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This is total and complete nonsense. There can be no argument that Bush misled the country and the world. Iraq had no nuclear program to speak of, sought no nuclear weapons parts in Niger, and apparently did not have any so-called “weapons of mass destruction” either. It also appears to have had no significant relations with al-Qaida. Since Bush claimed to know each and every one of these things, and managed to convince much of the country of them in order to sell his war, only two possibilities exist: Either he (and Rice, and Rummy, and Wolfie, and Tenet, and Powell) was just making the stuff up or he did not have “a thorough body of intelligence, good, solid, sound intelligence,” and was, in fact, honestly misled by a “thorough body of intelligence, bad, groundless, unsound, intelligence.”
The words “I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course” constitute perhaps the single most obvious lie the president has yet told; it would take me pages and pages to enumerate all of the areas in which this president refuses to take responsibility for what he says and does — which is why I’m lucky to be co-authoring a book on the topic. But what of the White House press corps? They simply nod their heads at this nonsense and move on to the next topic, as if Bush’s saying the words, but doing absolutely nothing to demonstrate that they have any meaning, simply closes the matter.
Mr. Bush's vague and sometimes nearly incoherent answers suggested that he was either bedazzled by his administration's own mythmaking or had decided that doubts about his foreign and domestic policies could best be parried by ignoring them.
Mr. Bush will simply not engage the issue of whether his administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat in the months leading up to the American invasion. When asked whether the United States had lost credibility with the rest of the world since neither weapons of mass destruction nor a strong Al Qaeda connection had been uncovered in Iraq, the president veered off into a tour through American history and the difficulty of coming up with an Iraqi version of Thomas Jefferson. He then skidded to a halt with the announcement that "I'm confident history will prove the decision we made to be the right decision."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it's surprising that there is no clear public record of his views on the controversial 1994 deal in which the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons program. What's even more surprising about Rumsfeld's silence is that he sat on the board of the company that won a $200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.
The company is Zurich-based engineering giant ABB, which signed the contract in early 2000, well before Rumsfeld gave up his board seat and joined the Bush administration. Rumsfeld, the only American director on the ABB board from 1990 to early 2001, has never acknowledged that he knew the company was competing for the nuclear contract. Nor could FORTUNE find any public reference to what he thought about the project.
But we are told that a strong woman, a "true" feminist, can no longer put up with such humiliation. We are usually informed what the true feminist should do by anti-feminists. I wonder what world such people live in. We see all the time women who are strong and independent, but who love disappointing partners. I am thinking of a truly strong woman like Jacqueline (Mrs. Jesse) Jackson. I know, and I suspect you do, many women (and for that matter men) in whom love interferes with consistency. Eulogies of the recently deceased Katharine Hepburn rightly celebrated her as a forerunner of and model for modern feminists, proud and free, with her own shrewdly crafted career, the daughter and niece of pioneer woman suffragists. But Claudia Roth Pierpont noted that this free spirit subordinated herself to the demanding Spencer Tracy, "from the part of her that required someone to save."[5] Even before she met Tracy, she was enamored of the director John Ford. I have read her love letters to him in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana. Written in her delicate slanting hand, they are schoolgirl effusions. Even the tough Ms. Hepburn could be sappy. Feminism, like any other ism, is not an inoculation against sappiness.
(a) "Because of some combination of bureaucratic inertia, political caution and unrealistic expectations left over from the war, we do not appear to be confident about our course in Iraq"Go. Play.
(b) "We just haven't seen any proof of linkages between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," said [blank], who said Liberia had much clearer ties to terrorists.
(c) "Congress has been a co-conspirator with the administration in failing to advance a predictable, multiyear budget for operations in Iraq that would demonstrate American vision and commitment, attract allied support and clarify the scope of our mission."
Cheney refused to serve in Vietnam. He received four 2-S draft deferments -- granted to students -- from 1963 through 1965 while he was a student at the University of Wyoming. He married Lynne in 1964, and was thus banned from the draft.You betcha.
But in October 1965, the Selective Service announced that married men without children could then be drafted. Exactly nine months and two days later -- on July 28, 1966 -- his first child was born. Cheney hadn't waited until her birth before he sought a 3-A deferment classification -- given to those with dependents. He did so when Lynne was only 10 weeks pregnant.
Cheney said to a reporter in 1989, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
It seems that by the DLC’s calculation, the “far left” doesn’t consist of Green party members or anti-globalization protestors or radical groups like Earth First and Peta. According to them, middle aged, middle class Democrats like me who enthusiastically backed charter DLC favorite sons Clinton and Gore in 3 successive presidential elections, supported the wars in Kosovo and in Afghanistan, aren’t fond of bureaucrats whether they work for government or the corporations, respect the need to curb long term deficit spending and come down on the side of the CATO institute as much as the ACLU when it comes to civil liberties…are now “far left.”
(Uh…Viva Che!)
This is a terrible misconception and one that will indeed “hang the party” because these guys are not only out of touch with their own party, they are obviously delusional about the opposition. They don’t recognize that the political landscape has completely changed since 1985 when the DLC was created and 1992 when it reached its zenith of power. In 2004 it is losing its relevance to many Democrats, not because of a difference in policy but because it has failed to recognize that while they have not changed, the Republican Party has undergone a complete metamorphosis. They do not seem to understand that when the competition completely changes strategy, you must be prepared to change strategy as well.
The Republican Party of George W. Bush is fundamentally different than the Party of George H.W. Bush. They are playing a form of political hardball that is completely unresponsive to the cooperative, consensus style politics that characterizes the DLC. They will not budge on policy and when it comes to tactics they are knife wielding thugs.
Dean’s early success isn’t about liberal spending programs and “far left” hatred for Junior. It’s about opening your eyes and seeing what is right in front of your face --- a dangerously radical Republican party that simply will not compromise or deal fairly.
Tom "Bug Chaser" DeLay thinks he saw a flying monkey:
To gauge how "out of touch" the Democrats are, DeLay instructed, "close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet." The crowd chuckled obligingly.
Now try to imagine Bush landing it. Now imagine the resulting carnage.
Another TSA spokesman told the Washington Post that the marshal's program "is not exempt from budget realities facing the TSA."
Really? Can we make it exempt?
Brazening out the failure to find the Saddam-Qaeda links and W.M.D. the administration aggrandized before the war, Mr. Wolfowitz has simply done an Orwellian fan dance, covering up the lack of concrete ties to the 9/11 terrorists with feathery assertions that securing "the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror."
It is a new line of defense that was also used by Dick Cheney in a speech last week ("In Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror") and by the president in a speech on Monday ("And our current mission in Iraq is essential to the broader war on terror; it's essential to the security of the American people").
