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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
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"If there were such a thing as Intelligent Design, we wouldn't have George W. Bush."
Christy Marx
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Satire has never served a better purpose. Go see.
Before they cart us off to the camps.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
34th President of the USA
a Republican, in a letter written to his brother
on November 8, 1954
"...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...."
Benito Mussolini
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln
November 12, 1864
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man."
Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
"CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
James Madison
(1751-1836)
4th President of the United States
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
Heinrich Heine
Almansor, 1823
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind
and won't change the subject."
Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)
Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian
The Democratic Underground
Lileks.com
White House
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to
come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want
war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That
is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall
"Authoritarian societies inevitably crumble because they silence the
critics who could save them from errors of blind hubris. Dissent is not a luxury to be indulged in the best of times, but rather an obligation of free people, particularly when the very notion of dissent is unpopular."
Robert Scheer
"FASCISM: a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism."
American Heritage Dictionary
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Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is
neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it
because it is right.
Dr. Martin Luther King
"My life is my message."
Gandhi
 Posted: 30 Oct. 2005
Too Many Liberals?
Olbermann says MSNBC bosses upset by liberal guests
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2707
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann recently revealed that network bosses were upset when he had two liberal guests too close together on his show in September 2003.
Speaking on October 25 to comedian and talk show host Al Franken, Olbermann said the following:
"You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president‘s office here and told, 'Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?'"
Olbermann added, "Al, can you believe that the country was actually at that point that recently?" Later he would answer his own question, saying, "Thank goodness we have steered out of that time."
Franken was interviewed on September 2, and Garofalo on September 4. Apparently having them both on over three days--a period of time in which Olbermann's show interviewed a total of 9 guests--was grounds for being called on the carpet at MSNBC.
This incident is consistent with the phobia MSNBC executives have displayed about hosts featuring too many left-of-center views. Phil Donahue's talkshow was cancelled in February 2003--despite being the channel's highest-rated show at the time--explicitly for his left-of-center political views. An internal management memo worried that his program could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda" (All Your TV, 2/25/03).
As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen--who went on to be a senior producer on MSNBC's Donahue show--explained to the American Journalism Review (12/04-1/05): "In the last months of Donahue, we were ordered to book more right-wing guests than left-wing, more pro-war than antiwar to balance the liberalism of host Phil Donahue." Cohen added that orders that Donahue's guestlist favor conservatives were stated repeatedly to the show's staff.
Cohen also noted that such dictates for counterbalance did not see m to apply to every MSNBC show: "Joe Scarborough is a current MSNBC right-wing host, and there are no orders from management demanding that his guest list favor the left wing."
But has MSNBC truly "steered out of that time," as Olbermann suggests? If MSNBC management were genuinely worried about ideological balance, then the fact that the channel currently has two one-hour programs hosted by well-known conservatives (Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough) and none hosted by liberals would be of considerable concern. Or MSNBC could fret over Hardball's right-leaning panel discussion after a 2004 election debate (FAIR Action Alert, 10/12/04), or the Hardball "town meeting" on the Iraq war that skewed heavily towards the pro-war side (FAIR Action Alert, 6/29/05). The group Media Matters for America (10/21/05) recently documented that Hardball's discussions of the Plame Wilson leak case frequently skewed to the right, citing nine examples of panels that included only conservatives, or conservatives "balanced" by centrists; the group found only one case where a panel similarly leaned to the left.
Having too many conservatives on, it seems, doesn't bother anyone in power at MSNBC.
(Read the Olbermann transcript at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9827774/)
Congressional committees approve a pile o' drilling and mining
Congress worked hard on Wednesday to ensure America a clean, secure energy future. Ah, we kid! Actually, the House Resources Committee approved a measure that would weaken the federal ban on new offshore gas and oil drilling. And both House and Senate resource committees approved provisions that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. And the House Resources Committee approved language proposed by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) (does this guy ever sleep?) intended to spur a sell-off of public lands to mining companies, even if those lands haven't been shown to contain valuable mineral deposits. The provision would enact a reform to the General Mining Law of 1872, long sought by conservationists, to charge $1,000 per acre or fair market value for federal lands intended to be used for mining -- instead of maintaining 19th century rates of $2.50 to $5 an acre. But that worthwhile reform is offset by an accompanying call to sell off millions of acres of Forest Service and Interior lands, according to activists. All three provisions are being packaged into a massive budget-cutting bill.
Republicans ask oil firms to "do their part" to ease pain at the pump
Oil companies and their GOP backers in Washington face a somewhat awkward situation: The oil industry is awash in record profits, but Republicans continue to shovel them millions in subsidies. Meanwhile, Americans stagger under the weight of soaring gas prices. This has created some unfavorable "optics," as the PR professionals put it. A few congressional Democrats are calling for a windfall-profits tax on oil companies to provide consumer relief, but c'mon, let's not get crazy. Instead, House Republicans opted for ... a stern press conference, calling on Big Oil to invest in new pipelines and refineries. "We expect oil companies to do their part to ease the pain," House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said. He later added, "Oil companies are enjoying record profits. That's fine. This is America." And also, "We don't want to tax more." No doubt oil companies are quaking in their boots. Those same companies, meanwhile, are ramping up ad campaigns designed to burnish their images. "Yes, our numbers are large," said the president of the American Petroleum Institute, but "we are half the size of the returns of the financials and pharmaceuticals." Poor, poor behemoths ...
Biofuels from odd sources gain new fans
Just about anything organic, from turkey entrails to cow dung, can be used to make biofuel, and with oil over $60 a barrel, just about everything is. Changing World Technologies' refinery uses the feathers, bones, fat, and other bits from a nearby turkey-processing plant to make up to 500 barrels daily of bird diesel, which it sells to a nearby industrial facility. CEO Brian Appel says turkey oil is competitive with petroleum, thanks to recent U.S. tax incentives for renewables. U.K.-based Green Fuels makes machines that turn used restaurant fryer oil into biodiesel, and business is booming. A Danish company plans to convert thrown-out coconut meat into fuel for farm tractors. Folks in India are mixing dung and water in backyard "digester" boxes to produce biogas for cooking. Oil may be growing scarcer, says one consultant at New Delhi's Ministry of Nonconventional Energy Sources, but "dung is always available." True dat.
ENERGY -- RECORD PRICES FOR AMERICANS, RECORD PROFITS FOR OIL FIRMS: Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, "rewrote the corporate record books Thursday as the oil company's third-quarter earnings soared to almost $10 billion." Anglo-Dutch competitor Royal Dutch Shell "wasn't far behind, posting a profit of $9 billion for the quarter." Exxon's return translates into $1,248 profit per second. Most companies would cast these profits in a good light. But mindful of mounting anger over gas prices and calls in Congress "to impose a 'windfall' tax on oil company profits," the firms yesterday "made a game effort to cast the record profit...as middling at best." Even Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) spoke out on the issue, calling for hearings. "If there are those who abuse the free-enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed." For more information on record oil and gas company profits, click here.
HEALTH CARE -- PhRMA COMES UP WITH A NEW SCARE TACTIC: For years, PhRMA has lobbied Congress to deny Americans access to discounted prescription drugs from Canada "by warning that terrorists might poison the imports." These efforts weren't enough for PhRMA, which came up with a new idea to scare Americans away from Canada: a fictional thriller novel about "a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they're importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices." A PhRMA marketing executive then became "intimately involved" in monitoring the book's progress, much to the frustration of the publishing company. "She demanded that the terrorists be militant Muslims but that their motivation be greed, not politics. She insisted on lots of 'frilly female stuff...Harlequin Romance stuff,'" said Kenin Spivak, who helped write the book. But in July, PhRMA suddenly informed the writers that the company "didn't like the book and was pulling out. [Spivak said] the group offered them $100,000 if they would agree never to speak ill of PhRMA or the drug industry for the rest of their lives. They refused." Check your bookstores for "The Karasik Conspiracy," which will be out in December.
