the generic spot

Gone Until September 2005

2005-05-06T17:54:00.000-05:00

2005-04-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

2005-04-05T20:52:00.000-05:00

Thou Shalt Not Kill

2005-03-22T10:01:00.000-06:00

from Father John Dear's homily on June 10,2004
(Matthew 5:19-26)

Last weekend, Daniel Berrigan and I spoke to a church gathering on Block Island, Rhode Island about these difficult days of war. A ninety-nine year old woman named Ira stood up and told about her grandson who has been preparing to enter the seminary to become a minister, but then decided to join the Marines. She asked him, “If someone orders you to kill, are you going to obey that order?” Yes, he said. “But aren’t you planning to become a minister someday?” Yes, he answered again. “Well, Jesus would never kill anyone and he orders you not to kill anyone no matter what.”

The grandson was speechless. But he has gone into the Marines and is now in Iraq. She continues to write him, urging him not to kill anyone and advising him to quit immediately. “I have seen wars throughout my entire life,” she said, “but I can tell you that war never solves anything. War destroys everything and makes everything worse. We have to be against war for the rest of our lives.”

In our Gospel from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Thou shalt not kill, and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother or sister will be liable to judgment. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there you recall that your brother or sister has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”

The Gospel is very clear. We have two choices. We can be like the scribes and the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, disregard this great commandment, and kill in the name of God to maintain our power and prestige; we can be like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their generals and refuse to reconcile or show love; we can be angry and support the killing of thousands and millions of people in Iraq and elsewhere in order to protect U.S. interests and oil companies. Or, like the saints and martyrs, we can follow Jesus, refuse to kill, be mindful of the roots of violence within us, refuse to give in to our anger, forgive those who hurt us, reconcile with those who have something against us, love our enemies and practice divine compassion.

What we are trying to do is simple and yet difficult; it does not attract media interest or worldly esteem. We are trying to follow the nonviolent Jesus. We not only refuse to kill or support war, we try to watch the anger and violence within us, to maintain the peace of Christ in our hearts through prayer and forgiveness, to reconcile with everyone, to love our enemies and even to practice perfect compassion toward all beings, just like Jesus. This is the wisest choice we can make, the best thing we can do with our lives, the most helpful way to live in these dark times.

The goal of this Gospel life lies in the opening verse: “to let our righteousness surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees.” We too have to surpass our modern day culture of Pharisees, to surpass the warmarkers of the day--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their generals, as well as the warmaking church and its military churchmen--and so “to enter the kingdom of heaven,” here and now, at this Eucharist and every moment for the rest of our lives. All we have to do is live in peace, resist Bush’s wars, show compassion toward one and all, stand in peace with all people, and follow the nonviolent Jesus.

Things Republicans Believe: A truthful and sarcastic list

2005-03-19T09:24:00.000-06:00

1. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is a solid defense policy

2. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

3. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

4. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s and John Kerry did in the 1970s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.

5. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

6. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

7. Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

8. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

9. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

10. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

11. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

12. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

13. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

Henry Rollins in Santa Fe

2005-03-17T11:48:00.000-06:00

Last Saturday night, my wife and I arrived in Santa Fe for some much needed down time. After checking into our hotel, we walked around the Plaza in search of something to eat. Passing the Lensic Theater, we noticed all of "the kids" hanging out. Punks, granolas, hippies, et ecetera. This was our kind of crowd (and not something that is usually found in Santa Fe).

The gathering was for Henry Rollins. Rollins was in Santa Fe for his Shock & Awe tour. We had to go and it was great. Rollins was political (using Bush's own words to point out the ignorance of the president), he was humerous (sharing his experience of hanging out at William Shatner's house for Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl), and he was gripping (telling stories of spending time with amputee-soldiers returning from combat and their families).

If you get a chance to see him do it. It was a great time.

Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction

2005-03-09T21:37:00.000-06:00

United Press International

A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.

Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.

"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.

"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.

He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: "You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."

"Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well," Abou Rabeh said.

Abou Rabeh was interviewed in Lebanon.

Quotes

2005-03-09T21:24:00.000-06:00

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein

"Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is to make things more normal." -Brian Eno

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -Martin Luther King Jr.

"Go fuck yourself." -Vice President Dick Cheney

Human Rights

2005-03-05T13:36:00.000-06:00

U.S. report on Chinese human rights abuses.

Chinese report on U.S. human rights abuses.

Class-Action Warfare

2005-03-05T08:15:00.000-06:00

Why are so many congressional Democrats voting against their own interests?

By Stephanie Mencimer, The American Prospect

During the second presidential debate last year, audience member Norma-Jean Laurent posed a tough question for Democratic challenger John Kerry. Laurent noted that Kerry had bemoaned the rising cost of health care for Americans. So how, she wanted to know, could he reconcile this campaign plank with his choice of a running mate who had made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals?

The question presented Kerry with a tremendous opportunity for a spirited defense of that great bedrock of American democracy, the civil-justice system. He could have championed his faith in the good sense of American voters who serve on juries and who know a frivolous lawsuit when they see one, without needing the heavy hand of Washington to tell them what to do. He might even have braved a response suggesting that it’s the doctors who commit malpractice who drive up health costs rather than the lawyers who represent their victims.

Instead, Kerry simply said, “John Edwards and I support tort reform.” Kerry then referred Laurent to his Web site, where he said she could find a “tort-reform plan” outlining his proposals for reining in lawsuits.

It was a telling moment in the nation’s conversation about the civil-justice system, and a sign of just how far the debate had swung. In putting himself and Edwards on record as tort-reform supporters, Kerry was explicitly endorsing the conventional wisdom put forth by George W. Bush and his business backers that Americans are too litigious, that too many frivolous lawsuits are driving doctors out of business, and that lawsuits are hindering America’s economic progress. By embracing the term “tort reform,” Kerry was agreeing that Americans need to have their legal rights restricted, a view quite at odds with most of the core values traditionally expressed by Democrats, who like to campaign on their support of “the people, not the powerful.”

But it’s not just Democratic values that Kerry betrayed in the fall campaign. It’s also his party’s financial viability. Along with unions, trial lawyers have long been the Democratic Party’s most reliable and generous donors, and without them, the party, both at the state and federal level, would have few other funding options. Every time Kerry spoke up in favor of lawsuit restrictions, he risked cutting off what amounted to $36 million in contributions from lawyers to the national Democratic Party in 2004 and a whopping $123 million to individual Democratic candidates, $22 million of which went to Kerry’s own presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Nor was Kerry’s tort-reform embrace a renegade notion that put him at odds with the Democratic establishment. In February, 18 Democratic senators voted in favor of a sweeping bill to restrict consumer class actions against large corporations, including the party’s new all-star, Barack Obama, and former presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. (Despite his declaration during the debate, Kerry voted against the bill.) Thirty-two Democrats in the House have also voted in favor of restricting class actions. Democratic governors in conservative states like West Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama have all signed tort-reform legislation in recent years as well, primarily to restrict patients’ rights to sue for medical malpractice.

Democrats leaning toward tort reform have been egged on by their policy-generating institutions, such as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). These New Democrats, led by former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, have been cheerleaders for the class-action bill. Dellinger, of course, now works for Exxon and other large companies backing the tort-reform movement. Likewise, the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute recently teamed up with Common Good, a corporate-funded tort-reform group that refers to the justice system as “a tool for extortion,” to push a measure that would take malpractice lawsuits out of the hands of juries.

These groups insist that the current legal system is “indefensible” and unpredictably chaotic. Yet few of the Democratic tort reformers seem to have read the comments by Republicans lately openly acknowledging that they support lawsuit restrictions, not primarily as a good policy measure but as a mechanism for depriving Democrats of their funding base. If votes for tort reform are, in effect, votes against their party’s survival, why are so many Democrats in favor of it?

The easiest answer is simply that Democrats actually believe that what they’re voting for is in the national interest. “Call me naive, but you have to believe they’re voting out of conscience,” says Republican political consultant John Weaver, who worked on Kerry’s campaign. “And if they really believe in limiting victims’ rights, then that’s how they should vote.”

More cynically, the biggest tort reformers among the Democrats also get significant campaign contributions from insurance companies, a key beneficiary of restrictions on lawsuits. Senator Ben Nelson, for instance, is a conservative Democrat and a tort-reform supporter whose largest donors are companies such as AIG, Allstate, Aflac, and Mutual of Omaha. Likewise, Senator Christopher Dodd voted with his donors on the class-action bill. Metropolitan Life, a life-insurance company that recently settled a class action for $120 million for overcharging African American policyholders, has showered Dodd with its largesse. Dodd was also an original co-sponsor of the 1995 securities litigation “reform” act, which restricted shareholder lawsuits, and worked to override Bill Clinton’s veto of the bill.

Neil Vidmar, a professor at Duke Law School who studies juries and is frequently called upon to testify on tort-reform measures in the North Carolina Legislature, says that one big problem with legislators on both sides of the issue is that they rarely have a firsthand view of the system, even though many of them are lawyers. “A lot of politicians are incredibly naive,” says Vidmar. “They don’t really understand the process about how these things work.”

Politicians, like the rest of the general public, have been influenced by a sophisticated media campaign waged by the insurance and tobacco industries and other large companies to help insulate themselves from liability for injuries to consumers. They’ve heard the story of the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.

“It’s the result of 30 years and hundreds of millions of dollars by the business community to convince people that tort reform is right,” says Pamela Gilbert, a Washington attorney who served as the executive director of the Consumer Products Safety Commission during the Clinton administration and has lobbied for consumer groups against tort reform. “The public is beginning to believe that we have too many lawsuits and the people to blame are the ones suing, not the wrongdoers. The Democrats who vote for tort reform should know better.”

Sober government data lend credence to what Gilbert is saying. Despite Bush’s frequent characterization of the legal system as “out of control,” his own Justice Department notes that lawsuit filings are on the decline and jury awards are down. The Government Accountability Office has concluded that doctors aren’t leaving medicine because of lawsuits.

But as with Iraq and Social Security, the Democrats are deferring not to the facts on tort reform but to some political calculus defined by their opponents. “They’ve gotten into this losing mind-set that they’re constantly playing defense,” Weaver says. “They’re constantly giving up ground to the Republicans over what were once their core principals.”

Gilbert believes the move by Democrats to embrace tort reform is shortsighted, because despite what they may think, it doesn’t protect them from attacks by Republicans and big business. Take Nelson, the Nebraska senator, she says. “The Republicans will go after him anyway,” Gilbert says. “They’re not going to reward him for those tort-reform votes.”

Indeed, the state of Mississippi provides a case study in how Republicans have effectively used tort reform to regain political dominance in once-Democratic strongholds, where many Democrats attempted to find “middle ground” on tort reform and still got clobbered for it in elections. In the state’s 2003 gubernatorial race, Washington über-lobbyist Haley Barbour effectively pummeled Ronnie Musgrove as a shill for trial lawyers, even though Musgrove had actually signed into law sweeping tort reform a year earlier in an attempt to mollify the business community. Democratic Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck, due to her embrace of tort reform, lost her trial-lawyer support and was forced to switch to the Republican Party to save her political career; there was simply nowhere else to turn for campaign donations as a Democrat. In Mississippi, like in many states, trial lawyers are the only source of significant campaign funding for progressive candidates.

Pam Johnson, a lobbyist for the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association, says that the Republicans, aided by outside money and resources from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, did such a good job of demonizing trial lawyers and candidates who took their money that Democrats felt like challenging the tort-reform myths outright was a losing battle. As a result, she says, “Nobody will come out and say it’s a big lie.”

Stephanie Mencimer is an Alicia Patterson fellow and a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly.

Bush's Next Target: Malpractice Lawyers

2005-02-27T10:24:00.000-06:00

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times

Todd A. Smith is one of the nation's leading medical malpractice lawyers, renowned and feared in the courtroom, having extracted a lengthy string of multimillion-dollar settlements and verdicts from doctors, hospitals and insurers over the years. Though wealthy even by the standards of his profession, Mr. Smith, 55, seems to have lost none of the intensity and passion that fuel his 12- to 14-hour workdays and make him a persuasive trial lawyer.

Seated in his law firm's conference room, with an Olympian view high above Lake Michigan, Mr. Smith recited the details of his first courtroom victory in the summer of 1977, when he was a $12,000-a-year assistant public defender in the Cook County criminal courts. The defendant, he recalled, was an American Indian who was accused of armed robbery in a case that was based mainly on his race. The man was identified as the robber, for example, in a lineup that included him and a collection of off-duty, white police officers. "It was terribly unfair," Mr. Smith said.

What drives Mr. Smith now, he says, is what drove him then: a desire to seek justice for people who need it, whether criminal defendants too poor to hire lawyers or victims of medical lapses whose lives have been ruined and face huge bills for care. "You can make a significant contribution to someone's life, someone who might be in desperate straits," he explained. "That's as rewarding as it gets for me. It's not really, or mostly, about money."

The Bush administration wants to make Mr. Smith's profession far less financially rewarding. Medical malpractice lawyers are cast as the marquee villains in the administration's war against what it regards as a litigious culture run amok. If there were a face in the bull's-eye in this political battle, it would be Mr. Smith's. He is not only a big-name medical malpractice lawyer, but he is also serving this year as the president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the principal advocacy and lobbying group for trial lawyers. And within conservative circles and inside the White House, the term "trial lawyer" is an epithet.

This month, the administration won the first round in its fight to curb litigation, as Congress passed legislation to sharply restrict class-action lawsuits against companies. Next up is medical malpractice. In his re-election campaign, Mr. Bush repeatedly decried "junk lawsuits" as the bane of the nation's doctors. The issue was deftly framed, and the subtext was clear: greedy lawyers were attacking the Marcus Welbys of America, good doctors doing their best.

In a speech last month in Illinois, Mr. Bush again called for strict limits on medical malpractice suits, including "a hard cap of $250,000" on what patients could recover for non-economic damages like physical and emotional pain and suffering. Returning to his election-year themes, Mr. Bush said doctors "should be focused on fighting illnesses, not fighting lawsuits."

"We need to fix a broken medical liability system," he said, and he called on Congress to act this year. This month, a medical litigation overhaul bill, mirroring the administration's proposals, was introduced in the Senate by two Republican senators, John Ensign of Nevada and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

The medical liability system, health care analysts agree, is deeply flawed. But they also generally agree that the solution offered by the administration and the Republican Congress - putting a ceiling on damages - addresses only one aspect of the problem.

Medical liability policy, said Dr. William M. Sage, a physician and a law professor at Columbia University, should seek three goals: restraining overall costs, compensating the victims of medical mistakes and providing incentives for doctors and hospitals to reduce medical errors.

"There is a strong consensus among people who have really studied the issue that caps on damages would tend to keep costs down and make liability insurance more affordable for doctors," Dr. Sage said. "And there is a universal consensus that caps would do absolutely nothing to reduce medical errors or to compensate injured patients. If anything, caps on damages would make those problems worse."

Medical malpractice laws vary state by state. But California offers a glimpse of a future preferred by the administration and many Republicans in Congress. In 1975, California passed the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, which included a cap of $250,000 for damages like pain and suffering in malpractice cases. It did not limit economic damages for things like the cost of continuing care for a person disabled or wages lost because of medical errors. The law also curbed attorneys' fees on a sliding scale that prohibited them from collecting more than 15 percent on award amounts over $600,000, with higher percentages for the amounts below that sum. (In states without limits on fees, contingency payments to malpractice lawyers are typically about one-third of awards.)

Research varies on the likely impact of curbs on awards and fees, but a RAND Corporation study last year concluded that the California law had reduced the net recoveries for plaintiffs by 15 percent and had cut attorneys' fees by far more, an estimated 60 percent. Defendant liabilities, it calculated, were trimmed 30 percent because of the law.

California malpractice lawyers say the law also discourages them from taking wrongful-death cases if the victims are children or retirees. Those groups have no economic value by the cold logic of the courtroom because they are not earning salaries, so the maximum award would be $250,000. Complex cases, which often require many expert witnesses and years of research, can cost that much to bring to trial.

Linda Fermoyle Rice, a medical malpractice lawyer in Woodland Hills, Calif., said she recently told the family of a 14-year-old boy who died unexpectedly in a hospital - apparently from medical negligence, Ms. Rice said - that she could not afford to pursue the case. "The law has made it impossible for many victims to get access to the court," she said.

Even plaintiffs who get to court often come away empty-handed. Nationally, defendants prevail in nearly 80 percent of the medical malpractice cases that go to trial. Many malpractice suits, legal analysts say, are filed by personal-injury lawyers, accustomed to handling simpler cases like those involving auto accidents, but not as experienced in medical negligence work. In a 2002 survey by the trial lawyers association, only 11 percent of its 60,000 members said medical malpractice was their primary area of practice; 40 percent replied that medical negligence cases were some part of their practice.

Mr. Smith, a partner at Power, Rogers & Smith in Chicago, resides at the top of the medical malpractice mountain. He does some aviation litigation, but medical negligence claims account for 70 percent of his cases; in the last 17 years, he has won more than $300 million in verdicts and settlements for clients. Contingency fees collected by his firm would typically be 20 percent of the total, a limit set by Illinois state law on all awards over $1 million.

So how much does he earn? "Far less than you might expect," Mr. Smith replied. His firm employs 11 lawyers - six working on medical malpractice cases, the remainder focusing on other personal-injury claims. It also employs four nurses as full-time researchers. Complex cases can require reams of expert testimony, years of investigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare. Medical malpractice lawsuits are custom work, focusing on one victim at a time, as opposed to large class actions against an entire industry, like the $246 billion tobacco settlement that trial lawyers helped 46 states win in 1998.

There are no hourly fees and no well-heeled corporate clients paying for expenses. Trial lawyers are the venture capitalists of the legal system, putting their money on the line and taking upfront risk. The occasional big paydays cover the daily expenses.

For all the costs, there is still plenty left over for Mr. Smith. He won't say precisely, but he concedes that his yearly income is routinely in the high six figures, and seven figures in good years, which appear to have been plentiful recently. That would put him on a par with partners at leading corporate law firms.

At one time, corporate law would have seemed the natural choice for Mr. Smith. In 1973, he was a freshly minted M.B.A. from Northwestern University's graduate school of business, now called the Kellogg School of Management, and most of his job offers were from banks in the Chicago area. But he says he balked at what struck him as an anonymous career within the crowded managerial ranks of a big bank. He became intrigued by the law and enrolled at the Loyola University law school; while there, he started working for the public defender's office.