Even now that it's clear the Bushies played up the terror angle because they thought it was the best way to whip up support for getting rid of Saddam, the administration refuses to level with the public.
It dishes out the same old sauerkraut — conjuring up images of Al Qaeda by calling Iraqi guerrillas and foreign fighters "terrorists." Meanwhile, the real Qaeda may be planning more suicide hijackings of passenger planes on the East Coast this summer, Homeland Security says.
Be it at Chicago, Duke, Harvard or the University of California at Berkeley, some of the nation's top economists, psychologists and statisticians are coming to see sports as a subject that requires their attention. Trying to understand human decision-making, they are writing papers about such choices as when to punt, or when to take out a basketball player in foul trouble. About 25 of them gathered in the spring for a two-day academic conference in Arizona, where they went to a spring training game once their work was done.
Their research is quickly leading to a theory that will resonate with any fans who have ever screamed for their team to go for it on fourth down: the professors say that managers, coaches and players are often far too cautious for their own good.
"Teams are averse to going for all or none," said Steven J. Sherman, a psychology professor at Indiana University, who came up with the idea for the conference with Thaler when they were having dinner in an Afghan restaurant in Chicago last year. "Teams don't want to do something that puts the game on the line right now."
An internal analysis by Environmental Protection Agency economists has found that a Senate plan to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming could achieve its goal at very little cost, according to a copy of the analysis made available by a group supporting the plan.
This stands in contrast to public statements by Bush administration officials saying the environmental benefits of the plan, which sets limits on emissions of so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, would come at a significant cost to the nation's economy.
The results of the environmental agency analysis, dated May 23, were never completed and analysts were told not to continue with the study, employees at the agency said. In June, Christie Whitman, who was then the agency's administrator, sent a letter refusing to carry out the study to the proposal's sponsors, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut.
But in building an insurgent campaign as a Washington outsider, Dr. Dean has gained fluency in the populist language of political revolution, constantly repeating the fact that half his contributors have never before donated to a candidate.
"The way to beat George Bush is not to be like him," he told a rally of 600 people overlooking the harbor in Portsmouth, N.H., on July 22. "The way to beat George Bush is to give the 50 percent of Americans who don't vote a reason to vote again."
The report finds no such connections between Iraq and al-Qaida terrorists. It is now quite clear that the president -- unwilling to deal with the ties between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden -- pursued Saddam as a politically convenient scapegoat. By drawing attention away from the Muslim fanatic networks centered in Saudi Arabia, Bush diverted the war against terror. That seems to be the implication of the 28 pages, which the White House demanded be kept from the American people when the full report was released.
Even many in Bush's own party are irritated that the president doesn't think we can be trusted with the truth.
"I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on "Meet the Press." "My judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know."
Asked why he thought the pages were excised, Shelby, a leading pro-administration conservative, said, "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations."
To the frustration of many of the people involved in the fight against Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration is said to have been distracted by competing priorities—most notably, the war in Iraq. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan terrorism expert who has analyzed thousands of Al Qaeda documents recovered by various governments, said, “I feel that if they had not gone to Iraq they would have found Osama by now. The best people were moved away from this operation. The best minds were moved to Iraq. It’s a great shame. It’s the biggest military failure in the war on terrorism so far. The Americans need more resources, and more high-level people exclusively assigned to this task.”Read the rest.
Supporters of the Iraq war suggest that this view overlooks longer-term benefits that have yet to be fully appreciated. Ambassador Oakley, for example, said, “I think the war in Iraq has made governments much more cautious about allowing terrorists into their countries—Iran and Syria, for instance—because they can see the consequences to themselves from the U.S.”
Many intelligence insiders, however, shared Gunaratna’s concerns. Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. official, said that the effort to find bin Laden had “lost at least half of its original strength.” He added, “Arabic speakers are in short supply. You still have some intelligence-collection assets in Afghanistan, but mostly it’s just small teams looking for signals. That’s because of Iraq.”
....Clarke told me that in the mid-nineties “the C.I.A. was authorized to mount operations to go into Afghanistan and apprehend bin Laden.” President Clinton, Clarke said, “was really gung-ho” about the scenario. “He had no hesitations,” he said. “But the C.I.A. had hesitations. They didn’t want their own people killed. And they didn’t want their shortcomings exposed. They really didn’t have the paramilitary capability to do it; they could not stage a snatch operation.” Instead of trying to mount the operation themselves, Clarke said, “the C.I.A. basically paid a bunch of local Afghans, who went in and did nothing.”
In 1998, Al Qaeda struck the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. In retaliation, Clinton signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to kill bin Laden. It was the first directive of this kind that Clarke had seen during his thirty years in government. Soon afterward, he told me, C.I.A. officials went to the White House and said they had “specific, predictive, actionable” intelligence that bin Laden would soon be attending a particular meeting, in a particular place. “It was a rare occurrence,” Clarke said. Clinton authorized a lethal attack. The target date, however—August 20, 1998—nearly coincided with Clinton’s deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clarke said that he and other top national-security officials at the White House went to see Clinton to warn him that he would likely be accused of “wagging the dog” in order to distract the public from his political embarrassment. Clinton was enraged. “Don’t you fucking tell me about my political problems, or my personal problems,” Clinton said, according to Clarke. “You tell me about national security. Is it the right thing to do?” Clarke thought it was. “Then fucking do it,” Clinton told him.
The attacks, which cost seventy-nine million dollars and involved some sixty satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles, obliterated two targets—a terrorist training camp outside Khost, in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum, Sudan—and were notorious failures. “The best post-facto intelligence we had was that bin Laden had left the training camp within an hour of the attack,” Clarke said. What went wrong? “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the I.S.I. was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that an attack was coming,” he said.
Clarke also blames the military for enabling the Pakistanis to compromise the mission. “The Pentagon did what we asked them not to,” he said. “We asked them not to use surface ships. We asked them to use subs, so they wouldn’t signal the attack. But not only did they use surface ships—they brought additional ones in, because every captain wants to be able to say he fired the cruise missile.”
...After the 1998 fiasco, Clinton secretly approved additional Presidential findings, authorizing the killing not just of bin Laden but also of several of his top lieutenants, and permitting any private planes or helicopters carrying them to be shot down. These directives led to nothing. “The C.I.A. was unable to carry out the mission,” Clarke said. “They hired local Afghans to do it for them again.” The agency also tried to train and equip a Pakistani commando force and some Uzbeks, too. “The point is, they were risk-averse,” he said. Tenet was “eager to kill bin Laden,” Clarke said. “He understood the threat. But the capability of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations was far less than advertised. The Directorate of Operations would like people to think it’s a great James Bond operation, but for years it essentially assigned officers undercover as diplomats to attend cocktail parties. They collected information. But they were not a commando unit that could go into Afghanistan and kill bin Laden.”