VOTING RIGHTS -- COURT UPHOLDS INJUNCTION BARRING GEORGIA'S PROPOSED 'POLL TAX': "In a case that some have called a showdown over voting rights, a U.S. appeals court yesterday upheld an injunction barring the state of Georgia from enforcing a law requiring citizens to get government-issued photo identification in order to vote," the Washington Post reports. The Georgia law would require voters to present a drivers license at the polls, or pay $20 for a five-year ID. "[I]n suspending the law last week, [U.S. District Judge Harold] Murphy said the measure would prevent many of Georgia's elderly, poor and African-Americans from going to the polls. The judge also found that the ID requirement would not effectively combat voter fraud." In 2004, about 150,000 Georgians voted without government ID, and fewer than 60 of the state's 159 counties have DMV offices. The state of Georgia plans to challenge the decision.
ETHICS -- BUSH CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISER INDICTED: The culture of corruption continues to grow. A federal grand jury has charged Thomas Noe with illegally funneling money to President Bush's re-election campaign efforts in Ohio. Noe pledged to raise $50,000 for an Oct. 30, 2003, Bush-Cheney fundraiser with a $2,000 cap on individual contributions. The indictment alleged that "Noe disguised $45,400 in personal contributions by recruiting and providing money to 24 friends and associates who made the contributions in their names so he could avoid the individual campaign contribution limit." "It's one of the most blatant and excessive finance schemes we have encountered," said Noel Hillman, section chief of the Department of Justice's public integrity section. Noe, a former coin dealer, is also being investigated for a $50 million investment in rare coins he managed for the state workers' compensation fund. "Noe has acknowledged that up to $13 million is missing, and Ohio’s attorney general has accused him of stealing as much as $6 million."
What To Expect Next
Elizabeth de la Vega
Elizabeth de la Vega has recently retired after serving more than 20 years as a federal prosecutor in Minneapolis and San Jose. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. This article appeared originally on TomDispatch.com and appears here by permission.
EXCERPTS: The grand jury supervised by U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has returned an indictment charging Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide and reputed "alter ego" I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with perjury, obstruction of justice and false statements to the grand jury. But this indictment does not end the story; rather, a close reading suggests that these charges are most likely merely a chapter in a long and tragic story. Here, from a former federal prosecutor, are thoughts about four things we should expect, four things we shouldn't, and one question we should all be asking.
We should not expect the president to take steps to "get to the bottom of this." He professed that desire in October 2003, but belied it in the next breath, saying he "had no idea who the leaker was and didn't know if we'd ever find out. "There's a lot of senior officials [out there]," he commented. "You tell me," he asked a group of reporters, "how many sources have you had that's leaked information, that you've exposed, or had been exposed? Probably none." Of course, assuming Bush didn't already know who the leakers were, all he had to do was make darned sure his aides told him.
We should expect more attacks on Joseph Wilson, even though they represent a very large red herring (more the size of a mackerel). These will be meant only for the court of public opinion. Since the White House has already admitted, repeatedly, that it had insufficient evidence to mention that Saddam Hussein was seeking Niger "yellowcake" uranium in thepPresident's State of the Union address in 2003, claims that Wilson went to Niger on a boondoggle or that he is merely a partisan critic (both of which appear to be untrue) have never been the least bit relevant. If you don't dispute the essence of the testimony of a witness, then undermining his credibility is pointless in a court of law.
READ THE REST.
Posted: 20 Oct. 2005
It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
EXCERPTS: There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.
As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.
Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."
Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.
READ THE REST.
‘Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy’
By Edward Alden in Washington
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
READ THE REST.
Raiders of the Lost Arctic
Drills closing in on the Arctic Refuge
We know, you've heard it before: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is in serious danger of being invaded by oil drills. But this time drilling opponents are more justified than ever in their alarm. The Senate Energy Committee yesterday voted to include a refuge-drilling provision in a massive budget reconciliation package that cannot be filibustered. Republicans pulled the same thing in 1995, but this time there's no Clinton to veto it. Muckraker takes a close look at the legislative maneuvering.
ESA foe Pombo took two trips paid for by anti-animal-welfare foundation
The ever-widening net of Republican-corruption busting may have snared a green bête noire: Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). It seems Pombo took two trips, to New Zealand in 2000 and Japan in 2002, underwritten by a nonprofit foundation notable for opposition to environmental and animal-welfare protections. Problem is, tax laws prohibit private, nonprofit foundations from financing international travel by government officials. According to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, Pombo, his wife, and a staffer have taken $23,000 worth of international travel paid for by the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources, whose backers include the Japan Whaling Association and the International Fur Traders Association. "This is an organization that has made a cottage industry out of opposing any animal-welfare reform," says the Humane Society's Michael Markarian. Pombo claimed he didn't know the group was a private foundation and said he'll reimburse the travel expenses if they prove to violate the tax code.
Latest national-parks policy draft drops worst of proposed revisions
The Bush administration has released its proposed revision of National Park Service management policies for 90 days of public comment. An earlier draft, written by Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Paul Hoffman and leaked to the press in August, would have required park managers to prove an activity would "irreversibly" damage park resources in order to ban it. This language is notably absent from the latest version. Some other dubious revisions have also been excised, like allowing more cell-phone towers and snowmobiling in the parks. Hoffman decries "anti-enjoyment" policies that over-prioritize conservation, but Stephen Martin, a deputy park service director, says "passing the resources on in as good, or better, condition to future generations is a key premise of the draft." Parks advocates are largely reserving comment until they've had a chance to read the 277-page document closely. This seems to be an improvement on the earlier version, says a former NPS superintendent, but "a Woodsy Owl comic book would have been better."
Teensy fuel cells offer greener power sources for small gadgets
Yes, yes, your new iPod nano is very cool. But wouldn't it be just that much cooler if you could recharge it with a small bottle of clear liquid? It might happen: Toshiba and other Japanese electronics firms are developing itty-bitty fuel cells to juice up portable gadgets. Unlike batteries, fuel cells contain few hazardous chemicals and metals and generate rather than just store electricity. Toshiba says its fuel cells for cell phones will run about twice as long as the average lithium-ion battery and recharge on the run with methanol. Developers say perfecting such small-scale applications is a step toward figuring out how to economically use fuel cells for bigger applications like cars and homes. "We're starting with as small an application as we can and keeping costs low," says Toshiba tech chief Fumio Ueno, whose lab has developed the world's smallest fuel cell to date. "We think it's better to start that way and grow into larger applications."
Leak Scandal Goes To The Top
What did the President know and when did he know it? Yesterday, the New York Daily News reported that, according to a "presidential counselor," an "angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair." According to the article, the run-in occurred "shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched." If the report is true, it raises serious questions about the integrity of President Bush's statements about the investigation. (At yesterday's press conference, White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to dispute the specifics of the article.) The report also suggests that testimony provided to the special prosecutor by Bush and Rove may have been inaccurate.
DID BUSH KNOW WHEN HE SAID HE DIDN'T KNOW? Josh Marshall notes that on October 7, 2003 -- around the same time as Bush's alleged rebuke of Rove -- Bush said, "I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official." Bush added, "[T]his is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth." The New York Daily News article suggests that Bush already knew the truth: one of the leakers was Karl Rove.
DID BUSH TELL PROSECUTORS ROVE DENIED ANY INVOLVEMENT? National Journal investigative reporter Murray Waas reported on 10/7/05, "In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush also testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson." Apparently, Rove has been telling a similar story. The AP reported that "Rove told President Bush and others that he never engaged in an effort to disclose a CIA operative's identity to discredit her husband's criticism of the administration's Iraq policy, according to people with knowledge of Rove's account in the probe." These accounts, if true, are completely inconsistent with the facts reported in yesterday's New York Daily News. Although Bush was not under oath, making false statements to a federal agent is still against the law.