In that office, Mr. Smith got his first taste of trial work, and he vividly described the thrill of standing in the huge courtrooms of the Cook County criminal court and the exhilaration of presenting cases. "It was real life, and the outcome really mattered to people's lives," he said.

The most skilled trial lawyers, legal professionals agree, truly savor the theater of the courtroom, the adrenaline rush of verbal combat, the on-the-fly decisions made in cross-examination and the challenge of winning over an audience. "In the end, it all depends on the judgment of 12 people," Mr. Smith noted.

But medical malpractice work requires more than a deft touch in court. According to colleagues and courtroom adversaries, Mr. Smith combines a relentless work ethic - needed to absorb the arcane details of medical science - and an underlying belief that his clients are victims who have suffered grave injustices.

"The best plaintiffs lawyers in this field, like Todd Smith, almost have a crusader mentality," said Brian C. Fetzer, a leading malpractice defense lawyer in Chicago, who has represented physicians, hospitals and insurers in cases against Mr. Smith for more than 20 years. "They are true believers."

Joseph W. Balesteri, a lawyer who joined Power, Rogers & Smith in 2000, after five years working the defense side of medical negligence cases, said of his colleague: "Todd gets into the medicine. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, and listening to him you really see that he believes what he says. It's a credibility that is felt by the jury."

Mr. Smith says his success rate is higher than 80 percent - including jury verdicts and settlements - far higher than the national average for medical malpractice plaintiffs' lawyers. Being picky in his selection of cases helps explain the high winning percentage. He says he decides to take fewer than 3 in 100 cases that are brought to his firm. "We say to people right off that a bad outcome does not mean you have a medical negligence case," he said.

The plaintiffs' lawyer must argue that a doctor or hospital failed to meet the profession's acknowledged standard of care for a certain operation, test or treatment, and, more important, must be able to prove it.

Cases worth pursuing, Mr. Smith said, are typically ones in which the victim has suffered a major injury that results in continuing pain, suffering and disability. Brain damage, loss of a limb and facial disfigurement, he noted, are good candidates.

At his firm, potential cases go through rigorous screening that can take months and cost costs tens of thousands of dollars. The victim's medical records are collected after receiving the authorization of the patient or family. Those records are reviewed, and one of the firm's nurse-researchers assesses the care that the patient received.

Next, the case is sent to a consulting specialist - often more than one. If the case still seems promising, the accumulated information is sent to a physician who determines whether the care was negligent enough to write a certificate of merit, required in Illinois and some other states, to be presented to the court.

"In his speeches, Bush makes it sound as if every lawsuit that is brought is junk or frivolous," Mr. Smith said. "But we do everything we can to weed out cases that are without merit. We have to. Our own money is at risk."

The work, time, risk and potential rewards in complex malpractice suits are illustrated by a $20 million settlement Mr. Smith won last June. The origins of the case go back to 1997, when Huong Nguyen, then a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was experiencing shortness of breath doing ordinary things like climbing stairs. She was diagnosed as having a faulty mitral valve, a pair of triangular flaps that regulate blood flow between two of the heart's chambers. The valve had to be repaired or replaced.

The surgery lasted more than eight hours, though the procedure usually takes about half that long, Mr. Smith said. The next morning, Ms. Nguyen could squeeze her right hand, but she was otherwise paralyzed and could not speak. She had suffered severe brain damage.

A lawyer referred the family to Mr. Smith, who began investigating. After an initial screening by Mr. Smith's firm, the family filed suit against the surgeon, Dr. Bradley S. Allen. Over the next several years, in preparation for trial, the law firm spent $375,000, much of it for the work of specialists like a cardiothoracic surgeon, neurologists, economists and a forensic videographer.

Mr. Smith contended that Dr. Allen did not properly remove air from the patient's heart during the procedure and that the resulting air embolus caused brain damage. Dr. Allen's lawyer, Kevin T. Martin, said Ms. Nguyen's resulting disability was a risk in this kind of surgery and "very unfortunate, but not a medical error."

The surgery had been videotaped, but when a court ordered Dr. Allen to produce the tape, there was a lengthy gap that included brief segments of television commercials. Had the case gone to trial, Mr. Smith would have contended that the defendant tampered with evidence, an assertion denied by Mr. Martin, who said the gap in the tape had resulted from a mechanical malfunction.

Ms. Nguyen is unable to move her arms or legs and cannot sit up or speak on her own. She communicates by tapping her right forefinger on a special keyboard. She suffers from depression and seizures but is cognitively intact. "She is totally aware of her desperate straits," Mr. Smith said. "This is as bad as it gets and she knows it."

Mr. Smith's economists estimated that lifetime care for her would cost up to $20 million. The settlement talks, Mr. Smith said, began a few months before the trial was scheduled to start, with the defense offers starting at $5 million and the Nguyen family deciding to settle at $20 million. "It was entirely the family's decision," Mr. Smith said. "I think we could have gotten more in trial."

Indeed, the risk for the defense, legal analysts say, is that the pain and suffering damages in such a heart-wrenching case, handled by a skillful medical malpractice lawyer like Mr. Smith, could lift the total award far higher. "There wouldn't have been a dry eye in the house" if Ms. Nguyen's case went to trial, said Mr. Martin, the surgeon's lawyer, who estimated that a jury award could have gone up to $100 million.

In settlements, defendants make no admission of guilt and typically try to add confidentiality agreements to the deal. Mr. Smith's firm, as a matter of policy, does not sign such agreements.

In big malpractice cases, the administration's proposed cap of $250,000 for pain and suffering would change the terms of trade in settlement talks. In the case of Ms. Nguyen, for example, there were sizable economic costs - for the care of the disabled patient - though the defense would surely have argued that they were less than $20 million. But it is the prospect of unknown, and potentially astronomic, damages in a trial that can give plaintiffs a powerful hand in settlement negotiations.

To Mr. Smith, the administration's battle against medical malpractice lawyers is simple to explain. "It's about politics and money; it's not really about health care," he said. "If you want to address the medical malpractice crisis in this country, do something about the medical errors. That's the real problem."

The quality of medicine across the country is uneven, analysts agree, and that represents a huge problem. Medical errors are estimated to be responsible for 45,000 to 98,000 deaths a year - more than those caused by breast cancer, AIDS or motor vehicle accidents, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

So Mr. Smith has a point. But improving the quality of health care raises a separate set of complex issues about incentives for improvement, investment in information technology and changes in the culture of medicine.

Pointing the finger elsewhere will not get Mr. Smith and his fellow lawyers off the political hook. There have been calls to overhaul medical malpractice before. But this time the White House, doctors, insurers and other business interests, who see curbs on malpractice suits as one step in reducing their health costs, are pushing hard together.

The champions of tort reform are spending heavily. Last year, the Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce, and the American Medical Association, the physicians' advocacy group, spent a total of $33.8 million on lobbying, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks federal lobbying. The trial lawyers' association spent $2.9 million on federal lobbying, PoliticalMoneyLine reported.

"We're outgunned financially, and we're being targeted because we have supported candidates who support Americans' rights to access to a jury trial," Mr. Smith said.

He has done his part. In the 2003-2004 campaign cycle, he contributed just under $100,000, nearly all of it to Democrats and Democratic political action committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group.

Yet even if the Bush administration prevails and malpractice awards are curbed, the impact on Mr. Smith will probably be limited. It may crimp his style but not change his game. "There will always be plenty of work for people like him, the best litigators on the plaintiffs side," said Dr. Sage, the Columbia law school professor.

Scott Ritter Says U.S. Plans June Attack On Iran

2005-02-26T17:54:00.000-06:00

Mark Jensen , United for Peace of Pierce County, 21 February 2005

02/19/05 -- United for Peace of Pierce County (WA) -- Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

Olympians like to call the Capitol Theater "historic," but it's doubtful whether the eighty-year-old edifice has ever been the scene of more portentous revelations.

The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran’s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.

The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.

Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

On Jan. 17, the New Yorker posted an article by Hersh entitled The Coming Wars (New Yorker, January 24-31, 2005). In it, the well-known investigative journalist claimed that for the Bush administration, "The next strategic target [is] Iran." Hersh also reported that "The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer." According to Hersh, "Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. ... Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. ... The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach [to Iran] cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act."

Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.

Scott Ritter's talk was the culmination of a long evening devoted to discussion of Iraq and U.S. foreign policy. Before Ritter spoke, Dahr Jamail narrated a slide show on Iraq focusing on Fallujah. He showed more than a hundred vivid photographs taken in Iraq, mostly by himself. Many of them showed the horrific slaughter of civilians.

Dahr Jamail argued that U.S. mainstream media sources are complicit in the war and help sustain support for it by deliberately downplaying the truth about the devastation and death it is causing.

Jamail was, until recently, one of the few unembedded journalists in Iraq and one of the only independent ones. His reports have gained a substantial following and are available online at dahrjamailiraq.com.

Friday evening's event in Olympia was sponsored by South Puget Sound Community College's Student Activities Board, Veterans for Peace, 100 Thousand and Counting, Olympia Movement for Justice & Peace, and United for Peace of Pierce County.

Mark Jensen is a member of United for Peace of Pierce County.

Source: ElectronicIraq.net

A Woman Could Be President

2005-02-25T22:48:00.000-06:00

Hillary Clinton, Rice Lead Poll

By Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist

I have always thought every little girl could grow up to be president.

But, like most women, I grew up only hearing that this exalted political goal was reserved for little boys.

Nowadays, the idea of a woman president is not at all far-fetched -- it could happen if a woman runs in 2008. And some women are getting ready to make that race.

It's about time.

American women have been sold short for too long and have had to struggle for basic American rights they should have had at birth. Why? Well, one reason is that this is a nation of immigrants, and for all of America's progress in so many fields, many cultures brought with them a primitive view of the woman's "place." The Founding Fathers had great vision, but not enough.

The battle for equality had its greatest impetus in the woman's suffrage movement that won women the right to vote in 1920. The struggle gained new momentum years later when feminists fought in vain for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But that feminist surge made many strides toward equality anyway. Through affirmative action and their own grand awakening, women moved into the elite professions, including business, broadcasting, law and medicine.

They sit in corporate boardrooms, serve as presidents of Ivy League colleges and are growing in numbers as lawmakers in the state houses, as governors and in Congress. They have made huge leaps in the last half of the 20th century.

But there are more mountains to climb, and it seems the acceptance of a woman president is the next natural step. It's an idea whose time has come.

Proof of that is the recent nationwide Hearst Newspapers/Siena College poll showing that a majority of Americans say the country is ready to elect a woman as president in 2008.

Better than that, a majority said they would vote for a woman for president.

The telephone poll was done Feb. 10-16 and surveyed 1,125 registered voters in 50 states and the District of Columbia. As portrayed by the poll, the first female presidential candidate would be a Democrat. Naturally, she is depicted as stronger on health care and education, but somewhat weaker as commander in chief.

The poll listed four prominent women -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R.-N.C., and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- and asked whether any of them should run for president.

The poll's respondents made Clinton the clear frontrunner -- 53 percent of those polled, including half of the men and 26 percent of the Republicans, said she should run. Clinton may not have needed that encouragement. It's already clear that she's running.

Following Clinton in the poll was Rice, with 42 percent of the respondents saying she should run in 2008, including 30 percent of Democrats. She has gained new prominence as the nation's leading diplomat. Although only 49 percent of Republicans said the United States was ready for a female president, 58 percent said they would vote for Rice.

Boxer -- who won the spotlight temporarily during Rice's Senate confirmation hearings when she sharply questioned the nominee's credibility in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- had 13 percent of the voters saying she should run, but nearly 40 percent said they did not know who she is.

Dole had the backing of one-third of the respondents who would like to see her run in 2008, but almost half said she shouldn't.

Several other women have been mentioned as possible candidates, including House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

It is going to be an interesting four years as the country gets used to the idea that we may have a woman president sometime soon.

Siena College, in Albany, N.Y., is staging a two-day conference to consider the pros and cons of a woman president March 4 and 5 with the leading experts on the subject.

I've covered nine presidents, all men, and I always believed that a woman could do their job even better. It's not a question of muscle. The highest office in the land is best served by people of good intellect, integrity, credibility and big hearts.

That kind of job description surely qualifies women.

Thrown to the Wolves

2005-02-25T16:23:00.000-06:00

By Bob Herbert, The New York Times

If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.

If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. But there he was, a 34-year-old man who now wears a perpetually sad expression, talking about his recent experiences - a real-life story with the hideous aura of a hallucination. Mr. Arar's 3-year-old son, Houd, loudly crunched potato chips while his father was being interviewed.

"I still have nightmares about being in Syria, being beaten, being in jail," said Mr. Arar. "They feel very real. When I wake up, I feel very relieved to find myself in my room."

In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.

He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.

Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.

He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.

"I used to ask God to help them," he said.

The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.

And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.

Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying "accidents will happen" in the war on terror.

Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.

Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.

Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.

"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."

A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."

This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.

Revealed: the rush to war

2005-02-23T20:35:00.000-06:00

By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal.

The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court.

And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith - but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote - was drawn up in Downing Street, not in the attorney general's chambers.

The full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer, is revealed in the Guardian today. More>>

Neocons fret over tilt to Europe

2005-02-23T20:28:00.000-06:00

By Robert Kuttner, The Boston Globe

"America supports a strong Europe," George W. Bush told an appreciative audience at his first major European speech in Brussels Monday, "because we need a strong partner in the hard work of advancing freedom in the world." But many on the right disagree, and the warm words conceal strenuous infighting among conservatives over the shape of the administration's Europe policy.

Gerard Baker, writing in the current Weekly Standard, criticizes the administration's olive branch and warns that Europe is seeking to become a counterweight to the United States in world affairs. The real European goal, writes Baker, is to undermine NATO, America's greatest source of trans-Atlantic influence, and to initiate policies of its own that are less bellicose than Washington's.

A prime example is the joint German-British-French initiative on Iraq, which would offer economic incentives in exchange for Iran's agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons capabilities.

American conservatives have relentlessly disparaged the Iran initiative as naive or opportunistic.

In fact, the initiative is actually making some headway and may spare us a military confrontation. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who provided crucial cover for President Bush's effort to portray the Iraq invasion as the work of a broad coalition, is with the Germans and French this time.

Other neoconservatives take an even darker view of Europe. In National Review Online, Andrew Stuttaford attacks Europe's proposed new constitution as "an unreadable mish-mash of political correctness" and faults Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for being "either delightfully insincere or dismayingly naive."

Some on the right believe that the United States should explicitly oppose Europe's new effort to have a common foreign and defense policy, as antithetical to American interests, and want to actively contain Europe.

Others applaud Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's effort to divide the "new' Europe of former Soviet satellites from the "old" Europe of major states that have been our most steadfast allies except on Bush's dubious Iraq policy. (This divide-and-conquer tactic won't work. It's the new European nations that look most closely to Brussels rather than to Washington.)

European integration has been a core US goal since the Truman administration. President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall blessed the antecedents of Common Market, which eventually became the European Union.

The original policy goal was twofold. First, contain Soviet expansionism. Second, anchor Germany within a larger, democratic European collectivity. The policy worked, magnificently. Europe, viciously divided against itself for centuries, has knit together into a democratic and civil society.

Of course, Europe developed its own social institutions -- universal healthcare, generous retirement systems, free or subsidized child care for working parents, less commercialized and more robust elections, far less extremes of wealth and poverty, less militarism. And much of the world sees this as a more attractive model than the one the Bush administration is promoting. America, statistically, is slightly richer on average than western Europe, but more than 80 percent of western Europeans live better than their US counterparts because our wealth is so concentrated at the top.

How like the neocons to see Europe's success as a menace! In the 1990s, the American right disparaged the project of completing a single European market, and the effort to build trans-European social, parliamentary, and regulatory institutions. American conservatives ridiculed the idea of a common European central bank and currency, but the euro is a phenomenal success and Bush could take some lessons from Europe's fiscal discipline.

It's stunning that the right tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, Old Europe is said to be a naive, force-averse, sclerotic society. On the other hand, it is a growing threat. I hope Secretary Rice is better at warding off neocon influence than her predecessor, Colin Powell, was. And I hope that President Bush's fence-mending is for real. Europe and America need each other.

Europe needs America's strong support as it reaches outward to embrace Turkey, the exemplary nation that is both Muslim and democratic. This is surely consistent with the administration's freedom goals. Europe and America also need to work together to root out terrorism, share operational intelligence, pursue humanitarian efforts, and work out a more balanced economic trade and monetary relationship.

And face it: America also needs Europe, to moderate the worst impulses of the Bush presidency. Let's hope the neocons are right on that score.

Clarification: Last week I faulted politicians for a failure of leadership on national health insurance. I failed to credit one magnificent exception -- Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who called for "Medicare for all" in his National Press Club address last month.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe

Haitian police raid Visitation House in Port-au-Prince and detain one U.S. citizen

2005-02-23T20:16:00.000-06:00

Washington, D.C. - At 1:45 pm, Wednesday, February 23, heavily-armed and masked Haitian national police raided Antwan Izmery Visitation House in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The police, who were accompanied by three Haitian officials and a Haitian judge, searched the house and the occupants which included Ron Voss, Visitation House director; David Robinson, Executive Director of Pax Christi USA; Johnny Zokovitch, Communications Director of Pax Christi USA; and William Quigley, Professor of Law at Loyola University in New Orleans and Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. All are U.S. citizens.

Police then detained Voss, a U.S. citizen who lives in Haiti and has overseen the Antwan Izmery Visitation House since 1993. Neither police nor the judge gave reason for search or detention of Voss, but yesterday the Haitian Minister of Justice, Bernard Gousse, alleged a connection in a public press conference between the Parish Twining Program of the Americas, and the February 19 jailbreak at Haiti's national prison, in which 500 inmates escaped in an armed attack. The minister stated that actors in the jailbreak had allegedly met at Visitation House prior to the incident.

This is one more in a pattern of illegal detentions that have taken place in Haiti since the February, 2004 coup.

"At least eight heavily armed and masked police entered Visitation House, guns out and aiming at us," said Robinson, who is in Haiti this week and staying at Visitation House. "They gave no reason for the search, or for why they were detaining Ron Voss, except that he must come with them and answer more questions."

William Quigley, a human rights attorney from Loyola University in New Orleans who was also staying at the house, went with Voss as he was taken by the police. The police also confiscated Voss's computer, and a camera belonging to Robinson.

"Pax Christi USA believes that this illegal detention of a U.S. citizen is a violation of his rights, and we are asking people to call on the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, the U.S. State Department, and the Haitian Embassy in Washington, DC to assure the safety of Mr. Voss and his immediate release," Robinson said. "Further, we call for the U.S. to play a more constructive role in supporting those calling for dialogue and bringing all sectors together to address the spiraling violence and to lay the foundation for a just and lasting peace, as has been called for by the Haitian Church, United Nations and others."