“That’s bullshit,” a senior intelligence official said. “Risk-taking depends on political will allowing you to take the risk. It wasn’t until after September 11th that people wanted the gloves to come off.”
But Clarke said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, “You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.”) The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.
Why they do so is something you can't say if you want to be around tomorrow. I've danced around this for 15 years, because people react to it with an emotion unseen in discussing other voting blocks. There's nothing complicated about it. The reason 94% of the black population is never going to vote for Bush or a Republican no matter what that Republican does is that they've chosen a way of life where Democrats are the masters and they're on their plantation. They have been made wards of the state.Now, here's MY version, about why corporate scumbags will never vote Democrat:
They have been made totally dependent on welfare, thanks to a deliberate effort by liberal Democrats to make them a permanent voting block. This is why blacks like Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice who make an effort to succeed are looked down upon and, yes, targeted for character destruction. Democrats want Black America complaining about the same old things for years to come, but never once thinking that they can find the solution to their complaints within themselves - or asking why the party they've given their votes to for decades hasn't made one thing in their lives better.
Why they do so is something you can't say if you want to be around tomorrow. I've danced around this for 15 years, because people react to it with an emotion unseen in discussing other voting blocks. There's nothing complicated about it. The reason 94% of millionaires are never going to vote for a Democrat no matter what that Democrat does is that they've chosen a way of life where Republicans are the mack daddy pimps and they're working the streets. They have been made financial addicts of the corporate state.
They have been made totally dependent on corporate welfare - special exemptions, tax credits and breaks - thanks to a deliberate effort by conservative Republicans to make them a permanent voting block. This is why billionaires like Georges Soros and Warren Buffett who make an effort to include the needs of society as a whole are looked down upon and, yes, targeted for character destruction. Republicans want corporate America complaining about the same old things for years to come, but never once thinking that they can find the solution to their complaints within themselves - or asking why the party they've given their votes to for decades hasn't made one thing beyond their own interests better.
Editor's note: The opinions voiced below are those of the infamous Doctor Thompson and are absolutely not the views of this network or the editors. That is free journalism.
...The real shocker of the week, for me, was and remains the stunning collapse of the evil Bush administration, which I view with mixed feelings.
In truth, I could be a lot happier about the collapse of Bush and his people and his whole house of cars and everything he stands for, if it didn't also mean the certain collapse of the U.S. economy, and the vital infrastructure, and, indeed, the whole "American way of life."
It will not be anything like the collapse and Impeachment of Richard Nixon, which had little or no impact on day-to-day life in this country. Nothing really changed, except Some people went to prison, of course, but that was to be expected, considering the crimes they committed and the shameful damage they caused ... They were criminals, and the righteous American people punished them for it. Our system worked, and we were all heroes.
Ah, but that was twenty-nine (29) years ago, bubba, and many things have changed. The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me, or it may already be too late. The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport -- we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be -- the end of the world as we knew it.
In sum, the 9/11 Report of the Congressional Inquiry indicates that the intelligence community was very aware that Bin Laden might fly an airplane into an American skyscraper.You know the drill. Read the whole thing.
Given the fact that there had already been an attempt to bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Center with a bomb, how could Rice say what she did?
Certainly, someone could have predicted, contrary to Rice's claim that, among other possibilities, "these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon."
Is Rice claiming this information in the 9/11 Report was not given to the White House? Or could it be that the White House was given this information, and failed to recognize the problem and take action? Is the White House covering up what the President knew, and when he knew it?
The Joint Inquiry could not answer these questions because they were denied access to Bush's Daily Brief for August 6, 2001, and all other dates. Yet these are not questions that should be stonewalled.
Troublingly, it seems that President Bush trusts foreign heads of state with the information in this daily CIA briefing, but not the United States Congress. It has become part of his routine, when hosting foreign dignitaries at his Crawford, Texas ranch, to invite them to attend his CIA briefing.
Yet he refuses to give Congress any information whatsoever about these briefings, and he has apparently invoked Executive Privilege to suppress the August 6, 2001 Daily Brief. It can only be hoped that the 9/11 Commission, which has picked up where the Congressional Inquiry ended, will get the answers to these questions.
Rest assured that they will be aware of the questions, for I will pass them along.
Riley, a Southern Baptist, says Alabama has taxed its poorest too harshly for too long.I don't understand. Doesn't Jesus say if a man asks you for your coat, you should give him your shirt, too?
"According to our Christian ethics, we're supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor," he said. "It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax."
Two of the governor's cabinet members resigned after Riley made the proposal. One of them, Labor Commissioner Charles Bishop, now leads opposition to the tax plan, saying Alabama voters thought they were getting a tax-cutting conservative who would eliminate waste, but instead got the opposite.
But technically, file sharing is not theft.Very interesting. Read the whole thing.
A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The Supremes did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked.
So "copying" is not "stealing" but can be "infringing." That doesn't have the same sound bite quality as Valente's position.
Complicated matters further, copying is not always infringing. If the work is not copyrighted, if you have a license to make the copy, or if the work is in the public domain, you can copy at will. Also, not all "copies" are the same. Say you buy a CD and play it on your computer -- technically, you have already made a "copy" onto the PC in the process of playing it, but that's not an infringement.
Making an archive copy is okay too, as long as your retain the original. What about a transformative copy -- say, making an MP3 out of a CD? You can do that, so long as you retain the original work. If the original CD get scratched, damaged or lost, you can probably burn the MP3 back to a CD (sans the really "sucky" titles), but this is not entirely clear.
So the RIAA and MPAA's claims that all "copying" is "stealing" are much overhyped.
But so too are the claims some swappers make that, simply because I bought a particular CD at some time in the past (or really, really thought about buying it), I now have the inherent right to share it with all my friends (even the ones I have never met in Singapore, Malaysia and Eastern Europe).
Tapped's new favorite thing is the Federal Election Commission database where you can type in anyone's name and see if he or she has donated money to political candidates or parties. (Tapped's old favorite thing was The Washington Post's home buyer database, where you could learn how much your neighbors spent for their apartments.) So check out this nifty little listing (go here and search for "Steinhardt, Michael") that we discovered while trying to see which big-shot New Democrats were supporting which Democratic presidential candidates: According to this list, Michael Steinhardt, former Democratc Leadership Council stalwart and part-owner of The New Republic, gave $2,000 to Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. on June 20, 2003.
Now, we know that there's often little direct relationship between a magazine owner's politics and the views of its writers, but it is a notable thing when one of the more prominent New Democrats around starts financing the continuation of the Bush administration.