EVIDENCE OF A CONSPIRACY: Today, the AP reports that "Rove and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby discussed their contacts with reporters about an undercover CIA officer in the days before her identity was published." The conversations are "the first known intersection between two central figures in the criminal leak investigation." According to people familiar with Rove's testimony, "Rove told grand jurors it was possible he first heard in the White House that Valerie Plame, wife of Bush administration Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA from Libby's recounting of a conversation with a journalist." (Rove has also testified that "he probably first heard of Wilson's wife in a casual social setting outside the White House in the spring of 2003 but could not remember who provided the information.") The coordination between Rove and Libby lends credence to the report that "Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge."
THE POOR ARE GETTING POORER: Instead of reducing "poverty with bold action" as he promised, Bush has heightened poverty with his bold actions. The $50 billion budget cuts proposed by conservatives in the House are aimed at cutting programs for students, families, and the poor. Only under intense pressure did the House leadership drop their plan to cut $500 million in food stamp aid for the poor. But President Bush's new bankruptcy law has meant that it is more "difficult to file bankruptcy to gain protection from creditors, coming at a time when bankruptcy may be the only option for some Americans devastated by Hurricane Katrina." At least the rich are getting richer. $70 billion is planned to go back into the pockets of the wealthy as tax cuts.
ADMINISTRATION -- TOP POWELL AIDE SAYS CHENEY 'CABAL' HIJACKED U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, until January the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said yesterday that "Vice President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world," the Financial Times reports. (Watch the speech here, or read the transcript.) In a "scathing attack on the record" of President Bush, Wilkerson claimed there is a "cabal" between the vice president and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." He charged that the "detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was 'a concrete example' of the decision-making problem," as well as "the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran," and that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was "part of the problem." The Cheney/Rumsfeld group is now "paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret," Wilkerson said, "but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."
Posted: 17 Oct. 2005
Judgment Call
Did Christian conservatives receive assurances that Miers would oppose Roe v. Wade?
Monday, October 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Two days after President Bush announced Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, James Dobson of Focus on the Family raised some eyebrows by declaring on his radio program: "When you know some of the things that I know--that I probably shouldn't know--you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice."
Mr. Dobson quelled the controversy by saying that Karl Rove, the White House's deputy chief of staff, had not given him assurances about how a Justice Miers would vote. "I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade," Mr. Dobson said last week. "But even if Karl had known the answer to that--and I'm certain that he didn't because the president himself said he didn't know--Karl would not have told me that. That's the most incendiary information that's out there, and it was never part of our discussion."
It might, however, have been part of another discussion. On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends--both sitting judges--said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.
READ THE REST.
The Faith-Based President Defrocked
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
EXCERPTS: To understand why the right is rebelling against Harriet Miers, don't waste time boning up on her glory days with the Texas Lottery Commission. The real story in this dust-up is not the Supreme Court candidate, but the man who picked her. The Miers nomination, whatever its fate, will be remembered as the flashpoint when the faith-based Bush base finally started to lose faith in our propaganda president and join the apostate American majority.
"Of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?" Mr. Bush was asked. "Yes," he answered. Has he ever discussed abortion with her? "Not to my recollection." How much political capital does he have left? "Plenty." With a straight face he promised that Ms. Miers was "not going to change" and that "20 years from now she'll be the same person with the same philosophy that she is today." Even were that a praiseworthy attribute, it would still contradict the history of a woman who abandoned her Roman Catholic faith for evangelical Christianity and the Democratic Party for the Republicans.
But Mr. Bush's dissembling wasn't limited to his Supreme Court nominee. Asked how he was going to pay for Katrina recovery, the president twice said he'd proposed $187 billion in budget cuts over 10 years - but failed to factor in his tax proposals and other budget increases. The real net total for proposed Bush cuts is $103 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and even less according to some independent number crunchers. Turning to Iraq, Mr. Bush once again fudged our "progress" there with a numerical bait-and-switch, bragging about "30 Iraqi battalions in the lead." (Translation: in the lead with American military support.) Less than a week earlier his own commanders had told Congress that the number of Iraqi battalions capable of fighting unaided had dropped from 3 to 1 since June. (Translation: 750 soldiers are now ready to stand up on their own should America's 140,000 troops stand down.) For good measure, Mr. Bush then flouted credibility one more time to set the stage for the next administration fiasco. In the event of a bird flu epidemic, he said, one option for effecting a quarantine would be to use the military. What military? Last week The Army Times reported that the Pentagon, its resources already overstretched by Iraq, would try to bolster sagging recruitment by tapping "a demographic long deemed off limits: high school dropouts who don't have a General Educational Development credential."
READ THE REST.
ENTITLEMENTS -- RIGHT WING WANTS TO CUT POVERTY PROGRAMS: "House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power," the Washington Post reports. "Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs." These cuts come after former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said on Sept. 13, "My answer to those that want to offset the spending is, 'Sure, bring me the offsets. ...I will be glad to do it, but no one has been able to come up with any yet."
BANKRUPTCY -- CHANGE IN LAWS COMES AT A DIFFICULT TIME: People were lining up late last week to file for bankruptcy before stricter laws take effect today. "The path into bankruptcy is now rougher, the path out is steeper, and the change could hardly come at a more difficult time for many US consumers," the Christian Science Monitor reports. If housing value increases begin to slow, "[Y]ou've got a very combustible situation," said Brad Stroh of the Freedom Financial Network. "The unfortunate consequence [of the new bankruptcy laws] is that some people living month to month are suddenly in serious trouble."
IRAQ -- HALLIBURTON EXPLOITING ASIA'S POOR FOR WORK IN IRAQ: Tens of thousands of foreign workers, often from impoverished Asian nations, make up the civilian service in Iraq. But, many of these workers, hired by contractor KBR (subsidiary of Halliburton), are lured to Iraq with false promises of a safe job in Kuwait or Jordan, work for as little as $1.56 an hour (well below the pay of an American employee), and are treated like second-class citizens. The U.S. military and KBR assume no responsibility for the recruitment of these foreign workers, leaving the job to subcontractors who often "employ practices condemned by the U.S. elsewhere, including fraud, coercion and seizure of workers' passports." While in Iraq, foreign workers are fired for labor strikes and during meal time, according to a KBR employee, they "had to stand in line with plates and were served something like... curry and fish heads from big old pots....It looked like a concentration camp." (American contractors, on the other hand, ate in an "air-conditioned [dining facility] featuring a short-order grill, salad, pizza, sandwich and ice cream bars.")
JUSTICE -- FACT-CHECKING FREEH'S "AUTO-WHITEWASH": American Progress CEO and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday fact-checking Louis Freeh's autobiography, My FBI. Podesta writes Freeh's claim that no one in the White House told him that radical Islamist terrorism was a major threat "is totally disingenuous." In fact, "there were countless memos circulating in the bureaucracy and numerous meetings that Freeh refused to attend." Freeh's FBI "provided intelligence to no one and took direction from no one." On Freeh's publicity-seeking claim that President Clinton failed to push Saudi Arabia for cooperation after the Khobar bombings and instead asked Crown Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his library, Podesta writes that, while Freeh was not in the room, those who were "all concur that Clinton pushed Abdullah hard for cooperation, telling him that the future of the American-Saudi relationship depended on the kingdom's cooperation."
EDUCATION -- EDUCATION DEPARTMENT FACING FURTHER SCRUTINY OVER ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS CONTRACT: In September, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Education Department engaged in "illegal 'covert propaganda' by hiring [radio broadcaster Armstrong] Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind Act without requiring him to disclose that he was being paid." Now, the Education Department's Inspector General has asked the U.S. attorney's office in Washington to investigate "whether Williams accepted public money without performing his required duties." Sen. Frank Lautenberg, (D-NJ), has pressed for fraud charges against Williams. "It's bad enough the administration bribed a journalist to promote their policies, but now it looks like taxpayer dollars were handed over for work that was never done," said Lautenberg.