Contact information
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti James B. Foley
Direct Line: 011-509-223-4711
Switchboard: 011-509-222-0200 or 011-509-222- 0354
Fax: 011-509-223-9038 or 011-509-223- 1641

US State Department - Haiti Desk - Anthony Beaver
202-736-4628 or 202-647-5088

Embassy of the Republic of Haiti - Washington, DC
Phone: 202-332-4090
Fax: 202-745-7215
Email: embassy@haiti.org

For more information, please contact Michael Jones at 814-490-9378 or email mike@paxchristiusa.org.

FBI Opening Three to Six New $100 Million Corporate Fraud Cases Every Month

2005-02-23T20:09:00.000-06:00

Maybe Sarbanes/Oxley isn’t haven’t very much of an impact.

In testimony delivered before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said that the FBI is pursuing 334 corporate fraud cases throughout the United States, a more than 100 percent increase over last year.

Eighteen of those cases involved losses to the public which exceed $1 billion, Mueller said.

“Unfortunately, the volume of cases has yet to reach a plateau, and the FBI continues to open three to six new cases each month – each case averaging a loss exceeding $100 million,” Mueller said.

Mueller placed corporate and securities fraud down his list of major priorities – coming in tenth on a list of fifteen.

The major priorities list was headed by counterterrorism and counterintelligence.

Mueller also made the following points:

* Since the initiation of the FBI Corporate Fraud Task Force in December 2001, there have been 480 indictments and 305 convictions of corporate executives and their associates.

* The FBI's efforts have also resulted in over $2 billion in restitutions, recoveries and fines, in addition to over $30 million in seizures and forfeitures.

* In the Enron, HealthSouth, Cendant Corporation, Credit Suisse First Boston, Computer Associates International, Worldcom, Imclone, Royal Ahold, Perigrine Systems, and America On Line cases the FBI obtained 119 indictments/informations and 79 convictions.

* The former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Worldcom is on trial in New York and the former CEO of HealthSouth is on trial in Alabama. Several additional high profile trials are anticipated in the near future, to include the trial of Enron's former CEOs and Chief Accounting Officer anticipated to be scheduled for August or September 2005.

* During FY 2004, the FBI had 2,468 pending health care fraud investigations, obtained 693 indictments and informations, 564 convictions or pre trial diversions, $1.05 billion in restitution, $543 million in fines, $28.8 million in seizures, $19.05 million in forfeitures and disrupted 186 and dismantled 105 criminal organizations.

“Corporate fraud can cost Americans their jobs and rob them of hard-earned savings,” Mueller said. “It shakes the public's confidence in corporate America to its foundation.”

Source: Corporate Crime Reporter

Nader Announces Democracy Rising 'Stop the War' Campaign

2005-02-23T18:32:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON -- February 23 -- News Advisory:

-- Nader Announces Democracy Rising 'Stop the War' Campaign

-- Highlights "Institutionalization of Corruption and Secrecy"; Calls for End to Bush Family War Profiteering and Urges Iraq Commission to Open Its' Findings

WHAT: Press Conference announcing: Democracy Rising 'Stop the War' Campaign

Two Reports: Bush Family War Profiteering; The Institutionalization of Corruption

WHERE: National Press Club, Zenger Room, 529 14th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.

WHEN: Noon, Thursday, Feb. 24

For Further Information: Kevin Zeese, 301-996-6582

DETAILS:

In announcing the 'Stop the War' Campaign of Democracy Rising, Ralph Nader today urged more public and Congressional focus on the "institutionalization of corruption and secrecy that is taking hold in Washington, D.C., particularly in the military budget and its corporate contractors, as a result of the Iraq War."

Nader made this point at the announcement of a new project the 'Stop the War' campaign being conducted by Democracy Rising. ( See http://www.DemocracyRising.US. ) Kevin Zeese, who is directing the project, said: "The goal of our campaign is the responsible withdrawal of U.S. troops and corporate interests from Iraq. We want to bring the troops home safely, as soon as possible." The website includes their three point plan for a responsible withdrawal from Iraq.

Nader pointed to the insider deals that are profiting Bush family members and their long-term political allies. Nader urged the media and Congress to "investigate what may be the biggest war profiteering First Family in history." A report on Bush family members and their close associates unethically profiting from the war and occupation of Iraq will be provided at the event.

Nader also pointed to the Iraq Commission criticizing its secrecy. This Commission was created by President Bush in response to David Kay's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kay reported to Congress the failure of his 1,500 person inspection team to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and flatly asserted "we got it wrong," in response President Bush created an independent commission to study Iraq intelligence failures.

Thus far, the Commission which includes Sen. McCain of 'plain talk express' fame has said its' report will not be made public. "The institutionalization of secrecy is damaging to a democratic society already depleted by Bush secrecy and Bush assaults. How can the public officially know how and when its' leaders misled the nation into war -- the most important decision a president can make -- when the Commission appointed to examine the matter has operated in complete secrecy and will be reporting in complete secrecy," said Nader. "The American people deserve to know how and when intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was manipulated or distorted by the President and his top advisors in order to plunge the nation into war." Presidential commissions in the past have made their reports public -- that has been their raison d'etre -- to inform the American people on matters of public importance.

Regarding the institutionalization of corruption, the 'Stop the War' Campaign Web site documents the widespread corruption related to the Iraq War and occupation in "Iraq War Facts" a compilation of key facts, reports and statistics on the Iraq War. Included with the press materials will be: "The Institutionalization of Corruption: A Hidden Cost of the Iraq War and Occupation."

On God's Side

2005-02-23T18:19:00.000-06:00

A BuzzFlash interview with Jim Wallis.

Jim Wallis talks about 'God's Politics' and values – by which Wallis doesn't mean hate, greed, and war-mongering.

... [R]eligion has to be disciplined by democracy. That means you don't enter the public square and say I'm religious so I ought to win. Or God has spoken to me directly and I have the fix for Social Security. You say my faith motivates me. It shapes my convictions or it compels me to act on behalf of the poor, or peace, or whatever. – Jim Wallis, God's Politics

Christianity Today describes Jim Wallis as "an evangelical leader in the faith-based [l]eft and a frequent critic of George W. Bush." Is there any wonder BuzzFlash is drawn to him? Both preacher and down-in-the-trenches social justice activist, Wallis currently is touring the country as a New York Times best-selling author discussing and signing his book, God's Politics. Not surprisingly, Wallis' message of inclusion and involvement is reverberating with Christians who don't like the right wing's "holier than thou" approach to politics, with its narrow and divisive emphasis on abortion and gay marriage. BuzzFlash talked with Jim Wallis about progressive values, God, and good deeds. More>>

Host a Vigil Marking Two Years of War in Iraq

2005-02-23T18:13:00.000-06:00

Sojourners has issued an urgent call to action to honor the lives lost in war, and to advance the imperative for peace. Since March 19, 2003, more than 1,400 U.S. soldiers have been killed, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis. U.S. citizens have also suffered on the domestic front, as crucial domestic programs that benefit low-income families have been threatened and the already-ballooning national deficit has swelled to compensate for the cost of war. Sojourners calls on readers to gather together in prayer and remembrance, and advocate for lasting peace and security in the region.

Host a vigil to mark the two year anniversary of the war. More>>

Behind Those Medical Malpractice Rates

2005-02-23T18:09:00.000-06:00

By Joseph B. Treaster and Joel Brinkley, New York Times

Speaking before hundreds of doctors and medical workers in a St. Louis suburb last month, President Bush called attention to a neurosurgeon on stage with him in the small auditorium. The doctor, the president said, was paying $265,000 a year in premiums for insurance against malpractice claims.

Such high prices, "don't start in an examining room or an operating room," the president declared. "They start in a courtroom."

Indeed, at many recent appearances, Mr. Bush has complained about the "skyrocketing" costs of "junk lawsuits" against doctors and hospitals.

But for all the worry over higher medical expenses, legal costs do not seem to be at the root of the recent increase in malpractice insurance premiums. Government and industry data show only a modest rise in malpractice claims over the last decade. And last year, the trend in payments for malpractice claims against doctors and other medical professionals turned sharply downward, falling 8.9 percent, to a nationwide total of $4.6 billion, according to data compiled by the Health and Human Services Department.

"There is an underlying cost push," said J. Robert Hunter, the director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, who is a former insurance regulator in Texas. "But there has not been an explosion of big jury verdicts or settlements. It's a constant drip, drip every year."

Lawsuits against doctors are just one of several factors that have driven up the cost of malpractice insurance, specialists say. Lately, the more important factors appear to be the declining investment earnings of insurance companies and the changing nature of competition in the industry.

The recent spike in premiums - which is now showing signs of steadying - says more about the insurance business than it does about the judicial system.

"You get these jolts in insurance prices periodically, and they attract a lot of attention," said Frank A. Sloan, a Duke University economist who has been following medical malpractice trends for nearly 20 years. "They're a result of a confluence of many things."

Data compiled by both the federal government and by insurance organizations show costs for the insurance companies climbing steadily over the last decade at an average annual rate of about 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. Over most of that period, premiums for doctors rose modestly and sometimes even dropped as the insurance companies battled for market share in a scramble to collect more money to invest in strong bond and stock markets. But when the markets turned sour and the reserves of insurers shriveled, companies began to double and triple the costs for doctors.

"The insurers were catching up, getting to where they should have been," said Larry Smarr, the president of the Physician Insurers Association of America, a trade group of companies that provide more than 60 percent of the nation's medical malpractice insurance.

While acknowledging the impact of industry forces and practices on prices, Mr. Smarr and many others in the insurance industry still regard lawsuits as their biggest problem. Claims of medical malpractice are typically complex and are rarely paid without a lawsuit or the threat of a lawsuit. If the insurance companies could find a way to limit payments for lawsuits, they say, they could significantly reduce their costs.

President Bush, supported by the insurance industry and the American Medical Association, is proposing a remedy: a national limit on what juries can award in medical malpractice cases. Such a limit, or cap, has often been cited by the president as an important part of what has been called tort reform - limiting what Mr. Bush calls costly and frivolous lawsuits.

The Bush administration is pushing for a $250,000 limit on jury awards to victims of medical mistakes and their families for pain and suffering. No limit would be placed on the more quantifiable payments for economic losses, including medical expenses and lost wages.

Introduction of legislation calling for such national medical malpractice limits - traditionally left to individual states - is at least a month away. Still, the administration has been bolstered by stronger Republican majorities in the House and Senate and by last week's signing into law of a measure that would move many class-action lawsuits to federal court, sharply limiting their potential spread.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who is a doctor, calls malpractice award limits "a majority priority." The House has passed similar proposals seven times in the last 10 years, most recently in 2003.

While this Congress might be the best opportunity yet for supporters of jury award limits, there will certainly be a fierce battle from Democrats, consumer groups and plaintiffs' lawyers.

Consumer advocates say such limits would mean that some of the most seriously hurt patients would not receive fair compensation. Also, they say, in the death of an infant, an elderly person or a homemaker, there would be little compensation because of the prevailing view that there could be no economic loss because no income was being earned.

Trial lawyers and consumer groups have been parading heart-wrenching victims of doctors' mistakes to make their argument. Among them, the American Trial Lawyers Association says, is Alice Lloyd of North Carolina. Doctors failed to treat her blood infection for so long that finally they had to amputate both legs above her knees, her left arm and all the fingers from her right hand. She still has her right thumb.

As the two sides dig in for a fight in Congress, 27 states have already adopted award limits, with caps ranging from $250,000 to $1 million. In some states, insurers have agreed to reduce, at least temporarily, premiums in exchange for limits on awards.

Insurers say that caps not only promise lower costs, but greater predictability on potential payouts. "It takes an unknown entity, which is the pain and suffering component, and makes it quantifiable and estimate-able," said Mr. Smarr of the Physician Insurers Association of America.

Insurers acknowledge that they consider several factors besides claims costs in setting prices for doctors. In the 1990's, even as their costs were rising, malpractice insurers held firm on prices, even lowering them in some years to hold or win a share of the market.

"You always try to say you're not chasing market share," said Donald J. Zuk, the chief executive of Scipie, a medical malpractice insurer that does business in about 30 states. "On the other hand, you have to have a certain market share, you have to show a certain amount of growth, or you don't survive."

But by the late 1990's, some insurers discovered that they had dropped prices well below the cost of paying claims. Several went out of business. One of the biggest insurers, the St. Paul Companies, now Travelers St. Paul Companies, stopped offering medical malpractice coverage.

The surviving companies "had to raise prices or go out of business," Mr. Smarr said.

In 2000, about the same time that under-pricing and other market conditions began to push up prices in medical malpractice, the much larger world of commercial insurance was also going through a cycle of higher prices. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cost insurers $40 billion and accelerated the upward pressure of the latest premium cycle.

Martin D. Weiss, the chairman of Weiss Ratings Inc., an independent financial rating agency, said the cyclical nature of the insurance business and a drop in insurers' investment earnings when markets fell had been among the strongest forces behind the rise in medical malpractice premiums.

Over the last year, insurance analysts say, prices for most lines of commercial insurance appear to have peaked and have begun to decline. While prices for medical malpractice coverage are not yet falling, they rose less steeply in 2004.

Costs for most doctors last year rose between 6.9 percent and 24.9 percent compared with increases of between 10 percent and 49 percent in 2003, according to The Medical Liability Monitor, a newsletter published in Chicago.

The most expensive place in the country is South Florida, where some obstetricians and general surgeons paid nearly $280,000 for coverage last year, according to The Monitor. Obstetricians in Illinois paid as much as $230,428, The Monitor said, while in Nebraska, the least expensive place in the country for malpractice insurance, obstetricians paid $16,194. Florida adopted a cap on awards of $500,000 to $1 million in 2003. Illinois has no cap and Nebraska has a cap of $500,000.

The recent jump in premiums shows little correlation to the rise in claims. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank of the Health and Human Services Department, the total paid out by insurance companies for claims against doctors and other medical professionals rose 3.1 percent annually, on average, between 1993 and 2003 and then declined last year.

The average payment in 2003 for malpractice, the data bank said, was $268,605, up from $197, 753 in 1993, after adjusting for inflation. In 2004, the average payment fell to $262,486 and the number of payments made for medical malpractice cases dropped to 17,696 from 18,996 the year before.

What may muddy the public picture is that while claims are rising at a measured pace, there have been more headline-grabbing big awards. Data compiled by the Physician Insurers Association of America show a distinct rise in payments of more than $1 million to victims of medical mistakes. In 1993, the organization said, 2.9 percent of the payments made by its companies exceeded $1 million. A decade later, 8.5 percent of the payments were for more than $1 million.

Many insurers regard the $250,000 limit in California as a model for Mr. Bush. They see it as largely responsible for California's shift from being one of the most expensive places for medical malpractice insurance to one of the least expensive. Consumer advocates, however, say the main reason costs for doctors have fallen in California has been a 1988 law that prohibits insurers from raising rates more than 15 percent a year without a public hearing.

And some researchers are skeptical that caps ultimately reduce costs for doctors. Mr. Weiss of Weiss Ratings and researchers at Dartmouth College, who separately studied data on premiums and payouts for medical mistakes in the 1990's and early 2000's, said they were unable to find a meaningful link between claims payments by insurers and the prices they charged doctors.

"We didn't see it," said Amitabh Chandra, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth. "Surprisingly, there appears to be a fairly weak relationship."

Catholic Politicians

2005-02-22T21:45:00.000-06:00

For God or Country?

By J. Peter Nixon, Commonweal Magazine

In 2004, it was hard for Catholics to read a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing debates about their political responsibilities. As the election approached, many Catholics were inundated with voter guides that argued no Catholic in good conscience could vote for a candidate whose positions were at odds with “nonnegotiable” Catholic teaching. Whether this argument convinced many Catholic voters is debatable, but the desired result-a majority of votes for John Kerry’s opponent-was obtained.

Now that the election is over, what responsibilities do Catholics have? If Catholic Democrats are going to be asked to confront their party’s intransigence on abortion, should Catholic Republicans bear a similar responsibility on other issues with respect to the GOP?

Consider the recent debate-or lack thereof-over the president’s nomination of Alberto Gonzales for attorney general. Gonzales was a key player in the Bush administration’s internal discussions about what qualified as torture, a term he apparently did not think applied to techniques like “waterboarding,” which causes a powerful sensation of drowning. While the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay cannot be laid solely at Gonzales’s doorstep, there is no question that his efforts contributed to a weakening of legal and moral constraints against the use of torture by intelligence officers and military personnel. The Washington Post, which has generally been supportive of the president’s foreign policy, argued that “to confirm such an official as attorney general is to ratify decisions that are at odds with fundamental American values.”

Given that the Catechism of the Catholic Church condemns torture as “contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity,” one might have thought that the Gonzales nomination would have provided Catholics who supported Bush with an opportunity to show their commitment to values that transcend partisan loyalties. If opposition to torture as an instrument of national policy is not a “nonnegotiable” Catholic teaching, it is fair to ask what is. Given the president’s solicitude for the Catholic vote, one wonders what would have happened if Catholics who had supported him had come together to oppose the Gonzales nomination.

But many prominent Catholics apparently had no problem throwing their support behind Gonzales. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), a favorite of Catholic conservatives and a possible 2008 presidential contender, asked no questions about torture during Gonzales’s nomination hearing. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) voted to confirm Gonzales without expressing a word of concern about his record. Catholic supporters of the war in Iraq, such as Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, were oddly silent about the Gonzales nomination, despite the demonstrable damage that the torture scandals have done to the foreign-policy goals they champion.

A cynic may wonder why we would have expected anything different. Yet only a few years ago some were speaking about a “Catholic moment” in the Republican Party. In 2000, Bush’s talk of “compassionate conservatism” seemed particularly infused with Catholic themes. A year later, the president invoked the memory of Dorothy Day at a commencement speech at Notre Dame. It did not seem far-fetched to suggest that a strong Catholic presence could influence the Republican Party as significantly as it had once influenced the Democrats.

That time seems very far away now. If there is a unifying theme to the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration, it is contempt for any mechanisms of collective action-progressive taxation, Social Security, labor unions, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations-that seek to level the playing field between the strong and the weak. With the exception of the administration’s efforts to protect human life in the womb and to defend the traditional definition of marriage, it is hard to imagine an ideology that is farther removed from the mainstream tradition of Catholic social thought.