As Den Beste puts it: "We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self-interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us. So why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in making the case for war, put so much emphasis on U.N. resolutions and weapons of mass destruction? Honesty and plain speaking are not virtues for politicians and diplomats. If either Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair had said what I did, it would have hit the fan big-time. Making clear a year ago that this was our true agenda would have virtually guaranteed that it would fail."
More sophisticated versions of this excuse are becoming familiar on the right, where everyone is seeking a plausible rationalization for appallingly poor policymaking. In the meantime, the White House still has much to conceal, as honest Republicans like Richard Lugar have noticed. The Indiana senator, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complained to NPR that the administration isn't being wholly truthful about the price of the Iraq occupation. They know it will cost tens of billions, he told National Public Radio. "But they do not wish to discuss that," Lugar added. What would happen if the brilliant Bush foreign policy team told us how much their adventure will cost? Why, someone might demand that Bush permit the return of the U.N. inspectors so that our former allies would be more willing to help police and rebuild that ruined nation.
Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.Oh no, this is nothing like Viet Nam. Not at all. And the soldiers coming home will be secure in the knowledge they were serving such a noble cause. That's why they kicked the shit out of a Japanese reporter who filmed the aftermath of this botched raid.
The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.
Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him."
Two civilians, both believed to have been driving with their families, were brought to the Yarmouk, one with abdominal wounds and the other with "his brain outside of his head", according to another doctor.
Standing in her living room, next to a piano with framed photos of her two daughters and celebrity friends like Bill Maher, who has made her a regular on his TV shows, Huffington hit all the progressive chords at the Sunday meeting. She vowed to "nationalize" the campaign, turning it into a referendum not just on Davis' governorship but on the Bush presidency and the corporate looting of the state and nation.
"If, as [Republican challenger] Bill Simon says Gray Davis is fiscally irresponsible, then George Bush is fiscally insane," she told the group. One of Davis' chief mistakes, Huffington argues, was his failure to explain to California voters why the Bush White House -- and its old friends at Enron and the energy industry -- are largely responsible for the state's budget woes. Huffington, whose recent bestseller "Pigs at the Trough" savages the reign of greed, corruption and environmental plunder under Bush, said she can't wait to take on the president's buddy Schwarzenegger. "It will be 'the hybrid vs. the Hummer,' said the near-candidate, who launched a media campaign last year against gas-guzzling SUVs.
But while Mr. Bush's poll numbers have fallen back to prewar levels, he hasn't suffered a Blair-like collapse. Why?
One answer, surely, is the kid-gloves treatment Mr. Bush has always received from the news media, a treatment that became downright fawning after Sept. 11. There was a reason Mr. Blair's people made such a furious attack on the ever-skeptical BBC.
Another answer may be that in modern America, style trumps substance. Here's what Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said in a speech last week: "To gauge just how out of touch the Democrat leadership is on the war on terror, just close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet on the deck of that aircraft carrier." To say the obvious, that remark reveals a powerful contempt for the public: Mr. DeLay apparently believes that the nation will trust a man, independent of the facts, because he looks good dressed up as a pilot. But it's possible that he's right.
What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that's all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.
Democrats will have to neutralize the "security gap" -- the wide chasm between the parties on the threshold issue for the presidency. Many of society's most vulnerable voters, including seniors, place high importance on security. Swing voters are unlikely to vote for a Democrat unless he can offer a vision to compete with Republicans when it comes to national defense and homeland security. In the past, Democrats like President Clinton had to neutralize the Republicans on crime and welfare reform to be heard on other issues. Today, Democrats must be strong on security to be heard on the economy.Click here for the whole thing.
Voters on the whole have mixed impressions of the Democratic Party. The ability of the Democratic Party to reach the growing segments of the electorate, and particularly married voters with kids at home, is hurt by current perceptions that Democrats stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal, and are beholden to special interest groups. These perceptions, which relegated Democrats to the sidelines in the 1980s, once again put the party at a disadvantage as it attempts to woo swing men and married men who currently lean heavily toward the Republican column.
Key general election voters and even Democratic primary voters show a higher level of confidence in moderate Democrats than in liberal Democrats. This is true on a favorability scale and on trust in handling domestic issues like the economy, health care, and education; fiscal issues like taxes and government spending; and national security and homeland defense.
The underlying values of the New Democrat agenda draw even stronger support in post-9/11 America. The New Democrat agenda remains central to expanding the party's appeal to moderates, especially among male swing voters. The agenda is also received positively by liberals.
Why has the uranium story puffed up so huge? It wouldn't have been a very big deal without the deepening crisis in Iraq. But it also has ballast because it clarifies an aspect of George W. Bush's essential character — specifically, the problem he has with telling the truth. I am not saying Bush is a liar. Lying is witting: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." This is weirder than that. The President seems to believe that wishing will make it so — and he is so stupendously incurious that he rarely makes an effort to find the truth of the matter. He misleads not only the nation but himself. Every worst-case Saddam scenario just had to be true, as did every best-case post-Saddam scenario. Bush's talent for self-deception extends to domestic and economic policy. He probably believes that he's a compassionate conservative, even though he has allowed every antipoverty program he favors to be eviscerated by Congress. This week's outrage is the crippling of AmeriCorps, which he had pledged to increase in size. He probably believes that his tax cuts for the wealthy will help reduce the mammoth $455 billion budget deficit (which doesn't include the cost of Iraq), even though Ronald Reagan found that the exact opposite was true and had to raise taxes twice to repair the damage done by his 1981 cuts. And Bush probably believed, as the sign said, that the "mission" had been "accomplished" in Iraq when he landed on the aircraft carrier costumed as a flyboy. He may even have believed that he was a flyboy.
But the country can no longer afford the President's self-delusions. He is entering the most crucial six months of his presidency. As a team of experts hired by the Pentagon reported last week: "The window for cooperation may close rapidly if they [the Iraqis] do not see progress." Which brings us back to the second part of the question the President didn't answer last week: Why is no one helping us in Iraq? A simple answer: Why on earth should they? The situation is a mess, in large part because of American arrogance. We insisted on doing the reconstruction on our own (only 13,000 of the 148,000 troops on the ground are British). It seems plain now that going it alone isn't working. Even Donald Rumsfeld came very close to admitting that on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. Asked if we should turn Iraq over to the United Nations, he said, "At some point, I think that—" and then he caught himself and said, "They're already playing an important role."
Still, some legal experts argue that the tactic is risky, particularly if the industry appears to be concentrating on families with no resources to defend themselves.Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you heard a mass-released record you just had to own? Suppose you did buy it and bring it home: betcha there were only one or two tolerable songs on the entire CD, right? Which works out to, oh, I don't know, eight dollars per usable song...