Posted: 14 Oct. 2005
The Fallen Legion
Nick Turse
In late August 2005, after 20 years of service in the field of military procurement, Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted. For years, Greenhouse received stellar evaluations from superiors—until she raised objections about secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR)—a subsidiary of Halliburton, the mega-corporation Vice President Dick Cheney once presided over. After telling Congress that one Halliburton deal was "was the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career," she was reassigned from "the elite Senior Executive Service... to a lesser job in the civil works division of the corps."
When Greenhouse was busted down, she became just another of the casualties of the Bush administration—not the countless (or rather uncounted) Iraqis, or the ever-growing list of American troops, killed, maimed or mutilated in the administration's war of convenience—but the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. Often, this has been due to revulsion at the president's policies—from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with North Korea to the flattening of FEMA and the slashing of environmental standards—which these women and men found to be beyond the pale.
Since almost the day he assumed power, George W. Bush has left a trail of broken careers in his wake. Below is a listing of but a handful of the most familiar names on the rolls of the fallen:
READ THE REST.
Poll says most Americans back ultra-strength environmental protections
Nearly half of all U.S. adults think the government's doing too little to protect the environment. Almost three-quarters say that eco-protections are important, and that standards cannot be too high. No, you're not dreaming -- it's a fresh new Harris Interactive poll on attitudes of Americans toward environmental protection. The survey of a nationwide cross section of 1,217 adults indicated that 71 percent think large corporations are doing less than their share to help reduce environmental problems. Fifty-three percent say President Bush isn't stepping up to the plate, 57 percent think Congress needs a kick in the butt, and 44 percent say the media isn't doing enough. Water and air pollution rank as the highest-priority problems, followed closely by global warming, ozone depletion, loss of forestlands, and the need for more recycling. Despite these opinions -- which are, in the context of today's political scene, extremely green -- only 12 percent self-identify as environmentalists. Go figure.
EPA issues draft rules that would gut air-pollution standard
The U.S. EPA has issued draft regulations that would allow the nation's dirtiest power plants to emit more air pollution. The proposed regs -- anticipated and dreaded by clean-air advocates -- would supersede new-source review (NSR), the Clean Air Act regulation requiring plants to upgrade their anti-pollution technology when expanding or modernizing their operations. The new rules would give plants a pass on upgrades if their hourly emissions rate doesn't increase, even if the plant goes on to operate for longer hours. Utilities would still need to reduce air pollution, eventually, but at a significantly slower rate than NSR requires -- one that could lead to 70,000 additional premature deaths by 2025, according to U.S. PIRG. Plus, at least a dozen current federal lawsuits against polluting utilities under NSR might be undercut. "Whatever shell of new-source review remained, it's now being completely eviscerated," said John Stanton, an attorney with Clear the Air.
straight to the source: The Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin, 14 Oct 2005
MILITARY -- PENTAGON AWARDS CROOKED CONTRACTOR $28 MILLION: In April 2005, Interstate Electronics Corp. was placed under federal criminal investigation after the contractor supplied defective emergency radio parts to the U.S. military, which makes up 75 percent of company's business. The Pentagon also suspected Interstate of supplying "thousands of other, potentially substandard parts over the years to a wide range of Army and Air Force weapons systems." Evidently, these wrongdoings weren't a problem for the U.S. military, which just awarded the contractor a $27.9 million contract "to support the test instrumentation hardware for most of America's nuclear missile fleet, and all of Britain's."
ETHICS -- MAJORITY LEADER FRIST SUBPOENAED BY THE SEC: On September 22, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) announced that he had been contacted by both the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's office about the divestiture of his family's shares of HCA, Inc. stock. In the past two weeks, the SEC has subpoenaed Frist to "turn over personal records and documents as federal authorities step up a probe of his July sales" of the stock. As the Washington Post notes, a formal request for documents usually signals an "acceleration of a federal probe." Frist will be testifying under oath in the coming weeks about whether he had illegal insider information on the company, whose value dropped sharply shortly soon after Frist and company insiders sold millions of dollars of the stock.
GOVERNMENT -- WHITE HOUSE ARGUES AGAINST WHISTLE-BLOWER RIGHTS: Bush administration lawyers "pressed the Supreme Court yesterday for a ruling that would make it harder for government whistle-blowers to win lawsuits claiming retaliation," the Associated Press reports. The case comes as Washington buzzes with talk that top Bush administration officials may soon be indicted for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent in retaliation against whistle-blower Joseph Wilson. Stephen Kohn of National Whistleblower Center "said that a victory for the government would mean 'whistle-blowers who expose waste, fraud, and corruption will have less constitutional protection than Ku Klux Klan members who burn crosses on their front lawns.'"
PUBLIC OPINION -- JUST TWO PERCENT OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS APPROVE OF PRESIDENT BUSH: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that, for the first time, President Bush’s approval rating "has sunk below 40 percent, while the percentage believing the country is heading in the right direction has dipped below 30 percent." The poll also reveals stunning opposition to President Bush among African-Americans. "Only two percent said they approved of his performance as president, the lowest level ever recorded in that category." Additionally, according to NBC, "strong majorities don’t believe that the recent charges against GOP leaders Tom DeLay of Texas and Bill Frist of Tennessee are politically motivated," and "just 29 percent think Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court."
HEALTH -- FDA REJECTION OF THE MORNING AFTER PILL ROUNDLY CRITICIZED: In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected an expert advisory panel's recommendation to make the emergency contraception Plan B available without a prescription. A bipartisan group of 62 lawmakers are now calling on the FDA to approve Plan B and have "chided officials for ignoring evidence." A draft of a GAO report on the FDA's actions has also been released, concluding that "the decision was highly unusual, was made with atypical involvement from top agency officials, and may well have been made months before it was formally announced." On October 17 at 9:30 a.m., American Progress will be looking at a "Plan B for Plan B" with panelists including Dr. Susan Wood, formerly in the Office of Women's Health at the FDA, who resigned in protest over the agency's decision.
Posted: 12 Oct. 2005
Internal Memos Show Oil Companies Intentionally Limited Refining Capacity To Drive Up Gasoline Prices
Santa Monica, CA -- The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits. The exposure comes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as the oil industry blames environmental regulation for limiting number of U.S. refineries.
The three internal memos from Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco show different ways the oil giants closed down refining capacity and drove independent refiners out of business. The confidential memos demonstrate a nationwide effort by American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying and research arm of the oil industry, to encourage the major refiners to close their refineries in the mid-1990s in order to raise the price at the pump.
READ THE REST.
ETHICS -- CIA LEAK CASE WIDENS: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald questioned New York Times reporter Judith Miller again yesterday, and Miller will return to speak with the grand jury today about a conversation she had in June 2003 with Scooter Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff. The Wall Street Journal reports, "There are signs that prosecutors now are looking into contacts between administration officials and journalists that took place much earlier than previously thought. Earlier conversations are potentially significant, because that suggests the special prosecutor leading the investigation is exploring whether there was an effort within the administration at an early stage to develop and disseminate confidential information to the press...Mr. Fitzgerald's pursuit now suggests he might be investigating not a narrow case on the leaking of the agent's name, but perhaps a broader conspiracy." Karl Rove is scheduled to talk with the grand jury sometime this week.
IRAQ -- CIA REPORT SLAMS WHITE HOUSE: More evidence today that the White House cherry-picked intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war. A newly declassified report by the CIA "rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq." The report, which was commissioned by then-CIA director George Tenet and conducted by a team of four CIA analysts, found "in an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right."