Catholic Democrats inclined to rejoice in this line of analysis should be wary of casting the first stone, as they are often no more willing than their Republican counterparts to challenge their own party on issues close to the core of Catholic social teaching. The list of Catholic Democrats with national ambitions who abandoned earlier prolife views is long: Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Mario Cuomo, Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). Many of these Democrats have long resorted to boilerplate statements that they are “personally opposed” to abortion. But when they trumpet their prochoice voting records, raise millions from the abortion lobby, declare that Roe v. Wade is “sacred ground,” and oppose even the most minimal protections for the unborn, it is hard not to see their personal opposition as essentially meaningless. Last November’s elections do seem to have initiated a conversation among Democrats about their rigid adherence to abortion rights (see William J. Byron’s “Prolife and Prochoice,” February 11, 2005), but it remains to be seen whether this conversation will lead to anything more than rhetorical repositioning.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the distinct voice that Catholics once brought to the public square is gradually being lost. In its place, we see the emergence of two separate Catholic political cultures, each serving the needs of one of the two major parties, and each with its own “magisterium.” Those wishing to embrace the church’s social-justice tradition while evading the moral force of its teaching on abortion can cite the speeches of Mario Cuomo, while those seeking a Catholic apologetics for libertarian economics or preemptive war can consult the encyclicals of Michael Novak and George Weigel.

The fact that Catholics are divided between the two parties is not the problem. There is no reason why Catholics must be of one mind on all matters of public policy. But there is still something disturbing about seeing Catholics become so completely conformed to the ideologies of their chosen political parties or movements. The recanting of earlier prolife views by so many prominent Catholic Democrats is one example of this. The unwillingness of many Catholic Republicans to offer any criticism of the Gonzales nomination-to say nothing of the war in Iraq-may be another.

In their 2004 statement, Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. Catholic bishops suggested that the church must be “political but not partisan.” But political parties-and the social movements affiliated with them-play a critical role in the nation’s democratic process. The question is how Catholics can participate in partisan political activity without compromising their religious beliefs. It is often suggested that the church needs to do a better job of educating Catholics about the church’s social teaching-our “best-kept secret”-which challenges the easy orthodoxies of Right and Left. But merely educating Catholics about that teaching is unlikely to make an impact if it is ultimately seen as no more authoritative than the information provided by a political party, trade union, small business association, or favorite Weblog.

The problem, of course, goes beyond politics and politicians. It reflects the challenge of maintaining a distinct Catholic identity, one powerful enough to compel Catholics to act against the interests of self, party, clan, or nation when the service of truth requires it. If that challenge cannot be met, it is easy to foresee a day when the cultural and political assimilation of Catholics in the United States will be complete and perhaps irreversible. The United States will be the poorer for it, to say nothing of the gospel.

State of the Union: Selling the Con

2005-02-22T21:30:00.000-06:00

Behind Bush's unpopular obsession with Social Security lies a greater political purpose -- creating more Republicans. Luckily, the GOP faces stiff opposition.

By Robert L. Borosage, Progressive Populist

Calling for "courage and honesty," George Bush delivered a State of the Union address notably lacking in both. The speech covered the normal bedsheet of issues, but its core was the president's plans on Social Security.

Bush and his political guru Karl Rove believe that they have a chance to consolidate the right in power for a generation -- and they are pushing to privatize Social Security. But their plans fit neither the needs nor the desires of most Americans, so the president didn't bother to level with Americans about them. He is once more selling a lie.

The president evokes a false crisis -- the looming "bankruptcy" of Social Security -- to justify the need to act, but his plan actually doesn't even address the projected shortfall that Social Security may face. In a profile of cowardice, he left that a blank sheet of paper for Congress to fill in, specifying only that the shortfall be solved with cuts in benefits, not increases in revenues.

His plan is to borrow $4.5 trillion over 20 years to set up private accounts for every American under 55. He promises that the money in the account is your "nest egg" and the "government can never take it away." But that isn't true, either.

Initial plans call for the accounts to act as a loan from the government that would have to repaid in full upon retirement at 3% interest. Any money left over -- and for most workers there is likely to be precious little -- would have to be devoted to a destitution annuity, providing enough money each year that, added to the drastically slashed guaranteed benefit, would save the senior from destitution. The "nest egg" the president promised would exist only for the minority that had anything left over. Don't plan to dine out on it.

Why borrow trillions, slash benefits and create accounts that loan Americans back their own money, require them to repay it and are likely to leave most worse off than under the current program? Mr. Bush's purpose isn't to "strengthen Social Security." It is ideological and political. He wants to dismantle the most successful government program that has generated support for Democrats and liberal ideas over the years.

In its stead, he wants each worker to get an annual report from the government, reporting on what is in his or her "personal account" set up by the good offices of George Bush and the Republican Party. Karl Rove thinks it possible to create a generation of grateful Republican voters -- at least until they retire and find out that their benefits have been slashed and the government is "clawing back" the bulk of the money in their accounts.

Can the president sell this to Americans? Seniors who pay attention are already skeptical; Republicans are wringing their hands and, amazingly, Democrats have lined up in opposition. The Campaign for America's Future, which I co-direct, is mobilizing a coordinated campaign involving an extraordinary range of groups. From the AARP and the AFL-CIO labor federation to Moveon.org and Rock the Vote, citizen groups are mobilizing to defend America's most successful social program.

But the president clearly plans to govern just as he ran for re-election. Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein dubs this the "Rush Limbaugh strategy" -- the president as radio shock jock. Moderate and independent opinion matters little. The president will rouse his own base, discipline his party and seek to pick off just as much support from vulnerable Democrats as he needs to get the program through.

Mr. Bush left after his speech to stump in five red states where Democratic senators face re-election next year. Reports are that Wall Street and corporate donors are putting together more than $100 million for front-group ad and mobilization campaigns. House Republicans have been given a 100-page playbook, with message honed and each word dial-tested. The right-wing message machine will echo the president's line and mock his opponents. The president is selling a lie, but -- as we know from the debate on Iraq -- he knows how to do it.

The pitched battle over Social Security at home and the occupation of Iraq abroad will define much of Mr. Bush's second term. He will campaign relentlessly on Social Security and pray tirelessly for escape from Iraq. But the ice is growing thin and the show is growing old. And those opposing this president will be fighting for the best interests of the country and its people. That's not a bad place to stand.

Robert L. Borosage, a veteran strategist and institution builder, is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future.

Help Stop the Hate from the Radical Right

2005-02-22T19:25:00.000-06:00

Stop 'USA Next'

The right-wing fringe has declared war on Social Security -- and this week they launched their newest attack. This ridiculous ad is the latest from USA Next, a front group for radical conservatives who want to dismantle Social Security.

You won't be surprised to hear who they hired to publicize their efforts: the same team of hatchet men that ran the swift boat smear campaign against John Kerry. Now they are targeting the AARP, a group that millions of seniors rely on to defend their interests.

We must stop these people … now.

Go to the Petition now.

Standing Their Ground

2005-02-21T23:37:00.000-06:00

By Ruth Conniff, The Progressive

As the Bush Administration pushes forward with its aggressive plans to tear up the Constitution and launch its liberty jihad, Senator Barbara Boxer has stepped forward as the voice of Democratic opposition.

In her celebrated clash with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the confirmation hearings, Boxer quoted Martin Luther King Jr., in what ought to be the Democrats' new motto: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

The life began draining out of the Democratic Party the day it decided to take a pass on opposing the most aggressively rightwing Administration in history. Fortunately, Boxer and a handful of colleagues decided to reverse the trend by publicly repudiating Bush in what was expected to be a noncontentious confirmation process. In taking a principled stand against Rice and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a few Democrats became the party's backbone.

The counterpoint to this position, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, took to the floor to endorse Rice and to caution fellow Democrats against giving aid and comfort to America's enemies by opposing Bush's nominees, or his policies. The criticisms of Rice, particularly her dissembling on Iraq, Lieberman said, "are all about the past."

"I don't hear any criticisms about where we are now or where we should go in the future," he said. (Memo to Joe: The war in Iraq rages on. Thirty-one Marines died in a single incident on the highest-casualty day of the conflict for the United States, the same day you were making your let-bygones-be-bygones remarks.)

Sure, Rice and the rest of the Bush team made a lot of self-contradictory statements about weapons of mass destruction. But "if you're just upset about some of the things this Administration has done in Iraq . . . give [them] the benefit of the doubt." Lieberman pleaded.

Lest anyone think there's a minority party in this country that opposes Bush's crusade to spread freedom's "untamed fire" to "the darkest corners of the globe," Lieberman declared that, "in the final analysis, we're together. We're together on what we're doing in Iraq and on the spread of freedom and democracy around the world."

Why is this man a Democrat?

It was a Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who stepped up first to oppose the Pentagon's frightening new warmaking powers. After New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh and The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is running his own secret intelligence-gathering operation without Congressional oversight, McCain called for hearings to determine if, in fact, the Pentagon can claim such unchecked power.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are clearly divided on how to play the role of opposition. Boxer represents the more aggressive approach, while Lieberman and other spineless wonders continue to pursue the conciliatory route. More>>

Kyoto By The Bay: Local cities defy federal government, make their own climate policies

2005-02-21T23:31:00.000-06:00

By Gregory Dicum, SFGate.com

Today, the Kyoto Protocol -- the international treaty to limit damage to the atmosphere from so-called greenhouse gases -- comes into force. Under self-imposed laws, 156 nations around the world will begin adhering to the treaty this week, but the United States -- the largest producer of greenhouse gases -- will not be one of them.

Unfazed by this seeming lack of interest on the part of our federal officials, local governments around the country are getting serious and acting as though they have signed the Kyoto Protocol themselves -- and the Bay Area has quietly become a leader in this movement. More>>

"Nature Boy" Larry David

2005-02-20T11:26:00.000-06:00

By Larry David, CampusProgress.org

I am pleased to announce that after a lifetime of indifference to man and nature, I have changed. I am now only indifferent to man. Yes, my friends, I’ve become “Nature Boy” Larry, committed activist. Fighting the good fight. Walking the walk . . . or is it talking the talk? I’m pretty sure it’s some combination of walking and talking.

How could such a transformation take place? How did I go from being Larry David, radical narcissist, to Larry David, radical environmentalist? Let me give you some background.

I grew up in Brooklyn. Of all the wonders and pleasures that Mother Earth has bestowed upon us, none of them could be found in Brooklyn. The only grass I ever saw was on the divider of the Belt Parkway. There were no flowers. Just artificial ones. Every apartment had artificial flowers. People took great pride in their artificial flowers—and fruit. Let’s not leave out the fruit. Anything fake. We loved good, fake things. The greatest compliment you could give somebody was to mistakenly pick up a piece of their artificial fruit and try to take a bite out of it. That made their day.

But I couldn’t smell a real flower anyway. I was born with the ability to smell only disgusting things. I never smell anything pleasant. Ever. You can shove a lilac up my nose, and I wouldn’t smell it, but urine and BO I can smell from three blocks away. And Brooklyn was not wanting for disgusting odors. Bus fumes, garbage, cigarette smoke. Everybody in Brooklyn smoked. Even nine-year-olds. You walk into someone’s house, you’re greeted with smoke in the face. The whole borough was hacking and coughing and spitting. There was phlegm everywhere. It was flying at you from every direction. Out of windows, cars. Anywhere you walked, you had to keep ducking so you wouldn’t get hit. It was like a shooting gallery.

And of course, needless to say, there were no animals in my life. My mother hated animals. All of them. If she had her way, she would kill every living animal on the planet. She looked at extinction as a good thing. When an animal was put on the endangered-species list, she went out and got drunk. “Let ‘em all die. Who needs ‘em? What good are they doing?”

And nobody ever went hiking in Brooklyn. The only time you took a hike was when someone told you to go fuck yourself. Then you took a hike. Then you got the hell out of there in a hurry. “You’re right, sir. Perhaps it is time for a little afternoon stroll. I think I’ll be moseying on.” There was nothing in nature we appreciated. Sunsets were mocked. The moon, in particular, held no fascination for anyone. I don’t think I ever heard anyone even use it in a sentence. Nobody ever said, “Hey, check out the moon!” We never gazed at it. We didn’t do any gazing. Well, people never looked up in general. We were too busy traversing a minefield of dog excrement. That’s why, to this day, I can’t look anyone in the eye, because, after spending many an afternoon throwing my sneaker away and hopping home, I became fixated on looking down.

So as a result of my background, I’ve never done anything outdoorsy. I don’t hike, I don’t ski, I don’t fish . . . I would if you could catch conservatives. I wouldn’t throw them back so fast, either. I’d let them flop around on the deck for a while. “It was wrong to lie about Saddam having nuclear weapons, wasn’t it?” “Yes, yes.” “In fact, the whole war was a big mistake!” “Yes, maybe.” “No, not maybe! It was a mistake!” “OK, it was a mistake. Throw me back. Please!”

Anyway, whatever harm’s been done to the environment—and I know there’s been a lot – it’s never really affected me personally in any way. That is, until a few months ago. The first thing that happened was I noticed something on my face. And it turned out to be a benign skin cancer, which was caused by ozone depletion! Cancer! On me! From ozone depletion! All right, it was benign. Of course, when people noticed the bandage and asked me what happened, I told them it was cancer. You know, I played it a bit. It’s the first time anyone’s felt sorry for me since they published my income eight years ago.

When you have money, the only way you can get any sympathy at all is to say you have cancer. You could lose a limb, no one would care. Only when they know you’re going to die do you get anyone feeling sorry for you. And even then, some people don’t. “Serves him right, rich prick.” That’s what I am now, a “rich prick.” Prick always follows the word rich. If you’re rich, you’re a prick. Just the way schmuck always follows the word poor. So I went from a poor schmuck to a rich prick without hardly any transition. Of course, I was a poor schmuck longer than I’ve been a rich prick, and frankly, I’m not that much happier as a prick than a schmuck. I never thought I’d become a prick. Neither did my friends. They said, “He’ll never be a prick!” And then, boom, I’m a prick. Now I have all new friends. All pricks. Schmucks call me from time to time. I say, “I can’t talk to you. I’m a prick.”

So I had the skin cancer caused by ozone depletion. OK, it was benign, they took it off, not terrible. I’m OK. My life goes on. But then a few weeks after that, I was reading the newspaper when something caught my eye, and what I read has changed my life and inspired me to write this piece. I’ll sum it up in one word: tuna. That’s right, my friends, tuna. I read that there’s mercury in tuna, and it’s just not safe to eat it anymore. Oh, sure, there’s mercury in a lot of other fish, but I don’t care about those other fish. I care about tuna. How am I supposed to live without tuna? What am I supposed to have for lunch?! I’ve been ordering tuna for lunch every day since I was ten years old. This has been the only decision of my life that I can make every day with any degree of certainty and feel good about it. And I was a tuna connoisseur. I could tell the difference between Bumble Bee and StarKist. I made my own. Me, in the kitchen—chopping and dicing! I had my own recipe, with pickles and peppers.

Oh, sure, there’s been peanut butter every now and then—but that’s only when tuna’s not available. I couldn’t eat peanut butter every day. And I can’t eat BLTs or grilled cheese because of cholesterol. What am I supposed to have—soup? Soup’s too distracting. There’s too much to do, and it always spills when you get it to go. And I don’t want anything on a plate. Lunch is a sandwich. You don’t eat lunch with a fork. You pick up lunch with your hands. Now the lunch decision is the hardest decision of the day. It’s painful—nobody wants to eat with me. The other day a waiter asked me what I was having. I said, “Whatever.”

And all because of what? Mercury. Because nobody in our government cares if there’s mercury in tuna. Well, I care, and I am going to do everything I can to stop it, so I can start eating tuna again. I hope you, too, will do whatever you can to help, so that once again I can sit down at a restaurant and say, “A tuna sandwich on whole wheat toast, with lettuce and tomato . . . hold the mayo.”

Larry David is the co-creator of Seinfeld and the creator and crankily acerbic star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President

2005-02-20T10:06:00.000-06:00

By David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them.

Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments on rivals. John McCain "will wear thin," he predicted. John Ashcroft, he confided, would be a "very good Supreme Court pick" or a "fabulous" vice president. And in exchanges about his handling of media questions about his past, Mr. Bush appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana. More>>

Just the Facts

2005-02-19T19:11:00.000-06:00

The Truth about Social Security
By Charles R. Morris, Commonweal Magazine

The first important fact about the Social Security “crisis” is that there is no crisis. The second important fact is that the Bush administration’s proposals for fixing the “crisis,” especially its “privatization” scheme, are perversely designed to make the system’s finances much more precarious than they are now and to impose deep benefit cuts. In fact, it would be hard to conceive of a more destructive set of policy initiatives than those the president is advocating. And it’s all completely unnecessary. Here’s why. More>>

U.S. Attorney Closes Criminal Probe of Baptist Health Systems, Senator Lott in the Mix

2005-02-18T20:23:00.000-06:00

The U.S. Attorney in Jackson, Mississippi has abruptly closed down a criminal probe of Medicare fraud and obstruction of justice by Baptist Health Systems and its executives, over the objections of line prosecutors and federal criminal investigators.

Sources close to the investigation say that before the case was closed, Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) contacted the U.S. Attorney’s office expressing his concerns about the criminal investigation of the Jackson hospital.

Senator Lott’s press office in Washington, D.C. did not return calls seeking comment. More>>

Source: Corporate Crime Reporter

How Bush Turned His Back on the "Christian" Conservatives

2005-02-18T20:14:00.000-06:00

Please, Keep Faith
By David Kuo

Former Bush Aide: 'Minimal commitment' from the White House plus Democratic hostility hinder the faith-based plan

Four years ago, while visiting a small urban charity, President Bush launched the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He called it "one of the most important initiatives" of his administration.

It was hard evidence of the "compassionate conservatism" that Texas Governor George Bush embraced in his first major policy speech of the Presidential campaign, "It is not enough for conservatives like me to praise [compassionate] efforts. It is not enough to call for volunteerism. Without more support and resources, both private and public, we are asking them to make bricks without straw." That day a conservative Texas governor promised more than $8 billion during his first year in office to help social service organizations better serve "the least, the last, and the lost." More than $6 billion was to go for new tax incentives that would generate billions more in private charitable giving. Another $1.7 billion a year would fund faith-based (and non-faith-based) groups caring for drug addicts, at-risk youth, and teen moms. $200 million more would establish a "Compassion Capital Fund" to assist, expand and replicate successful local programs. Legislation would ensure that reported government discrimination against faith-based social service organizations would end. A new White House Faith-Based Office would lead the charge. More>>

In Case You Missed It…Coburn’s Comments on Breast Implants Embarassing to All Oklahomans

2005-02-18T20:02:00.000-06:00

Oklahoma City, OK – In Al Kamen’s column in the February 7, 2005 edition of the Washington Post, “Rx for Doctors: A Dose of Humanity,” Kamen quoted Senator Tom Coburn arguing that scientific studies have shown that it is healthier to have silicone breast implants than not having them. Oklahoma Democratic Party Chairman Jay Parmley called Coburn’s comments embarrassing to all Oklahomans and publicly asked Coburn to refrain from making stupid comments and to provide documentation of any such claims in the future.