"The practice of filing thousands of lawsuits is a game of chicken, and not a sustainable model for the industry or the courts," Mr. Zittrain said. "The overall puzzle for the industry is how to truly convince the public that this is in the public interest."
He said there was no obvious historical analogue to the scattershot subpoenaing of individuals in copyright law enforcement, which has traditionally been aimed at businesses or people who are profiting from illegally copied material. He likened it instead to raids during Prohibition, or red-light cameras that catch drivers disobeying traffic laws when they think they are unobserved. Both have given rise to social outcry, Mr. Zittrain said, even though they were used simply to enforce the law.
Over at the headquarters of the California Democratic Party, the reaction was only slightly more nuanced. With moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger and populist something-or-other Arianna Huffington both poised to enter the race to replace Davis, Democrats realize they can no longer dismiss the recall drive as the fantasy of a million or so right-wing extremists. So chief Democratic spokesman Bob Mulholland was diving for the gutter this week in the hope of dirtying up the Terminator -- and trivializing Huffington -- before their candidacies take hold with voters. In a telephone call with Salon, Mulholland mocked Huffington's evolving political allegiances, riffed on Arnold's alleged penchant for groping women who aren't his wife, then took time to note that Schwarzenegger's father was a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.
"That stuff can be hard for any family," Mulholland said of the dirt he was dishing on Schwarzenegger. But he said it in a tone that suggested something less than heartfelt sympathy for the Schwarzenegger clan, and he didn't come close to apologizing. "Schwarzenegger has got to ask himself, 'Do I put myself in the election, take all the abuse and lose?'" Mulholland said. "I served in Vietnam, Gray Davis served in Vietnam, and we're not going to be replaced by somebody whose dad was in the Nazi army."
President Richard Nixon personally ordered the "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972, a trusted aide has now revealed, resurrecting the scandal that led to Nixon's political ruin and forced him from the nation's highest office.
Jeb Stuart Magruder, who was Nixon's assistant communications director before moving to the re-election committee, said he was privy to a telephone conversation between Nixon and John Mitchell, the campaign chairman, in which the president urged Mitchell to proceed with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate.
The revelation, if true, places the Watergate burglary in a new historical light. Though never concretely established, it generally was felt that Nixon was not involved in the break-in itself, only in the cover-up that occurred after the fact - an involvement that forced him to resign from office on Aug. 9, 1974.
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
....The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.
Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said.
The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.
The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.
Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality, a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South S.C.).
Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.
This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information about conservatism, and the result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, said Sulloway. That entails the tendency of people's attitudinal preferences on policy matters to be explained by individual needs based on personality, social interests or existential needs.
The researchers' analytical methods allowed them to determine the effects for each class of factors and revealed "more pluralistic and nuanced understanding of the source of conservatism," Sulloway said.
While most people resist change, Glaser said, liberals appear to have a higher tolerance for change than conservatives do.
The researchers said that conservative ideologies, like virtually all belief systems, develop in part because they satisfy some psychological needs, but that "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."
They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.
"In many cases, including mass politics, 'liberal' traits may be liabilities, and being intolerant of ambiguity, high on the need for closure, or low in cognitive complexity might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty," the researchers wrote.
....Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white in ways that would make liberals squirm," Glaser said.
He pointed as an example to a 2001 trip to Italy, where President George W. Bush was asked to explain himself. The Republican president told assembled world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right." And in 2002, Bush told a British reporter, "Look, my job isn't to nuance."
One person who has worked with Rice describes as "inconceivable" the claims that she was not more actively involved. Indeed, subsequent to the July 18 briefing, another senior administration official said Rice had been briefed immediately on the NIE -- including the doubts about Iraq's nuclear program -- and had "skimmed" the document. The official said that within a couple of weeks, Rice "read it all."
Bush aides have made clear that Rice's stature is undiminished in the president's eyes. The fault is one of a process in which speech vetting was not systematic enough, they said. "You cannot have a clearance process that depends on the memory of people who are bombarded with as much information, as much paperwork, as many meetings, as many phone calls," one official said. "You have to make sure everybody, each time, actually reads the documents. And if it's a presidential speech, it has to be done at the highest levels."
Democrats, however, see a larger problem with Rice and her operation. "If the national security adviser didn't understand the repeated State Department and CIA warnings about the uranium allegation, that's a frightening level of incompetence," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), who as the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee has led the charge on the intelligence issue. "It's even more serious if she knew and ignored the intelligence warnings and has deliberately misled our nation. . . . In any case it's hard to see why the president or the public will have confidence in her office."
Former majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said in an interview this week that he could see Democrats using the actions of Thomas and others to paint "a systematic pattern of Republicans using heavy-handed tactics. . . . We said 40 years of one-party rule is enough. Now they're saying 10 years is enough."
Perhaps most vexing to House Democrats is the GOP's refusal to let them offer ideas -- such as an expansion of the child tax credit for low-income families -- for votes on the House floor. Republicans won control of the House, in part, by promising to allow elected representatives a chance to voice their proposals and have them voted up or down. On the November 1994 night that voters delivered the House into GOP hands, the incoming speaker, Gingrich, declared: "We're going to be dramatically more fair than the Democrats have been in my lifetime."
Nonetheless, Republicans routinely write complicated legislation and provide Democrats little time to review it. They frequently prevent the minority party from offering an alternative.
Norman Ornstein, a nonpartisan congressional scholar, this week wrote in the newspaper Roll Call that the Democratic "high-handedness" Gingrich lamented was "nothing compared to what House Republicans are doing now."
Republicans concede that it was easier -- or more convenient -- to make promises in 1993 as the minority party, than to keep them in 2003 as the majority party.
I became so angry at the Democrats driving down the highway, that I pulled over my Jag. I pulled under a tree and I thought. The more I thought about how all the things Democrats have done to real Americans the madder I got. I became so enraged that I could feel my rock hard nipples poking through my 34C bra. I touched those rock head nipples with my finger tips. I became more enraged just thinking about Ted Kennedy. I could feel my juices flowing. I could feel these juices as they quickly soaked my silk panties. In my anger I touched myself "down there." I touched with fingers that knew their way around the parts of my womanhood like no other. The more I thought about Democrats the madder I became. The madder I became, the wetter I got. The wetter I got the more I touched myself "down there."And then there's the G. Gordon Liddy parody:
Ken handed me pictures he had drawn of Clinton, These drawings showed a stick man with "Clinton" written above it, and he was forcing the other stick men to make reference of Saddam trying to buy nuclear stuff from Niger. The other two stick men had written above their heads, " Bush," and "Dick." The drawing also had a crude outline of the nation of Niger, and it had a mushroom cloud, with the word," BOOM." above it.