ETHICS -- DESPITE INDICTMENTS, DELAY STILL RUNNING HOUSE AGENDA: Although Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) recently stepped down as Majority Leader after being indicted for money laundering in Texas, he is still leading right-wing efforts in Congress. Last week, DeLay helped find the votes necessary to pass a hotly-debated energy bill by a narrow margin, and he worked with his colleagues on spending and budget issues. "DeLay is driving the agenda," one lawmaker said. "I guess he has to be because he is the only guy who can get this done. But once people find out he is still in charge, that brings its own set of issues." James Thurber of American University added, "I thought once he was out, people would move on. But he is still there, concentrating power within the leadership and himself."
ETHICS -- IRAQ AND KATRINA HAVE MADE CHENEY RICHER: In 2003, Vice President Cheney asserted, "Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." That wasn't true in 2003, and it's not true now. In 2003, Cheney still received deferred compensation from the contracting behemoth and possessed more than 433,000 stock options. Those options were worth $241,498 a year ago; they now are worth more than $8 million. With Cheney in office, Halliburton has received more than $10 billion for work in Iraq and received one of the first no-bid contracts for work in the Gulf Coast.
Reforming Ohio's Culture of Corruption
On November 8, Ohio residents will vote in what is arguably the most important election of 2005. On the ballot are four initiatives aimed at fundamentally reforming the state's political system to increase voter participation, enhance election competition, and remove partisan politics from important duties like legislative redistricting and election oversight. Ohio politics today are awash in special interest money and hobbled by corruption. Ethics violations are common even at the highest levels of government, and elections involve such little competition that the legislature has begun to resemble a Soviet-era politburo. The vote next month will be the first shot in the progressive effort to reform government so that it is truly for the people -- open, effective, and committed to the common good. To join the fight, visit ReformOhioNow.org.
FOUR FUNDAMENTAL REFORMS: Next month's ballot contains four initiatives. The first would have Ohio join 24 other states in permitting all citizens to vote by mail via absentee ballot. As it stands now, voters must provide a reason -- "like they are disabled, elderly, on military duty or going to be out of the county" -- to not vote in person at the polls. The second initiative would "create limits on individual campaign contributions to $2,000 for statewide candidates and $1,000 to legislative candidates, ban corporate contributions, and require full disclosure" of contribution information from campaigns. The third would take the responsibility for drawing up legislative districts out of the hands of politicians (who snuff out competition by stacking districts to reward their friends and punish their enemies) and transfer it to an independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission. The final initiative would remove partisan officials from election oversight responsibilities in an attempt to avoid the problems that have plagued Ohio elections. Last year's vote was overseen by Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (R), who also served as the Ohio chairman of President Bush's reelection campaign.
OHIO'S CULTURE OF CORRUPTION TRIES TO 'SWIFT BOAT' REFORM EFFORTS: All of the reforms are opposed by Ohio's conservative political establishment, currently headed by criminally indicted Gov. Robert Taft (R). (At 15 percent, Taft has the lowest approval ratings in the country for a state official. Says Gallup poll director Frank Newport, "It's hard mathematically to get that low.") Ohio First, the political action committee organizing the fight against the reforms, is backed strongly by the leaders of both the state Senate and House (both allies of Taft), and has hired Jessie May, Gov. Taft's chief fund-raiser. Jessie May, in turn, now works for Hicks Partners, "a lobbying and political consulting firm run by Brian Hicks, who was the governor's chief of staff until July 2003. Hicks, like Taft, was convicted of ethics violations last summer." To carry forth their anti-reform message, the group recently "hired the advertising firm that last year produced the national Swift Boat Veterans' campaign ads against presidential candidate John Kerry."
REAL REFORM -- INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING TO INCREASE COMPETITION: Perhaps the most important of the four initiatives is aimed at breaking up the state's stultified political system by turning over redistricting responsibilities to an independent commission. Given President Bush's narrow victory (50.8 percent to 48.7 percent) over Sen. John Kerry in Ohio last year, one gets the impression of "a politically competitive state, with an electorate almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats." Yet the results of last year's congressional and state legislative races tell a very different story. Of the 18 Ohio U.S. House elections, the winner of the closest race received 58.6 percent of the vote. "In 10 of the 18, one of them uncontested, the winner received more than 65 percent," the Dayton Daily News reports. "In 13 of 16 state Senate races, the winner received more than 62 percent of the vote." The results were somehow even more tilted in the Ohio House, where fully 21 of the 99 races were uncontested, while another 50 races had winners who received more than 60 percent of the vote.
REAL REFORM -- INCREASE VOTER PARTICIPATION: Another important reform effort would ease restrictions on absentee balloting. The change seems relatively minor at first glance, yet states that already rely on vote-by-mail insist it makes a significant difference. "It has been very popular. People love it," says Anne Martens, communications chief for Oregon's secretary of state, "citing a recent University of Oregon study that found 81 percent of Oregonians prefer vote-by-mail to other methods." According to Martens, Oregon's universal vote-by-mail system is cheaper, more reliable (since the ballots are taken to a central location before being counted), and avoid problems associated with finding trained workers to staff polling stations. More importantly, "Oregon had the third-highest voter turnout among states for the 2004 presidential election, but even more interesting, she said, is that turnout for so-called low-interest elections in off-years has increased by 10 percent." Conservative critics who oppose the measure claim it "is likely to lead to a significant increase in cases of fraudulent voting in Ohio." But this is a red herring. As the Akron Beacon Journal points out, "there has been no evidence of a significant increase in voter fraud" in states that have loosened restrictions on absentee balloting.
Director Of Censored Intelligence
John Prados
John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).
Two recent developments at the CIA make it clear that America’s premier intelligence-gathering agency is a mess. The first, CIA director Porter Goss' refusal to implement the disciplinary recommendations contained in the agency's inspector general 9/11 performance review, will no doubt attract far more attention.
But the second development is equally significant. That is the release, with no public fanfare at all, of a version of the CIA's internal inquiry into prewar Iraq intelligence. Conducted by a panel under former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr, the Iraq inquiry was supposed to get to the bottom of the hype on the now-notorious claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Both of these events says a great deal about political power, self-censorship and the Bush administration's determined effort to evade accountability for either the 9/11 attacks or its premeditated war against Iraq.
READ THE REST.
Posted: 11 Oct. 2005
World's 10 largest seed sellers control half the global market
Seeds are at the core of almost everything humans eat -- that's why the tightening grip of seed-selling corporations is so worrisome. The world's 10 largest seed-hawkers now control about half the global market, and its top three are among the world's largest pesticide purveyors and are heavy into genetic modification. What does this mean for the sustainability-inclined farmer now pushed to do business with the behemoths? And what does GM giant Monsanto's purchase of a key fruit-and-veg-seed distributor signal about the future of the supermarket produce aisle? Tom Philpott, our new ag-expert blogger, digs in and serves up answers.
new in Gristmill: Dominant traits: Time to bust the GM seed trusts?
Canada's oil sands boom for business, bust for environment
We have seen our energy future, and it's very, very dirty. By some estimates, the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada, contain 175 billion barrels of crude, reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's. Problem is, getting usable oil out of the tarry, sticky sand requires clearing vast swaths of forest, burning tons of natural gas, polluting millions of gallons of water, and spewing untold amounts of greenhouse gases. It is, says environmental policy analyst Dan Woynillowicz, "a form of oil extraction where the intensity of environmental impacts is at an order of magnitude greater than any other form of oil extraction we have seen on the planet." Until recently, the high cost of extracting oil from tar sands made the undertaking a financial loser, but rising oil prices have this fledgling industry booming. Resistance is futile, says Canada's environment minister, Stéphane Dion: "There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big."
straight to the source: The Boston Globe, Beth Daley, 09 Oct 2005
A Question for Journalists: How Do We Cover Penguins and the Politics of Denial?
by Bill Moyers
Keynote Speech to the Society of Environmental Journalists Convention
Austin, Texas - October 1, 2005
EXCERPTS: I didn't reckon on the backlash. If the Green Revolution is a bloody pulp today, it is not just because the environmental movement mugged itself. It is because the corporate, political, and religious right ganged up on it in the back alleys of power. Big companies fund a relentless assault on green values and policies. Political ideologues launch countless campaigns to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich benefactors. And homegrown ayatollahs are more set on savaging gay people than saving the green earth.