“I’m not sure what scientific studies Mr. Coburn has been reading,” Parmley said. “But his comments are quite embarrassing for the people of Oklahoma. When people across the country open up the Washington Post and read these comments, they must think that we are all as backward and misinformed as the Senator that we have elected to serve in the United States Senate.”

According to Mr. Kamen, Coburn spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee and discussed a bill restricting class-action lawsuits:

“You know, I immediately thought about silicone breast implants and the legal wrangling and the class-action suits off that.

“And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. . . . In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier.” [emphasis added, Column, Al Kamen, Washington Post, “Rx for Doctors: A Dose of Humanity,” 2/7/05]

“The really frightening thing is the fact that this man is a doctor and people’s lives are rested on his advice and opinions,” Parmley said. “Judging from the reaction that Senator Coburn’s comments had on the women I have spoken with, I think it would only be appropriate for him to recant these comments and apologize to the people of Oklahoma for embarrassing us yet again.”

Coburn’s breast implants comments unfortunately come as no surprise to Oklahomans, who have heard him tell a House committee that a deadly parasite, which killed 104 people and sickened 400,000 others in 1993, could be very helpful for doctors in identifying patients who were incapable of developing normal immune responses

No Evidence Caps Will Curb Malpractice Rates

2005-02-18T19:53:00.000-06:00

From ConsumerWatchDog.org

Third Time's a Charm: Another Malpractice Insurer Admits Damage Caps Won't Lower Doctors' Premiums

Santa Monica -- The company running South Carolina's largest medical malpractice insurer stated that "our data is just not adequate" to guarantee that a cap on non-economic damages would lower doctors' malpractice premiums. The company joins the growing ranks of insurers that privately admit the failure of malpractice caps but continue to push publicly for their passage.

The article.

Read the Marsh USA letter.

Read the GE Medical Protective filing and the SCIPIE Indemnity executive's testimony.

Backlog or Backfire?

2005-02-18T19:29:00.000-06:00

Corporations may rue the day they fought for class-action reform.

By Stephanie Mencimer, American Prospect

When supporters of “class-action reform,” which passed in the Senate last week, talk about the alleged horrors of class-action litigation, they frequently hold up the tiny, impoverished, and mostly black Jefferson County, Mississippi, as Exhibit A. “Reformers” allege that current state laws allow plaintiffs’ lawyers to “forum shop” for a friendly court, such as Jefferson County, where the itty-bitty courthouse doesn’t even posses a computerized docketing system -- yet where Circuit Court Judge Lamar Pickard has presided over a number of multimillion-dollar, mass lawsuits filed against some of the nation’s biggest corporations. The American Tort Reform Association has dubbed the court a “judicial hellhole.”

The new class-action bill would circumvent Pickard, a former member of the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association board of governors, and push most mass torts to the federal district court level. In Pickard’s county, this might mean suits would go before a judge like Charles Pickering Sr., the recently retired U.S. District Court judge in the Southern District of Mississippi, who stated during his 2002 confirmation hearings that almost no employment discrimination cases that come before the federal courts have merit.

The business community, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, contends that the federal system will bring “common sense” and “balance” to the world of mass torts. They argue that class actions -- lawsuits involving hundreds and thousands of similarly harmed plaintiffs -- that have plaintiffs from multiple states and national implications should be heard in federal court, not by local yokels like Pickard.

On its face, the notion that the federal court will somehow bring a rational voice to a patchwork of different state court forums seems logical. Lost in the debate, though, is the viewpoint of those federal judges. Led by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Judicial Conference of the United States -- the formal organization of federal judges -- has officially opposed the bill in letters to Congress, primarily because it believes that cases involving state law should remain in state courts; most class actions are based on state, not federal law.

Ten years ago, in its long-range plan, the Judicial Conference stated emphatically: “If federal courts were to begin exercising, in the normal course, the broad range of subject-matter jurisdiction traditionally allocated to the states, they would lose both their distinctive nature and due to burgeoning dockets, their ability to resolve fairly and efficiently those cases of clear national import and interest that properly fall within the scope of federal concern.”

Indeed, one reason that most class actions are now filed in state courts is a string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the mid-1990s that questioned whether the federal courts were the proper venue for resolving mass tort litigation based, as most is, on state consumer protection or anti-fraud statutes. Critics of the class-action bill argue that these same decisions will prevent judges from allowing state class actions to go forward in federal court, thus making the class actions impossible to bring at all.

The federal judges’ opposition to the class-action bill is also partly based on money. In 2004, the federal courts saw a nearly 10-percent increase in new filings over the previous year. At the same time, the courts laid off nearly 1,000 employees due to restricted budgets, and the judges have insisted that court backlogs will only grow with the new responsibilities for state class actions. At a House Budget hearing last year, Chief Judge John G. Heyburn II, chair of the Judicial Conference’s budget committee, testified, “The courts’ workload and the resources provided to handle that workload are headed in opposite directions.”

Federal judges generally don’t take a position on pending legislation individually. Several contacted for this story, in fact, weren’t even aware that the class-action bill was so close to passage, and none had actually read the bill. Nonetheless, they recognize some of the potential difficulties. “If Congress thinks this is the work that we should be doing, we’ll do it,” says Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski. “I would only caution that if Congress wants us to do more work, it will have to give us more resources.”

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the new class-action law would cost the federal courts about $6 million a year but did not assess the cost of the additional judges it suggested would be needed if the bill passed. Congress has not allocated any more money to the courts to handle the new class-action workload.

The courts’ ability to manage the new class actions is one reason why critics of the bill suspect that it was designed simply to keep such cases out of court altogether. “This is a major effort by big corporations to transfer jurisdiction from state courts, where there is relatively quick resolution of people’s claims, to the dark hole of the federal judiciary, which doesn’t want them,” says West Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals Judge Larry Starcher, whose court will be losing authority for many class actions under the new law. “It will be the end of class actions.” Starcher notes that the West Virginia state courts aren’t exactly flush, but he believes they are much better equipped to handle the state class actions than the federal court. “As a trial court judge, I tried about 20,000 individual asbestos cases. I know a little about mass litigation,” he says.

But some plaintiffs’ lawyers who will be impacted heavily by the bill are not entirely convinced that federalizing class actions will eliminate them. “I think this is a classic case of ‘Be careful what you ask for,’” says Elizabeth Cabraser, a prominent California plaintiffs’ attorney who specializes in mass litigation. “I’m a great believer in the federal judiciary. They are going to certify meritorious cases. Federal judges are not political hacks. This is an added burden that’s being put upon them, but they’ll deal with that. I think federal courts won’t go along with any purported plan to sabotage class actions.”

Despite his opposition to the bill, Starcher, too, suspects that corporations may be surprised to discover that plaintiffs’ lawyers will find a way around it. Indeed, some plaintiffs’ attorneys have already observed that under the new law, corporate defendants could end up fighting a lot more litigation, rather than less. The bill forces class actions into federal court if fewer than a third of the plaintiffs are from the same state in which the case was filed (for instance, if the suit was filed against a company in the state where it is headquartered, but many of the injured parties live elsewhere). Lawyers could simply file smaller class actions in many states -- with only state residents as plaintiffs, rather than one national case -- forcing the company to defend itself in far more forums.

There are even signs that the new system could prove as costly as the current patchwork. In Texas, where class actions have become harder to bring, one enterprising attorney -- legendary tobacco lawyer John O’Quinn -- has brought a host of lawsuits over the diet drug “fen-phen” one case at a time, rather than consolidating them into a class. In one of those cases last year, O’Quinn won a $1 billion verdict -- for a single plaintiff.

Stephanie Mencimer is an Alicia Patterson fellow and a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly.

Pharisee Nation

2005-02-15T20:09:00.000-06:00

By John Dear, from CommonDreams.org

Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. “Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.”

With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”

So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.

I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was reelected president. As I travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with the culture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporate greed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many others swept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of these people, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I am ashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, that they do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to the nonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized injustice.

I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s great book, “Wise Blood,” where her outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christian hypocrisy that he forms his own church, the “Church of Christ without Christ,” “where the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and the dead don’t rise.” That’s where we are headed today.

I used to think these all-American Christians never read the Gospel, that they simply chose not to be authentic disciples of the nonviolent Jesus. Now, alas, I think they have indeed chosen discipleship, but not to the hero of the Gospels, Jesus. Instead, through their actions, they have become disciples of the devout, religious, all-powerful, murderous Pharisees who killed him.

A Culture of Pharisees

We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.

Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.

We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God.

In the past, empires persecuted religious groups and threatened them into passivity and silence. Now these so-called Christians run the American empire, and teach a subtle spirituality of empire to back up their power in the name of God. This spirituality of empire insists that violence saves us, might makes right, war is justified, bombing raids are blessed, nuclear weapons offer the only true security from terrorism, and the good news is not love for our enemies, but the elimination of them. The empire is working hard these days to tell the nation--and the churches--what is moral and immoral, sinful and holy. It denounces certain personal behavior as immoral, in order to distract us from the blatant immorality and mortal sin of the U.S. bombing raids which have left 100,000 Iraqis dead, or our ongoing development of thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Our Pharisee rulers would have us believe that our wars and our weapons are holy and blessed by God.

In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior, such lies. They were called “blasphemous, idolatrous, heretical, hypocritical and sinful.” Such words and actions were denounced as the betrayal, denial and execution of Jesus all over again in the world’s poor. But the empire needs the church to bless and support its wars, or at least to remain passive and silent. As we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the American empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a “Church of Christ without Christ,“ as Flannery O’Connor foresaw.

Troublemaking Nonviolence, the Measure of the Gospel

The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become good Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons, corporate greed and systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of God. They are the definition of mortal sin. They mock God and threaten to destroy God’s gift of creation. If you want to seek the living God, you have to pit your entire life against war, weapons, greed and injustice--and their perpetrators. It is as simple as that.

Every religion, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, is rooted in nonviolence, but I submit that the only thing we know for sure about Jesus is that he was nonviolent and so, nonviolence is the hallmark of Christianity and the measure of authentic Christian living. Jesus commands that we love one another, love our neighbors, seek justice, forgive those who hurt us, pray for our persecutors, and be as compassionate as God. But at the center of his teaching is the most radical declaration ever uttered: “love your enemies.”

If we dare call ourselves Christian, we cannot support war or nuclear weapons or corporate greed or executions or systemic injustice of any kind. If we do, we may well be devout American citizens, but we no longer follow the nonviolent Jesus. We have joined the hypocrites and blasphemers of the land, beginning with their leaders in the White House, the Pentagon and Los Alamos.

Jesus resisted the empire, engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience in the Temple, was arrested by the Pharisees, tried by the Roman governor and executed by Roman soldiers. If we dare follow this nonviolent revolutionary, we too must resist empire, engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against U.S. warmaking and imperial domination, and risk arrest and imprisonment like the great modern day disciples, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Philip Berrigan.

If we do not want to be part of the Pharisaic culture and do want to follow the nonviolent Jesus, we have to get in trouble just as Jesus was constantly in trouble for speaking the truth, loving the wrong people, worshipping the wrong way, and promoting the wrong things, like justice and peace. We have to resist this new American empire, as well as its false spirituality and all those who claim to be Christian yet support the murder of other human beings. We have to repent of the sin of war, put down the sword, practice Gospel nonviolence, and take up the cross of revolutionary nonviolence by loving our enemies and discovering what the spiritual life is all about.

Just because the culture and the cultural church have joined with the empire and its wars does not mean that we all have to go along with such heresy, or fall into despair as if nothing can be done. It is never too late to try to follow the troublemaking Jesus, to join his practice of revolutionary nonviolence and become authentic Christians. We may find ourselves in trouble, even at the hands of so-called Christians, just as Jesus was in trouble at the hands of the so-called religious leaders of his day. But this very trouble may lead us back to those Beatitude blessings.

John Dear is a Jesuit priest and the author/editor of 20 books including most recently, “The Questions of Jesus” and “Living Peace” both published by Doubleday. He lives in New Mexico where he is working on a campaign to disarm Los Alamos. For info, see: www.johndear.org

Oklahoma Dems Seek Party Leader

2005-02-13T10:18:00.000-06:00

Democrats seeking director

By Michael McNutt, The Oklahoman

Oklahoma Democratic Party leaders are considering hiring someone to help run operations, even though the contract of the party's executive director doesn't expire until June 1, Gov. Brad Henry confirmed Friday.

Statewide elected officials and party leaders have been talking about bringing in someone to ensure a smooth transition when Jay Parmley steps down, Henry said.

Parmley announced last week he would not seek a third two-year term as party chairman. He also serves as executive director, which pays $42,000 a year.

Parmley said earlier this week he was not involved in any of the meetings with statewide party leaders.

A party spokesman, Robert Blunt, said Parmley, who was in Washington on Friday at a Democratic National Committee meeting, plans to get more involved in discussions next week when he returns. More here.

Federal Cuts Affect Oklahoma

2005-02-13T10:15:00.000-06:00

By Mike Hinton, The Oklahoman

Oklahoma's economy is so strong that the federal government has decided to slash Medicaid health services by about $65 million a year, state health officials said this week.

If the loss is not restored, mental health officials say, services may have to be cut for 150 people a month by fall. About 550 people a month are now turned away from community mental health centers, state Secretary of Health Terry Cline said.

This comes at a time when other indicators show the state is not doing so well. Oklahoma's food stamp rolls continue to increase, said Phil Motley, budget director of the human services department.

"We set a new all-time high each month," Motley said.

Hardest-hit would be the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, which administers the huge Medicaid program serving Oklahoma's poor and elderly. The Department of Human Services would lose $12 million.

In fiscal 2004, Oklahoma's Medicaid rolls reached an all-time high of nearly 670,000 people.

Medicaid provides free or reduced-price health care for low-income children, pregnant women, the disabled and senior citizens. More here.

The Future of Iraq is Shiite

2005-02-13T09:47:00.000-06:00

The Iraqi election results have been counted. The Shiite won all but seven of the 275 seats for the new parliament. With nearly 47 percent of the total votes, the Shiite can now influence the direction of the country. The Kurdish alliance received 25 percent while the U.S. backed Alawi only garnered 14 percent. More here.

Corporate Greed at W.R. [Dis]Grace

2005-02-12T22:35:00.000-06:00

W.R. Grace, facing charges that it knowingly endangered the health of residents of Libby, Montana and obstructed justice, implied last week that it was blindsided by federal prosecutors.

In a press release posted on the company’s web site, Grace said “the government decided to distribute the indictment to the media without providing a copy to Grace.”

“However, based on news reports of the government’s charges, Grace categorically denies any criminal wrongdoing,” the company said. “We are surprised by the government’s methods and disappointed by its determination to bring these allegations.”

But lawyers familiar with the pre-indictment negotiations said that while Grace’s lawyers were not shown a final version of the indictment, in meetings with federal prosecutors they were shown a draft indictment that was virtually identical to the final version. From Corporate Crime Reporter.

The indictment.

Cover Up at Pentagon Over Iraqi Security Force?

2005-02-12T22:13:00.000-06:00

Pentagon covers up failure to train and recruit local security forces

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, Kim Sengupta in Basra, and Raymond Whitaker in London

Training of Iraq's security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

Sunday Morning Line-ups for 2/13/05

2005-02-12T20:20:00.000-06:00

Fox News:

Exclusive interviews with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

Meet the Press [NBC]:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, Rep. Charlie Rangel, Natan Sharansky and Patrick Buchanan

This Week [ABC]:

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Budget Committee, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the top Democrat on the committee, on Washington's budget battles.

Face the Nation:[CBS]:

Sen. Rick Santorum Chairman, Senate Republican Conference Republican - Pennsylvania; Sen. Richard Durbin Senate Democratic Whip Democrat - Illinois; Karen Tumulty TIME Magazine

It's Official: Dean is the New Leader of the Dems

2005-02-12T16:19:00.000-06:00

It is now official, the DNC elected Howard Dean to succeed Terry McAuliff as the chairman of the national party. More here.

McDonalds Hot Coffee Lawsuit and Beyond: The Tort Reform Myth Machine

2005-01-23T13:45:00.000-06:00

by Jon Greenbaum

Perhaps you saw the Seinfeld episode in which lawyer Jackie Chiles encourages Kramer to sue over a cup of hot coffee. The show was a comic take on the reported $2.7 million awarded to a woman who had sued McDonalds. Elaine's reaction to Kramer mirrored what most people were saying, "Who ever heard of this anyway? Suing a company because their coffee is too hot? Coffee is supposed to be hot." Of course Kramer, replies, "Yeah, but Jackie says the top was faulty."

It's a perfect morality tale exposing everything wrong with a litigious American society whose members refuse to accept personal responsibility. The McDonalds lawsuit was ridiculous, right? We're all bearing the burden of higher insurance rates because there is an epidemic of lawsuits, right? Malpractice lawsuits are driving doctors out of business, right?

Well, not really.

Third Degree Burns

Here's what the talk show pundits and columnists neglected to mention about the McDonalds coffee burn case:

79 year old Stella Liebeck suffered third degree burns on her groin and inner thighs while trying to add sugar to her coffee at a McDonalds drive through. Third degree burns are the most serious kind of burn. McDonalds knew it had a problem. There were at least 700 previous cases of scalding coffee incidents at McDonalds before Liebeck's case. McDonalds had settled many claim before but refused Liebeck's request for $20,000 compensation, forcing the case into court. Lawyers found that McDonalds makes its coffee 30-50 degrees hotter than other restaurants, about 190 degrees. Doctors testified that it only takes 2-7 seconds to cause a third degree burn at 190 degrees. McDonalds knew its coffee was exceptionally hot but testified that they had never consulted with burn specialist. The Shriner Burn Institute had previously warned McDonalds not to serve coffee above 130 degrees. And so the jury came back with a decision- $160,000 for compensatory damages. But because McDonalds was guilty of "willful, reckless, malicious or wanton conduct" punitive damages were also applied. The jury set the award at $2.7 million. The judge then reduced the fine to less than half a million. Ms. Liebeck then settled with McDonalds for a sum reported to be much less than a half million dollars. McDonald's coffee is now sold at the same temperature as most other restaurants.