"The Vice President also has some proof," Ken said. I looked at the Vice President and he handed me an official White House blank sheet of paper with the embossed letterhead of Bill Clinton at the top of it. I looked at the blank sheet of paper and back at the Vice President. "Thats proof enough for me." I said. The Vice President also nodded his head and said, "Clinton forced me and George to say those things in the State of the Union address about WMD. We didn't want to, but Clinton said he would have sex with ours wives if we didn't." I shook my head in disbelief. I was so angry at Clinton! "Damn!" I yelled and pounded my fist on the table.
...Yes, in baseball when the team stinks, you fire the manager. But you don't fire him because it rains. And you don't let the opposing team choose a new manager for you.
And you don't fire him between innings. And replace him with a Viennese weightlifter.
Here's why the economy turned: The dot-com bubble burst. (Obviously on the orders of Gray Davis.) The airline industry collapsed. (Just as Gray Davis planned.) We fought two wars. (Playing right into Gray Davis' hands.) And Dick Cheney's friends at Enron "gamed" the energy market and ripped off the state for billions.
So you can see the problem: Gray Davis.
And the obvious solution: A Viennese weightlifter. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German.
But there are still a lot of Democrats with sour grapes over the last presidential election, and they're not collecting petitions to replace George Bush with Bernie Mac.
Now, I'm not saying that I like Davis. Being enthusiastic about Davis would be like saying your favorite food is straw. But he fought for his country in Vietnam and won a fair election, and he's entitled to his term.
Maybe he's a lousy governor, but he was the one elected by voters who bothered to show up at the polls. Their efforts shouldn't be undone by disgruntled shoppers signing a petition on their way out of Target.
Anyone who thinks this recall is some great affirmation of democracy should review early American history. This is precisely the kind of direct involvement by the howling masses that the framers wanted to avoid.
But, hey, let's have the recall. And then the people who voted for Davis can have a recall and put him back in. And then we can throw him out again. It works well in Italy.
And it'll really help the state economy, too, when investors realize our political system is on par with Belize.
Oh, and a recall election will cost the state up to $35 million. Money we would otherwise just waste on schools and roads. And we'll still have to have a regular election in March.
But this really isn't about elections at all. This is about a congressman named Darrell Issa, a Republican car alarm magnate who wants to be governor and has spent $1.5 million of his own money to fund the recall effort.
Think about that as the silver lining the next time a car alarm wakes you up in the middle of the night.
Well, this is the longest statement of disinformation that I think the American government has distributed to the American people. You know, the very obvious thing is where are the nuclear weapons. Why haven't we found the nuclear weapons? Why haven't we found the evidence that he was really trying to import uranium and enrich uranium for nuclear weapons? Where are the scud-type missiles that Cheney was talking about? Where are the hundreds and hundreds of tons of chemical agents that he said, and the C.I.A. said could fill 16,000 rockets.
Where are the huge numbers of materials that were supposedly produced for thousands of liters of Anthrax and botulinum toxin and all of the other biological agents that Colin Powell listed in his speech to the UN--which was written for him by the C.IA. after he turned down a version of the speech that was written for him by Dick Cheney's chief subordinate? Where is any of this material? The fact of the matter is that there was no clear and present danger, there was no imminent threat.
And for Dick Cheney just to recite these charges that we all know now not to be true, adds to the terrible politicization of intelligence that's created a scandal in the intelligence community unlike anything I ever saw in my 24 years in the C.I.A. That includes the period of Vietnam, the period of the intelligence failure on the Soviet union, and the incredibly contentious disputes over arms control.
SO WHEN, FOR instance, he says “this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war,” people might begin to wonder whether he is telling the truth. They might wonder if the 13 percent state-college tuition hike in Maryland or the $1 billion state-tax increase in Ohio or the state Medicaid crisis now raging from coast to coast might have something to do with priorities in Washington. If Bush loses, it won’t be on yellowcake uranium but on “let them eat cake” economics.
Yes, the president acknowledges that the economic downturn might also have contributed something to the eye-popping $455 billion budget deficit announced last week, the largest ever. But God forbid he admits that his huge tax cuts are in any way relevant. That would risk saying something inconvenient and true. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that Bush’s tax cuts have cost the Treasury nearly three times as much as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, reconstruction after September 11 and homeland-security measures combined. Tax cuts = 9/11 + war x 3. And the numbers get much worse in the years ahead as baby boomers retire. In other words, even if the tax cuts help stimulate a modest recovery, we have dug ourselves a deep hole.
....Explaining all this politically is a “bank shot,” to use a billiards term. It requires trusting the voters with complexity. Will they see that their new $400 child credits are chump change compared with all the new fee hikes and service cuts? Will they understand that they’re paying more in state and local taxes so that a guy with a Jaguar putting up a McMansion down the block can pay less in federal taxes? Will they connect those 30 kids cramming their child’s classroom to decisions in faraway Washington?
It’s hard to tell, but the Democrats better try to develop that connective tissue. The reason I have not yet written off John Edwards is that he is quietly devoting his campaign to this theme. In New Hampshire last week, he raised Bush’s unfunded mandates in education: “The result is that your property taxes have to be raised, and that’s a huge mistake.”
President Bush is a regular guy who doesn’t care a whole lot about regular people. The first is a political asset; voters like his guyness. The second is his greatest vulnerability, and he offers more evidence for it almost every day. Remember how he promised last winter to get rid of a loophole that allows U.S. companies with homeland-security contracts to unpatriotically incorporate in Bermuda to avoid taxes? The loophole’s still there. Remember how he promised to expand national-service opportunities for patriotic young Americans by 50 percent? Last week—despite bipartisan action in the Senate—he still hadn’t lifted a finger in the House for a measly $100 million to keep AmeriCorps from being slashed by 40 percent, leaving kids untutored and after-school programs facing closure. Who is he for first? The question is not just if the president tells the truth but if the truth—finally—will be told about him.
The push was championed by then-Secretary of State John T. Willis, who dismissed the Hopkins report as "technological hysteria."
"To say I can duplicate a Smart Card, sure, you can postulate all kinds of things, but there are so many checks and balances," he said. "I have 100 years of election data. If someone would try to monkey around precinct by precinct with the vote results, I'd know."
But not everyone is so sure. In 2001, four out of the five members of the technical group that was asked to recommend to the state which electronic voting system to buy instead recommended against buying any at all. The state ignored the advice.
"They didn't take us very seriously then," said Tom Iler, director of Information Technology for Baltimore County who served on the group. "I suppose it's not very surprising that they're not taking this study very seriously now."