I especially failed to reckon with how ruthless the reactionaries would be. What they did to Rachel Carson when Silent Spring appeared in 1962 has been honed to a sharp edge aimed at the jugular of anyone who challenges them.
I felt the knife's edge some years ago when I took up the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary on PBS. My producer, Marty Koughan, learned that the industry was plotting behind the scenes to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Science study on the effect of pesticide residues in children. When the companies found out we were on the story, they came after us. Before the documentary aired television reviewers and the editorial pages of newspapers were flooded with disinformation. A whispering campaign took hold. One Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast without having seen it and later confessed to me that he had gotten a bum tip about the content from a top lobbyist for the chemical industry and printed it without asking me for a response.
Some public television managers were so unnerved by the propaganda blitz against a yet-to-be aired documentary that they actually protested to PBS with a letter prepared by the chemical industry.
They say denial is not a river in Egypt. It is, however, the governing philosophy in Washington. The President's contempt for science - for evidence that mounts everyday - is mind boggling. Here is a man who was quick to launch a 'preventative war' against Iraq on faulty intelligence and premature judgment but who refuses to take preventive action against a truly global menace about which the scientific evidence is overwhelming.
READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH.
CONGRESS -- RIGHT WING TWISTS ARMS TO PASS OIL INDUSTRY WINDFALL: The Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005 passed on Friday by a narrow 212-210 vote, but only after House conservatives extended the five-minute vote to 50 minutes to round up extra votes for the bill that appeared ready to fail. Rep. Bill Young (R-FL), one of the last lawmakers to switch his vote to support of the bill, said, "He [House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL)] worked me over a little" to get him to switch. (See the video on Think Progress.) Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) called it a “leave-no-oilman-behind bill,” and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) stated, "The bill weakens state and federal environmental standards...and gives a break to wealthy oil companies while doing little or nothing to affect oil prices."
KATRINA -- LOBBYISTS CRAFTED RECONSTRUCTION BILL: A member of the advisory panel that made recommendations to Louisiana senators on how best to craft Katrina relief legislation has spoken out against the high number of lobbyists who were included. The resulting $250 billion Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act contained billions of dollars for firms whose lobbyists were on the panel. Ivor van Heerden of Louisiana State University's hurricane public health research center said, "I was basically shocked. ... What do lobbyists know about a plan for the reconstruction and restoration of Louisiana?" Van Heerden called the bill a "huge injustice" to his state. "This is congressional looting at its worst," added Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
CONTRACTS -- GOVERNMENT CAN'T EXPLAIN WASTE OF $343 MILLION IN 2002 TSA CONTRACT: After Sept. 11, $343 million of the public's money -- intended for airline safety -- went to an unnecessary spending upgrade of a 2002 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) contract with NCS Pearson Inc. The Washington Post notes, "The modification to the contract involved switching the interview sites for tens of thousands of airline passenger screener jobs from a contractor's own assessment centers to hotels and luxury resorts." Pamela Pearson, then the TSA director of workforce creation, said that the original assessment centers were too small and weren't attracting enough applicants. However, documents obtained by the Post show that "the decision [to switch to hotels] was contemplated before the contract was signed." "Homeland security officials say they have no memos, e-mails or other paperwork to document the reason for the change, as required by federal contracting regulations."
MILITARY -- ARMY VOWS TO REVERSE RECRUITING SLUMP: This year, the Army fell 6,600 recruits short of its 80,000 goal, and it was the first time it had failed to hit a recruiting goal since 1999. In response, "[t]he Army has a master plan for recovering from this year's painful recruiting problems that includes new financial incentives for enlistees, greater use of computers, a new way for recruiters to make their pitch and a proposed finder's fee for soldiers who refer recruits." The Massachusetts Army National Guard is taking a more novel approach by recruiting soldiers at the mall. New England Patriots cheerleaders will kick off the grand opening of their new recruiting office in the Natick Mall, the Boston Herald reports.
Posted: 10 Oct. 2005
Andy Borowitz: Bush Praises Swiftness of Hurricane Rita Photo-Ops
But Says Government Must Create Impression of Concern Even Faster in Future
By: Andy Borowitz
Published: September 28, 2005 at 07:33
In a televised speech to the nation last night, President George W. Bush praised the Federal government for responding swiftly to Hurricane Rita with well-crafted, high-quality photo opportunities showing him looking concerned, but said that the government needs to create the impression of concern even faster in the future.
Mr. Bush said the fact that the government provided the first images of him looking grave and engaged in the crisis even before Hurricane Rita slammed into the Texas and Louisiana coastline showed that it had learned the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
"After Hurricane Katrina, it was hours before the American people saw the first photos of me furrowing my brow and looking serious," Mr. Bush said. "But with Rita, we had high-quality images of me looking worried right from the get-go."
While praising the swiftness of the government's photo-op response to Rita, the president said that "much work still needs to be done" to ensure that the government will produce high-quality post-disaster photo-ops even faster in the future.
To that end, he said he was creating a new government bureaucracy, the Federal Emergency Image Management Agency, which would provide the president with lighting, cameras, and dramatic backdrops within minutes of any national emergency.
"In times of crisis, the president needs to send the American people the following message," the president concluded. "Message: I look like I care."
Elsewhere, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher wed in a private ceremony over the weekend, vowing to love, honor and obey each other longer than Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney.
Enviros anxious as Senate gears up to reform Endangered Species Act
The brawl over Endangered Species Act reform is tumbling into the Senate. Will bills being drafted in that chamber mimic Rep. Richard Pombo's (R-Calif.) pugnacious House legislation, much loathed by enviros and loved by developers? Or will the Senate be more nimble on its feet? Muckraker calls the fight.
new in Muckraker: Speak Now, or Forever Hold Your Species
Posted: 9 Oct. 2005
Posted: 8 Oct. 2005
Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him
By Matthew Rothschild
Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.
But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.
READ THE REST.
Santorum’s People Toss Young Women out of Barnes & Noble, Trooper Threatens Them with Prison
Matthew Rothschild
On the evening of August 10, Hannah Shaffer of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, decided to go to the nearby Barnes & Noble outside of Wilmington. She wanted to see Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who was promoting his book, "It Takes a Family."
The event was billed as a "book signing and discussion," Shaffer says.
But discussion was the last thing that the Senator’s people wanted.
Shaffer, her friends, and two other young women were booted out of the store and threatened with imprisonment even before they had a chance to say a word to Santorum, as Al Mascitti first noted in the Delaware News Journal.
READ THE REST.
Posted: 7 Oct. 2005
House energy legislation would undermine parts of Clean Air Act
You just can't keep a bad bill down. Provisions cut from the energy bill that was passed this summer have lurched back to life; they now stumble forward under the banner of the Gasoline for America's Security (GAS) Act, due for a House vote today. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the legislation's sponsor, says the act will help curb spiking gas prices and ease post-hurricane energy bottlenecks by giving companies incentives to build more refineries -- "without messing with any environmental laws." But not everyone agrees. In a letter to House leaders on Thursday, nine state attorneys general called the bill "a major setback for air quality across the nation" that "permanently eviscerates key protections of the Clean Air Act" in relation to refineries and power plants. The legislation would also allow new refineries to be sited in national forests and wildlife refuges. Although passage is likely in the House, the act's chances in the Senate are currently considered dim.
straight to the source: The Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin, 06 Oct 2005
INTELLIGENCE -- PENTAGON DOMESTIC SPYING PROVISION SNUCK INTO BILL: The Senate may give the Defense Department more information about American citizens, without letting American citizens know. The new provisions -- snuck into the bill with little public attention -- reflect President Bush's desire to give the Pentagon increased powers in civil affairs. The new provisions include allowing the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to "covertly approach and cultivate 'U.S. persons' and even recruit them as informants -- without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government," allowing federal intelligence agencies increased access to government databases on U.S. citizens, and granting the DIA new exemptions to withhold information from public requests. Similar provisions were inserted last year into the same authorization bill, but removed under public objections. ACLU Legislative Council Tim Sparapani objected: "This punches yet another enormous hole through the Privacy Act."