The Lawsuit Crisis Myth

President Bush is now pushing for "tort reform," claiming that lawsuits are hurting the economy. Contrary to popular belief, since 1975 the number of lawsuits has declined. Government data show that the median jury verdict for punitive damages was only $37,000, significantly less than the $65,000 median award in 1992.

Although corporate America is complaining about how lawsuits are "hurting the economy" the vast majority of lawsuits are brought by corporations, not individuals. Moreover, judges dismiss corporate lawsuits as frivolous 69% more often than the lawsuits brought by individuals.

So, why are Newsweek and Time running cover stories about "Lawsuit Hell"? Why is there a common perception of a "lawsuit crisis"? Why is Bush talking about the need for "tort reform" (legislation that would limit citizens‚ rights to a jury trial or limit juries‚ ability to set punitive damage awards)?

It wasn't until the 1950's that lawyers began to make progress in getting judicial precedents that established corporate responsibility for injuries to workers and consumers. Corporations started to be held accountable and consequently their insurance companies were increasingly being forced to pay damages. The insurance industry responded with a public relations campaign against "excessive awards." Their strategy was to convince people who might sit on juries that there was a problem.

By the 1980's, with the insurance industry in a slump, industry strategists decided it was time to move beyond targeting prospective jurors, and to take on the law itself. Their goal was to restrict citizens‚ right to a jury trial. Their ad copy pointed out that "everybody pays" for overzealous lawsuits. The industry couldn't very well attack consumer and environmental protection or victims. Instead they scapegoated the trial lawyers. Dozens of tort reform measures were introduced in state legislatures.

Teams of lobbyists were mobilized to push the tort reform bills through state legislatures. The insurance industry mobilized right wing think tanks to focus on the "crisis". They targeted journalists and circulated bogus statistics about the "costs of frivolous lawsuits". Large corporations created fake grassroots groups (called "Astroturf") like Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse and set up chapters in local Chambers of Commerce. Fantastical anecdotes of bizarre lawsuits buzzed on the internet, and major media outlets like U.S. New and World Report picked up on the stories without fact checking. Conservative columnists at smaller papers also ran with these urban legends of runaway jury verdicts. Did you hear the one about the man who sued Winnebago after setting his R.V. on cruise control and going to the back to make some coffee? How was he supposed to know the R.V. would crash? The fact that the incident never happened didn't stop papers like the Weirton Daily Times in West Virginia from printing the story in a column calling for tort reform.

Have insurance rate gone up? Sure. The insurance industry is one of the most profitable industries. The companies typically make most of their profits in stocks and bonds. When the bubble burst on Wall Street several years ago the industry jacked up premiums to maintain their profit margin.

Will outlawing our right to sue grossly negligent doctors for punitive damages stop the escalating costs of health care? The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office figures that medical malpractice lawsuits account for one half of one percent of health care costs.

Would insurance rates go down? According to the American Insurance Association, "The insurance industry never promised that tort reform would achieve specific premium savings." (March 13, 2002) and the American Tort Reform Association added, "We wouldn't tell you or anyone that the reason to pass tort reform would be to reduce rates." (July 19, 1999).

What will tort reform accomplish? It will limit our ability to hold corporations accountable for their misdeeds. Corporate America has succeeded to a great extent in buying up our legislators and capturing regulatory bodies. We must not let them wrest control of the judicial system as well.

Kennedy: Fascist America

2005-01-23T13:35:00.000-06:00

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to run for Attorney General of New York State.

He might announce his candidacy within the next two weeks.

He's the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the former Attorney General under his brother, John F. Kennedy.

In 2001, President Bush named the Justice Department building after RFK.

The young Kennedy attended the ceremony.

We asked him what he thought of President Bush naming the building after his dad.

He said he wouldn't comment on the record.

But he did call President Bush "the most corrupt and immoral President that we have had in American history."

Not that he was enamored with Senator John Kerry.

Early in the campaign, Kennedy endorsed Senator John Kerry for President, but last month he expressed disappointment in Kerry's campaign and in the Democratic Party.

"The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt," Kennedy. "They are accepting money from the same corporations. And of course, that is going to corrupt you."

He has spent the last 18 years as a sort of private attorney general -- suing polluters to clean up the Hudson River.

Kennedy says that in the late 1960s, the Hudson River was "a national joke."

"It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City and south of Albany. It caught fire. It changed colors," he said. "Today, it is the richest water body in the North Atlantic. It produces more pounds of fish per acre and more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic north of the equator. It is the last major river system left in the North Atlantic, on both sides, that still has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish."

He is seeking to close down the Indian Point nuclear power plant 22 miles north of New York City.

"After Chernobyl, 1,000 miles around the plant were uninhabitable. One hundred miles around the plant are permanently uninhabitable," he said. "One hundred miles around Indian Point would be all of New York City. So, imagine a world without New York City. Well, the terrorists already have. According to the 9/11 Commission, Mohammed Atta cased Indian Point before deciding to bomb the World Trade Center. But he believed, erroneously as it turned out, that the plant must be so heavily guarded, that it would be impossible to crash an airliner into it."

Kennedy charges that his appearance on MSNBC's Charles Grodin show in November 1996 got Grodin fired.

Kennedy was invited on the show to talk about his book and group by the same name -- Riverkeepers.

On the show, Kennedy ripped into GE, an owner of the network, for polluting the Hudson with PCBs.

On the show, Kennedy claimed that "every woman between Oswego and Albany has elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE."

Grodin was soon thereafter fired.

Kennedy wrote a book last year that he hoped would change the direction of the country.

It didn't.

But it's a great book, nonetheless.

It's called Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy (HarperCollins, 2004).

For the past couple of years, he's been giving 40 or so speeches a year, mostly in the red zone, mostly to conservative groups.

He speaks about the corporate attack on the country.

"There is no difference between the reaction I get from Republicans and Democrats, because Americans share the same values," Kennedy told us. "If you talk about these issues in terms of our national values, everybody understands it."

In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.

"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as '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.' Sound familiar?"

He quotes Hitler's propaganda chief Herman Goerring: "It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. 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."

Kennedy then adds: "The White House has clearly grasped the lesson."

Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini's insight that "fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

"The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power," Kennedy told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy."

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of the forthcoming On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

© 2004 Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

On Receiving Harvard Medical School's Global Environment Citizen Award

2004-12-21T18:48:00.000-06:00

by Bill Moyers

On Wednesday, December 1, 2004, the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School presented its fourth annual Global Environment Citizen Award to Bill Moyers. In presenting the award, Meryl Streep, a member of the Center board, said, "Through resourceful, intrepid reportage and perceptive voices from the forward edge of the debate, Moyers has examined an environment under siege with the aim of engaging citizens." Here is the text of his response to Ms. Streep's presentation of the award:

I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera whom you never see. And for all those scientists, advocates, activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we have covered in reporting on how environmental change affects our daily lives. We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people's knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom. We tell their stories.

The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill McKibben. He enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment. His bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson's Silent Spring left off.

Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems we journalists routinely cover - conventional, manageable programs like budget shortfalls and pollution - may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment, creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is causing the melt of the arctic to release so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could radically alter civilizations.

That's one challenge we journalists face - how to tell such a story without coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the people we most want to understand what's happening, who must act on what they read and hear.

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation where four angels 'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144-just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer - 'the road to environmental apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total - more since the election - are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that i will send a famine in the land.' He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America's Providential History. You'll find there these words: "the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.' however, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth……while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

I can see in the look on your faces just how had it is for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots:

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.

That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

That wants to open the arctic wildlife refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the international policy network, which is supported by ExxonMobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is 'a myth, sea levels are not rising, scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas, age 10; of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, 'Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.' And then I am stopped short by the thought: 'That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.'

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to out moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: 'How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma' - the science of the heart…..the capacity to see….to feel….and then to act…as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

Source: Common Dreams

Voting Without the Facts

2004-11-08T11:19:00.000-06:00

By BOB HERBERT
New York Times Op/Ed Contributor

The so-called values issue, at least as it's being popularly tossed around, is overrated.

Last week's election was extremely close and a modest shift in any number of factors might have changed the outcome. If the weather had been better in Ohio. ...If the wait to get into the voting booth hadn't been so ungodly long in certain Democratic precincts. ... Or maybe if those younger voters had actually voted. ...

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."

I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.

A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.

If you don't think this values thing has gotten out of control, consider the lead paragraph of an op-ed article that ran in The LA. Times on Friday. It was written by Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who is now a host on the Christian talk-radio station KKLA.

"Christians, in politics as in evangelism," said Mr. Pastore, "are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology."

Mr. Pastore goes on to exhort Christian conservatives to reject any and all voices that might urge them "to compromise with the vanquished." How's that for values?

In The New York Times on Thursday, Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, declared, "Now comes the revolution." He said, "Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years."

Mr. Viguerie, it is clear, will stand four-square against any such dangerous moves toward reconciliation.

You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?

What the Democratic Party needs above all is a clear message and a bold and compelling candidate. The message has to convince Americans that they would be better off following a progressive Democratic vision of the future. The candidate has to be a person of integrity capable of earning the respect and the affection of the American people.

This is doable. Al Gore and John Kerry were less than sparkling candidates, and both came within a hair of defeating Mr. Bush.

What the Democrats don't need is a candidate who is willing to shape his or her values to fit the pundits' probably incorrect analysis of the last election. Values that pivot on a dime were not really values to begin with.

Yes!

2004-11-07T18:17:00.000-06:00

Udall meets with protesters

Boulder High students concerned about government

By Todd Neff, Camera Staff Writer
November 6, 2004

The inked peace signs on their cheeks and foreheads had faded to match the circles under their eyes by Friday morning. But the 16 Boulder High School students crammed into Principal Ron Cabrera's office had achieved more than they'd hoped with their all-night protest about the direction of the U.S. government.

U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, R-Eldorado Springs, sat at the head of Cabrera's meeting table, with Boulder County Republican Party Vice-Chairman Bill Eckert standing near the doorway.

As the politicians fielded questions from the sleep-deprived youth around the table, three television cameras stared on — one from a tripod planted directly behind the desk, where on a different Friday morning Cabrera might have been finishing the coffee left cold in a Styrofoam cup.

Three days after a close election, Boulder High students' decision to air their concerns about the national debt, military recruitment in schools and disregard for the environment in their school library exploded into a national news story.

Boulder High Senior Stephen Lobanov-Rostovsky, 17, had been working on a half-hour's sleep when he went live on Air America Radio, he said. MSNBC and CNN were among the other national media that had taken interest in the all-night protest of about 85 students he and other students organized.

"We're doing this so we can prove we have a voice in society, and our voice is strong," Stephen said. "Our concerns are not partisan — Republican, Democrat, Green — we just want young people to be politically valued."

James Vacca, the Boulder High teacher who had been an adviser to the protesting students, sat in the adjoining office, assuring someone from Fox News Radio that the students were not puppets of his or anyone else's left-wing agenda.

The students' goals had been relatively modest. They wanted visits from local elected representatives, in particular Republicans who might have a better chance of getting the Bush administration's ear.

Eckert may not have a direct line to the White House, but he agreed that the country had to narrow the political divide. He said Boulder County Republicans would join in a summit with local youth planned for Boulder High, to give youth a means of expressing their opinions "without having to camp out in the library."

"This is very productive," he said. "You made a statement. I can tell you that. You made a statement."

Udall said he decided to meet with the students after his chief of staff called him at 7 a.m. Friday. By 9 a.m., he was at the school.

"Like any community, people want to be heard," Udall said. "I don't think it's any different if you're 15 or 55."

Udall assured students that the political process allowed for change outside of presidential election cycles.

"There will be another election in four years, but in the meantime there will be plenty of other places to apply power," he said, ranging from state governments to Senate filibusters.

Udall said he would also participate in a youth summit.

Sophomore Bonnie Hoffmann, 15, said the protest's taking place in the school gave it symbolic meaning, as well.

"It's where you go in as teenagers and come out as adults, where we develop our political opinions," she said.

The students spent the night talking politics and playing music. There wasn't much sleep to go around.

"This started out as a little protest. We were afraid of the worst, being suspended," said sophomore Teague Owings, 15. "We feel heard. We feel appreciated. We feel respected. We feel like we count."

In the face of reports of low voter turnout among the 18- to 24-year-old set, they also felt they had something to prove.

"So often, this generation is associated with apathy," said junior Brielle Gordon, 16. "But I think this demonstrated we're far from apathetic."

Cabrera, Boulder High's principal, let the protest continue through the night after establishing ground rules with the students. One was that they straighten up the school library in the morning.

"This has been one of the best civics lessons that our kids have indulged in since I've been here," Cabrera said.

Deputy Superintendent Mack Clark said it was the first all-night protest he could recall in the Boulder Valley School District.

"It's a lot easier to work with the kids than against them," he said.

Camera Staff Writer Aimee Heckel contributed to this report.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Todd Neff at (303) 473-1327 or nefft@dailycamera.com.

Copyright 2004, The Daily Camera. All Rights Reserved.

The Language of Politics

2004-11-07T01:21:00.000-06:00

Frame Wars

Whoever wins on November 2, the fight over reality and political language will continue

BY MICHAEL ERARD

The conventional view of politics says that people are swayed by words, images, or facts. But that’s false, according to Frank Luntz and George Lakoff, two of the most successful practitioners of political reality construction. They believe that increasingly political forces will clash less over reality than over how it’s shaped.

At first glance, both men appear well equipped to deal with a complex world. They have PhDs (Luntz in political science and Lakoff in linguistics) and run consulting operations (the Luntz Research Companies and the Rockridge Institute, a think tank), and they’re gurus to opposing political parties (the GOP and the Dems) to whom they push, as they’ve done for years, what is essentially the same idea about language in politics. The idea? That the basic building blocks of political communication are “frames” (as Lakoff calls them) or “context” (to use Luntz’s word).

The most important resource that politicians have, they both argue, is the ways in which people understand the world. Their values. Their worldviews. (Lakoff adds to this: their brains.) If you tap into those values, inform them, tweak them, focus and reflect those values back at an electorate—that’s the way to win power.

In this struggle to control political reality through language, you don’t dispute specific words or rebut the facts; you don’t even attack your opponents’ frames. What you do is assert your side’s frame, making it so big, so omnipresent, so unavoidable that it’s as natural as talking about the roundness of the Earth. Disputing such a fact seems counterintuitive. Even heretical.

A prime example in this election season is the phrase “war on terror,” which evokes a tangible, winnable conflict. Done right, the framings should be invisible, not the product of human hands. They should give the impression that the world actually is that simple and hasn’t merely been simplified. For conservatives, this is easy because they have invested decades into creating their frames. Liberals, meanwhile, have so much catching up to do that they have to be taught how to frame explicitly. Enter George Lakoff, who over the last year has boiled conservative language down to its bare bones in books, numerous interviews, and presentations. (In 2003, the Rockridge Institute finally received funding to start building a response to conservative frames.) Until now, the left hasn’t had anything like Lakoff or Rockridge, partly because of liberal pride. To some people, Lakoff’s ideas smack of propaganda and spin, which they find morally objectionable. Still others suffer from a sort of intellectual arrogance.

“The people on our side have been brought up to think from an Enlightenment perspective, to think that the facts will set you free, that you can just negate the other guy’s frame,” Lakoff says. “But that’s not how it works.”

Regardless of the outcome of the November 2 election, Luntz and Lakoff will continue to be at the forefront of a growing conflict over American values, political language, and the intersection of the two. Call it the frame war. It’s not a battle of style over substance because truth is not at stake. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Most Americans believe that SUVs are safer vehicles to drive. Not only SUV drivers think this—any parent whether they feel more at ease with their teenager in an SUV or a Mini Cooper, and they’ll choose the SUV even though SUVs aren’t actually engineered to be safer than other vehicles. They’re only bigger. That makes them less safe: They roll over, they’re less maneuverable, and they take longer to stop. Yet “bigger is safer” is a frame that you can’t shake loose with the facts.

Lakoff says that we engage frames in the simplest acts of thinking or talking. “Framing is the most ordinary everyday thing,” he says. “Every word we use comes with a frame, and the conventional frames are there in your brain.” Take a more political example: the word “war.” In the same way that the size of an SUV resonates “safe,” “war” evokes not only battles, but also sacrifice, martial glory, and an ultimate victory. It’s not simply a figurative or a poetic connection—it attaches to the way people see reality and determines how they act. Every use of the word “war” ratifies this frame.

This is why the phrase “war on terror” has been so devastatingly effective. It’s so engrained that it gathers conservatives and so effective at explaining the world that people who aren’t conservatives find it appealing. The phrase can be strangely soothing. Clarity oozes from it. It subtly encodes a frame in which an intangible, terror, can be targeted and conquered, partly by recycling a Cold War frame in which we waged war on another intangible, Communism. And we won! The phrase offers the promise that we can win this one, too, because it invokes a history of military victories and strength. America, after all, wins its wars.

Of course, America doesn’t win all of its wars. The conservative frame depends on the martial fantasy of inevitable victory, and that is why John Kerry’s criticism of the Vietnam War angers Republicans. It also depends on the rush that absolute moral victory provides, which explains why the administration was able to both attack Kerry and shore up the common sense behind the “war on terror” frame when it criticized the senator for stating that the nation’s goal should be to make terrorism a nuisance.

Kerry and his team could have done a better job of asserting their own frames, but fortunately for them, Bush let the conservative one slip. Frank Luntz says that invoking the “war on terror” set up the conditions for an electoral win by Bush. “If the public sees what the president’s doing as a war on terror, he wins. If they see it as a war on Iraq, Kerry wins. What is the context of what the president is doing? Define it one way, you have one outcome; define it another way, you have a different outcome.”

In the first and second debates, Luntz says that President Bush failed “somewhat” to keep the focus on his advantageous frame. “Look how rarely he talked about the war on terror. He was responding to Saddam Hussein. Was Saddam Hussein a threat? Rather than, was Saddam Hussein a contributor to terror? He did not change the context of the question. He did not reset the way the public would look at the issue.” Once Bush let the simplifying “war on terror” frame slip, all the complexities of domestic policy, especially economics, hung out in the air, unexplained.