Our mission is to mobilize military families, veterans, and GIs themselves to demand: an end to the occupation of Iraq and other misguided military adventures; and an immediate return of all US troops to their home duty stations.Be sure to click on the letters page.
The truth is coming out. The American public was deceived by the Bush administration about the motivation for and intent of the invasion of Iraq. It is equally apparent that the administration is stubbornly and incompetently adhering to a destructive course. Many Americans do not want our troops there. Many military families do not want our troops there. Many troops themselves do not want to be there. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis do not want US troops there.
Our troops are embroiled in a regional quagmire largely of our own government's making. These military actions are not perceived as liberations, but as occupations, and our troops are now subject to daily attacks. Meanwhile, without a clear mission, they are living in conditions of relentless austerity and hardship. At home, their families are forced to endure extended separations and ongoing uncertainty.
As military veterans and families, we understand that hardship is sometimes part of the job. But there has to be an honest and compelling reason to impose these hardships and risks on our troops, our families, and our communities. The reasons given for the occupation of Iraq does not rise to this standard.
Without just cause for war, we say bring the troops home now!
Not one more troop killed in action. Not one more troop wounded in action. Not one more troop psychologically damaged by the act of terrifying, humiliating, injuring or killing innocent people. Not one more troop spending one more day inhaling depleted uranium. Not one more troop separated from spouse and children. This is the only way to truly support these troops, and the families who are just as much part of the military as they are.
Bush says "Bring 'em on." We say "BRING THEM HOME NOW!"
So no wonder Washington wants to believe Saddam and his late sons are the inspiration for those guerrilla attacks that cost the lives of another three Americans just today. No wonder Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz clings to the idea that paid assassins are at the heart of resistance to the benevolent American presence. And we should all hope that’s the case, because if it is, then the end of Saddam, which may come soon, could really mean an end to the war.Good piece. Read the whole thing.
But Adnan Abu Odeh, a former advisor to Jordan’s King Hussein and one of the region’s real wise men, offers another scenario. He suggests the Iraqi people see themselves struggling against two enemies now: Saddam on the one hand, the American occupiers on the other. “Ironically, if Saddam is killed as well as his two sons,” says Abu Odeh, “that will accelerate the process of seeing the Americans as the real enemy.”
The dynasty is over. The dying is not.
Among the revelations (culled from various articles and columns) that occurred after the lobbyists were faced with possible penalties for perjury:
* "I am not aware of any instance where we said the problem was the enormous amount of frivolous lawsuits," said Jeff Scott, legal counsel for the FMA (Florida Medical Association).
* When Sandra Mortham of the Florida Medical Association testified, Campbell demanded to know why Mortham had blamed "frivolous lawsuits" for the rise in malpractice rates. "Certainly, I've never said that," replied Mortham, a former House member from Largo and the FMA chief executive officer. "I don't feel I have the information to say whether or not there are frivolous lawsuits in the state of Florida."
* A state regulator said no, there hasn't been an explosion of frivolous lawsuits.
*Witness after witness denied a crush of frivolous lawsuits has crippled the state's medical malpractice tort system.
* We fixed the frivolous lawsuit problem" in past legislative sessions, testified Bob White, president of First Professionals Insurance.
* Insurers didn't need a cap on jury awards to be profitable.
* State data shows malpractice claims have not skyrocketed and that Florida has more physicians than ever.
* There has been no sharp rise in medical malpractice settlements made by insurance companies.
* A state insurance regulator surprised senators by saying he often depended on insurance companies' information when deciding whether to raise rates.
*Contrary to stories of doctors quitting the business, the number of licensed doctors is increasing. A Health Department official said new applications for new medical licenses in Florida rose from 2,261 in fiscal 2000 to 2,658 in fiscal 2003.
*Bob White, president of First Professionals Insurance Co., the state's largest malpractice insurer, surprised senators by blaming rising premiums mainly on new medical technologies and procedures...
*The hearings also revealed that White's company pays $500,000 a year as an "endorsement fee" to the Florida Medical Association, the doctors group that rallied for the cap.
*First Professionals was lobbying for the damages cap at the same time it has “boasted to stockholders of its profits in Florida.”
* The Florida Medical Association received $4.5 million in endorsements from insurance companies to lobby for tort reform. That represents about 10% of the FMA budget.
Fall guys, intimidation and leaked personal attacks on enemies are back in at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. How Nixonian. How disappointing.
"If you look at every policy, pension reform, guess who gets the shaft? Tort reform, guess who gets the shaft? Environmental reform, you know the level of hypocrisy," he said. "If it comes to who is going to get a break, people who make $1 million today or young kids who will make the country tomorrow, you don't even have to look."
Recent political history shows Democrats win when they stand up and fight, Carville said.
And that lead to what Carville said was the big issue for Democrats in '04, what he called the Bush administration's reversal of "the generational promise of America -- each time we do what we can do to make the next generation better."
"That promise, today like no other time in our lifetime, is under attack," he said. "The idea that we are a society beyond our own self-interest is under attack. We are told America is best when people are interested in ourselves. We know America is better when we're based on a common interest.
"We have a president that is no longer interested in what happens to the next generation. We have a president that is no longer interested in what happens to the promise of America.
"I am telling you that there is so much at stake here. There is so much for us to fight for. There are so many people who don't want to give up the dream of generational promise.
"People always ask, 'What can I do? What can I do?'" Carville told the 1,000-plus crowd. "Sit down, shut up and write a check. And then after you do that, get to a phone bank and do whatever you can in your city or state."
Uranium-from-Africa? The item was chosen for its high drama; it has those entertaining crudely forged documents (although no one seems to be asking who forged them), and it has that stirring honest ambassador. And Niger was chosen for its murk—the story is driven by several conflations in which the press corps has taken delight. Here at THE HOWLER, we stand with that mailer; without prejudging what a probe would show, we’d like to see a real probe of these matters. But if we let the press corps play with the facts, and if we let them dawdle on that side road, we’ll never see a real investigation. Clinton had it right on Larry King Live—this Niger matter is just no big deal. An American president cites British intelligence, and that is supposed to be a Big Scandal? But then, Perfect Storms are built on spin—and they allow a lazy press to ignore “much larger patterns.”
Let's not forget that back in 2001, Mr. Greenspan lent crucial political aid to the first Bush tax cut, arguing that such a cut was necessary to prevent, yes, excessive budget surpluses and too rapid a payoff of the federal government's debt. He should have known better _ it wasn't hard, even then, to figure out that those huge projected surpluses were largely fantasy. But he tied himself in knots to find a way to give his political friends what they wanted.