QUOTE OF THE DAY: According to a new BBC documentary, "President Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State." Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath describes his first meeting with President Bush in June 2003: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'" (Scott McClellan said yesterday the BBC report is "absurd.")
ENERGY
Pain At the Pump, Profits In the Boardroom
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline stands at $2.93, up nearly $1 from a year ago, and rising gas prices are hitting most Americans hard. USA Today reports, “As gas prices soar, more people are charging purchases, even as many are having difficulty paying off credit card debt.” While low- to middle-income families face yet another burden in saving for the future, the oil and gas companies rake in record profits. “If motorists are the big losers in the spectacular run-up in gas prices, the companies that produce the oil and turn it into gasoline are the clear winners.” In response, the right wing is pushing schemes that are harmful both to the environment and our economic security. Progressives have better ideas.
RIGHT WING IS ALL WRONG: The response by conservatives in Congress is more of the same. They continue to fight to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, even though this move would do nothing to address our long-term energy needs. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) is exploiting Hurricane Katrina to push an oil industry deregulation bill through the House. The Bush administration has done no better. After five years of considering high gasoline consumption an “an American way of life,” President Bush changed course last month: “We can all pitch in by being better conservers.” Half-hearted efforts to bring lifestyle changes to the White House and new websites telling people how to become “energy hog busters” demonstrate a lack of seriousness on the issue. President Bush recently signed into law a bill that he himself admitted “wouldn't change the price at the pump today.”
INDUSTRY HITS THE GAS ON PROFITS: American Progress has released a report that shows that while working families are struggling to pay their bills because of rising gas prices, the oil and gas industry is taking in record profits. According to data reported by the Energy Information Agency (EIA), the price of a gallon of regular gas has gone up $2 since January 2002, or 174 percent. The steep increase in prices mirrors the steep increase in industry profits. “Oil companies reported record profits last year -- and not just records for oil companies.” ExxonMobil broke the profit record for all American companies with $25.33 billion. ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP have profited handsomely as well. These companies are funneling the profits to their own CEOs – whose median compensation has increased by 215 percent since 2002 - and political activities totaling more than $440 million over the last six years. It’s been a worthwhile investment: the energy bill contained $4 billion in tax breaks for companies already making record-breaking profits.
A PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION: The Center for American Progress released a plan earlier this year to "provide immediate relief to working Americans, reduce long-term structural demand for oil, create real transportation choice, and retool the auto industry for jobs in the markets of the future." Solutions include offering relief for those hit by price spikes and least able to pay and penalties for profiteering oil companies be paid for by scrapping current tax incentives that encourage gas guzzling.
Posted: 6 Oct. 2005
World Bank study says pollution, climate change hurt millions
The World Bank is not the first institution that comes to mind when you're looking for hard-hitting environmental analysis. But a new report from the powerful development agency asserts that while alcohol, tobacco, and unsafe sex are still the most common threats to human health in developing nations, millions of deaths and a full fifth of illnesses in these countries can be traced to environmental factors. Unsafe water, poor sanitation, air and soil pollution, pesticides, and hazardous wastes are big contributors to Third World woes. The bank also connects cancer to environmental conditions and acknowledges that global warming is already having major human-health impacts, especially in poor nations. "Without a healthy, productive labor force, we will not have the economic growth that is necessary to ensure a pathway out of poverty," says World Bank environment director Warren Evans. "Poor people are the first to suffer from a polluted environment." True dat.
straight to the source: The Guardian, John Vidal, 06 Oct 2005
BUDGET -- CONSERVATIVES PLAN TO CUT 300,000 POOR FROM FEDERAL FOOD PROGRAMS: Conservatives in Congress are planning to cut $574 million from food programs for the poor. Earlier this year, Congress passed a budget framework that called for $3 billion in agriculture spending cuts. "Leading Republicans indicated they would rather target food stamps and conservation programs than simply make the deep cuts [in farmers' payments] that Bush was seeking." The $574 million cut in food stamps, brought on primarily because Bush's irresponsible tax cuts have exacerbated the nation's deficit, would come from restricting access to this benefit for certain families that receive other government assistance. The restriction would shut an estimated 300,000 people out of the program. Gerry Roll writes in the Christian Science Monitor, "We can keep our food stamp program intact. It just might mean putting big corporate farmers on a thrifty food plan."
ETHICS -- SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL CHARGED WITH FIVE-COUNT INDICTMENT: Yesterday, the Justice Department officially announced a five-count indictment against former White House chief procurement officer David Safavian. Safavian is accused of lying and obstructing investigations into his 2002 golf outing to Scotland with GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and of making similarly false statements to the Senate and executive branch investigators about his relationship with the lobbyist. Safavian was arrested last month on obstruction charges, and Abramoff "remains the focus of a lengthy investigation by a task force led by prosecutors at the Justice Department and including investigators at the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department and General Services Administration."
CORRUPTION
Let's Not Be Blunt
Shortly after Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) was criminally indicted and forced to step down from his post as House Majority Leader, New York Times columnist David Brooks declared the DeLay era "dead." Not so fast. DeLay's "temporary" replacement as Majority Leader, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), is a "DeLay protégé" with more than his fair share of ethical problems. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that "Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt through a series of donations....When the financial carousel stopped, DeLay's private charity, the consulting firm that employed DeLay's wife and the Missouri campaign of Blunt's son all ended up with money." Also involved in the scam: disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (For more details, check out the AP's handy timeline.) The complicated transactions could lead to more trouble for both men. Lawrence Noble, formerly the government's chief elections officer, said, "The Blunt and DeLay transactions are similar to the Texas case [in which DeLay has been indicted] and raise questions that should be investigated regarding whether donors were deceived or the true destination of their money was concealed."
BLUNT SECRETLY ADDS PRO-TOBACCO PROVISION TO BENEFIT GIRLFRIEND: In November 2003, only hours after Blunt was elevated to the House's third-highest leadership job, "he surprised his fellow top Republicans by trying to quietly insert a provision benefiting Philip Morris USA into the 475-page bill creating a Department of Homeland Security." Philip Morris donated more than $150,000 to Blunt's political committees from 2001-2003. Several insiders "privately expressed concern that Blunt pushed the provision partly because of his personal relationship with Philip Morris lobbyist Abigail Perlman." Once the chief of staff to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) found out, the provision was quickly removed. (The scandal was kept secret for months because the White House and House leaders preferred "no publicity on a matter involving favors for the nation's biggest tobacco company and possible claims of conflicts of interest.") Blunt and Perlman are now married. Blunt's son, Andrew, now lobbies for Philip Morris, "a major client he picked up only four years out of law school."
BLUNT'S PAC RUN BY INDICTED DELAY ASSOCIATE: Blunt's political action committee, the Rely On Your Beliefs Fund (ROYB), was, until very recently, run by Jim Ellis. (Payments from ROYB to Ellis were recorded as late as July 2005). Ellis also ran DeLay's state political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), and has been criminally indicted for money laundering for that role. He has also encountered trouble with ROYB and in 2002 was forced to sign a consent decree for ethics violations.