It’s a strange admission for Luntz to make, as he’s one of the pillars of the conservative infrastructure, whose frames he helps prop up. He regularly gives presentations to GOP groups, to whom he circulates memos that tell people the right way to talk about the environment, terrorism, or other topics. He’s also partnered with former Oklahoma congressman J. C. Watts to form a communications firm, Watts-Luntz Communication. Luntz is most famous for “writing” the Contract with America in 1994. He’s also been successful at coming across as an objective social scientist—mostly. To borrow a term from a recent New York Times Magazine article, Luntz casts himself as a member of the “reality-based community,” someone who studies the world as it is. In fact, he is part of a media apparatus (MSNBC) that’s creating reality for the rest of us, and part of a GOP apparatus that gives the media its talking points. His status as an “objective” social scientist has also been questioned. In 1997, he was censured by the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers for refusing to disclose the methods he used to conclude that 60 percent of Americans apparently agreed with the Contract with America.

In the frame wars, the people who do the frame work are themselves framed, shaped, buffed, and branded. Lakoff is the “professor,” an instant credibility that can work to his advantage, though it’s also damaging—people immediately assume that what comes out of his mouth is too hard to understand, divorced from reality, impractical. (An interview in a recent Believer magazine labeled him a “mandarin.”) In person, Lakoff is actually down to earth and will answer nearly any question clearly and succinctly. His political analysis is keen, his sentences brief. (“Deep but simple,” observed Glenn Smith, a Democratic political consultant who was instrumental in bringing Lakoff to Texas in 2001).

Luntz, meanwhile, has successfully allied himself with the forces of common sense, one reward of playing for the side that has control of the frames. But that image has begun to fray as Luntz is challenged on his objectivity. For the debates, MSNBC sidelined Luntz after a liberal media group complained about his GOP affiliations. While Luntz has a fatter portfolio, Lakoff has gained access to national Democratic leaders, and his ideas have become increasingly visible. His 1996 book, Moral Politics, was required reading by the Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich campaigns. His new book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, a stripped down version of the earlier tome that includes a punchy to-do list for progressives, is selling well on Amazon.com. As a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, Lakoff can’t advise campaigns, but as a private citizen he’s an advisor to Kerry. None of this proves that his ideas are viable, but it does suggest that Lakoff might be on the cusp of becoming the new common sense.

In Moral Politics, Lakoff applied a theory of language and mind to political beliefs, and the result is a useful pocket guide to conservative and liberal worldviews. Conservatives, he argues, believe in a family led by a strict father who protects moral dependents, punishes moral inferiors, and aims to raise independent children to fend for themselves in a dangerous world. Liberals believe in the family led by a nurturing parent who encourages children’s inherent goodness so they will treat others with fairness and equality. All policies and positions shake out from these models and help predict what each side will do, according to Lakoff.

From this perspective, Bush’s accusations in the first debate that Kerry sends “mixed messages” about Iraq are akin to calling him a poor father. In the strict-father mentality, a father lays down the law unwaveringly and never reflects on his authority. (It’s a line that social conservatives in the sexual-abstinence movement also use to bash the pro-condom sex educators: Saying “Don’t have sex, but if you’re going to, use a condom” is a mixed message.) Whether or not Bush wins the election, Republicans will also continue to push the language of the “ownership society.” It’s a phrase that resonates with people’s desire to have equity, even if they’ll never own much property. It trades on the promise that government makes to citizens through social programs like Social Security, and it replaces that promise with what’s more culturally desirable: the ability to work hard and be rewarded.

How can progressives respond? They have to figure out what they believe and then put words to it. “When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas,” Lakoff writes in Don’t Think of an Elephant. “Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily.”

The frames for progressives to use to counter the “ownership society” will probably reflect how they value fairness, accountability, and opportunity. What words and images they use won’t mention those values explicitly; they’ll evoke them, and make them seem like the only values worth having.

One of the more thorough critiques of Lakoff that combines conservative thought with language expertise comes from Justin Busch, a computational linguist who lives in San Diego and blogs about politics at www.semanticcompositions.typepad.com. Busch says that “Lakoff’s problem, and this is one area where Frank Luntz just by virtue of his job has a real advantage…is that he doesn’t see enough ordinary people and discuss these things.”

To Busch, Lakoff simplifies the world the wrong way, citing the linguist’s assertion that environmental progressives see the Earth as the goddess. “This is straight out of cloud cuckoo land,” Busch says. “You and I know that unless he’s dressing up in druid robes and going out to Stonehenge, that he doesn’t really think that. The Earth is goddess is just something that he tossed off as poetic and imaginative, but it’s also freaking disastrous.” As Busch sees it, Lakoff doesn’t offer hard evidence for his claims about what conservatives or liberals think, and he relies too much on his own stereotypes and experiences in his simplification of conservatives. Lakoff counters by saying that his books are empirically based and that more evidence for the models is on the way.

A key to victory in the frame war is the way the ideas about frames are themselves accepted and disseminated. What makes liberals open to Lakoff’s ideas is that they believe in openness. But the same profile, drawn in terms of the family metaphor, exposes a few other liabilities about liberals. For one thing, liberals are invested in an intellectual egalitarianism that can be crippling. (Conservatives may be more content with a division of labor in which some people do the thinking and others do the shouting.) “A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that they don’t have all the ideas,” Lakoff says. “It’s a major problem. A lot of liberals think, ‘Well, I don’t have the words, but I have all the ideas.’ The fact is, they don’t.”

A glance at the liberal blog www.dailykos.com gives you some idea of the readiness of the troops that Lakoff is sending into battle. In late September, the site’s main blogger, a Berkeley, California, lawyer named Markos Moulitsas posted a short review of Don’t Think of an Elephant, calling it “the best book this cycle.” In the thread of responses that followed, the liberal stereotypes were on parade. The moralist: “I hate pr/marketing/spinning.” The feminist: “Ummm...wonder what he’s got against women?” The post-feminist: “I don’t want to be known as the Mommy party. We’re the party of Solomon.” The literal: “I’m not the child of the government.”

As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day.

Contributing writer Michael Erard is writing a book about verbal blundering.

Source: Texas Observer

Oh, This is Good

2004-11-07T01:06:00.000-06:00

Saudi Religious Scholars Support Holy War

Sat Nov 6, 9:54 PM ET

By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Prominent Saudi religious scholars urged Iraqis to support militants waging holy war against the U.S.-led coalition forces as American troops prepared Saturday for a major assault on the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah.

The 26 Saudi scholars and preachers said in an open letter to the Iraqi people that their appeal was prompted by "the extraordinary situation through which the Iraqis are passing which calls for unity and exchange of views." The letter was posted on the Internet.

"At no time in history has a whole people been violated ... by propaganda that's been proved false," Sheik Awad al-Qarni, one of the scholars, told Al-Arabiya TV.

"The U.S. forces are still destroying towns on the heads of their people and killing women and children. What's going on in Iraq (news - web sites) is a result of the big crime of America's occupation of Iraq."

In their letter, the scholars stressed that armed attacks by militant Iraqi groups on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq represent "legitimate" resistance.

The scholars were careful to direct their appeal to Iraqis only and stayed away from issuing a general, Muslim-wide call for holy war. They also identified the military as the target, one that is considered legitimate by many Arabs who view U.S. troops and their allies as occupiers.

The independent scholars — some of whom have been criticized in the past for their extremist views — apparently did not want to antagonize the Saudi government, a U.S. ally, or appear to be flouting its efforts to fight terrorism.

Saudi Arabia has sealed off its long border with Iraq and bars people from crossing into that country. Its most senior clerics issued a statement last year saying the call for jihad — or holy war — should only come from the ruler and should not be based on edicts issued by individual clergymen.

Saudi officials did not comment on the latest statement.

The clerics' appeal came as U.S. troops, backed by air and artillery power and Iraqi security forces, were gearing up for a major assault on Fallujah.

The clerics issued a fatwa, or religious edict, prohibiting Iraqis from offering any support for military operations carried out by U.S. forces against insurgent strongholds.

"Fighting the occupiers is a duty for all those who are able," the letter said. "It is a jihad to push back the assailants. Resistance is a legitimate right. A Muslim must not inflict harm on any resistance man or inform on them. Instead, they should be supported and protected."

Besides al-Qarni, the prominent scholars signing the letter included Sheik Safar al-Hawali, Sheik Nasser al-Omar, Sheik Salman al-Awdah and Sheik Sharif Hatem al-Aouni.

Al-Hawali, who was jailed in the 1990s for five years without trial because he criticized U.S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) against Iraq, once was close to Saudi-born al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). He opposed the presence of U.S. troops in the kingdom.

His name appeared this month on a list issued by a group of Arab intellectuals seeking to prosecute prominent clerics for encouraging terrorism.

The scholars said inter-Iraqi fighting would cause "great damage to the Iraqis and give a free service to the Jews who are infiltrating into Iraq and to the coalition forces which exploit differences to consolidate their domination."

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to its two holiest cities, has launched a campaign against militants. The crackdown began after al-Qaida-affiliated operatives attacked three residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003 and killed dozens of people, bringing terrorism to the kingdom for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Source: Yahoo! News

"You Could Say That It Is The Mother of All Coalitions" - Donald Rumsfeld

2004-11-04T21:55:00.000-06:00

Again, so much for the "coalition of the willing."

Coalition Members Mull Iraq Pullout

By William J. Kole
The Associated Press BUDAPEST -- U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq isn't quite so willing any more.

In a blow to U.S. efforts to keep countries from deserting the multinational force, Hungary said this week it will not keep troops there beyond March 31. The Czechs plan to pull out by the end of February, the Dutch by the end of March, and Japan is feeling pressure to withdraw.

There's no mad scramble to leave, but that could change after Iraq holds elections in January and nations feel their obligations have ended.

"We should never have sent troops to Iraq. Bringing them back now is already too late," Janos Fekete, a Budapest shopkeeper, said Thursday.

Key allies said this week they will hold firm in Iraq.

Britain said Hungary's decision would not prompt a rethink, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Thursday his country's 3,000 troops will stay for as long as the Iraqi government wants. Staying on, he said, was part of Italy's duty in "defending democracy in the world."

Nevertheless, Hungary's announcement that it will not keep its 300 noncombat soldiers in Iraq beyond the end of March dealt a blow to the coalition.

Hungary's new prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, says he does not believe in pre-emptive war and has been receptive to public calls for a withdrawal despite an Iraqi request that the troops stay another year. Polls show 60 percent of Hungarians want them home now.

Parliament next week will debate his proposal to extend the troops' mandate, which expires Dec. 31, by three months. But that would require a two-thirds majority vote, and the country's main opposition party has said it will consider an extension only if the troops are given a UN mandate to stay.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been beset by fresh calls for a pullout of his country's 500 troops from the opposition, which blames his pro-U.S. policy for the beheading this week of a 24-year-old Japanese backpacker. Koizumi has not said whether the forces will extend their aid mission beyond mid-December.

Lawmakers in the Czech Republic voted Thursday to keep 100 military police in Iraq through Feb. 28, but Czech leaders have made it clear they see the Iraqi elections as a logical end to their commitment.

Bulgaria said this week it may "slightly reduce" its contingent of 480 infantry soldiers next year. The Netherlands said its 1,400 troops will finish their mission in March. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all plan to stay through next June.

Portugal's 120 police in Iraq are set to end their current tour on Nov. 12. The government was expected to decide on Friday whether to keep them there, and Foreign Minister Antonio Monteiro hinted that it would.

"Are we going to give Iraq a chance at sovereignty, or are we going to say 'no' and leave them at the mercy of people with guns?" Monteiro said.

Profile: Barack Obama

2004-11-03T23:36:00.000-06:00

Widely seen as a rising star in US politics, Barack Obama is tipped by some to become the country's first black president.

The Illinois Democratic state senator's career has taken another step upwards easily winning a seat in the Senate in the November election.

He will be the only black member among 100 senators when Congress convenes in January and only the fifth African-American to serve there.

A passionate speaker, he wowed Democrats when he addressed the party's convention in Boston in July.

The son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, Mr Obama made a speech strong on his personal history, a speech reflecting traditional American ideals of self-reliance and aspirations.

"Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place - America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before," he said.

Mr Obama, 42, is currently a state senator for Illinois, representing a district in south Chicago.

He was the favourite to win the Senate seat in 2004, held by Republican Peter Fitzgerald, who is retiring.

Mr Obama stunned Democratic opponents when he won his party's state nomination in March, facing six opponents and still winning 53% of the vote.

International upbringing

Supporters say he appeals to black and white voters alike. He is also said to have an ability to connect with white rural and small-town voters - a trait Mr Obama puts down to his family background.

Mr Obama is named after his father who grew up in Kenya herding goats, but gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii.
There the Kenyan met and married Mr Obama's mother, originally from Kansas, who had moved to Honolulu with her parents.

When the junior Barack was a toddler, his father got a chance to study at Harvard but there was no money for the family to go with him. He later returned to Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist, and the couple divorced.

When Mr Obama was six, his mother, Ann, married an Indonesian oil manager and the family moved to Jakarta. The boy lived there for four years, but then moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend school.

Both his parents are now dead.

Law career

Mr Obama went on to study political science at Columbia University in New York, and then moved to Chicago where he spent three years as a community organiser.

In 1988 he left to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

After Harvard, Mr Obama returned to Chicago to practise civil rights law - rejecting the big corporate law firms to represent victims of housing and employment discrimination.

He is married to a lawyer, Michelle, and they have two young daughters.

Mr Obama still practises law, and also does some teaching at the University of Chicago Law School which he says keeps him sharp when it comes to issues like abortion, gay rights and affirmative action.

Mr Obama was an early critic of the Iraq war, speaking out against the prospect of war several months before the March 2003 invasion.

When he addressed Democrats in Boston, he praised the men and women serving in Iraq, and said more should be done to financially support the families of those killed.

"When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world," he said.

Fans of Mr Obama are already number-crunching. By 2012 he could have eight years in the Senate under his belt.

By 2016, he will be 54 - a good age for a president, some say.

Mr Obama often jokes that people are always getting his name wrong, calling him "Alabama" or "Yo Mama".

Supporters believe that one day, no-one will make that mistake.

Source: BBC News

So Much for the "Coalition of the Willing"

2004-11-03T23:13:00.000-06:00

Hungary Will Withdraw Troops From Iraq

by Calvin Woodward and Ron Fournier

BUDAPEST, Hungary - Hungary will withdraw its 300 non-combat troops from Iraq by March 31, the country's new prime minister said Wednesday, because staying longer would be an "impossibility."

"We are obliged to stay there until the (Iraqi) elections. To stay longer is an impossibility," Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said at a ceremony to mark the end of mandatory military service in Hungary.

The former communist country, which joined the European Union in May, sent the troops as part of the U.S.-led coalition, but the government has been under mounting pressure from citizens and opposition parties who oppose the soldiers' presence.

The Iraqi elections are due to be held by Jan. 31.

The interim Iraqi government recently asked Hungary to maintain its troop presence for about another year.

In a letter sent to Hungary about three weeks ago, Iraq thanked the country for its contributions so far and asked that the troops' mission be extended by about a year "to help Iraq's stabilization process," government spokeswoman Boglar Laszlo told The Associated Press.

Hungary has a transportation contingent of 300 troops in Iraq stationed in Hillah, south of Baghdad. Parliament last year authorized the mission until Dec. 31.

One Hungarian soldier has died in Iraq, killed when a roadside bomb exploded by the water-carrying convoy he was guarding.

Gyurcsany, who was elected in September, said last month he did not believe in pre-emptive war.

Defense Minister Ferenc Juhasz had said the government would await the outcome of the U.S. presidential election before making a decision about Iraq.

What You Won't Hear on TV Today

2004-11-03T17:15:00.000-06:00

Governor Howard Dean sent this message to Democracy for America supporters today.

Montana, one of the reddest states, has a new Democratic governor.

First-time candidates for state legislatures from Hawaii to Connecticut beat incumbent Republicans.

And a record number of us voted to change course—more Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history.

Today is not an ending.

Regardless of the outcome yesterday, we have begun to revive our democracy. While we did not get the result we wanted in the presidential race, we laid the groundwork for a new generation of Democratic leaders.

Democracy for America trained thousands of organizers and brought new leadership into the political process. And down the ballot, in state after state, we elected Dean Dozen candidates who will be the rising stars of the Democratic Party in years ahead.

Tens of millions of us are disappointed today because we put so much of ourselves into this election. We donated money, we talked to friends, we knocked on doors. We invested ourselves in the political process.

That process does not end today. These are not short-term investments. We will only create lasting change if that sense of obligation and responsibility becomes a permanent part of our lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

We will not be silent.

Thank you for everything you did for our cause in this election. But we are not stopping here.

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

1984 by George Orwell Part 1, Chapter 1

2004-11-03T15:09:00.000-06:00

Part One

1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never --

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief -- or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope -- that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard -- a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party -- an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed -- and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army -- row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.

It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B! ...B-B!' -- over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second-a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B! ...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -- if, indeed, it did happen.

Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew-yes, he knew!-that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.

That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all -- perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls -- once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.

His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals -

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

over and over again, filling half a page.

He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.

He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother --

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.

Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.

The Good Doctor's Medicine

2004-11-02T14:44:00.000-06:00

US blogger Markos Moulitsas reflects upon the Democratic revival sparked by Howard Dean as the campaigning draws to a close

Markos Moulitsas
Tuesday November 2, 2004

The Guardian

It's actually happening.
It was barely two years ago that a band of obsessive political bloggers set their sights on the nascent presidential campaign, positioning themselves for a front-row seat to the big show. It's hard to believe that the end is near.

Bush's approval ratings were in the 70% range when many of us wrote our first words of dissent. Bush seemed invincible, riding his Afghanistan victory and a terror-induced, panic-stricken nation to stratospheric approval ratings. Bush had all the political capital he needed to drive his political agenda and sail smoothly to a second term. Except his agenda consisted of a single item: Iraq.

Veterans like myself saw Bush's rush to war as an inevitable mistake, wilfully ignoring the lessons of our past - lessons that Bush's father himself heeded when he refused to march on Baghdad in 1991. Bush's fate was now intertwined with that of Iraq: if his war was a success, nothing would stop him in 2004. If he failed, well ...

Bush's post-war bounce lasted no more than two months as the war's costs, in both blood and treasure, started taking a toll on his approval ratings. Meanwhile, the Iraq disaster gave rise to a new face in national Democratic party circles: Howard Dean.

While originally planning a healthcare-based campaign, the Democratic party's feeble respond to Bush's war lust gave Dean an issue that resonated with the party faithful, and a new movement - fuelled by the blogs - was born.

Dean ultimately faltered in the Iowa cornfields, but not before the good doctor had fused a new backbone into the Democratic party. Opposing the president - once viewed as political suicide - was suddenly en vogue. The strategy of "Republican lite", wielded by Democrats to disastrous consequences in the 2002 midterm election, was finally dead.