He could have redeemed himself by changing his mind once record surpluses turned into record deficits, but he didn't. Mr. Greenspan still talks about the evils of deficits, but refuses to say the obvious: that if we are ever to balance the budget again, many of the Bush tax cuts will have to be reversed once the economy recovers. Instead, Mr. Greenspan offers platitudes about spending restraint: ``I would prefer to find the situation in which spending was constrained, the economy was growing and that tax cuts were capable of being initiated without creating fiscal problems.'' (``I would prefer a world in which Julia Roberts was calling me,'' Representative Brad Sherman replied, ``but that is unlikely to occur.'') In short, the budget is in a mess, and Mr. Greenspan is one of the main culprits. And that, suggest some people I've talked to, may explain how he misjudged his recent testimony so badly.
10. As we reported on July 17, Tenet's lengthy, closed Capitol Hill testimony "outed" not just NSC non-proliferation staffer Bob Joseph, but also Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, and, by implication, Condi Rice, and Vice President Cheney, if not Bush himself.
-- yesterday, Hadley performed a virtual repeat of Tenet's highly qualified "taking responsibility" pose by making it clear that if he has to take a fall, then Ms. Rice needs to explain why she didn't read the memos he gave her.
11. As one Administration source put it, privately, today: "Between Tenet and Hadley, Condi now has the choice of saying she's a fool, or a liar…if not both. Bottom line is she failed to protect the President…look at all this lame stuff about him not being a 'fact checker'. It's just incredible."
-- even before last week, a source close to the White House told us, "the President now sees that he's exposed on the intel problems. And he now sees who's been manipulating him, and he's not happy about it. No president likes to be embarrassed, but this stuff goes to the heart of all the reservations, pre-9/11, about his intelligence, his attention span, and his interest in foreign affairs."
Diebold is a major supplier of electronic voting equipment in the United States, with more than 50,000 of its voting stations installed in Georgia, California, Kansas and other states.Update: The New York Time ran this today:
The company said its e-voting software is constantly updated to comply with certification requirements, but the researchers said the software would have to be rebuilt from scratch in order to address the security vulnerabilities they found.
“The stuff that we looked at is not something from which you could evolve a secure system,” Avi Rubin, technical director of Johns Hopkins’ Information Security Institute, told MSNBC.com.
In addition to Rubin, the research team included Yoshi Kohno and Adam Stubblefield, doctoral students at Johns Hopkins, and Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice.
....Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer science professor who serves on Iowa’s board of examiners for electronic voting systems, said he recognized one of the encryption flaws cited by the researchers’ report as one he called attention to during a board meeting at least five years ago.
“I can say with great confidence that several Diebold representatives were at the meeting, and one of their people who was described to me as being one of their main programmers,” he told MSNBC.com. “The fact that that flaw is still there, half a decade later, is as far as I’m concerned grounds for decertifying their machine.”
Jones said that based on the researchers’ report, he recommended decertification to Iowa’s secretary of state on Wednesday. The issue would have to be considered by the full board of election examiners, he said.
Some critics of e-voting contend that the software flaws could affect optical-scan voting machines as well. Jones said he would not call for decertification of those machines, however, because Iowa election law requires on-paper confirmation of optical-scan results at the precinct level.
He also noted that with optical-scan systems, there was a paper trail that could be retraced in case there were any questions. Indeed, the bottom line for Jones as well as Rubin and other e-voting skeptics is that any voting system should have a voter-verifiable paper audit.
“With the direct-reporting electronic system, where all these questions about security actually touch on the authenticity of anything the machine retains, we have nothing to fall back on,” Jones said.
Such a “paper trail” requirement has been proposed in a House bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.
Jones, who said he was involved in the drafting of the bill, quoted a phrase oft used by e-voting skeptics: “If you have a voter-verifiable audit trail, even the devil himself could design the software, and you’d still be able to conduct an honest election.”
The move to electronic voting — which intensified after the troubled Florida presidential balloting in 2000 — has been a source of controversy among security researchers. They argue that the companies should open their software to public review to be sure it operates properly.For the techies among you, check out the story board posts at Slashdot.
Mr. Richardson of Diebold said the company's voting-machine source code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he said, but "we don't feel it's necessary to turn it over to everyone who asks to see it, because it is proprietary."
....As an industry leader, Diebold has been the focus of much of the controversy over high-tech voting. Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
The list of flaws in the Diebold software is long, according to the paper, which is online at www.avirubin.com/vote.pdf. Among other things, the researchers said, ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent.
The kind of scrutiny that the researchers applied to the Diebold software would turn up flaws in all but the most rigorously produced software, Mr. Stubblefield said. But the standards must be as high as the stakes, he said.
"This isn't the code for a vending machine," he said. "This is the code that protects our democracy."
Want to know how far off the rails things have slid at the Pentagon? Recently, the Army wanted to tally up how much money it had been forced to divert to private contractors as part of Rumsfeld's rush to privatize military tasks. The Rummycrats forbid it. They refused to let the Army balance its own books — because the privatization mafia knew what they would find: Contractors cost more, not less, than soldiers.
When honest budget managers in the services calculate the transition of any uniformed job to a private contractor, their working assumption is that the contract employee will cost the Pentagon $100,000 a year. A sergeant barely makes a quarter of that, and a private hardly a fifth — including benefits.
You, the taxpayer, are being cheated outrageously in the name of an ideologically driven crusade to reduce the size of government. This is corporate welfare that has nothing to do with the welfare of our troops. And guess what? Most of those contractors disappear when the bullets start flying.
The occupation and the reconstruction efforts are going well in Iraq — much better than the media reports imply — but our soldiers are making progress despite the lies, incompetence, greed, favoritism and wishful thinking on the part of the Rummycrats.
At a press conference in Japan the day after David Kelly's body was found, Tony Blair was asked, ''Have you got blood on your hands, prime minister?'' Alas, there is an ocean of blood on the hands of Tony Blair and George Bush. Whether shown to be ''lying'' or not, they shunted aside the ambiguities and uncertainties that characterized the prewar intelligence assessments of Hussein's threat. And though, as I argued last week, there is a long tradition of leaders manipulating intelligence estimates for their own preset purposes, the act of war is in a special category. When disputed intelligence is the basis of war, then the leader's reading of that intelligence had better be proven true. Otherwise the just war argument from necessity fails.
No wonder the dispute won't die. The questions matter too much. No wonder polls are shifting away from Bush. Citizens of the United States do not like to think of themselves as wanton killers. No wonder American soldiers in Iraq are openly expressing doubts. A democracy's first requirement of military discipline is the army's belief in the moral necessity of its mission. No wonder, even, pressures of the dispute may have driven one man to kill himself. The issue is mortal: Was George Bush's new style ''preventive'' war just another war of aggression, after all?
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