to protect fruit and vegetable farmers in the event that their customers went out of business without paying for their produce. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-afries15jun15,0,202707.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
-R
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