BLUNT PUTS CORPORATE INTERESTS OVER AMERICA'S INTERESTS: Blunt has made effective corporate lobbyists honorary members of the House of Representatives. The Washington Post reports that Blunt, as Majority Whip, delegated "authority to Washington business and trade association lobbyists to help negotiate deals with individual House members." These lobbyists "are now an integral part of the...whip operation on par with the network of lawmakers who serve as assistant whips." Blunt's son collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees from Blunt's closest corporate allies. Blunt also cashes in on his corporate connections with luxury travel on company-owned jets. The Washington Post reports that "Blunt and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay are the top two users of [corporate] jets among the current leadership, together accounting for at least 140 trips during the past two election cycles -- an average of one flight every 10 days."
AFGHANISTAN
Four Years Later, A Fragile Future
Tomorrow marks four years since the United States invaded Afghanistan. But despite American and international efforts, "Afghanistan faces an uncertain and fragile future," according to a new American Progress report. Today, President Bush will give a "significant speech on the war on terrorism" with "unprecedented detail" on the nature of the enemy. Bush has referred to the invasion of Afghanistan as one of the "great turning points in the story of freedom," but he hasn't explained why so little progress has been made in the areas of security, drug production, governance, and reconstruction. For $1 billion spent in Afghanistan each month, Americans deserve answers, not fear-mongering. (Check out American Progress's Afghanistan anniversary event yesterday, with coverage replaying on C-SPAN.)
DANGEROUS SECURITY SITUATION PREVENTING PROGRESS: While the White House continues to declare "liberty is on the march" and to talk about plans to reduce U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan by 20 percent, the security situation in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating, with increased insurgent activities in the southern and southeastern provinces bordering Pakistan, rampant crime, and a strengthened anti-government insurgency. Thirty percent of total coalition casualties have occurred in the past three months, with 2005 marking the highest death toll rate since the 2001 invasion. The Taliban and al Qaeda "are now working in a much more organized way" and al Qaeda is teaching tactics learned in Iraq to the Taliban. The Bush administration uses the number of Afghan troops and members of the police force as success stories, but fails to mention that the military is a long way from being able to fight without American assistance and the police force is rife with corruption. Next week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Afghanistan and must address what the U.S. plans are to control the security situation.
DRUG TRADE CONTINUES TO FLOURISH: In 2001, Afghanistan supplied 12 percent of the world's opium. In 2004, the country supplied 87 percent. Karzai declares drug production to be Afghanistan's greatest challenge. The drug economy has moved beyond poppy cultivation and now includes heroin production. Afghanistan now receives more money from the drug trade than from foreign aid, with the majority of revenues going to traffickers, rather than the Afghan population. Karzai remains committed to fixing the drug problem through a $100 million program for the forcible eradication of poppies in key growing areas. "[W]e are doubtful that reductions can be sustained. Now farmers are going to expect some assistance, and if that assistance isn't coming, they will go back to cultivating poppies," according to a United Nations official involved in drug control. James Dobbins, a top analyst at the RAND Corporation, said, "I don't see a near-term strategy" to reduce the economy's reliance on the drug trade.
RECONSTRUCTION OUTLOOK UNCERTAIN: The Afghan government has made gains in the improvement of living standards for Afghans, including the highest percentage of girls enrolled in school in Afghanistan's history. But a lack of a comprehensive reconstruction strategy has impeded progress. "Afghanistan has approximately one health facility per 27,000 people, and nearly 40 percent of the existing clinics providing basis care employ no female health workers." Only 6 percent of Afghanistan's population has access to electricity and 14 percent of women are literate. Afghanistan held elections for the National Assembly and the Provincial Councils on September 18 and the majority of the results are due out today. Early returns have found fraud at nearly 300 polling stations and leading candidates in most provinces are warlords and leaders of mujahedeen factions, as well as former communists, a former Taliban commander, doctors, and the elder brother of President Karzai.
Posted: 5 Oct. 2005
PRIVACY -- INDIANA BILL WOULD MAKE "UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION" A CRIME: A bill introduced by right-wing lawmakers in Indiana would force anyone "who knowingly or willingly participates in an artificial reproduction procedure" to show proof that she is married. The bill, which was introduced at a September 29 meeting of the Indiana General Assembly's Health Finance Commission, would require that mothers who want to reproduce "by means other than sexual intercourse" must file a "petition for parentage" with their local court. The court would then award only married women a "gestational certificate" to use at a reproductive therapy clinic. Indiana State Sen. Patricia Miller said of the bill, "Studies have shown that a child raised by both parents - a mother and a father - do better. So, we do want to have laws that protect the children."
Read the actual bill here:
http://www.in.gov/legislative/interim/committee/prelim/HFCO04.pdf
Action Alert
CBS's One-Sided DeLay Discussion
All-Republican panel discusses a "Republican problem"
It was no surprise that the Sunday morning talkshows would focus on the indictment of Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay on conspiracy charges. But CBS' Face the Nation covered the DeLay scandal in an unusual manner: by convening a panel of three Republicans.
Congressmembers David Dreier of California, John Shadegg of Arizona and Jim Leach of Iowa--all Republicans--were host Bob Schieffer's only guests on the topic.
Why the curious booking decision? Schieffer explained midway through the interview: "Let me just point out, I didn't invite any Democrats to be on this morning because I thought this was a Republican problem and wanted to give you a chance to talk about it."
But how could the allegation that DeLay illegally funneled corporate donations to Texas Republicans in an effort to win local elections and gerrymander the state's Congressional districts be considered merely a "Republican problem"? Given that the redistricting scheme increased the size of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the DeLay story affects everyone.
In the discussion of the DeLay scandal, the opposition party did come up: Dreier commented, for instance, that "frankly, there is really no plan that has come forward from Democrats on any issue whatsoever." Presumably if Democrats had been invited to take part in the program, they would have had a response to that statement--not to mention a different take on DeLay's woes.
It's not the first time CBS has apparently determined that a given subject was an exclusively Republican matter. After last November's election--which saw the GOP solidify its power in the White House and Congress--Face the Nation turned to three Republicans to talk about the election: senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Chuck Hagel (11/7/04).
This is not typically how Face the Nation has handled controversies involving Democratic politicians. After the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, for instance, the program (2/8/98) interviewed Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta for reactions. When there were allegations that Vice President Al Gore was connected to fundraising violations at a Buddhist temple, Face the Nation (7/20/97) discussed the charges with Republican Sen. Thad Cochran and Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The show did not describe these affairs as "Democratic problems."
ACTION:
Contact CBS and tell them that this weekend's Face the Nation discussion about Tom DeLay should not have been turned over exclusively to Republican politicians. Let them know that DeLay's indictment is not, as anchor Bob Schieffer put it, a "Republican problem," but a national one.
CONTACT:
CBS Face the Nation
Phone: (202) 457-4481
ftn@cbsnews.com
Also, you can contact CBS's new "Public Eye" ombudsman:
publiceye@cbsnews.com
Posted: 1 Oct. 2005
Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.
Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."
The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."
The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."
Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."
The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.
The office said Mr. Williams's work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush's education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.
The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to "convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government's behalf and in return for the payment of public funds," the G.A.O. said.
READ THE REST.
This month, BLACK BOX VOTING exposed NEW information on how elections can be manipulated. We produced the information in a visual, easy to understand format showing several real-life attack mechanisms. As the Carter-Baker panel showed in their insufficient report, our public officials are still not dealing with real problems in election security. We need to get everyone out of denial.
You can use the file below for presentations just as is, or for guidelines on developing your own communications. You can quickly flip from page to page. The presentation is in three sections: Why voting is so important, how to evaluate the real risks, and factors in local and national election manipulation.
http://www.bbvdocs.org/presentations/attacks-public.pdf
For more info, go to Black Box Voting.
America is running out of time
By Paul Craig Roberts
George W. Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its superpower status.
Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The war is being fought with hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreigners. The war is bleeding the military of troops and commitments. The war has ended the US claim to moral leadership and exposed the US as a reckless and aggressive power.
READ THE REST.
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