The odds were still long. Bush had amassed a $180m war chest during the primary. No Democrat could be expected to keep pace with that kind of money, it seemed. Gore had raised just $50m in 2000 (before federal funds kicked in).

But Republicans underestimated the fundraising machine pioneered by the Dean campaign. Donors also flooded the Kerry campaign with unprecedented amounts of money, forcing Bush to far surpass his original $180m goal. Bush still outraised Kerry $360m to $317m including federal funds, but the Republicans wouldn't be able to blow Kerry out with cash alone. Not that they didn't try ...

The Bush campaign had little to run on. The economy was bleeding jobs while Iraq had become a political liability. So Republicans placed the spotlight on Kerry instead, hoping to "define" him to the electorate before Kerry could fight back. Tens of millions of dollars in attack ads claimed Kerry was a "flip flopper", while the Rightwing Noise Machine pushed the unrelenting attacks.

A Washington Post report in May spoke of the unprecedented negativity of the Bush effort: "Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented - both in speeches and in advertising.

"Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75% of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads - or 27% of his total."

The lowest blow came from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who spread unsupported charges that Kerry had faked his medals to any media outlet who would listen - and just about all of them gave these attack dogs a forum. The nerve of these Bush-affiliated surrogates was breathtaking: they slandered Kerry for his well-documented Vietnam heroics, even though not one of them had served with Kerry. Meanwhile, Bush used his family connections to avoid Vietnam, and even then failed to complete his national guard duties. There was no hypocrisy big enough, no slander slimy enough, to keep the Swift Boat liars and their gleeful allies from attempting to take down a genuine American hero.

In 2000, the right might have gotten away with it. But the blogs, new progressive thinktanks, Comedy Central's The Daily Show, media watchdog groups and allied organisations helped Kerry beat back the Swift Boat liars and put a spotlight on a clueless-to-hostile mainstream media obsessed with trumpeting Bush's electoral advantages. One small but telling example: on October 21, an AP poll gave Kerry a 49-46 lead. The headline: "AP Poll: Bush, Kerry in Dead Heat." The same day, a Reuters poll gave Bush a 46-45 lead. The headline? "Reuters Poll: Bush Grabs One-Point Lead on Kerry."

The mainstream press didn't want to believe that the "wartime president", he of the unprecedented approval ratings, could actually be vulnerable.

Kerry faced $200m in negative attack ads, a hostile mainstream media, an administration that uses "terror" as a political tool and the combined might of the Rightwing Noise Machine. Yet Kerry entered election day in a strong position to win, both in the final round of polls and in early voting results in battlegrounds like Iowa and Florida. That alone is a major accomplishment, and one that hopefully bodes well for Kerry tonight.

· Markos Moulitsas runs the dailykos.com US political blog, and Our Congress, a blog tracking the hottest congressional races

Bin Laden Reaches Out to Swing Voters

2004-11-02T11:57:00.000-06:00

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 2, 2004; 10:00 AM

Who benefits from the last-minute surprise appearance of Osama bin Laden in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign?

"If Bush wins the elections, he will owe Bin Laden a favor," says London's Al-Sharq al-Awsat (in Arabic), an influential Saudi-owned newspaper based in London.

But most of the Arabic newspapers surveyed by the BBC say bin Laden's videotaped appearance on al-Jazeera was a "devastating blow" to the president that would boost the Democratic challenger John F. Kerry.

The only consensus seems to be that bin Laden mostly helped himself. The five minute videotape showed he is capable of communicating something to a Western audience other than menace. Whoever is elected president today will confront an al Qaeda leader with an evolving message about his enduring strategy.

As the transcript posted Monday on aljazeera.net makes clear, bin Laden was trying to use language and references familiar to U.S. voters. He alluded to Michael Moore's anti-Bush film "Farenheit 9/11." He quoted Ben Franklin ("An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure."). He expressed sympathy for Sept. 11 victims who blamed U.S. foreign policy for the attacks.

Gone, if only temporarily, were his usual flowery poetics, bloody-minded hyperbole and theological digressions. Instead of citing verses in the Koran, he spoke directly to American voters about their interest in the Middle East. He boasted that al Qaeda had gained ground in recent years but slyly acknowledged "the Bush administration has also gained."

Look "at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind," he said. "It all shows that the real loser is...you."

Bin Laden, who hadn't been seen on tape since September 10, 2003, or his media advisers, whoever they are, made sure that U.S. viewers would see the message. According to the Age in Australia, the Oct. 29 tape was the first bin Laden video to come with English subtitles. Like Bush and Kerry, bin Laden seems intent on reaching those key swing state voters.

There was none of the usual hand-held camera footage of the imperturbable sheik surrounded by gun-toting disciples on some rugged mountainside. Rather, bin Laden sat at a table, reading from his notes. The media product was more C-SPAN than Lawrence of Arabia.

"Bin Laden is offering the Americans a deal," wrote columnist Amin Taheri in the Gulf News. "The deal is simple, and Bin Laden hammers it in more specifically: 'Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure yourself.'"

Taheri is an iconoclastic Iranian-born journalist critical of the Arab political order. Taheri posits that the fugitive Saudi prince is sounding reasonable because al Qaeda has lost the ability to carry out strikes on Americans.

"Appearing on the eve of elections in democratic countries to throw in a political hand grenade is the major asset that Bin Laden has left," Taheri wrote. "And it is on that basis that he is offering a deal. Bin Laden may have the illusion that by offering an olive branch, albeit in his own strange way, he might pave the way for negotiations with a putative Kerry administration in Washington. "

Yigal Carmon, an Israeli terrorism analyst and head of the Middle East Media Research Institute, wrote that bin Laden is implicitly making a "peace offer." He described the Saudi's remarks as a follow up to the speech he directed at European public opinion last April. In the wake of an attack that killed 192 people in Madrid, the al Qaeda leader offered a truce to any European nation that pulled its armed forces out of Iraq.

Carmon sees bin Laden mounting a diplomatic offensive to make his ever-present threat of terrorism more effective. He quotes an Islamist Web site that says bin Laden's appearance brought together "the complementary elements of politics and religion, political savvy and force, the sword and justice."

One message to American voters, summed up in bin Laden's much-quoted conclusion, was almost reassuring: "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaeda. No. Your security is in your own hands."

But Mahmud Rimawi, a columnist for al Rai (in Arabic), the most popular newspaper in Jordan, said another message is that "keeping this or that person in the White House is not that important and that what is important is to review [U.S. foreign] policies." The message, Rimawi concluded, "could have been very convincing had the person who made it been other than Bin Laden."

After all, bin Laden's low-key approach in the latest video could not dispel his sinister reputation nor conceal the threats implicit in his diplomacy. He took credit for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people more explicitly than ever before. He made clear his strategy for driving U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq. He called it the "bleed-until-bankruptcy" plan. Al Qaeda's message may have been modified but its mission has not.

What is new is that bin Laden, while wielding the stick of terrorism, seems to be offering a carrot to the American people: the possibility of a respite from fear. That's a potentially powerful message even if it's entirely deceptive. No matter who wins the presidency, Taheri predicts that bin Laden will "be able to claim part of the credit."

One Day Left

2004-11-01T14:43:00.000-06:00

by Michael Moore

Dear Friends,

This is it. ONE DAY LEFT. There are many things I’d like to say. I’ve been on the road getting out the vote for 51 straight days so I haven’t had much time to write. So I’ve put together a bunch of notes to various groups all in this one letter. Please feel free to copy and send whatever portions are appropriate to your friends and family as you spend these last 24 hours trying to convince whomever you can to show up and vote for John Kerry.

Here are my final words…

To Decent Conservatives and Recovering Republicans:

In your heart of hearts you know Bush is a miserable failure. From having no plan on what to do in Iraq once he conquered Baghdad to the 380 missing tons of explosives that could be used to kill our brave young men and women, this guy doesn’t have a clue how to fight and win a war. You should see the mail I’ve been getting lately from our troops over there. They know how much the Iraqi people hate them. They are sitting ducks anytime they go out on the road. Many believe we are not that far away from a Tet-style offensive inside the Green Zone with hundreds of Americans and Brits killed.

Bush refused to go after and capture Osama bin Laden. He fought, every step of the way, the investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Who on earth would oppose such a thing? If 3,000 people died at your place of work and your boss said we don’t need to find out why or how it happened, he’d be thrown out on his ear. Bush’s behavior after this great tragedy alone is reason enough for his removal.

You already know that George W. Bush is the farthest thing from a conservative. He’s a reckless spender who has run up record-breaking deficits and the biggest debt in our history. He believes in having the government pry into everything from your library records to your bedroom. He has hit you with hidden taxes with his tax cuts for the rich.

I know many of you don’t like Bush, but are unsure of Kerry. Give the new guy a chance. He won’t raise your taxes (unless you are super-rich), he won’t take your hunting gun away, he won’t make you visit France. He risked his life for you many years ago. He’s asking for the chance to do it again. Scott McConnell at The American Conservative magazine has endorsed him. What more do you need?

To My Friends on the Left:

Okay, Kerry isn’t everything you wished he would be. You’re right. He’s not you! Or me. But we’re not on the ballot – Kerry is. Yes, Kerry was wrong to vote for authorization for war in Iraq but he was in step with 70% of the American public who was being lied to by Bush & Co. And once everyone learned the truth, the majority turned against the war. Kerry has had only one position on the war – he believed his president.

President Kerry had better bring the troops home right away. My prediction: Kerry’s roots are anti-war. He has seen the horrors of war and because of that he will avoid war unless it is absolutely necessary. Ask most vets. But don’t ask someone whose only horror was when he arrived too late for a kegger in Alabama.

There’s a reason Bush calls Kerry the Number One Liberal in the Senate – THAT’S BECAUSE HE IS THE NUMBER ONE LIBERAL IN THE SENATE! What more do you want? My friends, this is about as good as it gets when voting for the Democrat. We don’t have the #29 Liberal running or the #14 Liberal or even the #2 Liberal – we got #1! When has that ever happened?

Those of us who may be to the left of the #1 liberal Democrat should remember that this year conservative Democrats have had to make a far greater shift in their position to back Kerry than we have. We’re the ones always being asked to make the huge compromises and to always vote holding our noses. No nose holding this time. This #1 liberal is not the tweedledee to Bush’s tweedledum.

To Nader Voters:

See the above note.

Ralph’s own party, the Green Party, would not endorse his run this year. That’s because those of us who want to build a third party in this country know that the only way to do this is to build bridges with those who believe in the issues Nader believes in. But not one of those people will sacrifice the chance to remove George W. Bush from the White House on Tuesday. The choice here is clear: do we join with our friends, or do we piss on them?

After the debacle of 2000, the Democrats got smart and abandoned the conservative wing of their party. That’s why 8 of the 9 Democrats in the primaries this year were from the liberal wing. Ralph should take credit for that and declare victory. It’s so sad that he doesn’t realize the good he’s accomplished. But for reasons only known to him, he’s more angry at the Democrats than he is at Bush. He has lost his compass. I worry he has lost his mind. But he still gives a great speech!

And Lila Lipscomb, the mother from Flint who lost her son in Iraq, she still grieves -- as do the mothers of 1,120 others (not to mention the mothers of the 100,000 Iraqis who have died because of Bush’s war). That’s what this election is about. Not Ralph proving some point. Almost none of us on his 2000 advisory group are supporting him this year. His total lack of respect for his best friends should tell all of you something about what he really thinks of you, too.

To the Non-Swing States:

Stop listening to how your vote doesn’t count in this election and that your state is already decided for Kerry or Bush. It is critical that you vote because we not only need to give Kerry the electoral win, but he needs to have a HUGE mandate with an ENORMOUS popular vote victory as well. It will be impossible for him to get anything done for four years if there is no clear mandate. We must not only defeat Bush, we must put a stake in the heart of the right-wing, neo-con movement. If you live in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, the Northeast or the Deep South, you need to vote and you need to bring ten people with you to the polls. If you live in a state where we have the chance to elect the Democrat to the Senate or the House, you need to vote. Turn off the TV. Quit listening to news media that has a vested interest in repeating to you over and over that your vote does not count. It does.

If you have friends or relatives who live in the 30-plus non-swing states, call them and remind them how important it is that Kerry gets a massive popular vote victory.

To Non-Voters:

I understand why you stopped voting. Politicians suck. Nothing ever seems to change. You’re only one vote.

Yes, politicians suck. But so do car salesmen – and that hasn’t stopped you from buying a car. Politicians only respond to the threat of the angry mob also known as the voting public. If most people don’t vote, that’s good news for them ‘cause then they don’t have to answer to the majority.

Almost fifty percent of Americans don’t vote. That means you belong to the largest political party in America – the Non-Voting Party. That means you hold all the power to toss George W. Bush out of the Oval Office. How cool is that?

I believe that we are going to have the largest election turnout in our lifetime tomorrow. You don’t want to miss out on that. The lines at the polls are going to be long and raucous and fun. It is an historic election. You won’t want to say that you were the only one who wasn’t there. Promise me you’ll vote, just this one time.

To All First-Time Voters:

Welcome to the longest running, uninterrupted democracy on earth! You own it. It’s yours.

A few words about how messy it’s going to be tomorrow. The lines are going to be long. Bring your iPods. Better yet, bring a friend or two. The election officials have no clue just how many millions are going to show up at the polls. This will be the largest turnout in our lifetime. They don’t have enough machines. They are going to have to send for more ballots.

And they are going to make it difficult for you to vote. The new law says if this is your first time voting you must bring ID with you that matches the address you are registered at.

If for some reason they can’t find your name on the voting rolls, you have the right to ask for a provisional ballot, which you can fill out and then sort things out later.

If you have any problems at the polling place, please call 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The people there can tell you how to find the precinct where you should be voting, get you legal help if you are denied the right to vote, or answer any other questions you may have.

If you need any help figuring out the ballot, don’t be afraid to ask. If you screw up your ballot, you can ask for another one. In fact, the law allows you to screw up your ballot two times before you finally have to submit your final ballot! Be careful to vote on the line that says John F. Kerry/John Edwards. Don’t vote for more than one Presidential, Senate or House candidate or you ballot won’t be counted. If your polling place has a stub or a receipt from your ballot, make sure they give you one.

Thanks for joining us. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It only works when we all come off the bench and participate.

To African Americans:

First of all, let’s just acknowledge what you already know: America is a country which still has a race problem, to put it nicely. Al Gore would be president today had thousands of African Americans not had their right to vote stolen from them in Florida in 2000.

Here is my commitment: I will do everything I can to make sure that that this will not happen again. And I’m not the only one making this pledge. Thousands of volunteer lawyers are flying to Florida to act as poll watchers and intervene should there be any attempts to deny anyone their right to vote. They will NOT be messing around.

For my part, I have organized an army of 1,200 professional and amateur filmmakers who will be armed with video cameras throughout the states of Florida and Ohio. At the first sign of criminality, we will dispatch a camera crew to where the vote fraud is taking place and record what is going on. We will put a big public spotlight on any wrongdoing by Republican officials in those two states. They will not get away with this as they did in 2000.

In Ohio, the Republicans are sending almost 2,000 paid “poll challengers” into the black precincts of Cleveland in an attempt to stop African Americans from voting. This action is beyond despicable. Do not let this stop you from voting. I, and thousand of others, will be there to fight for you and protect you.

To George W.:

I know it’s gotta be rough for you right now. Hey, we’ve all been there. “You’re fired” are two horrible words when put together in that order. Bin Laden surfacing this weekend to remind the American people of your total and complete failure to capture him was a cruel trick or treat. But there he was. 3,000 people were killed and he’s laughing in your face. Why did you stop our Special Forces from going after him? Why did you forget about bin Laden on the DAY AFTER 9/11 and tell your terrorism czar to concentrate on Iraq instead?

There he was, OBL, all tan and rested and on videotape (hey, did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie? Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?)

Speaking of my movie – can I ask you a personal question before we part ways for good on Tuesday? Why did you and your friends fund SIX “documentaries” trashing me -- but only ONE film against Kerry? C’mon, he was the candidate, not me. What a waste of your time and resources! Sure, I know what your pollsters told you, that the film had convinced some people to vote you out. I just want you to know that that was not my original intent. Funny things happen at the movies. Hope you get to see a few at the multiplex in Waco. It’s a great way to relax.

To John Kerry:

Thank you.

And don’t worry – none of us are going away after you are inaugurated. We’ll be there to hold your hand and keep you honest. Don’t let us down. We’re betting you won’t. So is the rest of the world.

That’s it. See you at the polls – and at the victory party tomorrow night.

Yours,

Michael Moore

www.michaelmoore.com

MMFlint@aol.com

A Good Sign for Kerry

2004-10-31T22:54:00.000-06:00

Polls Suggest Higher Voter Turnout Likely

By WILL LESTER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Voter turnout is likely to be higher than in recent presidential elections — especially among young voters — in a very close race, weekend polls suggest. Those polls suggest the race is very close nationally with some polls showing President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry even and another showing Bush slightly ahead.

Bush has a slight edge at 48 percent and Kerry at 45 percent in a Pew Research Center poll, while several national polls released this weekend showed the race even. New polls show Bush and Kerry knotted in key states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Hampshire.

More than eight in 10 registered voters in the Pew poll, 84 percent, describe this election as especially important, compared with 67 percent in 2000 and 61 percent in 1996.

Pew pollster Andrew Kohut said the poll suggests turnout could be as high or slightly higher than in 1992, when it was more than 55 percent of those eligible to vote — based on his analysis of voter enthusiasm.

Bush had more intense support from his backers than Kerry, though both get the backing of about nine in 10 in their own parties.

The poll suggested the two candidates are running about even among early voters.

The Pew poll of 2,408 registered voters and 1,925 likely voters was taken Oct. 27-Oct. 30 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Republicans Voting Against George W. Bush

2004-10-31T16:35:00.000-06:00

See also "Conservatives on Bush" in the column to the right.

"As son of a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration's decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry."

-- Ambassador John Eisenhower, endorsing Kerry in an opinion piece published in The Manchester Union Leader, September 28, 2004.

"The two 'Say No to Bush' signs in my yard say it all. The present Republican president has led us into an unjustified war -- based on misguided and blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The terror seat was Afghanistan. Iraq had no connection to these acts of terror and was not a serious threat to the United States, as this president claimed, and there was no relation, it's now obvious, to any serious weaponry. Although Saddam Hussein is a frightful tyrant, he posed no threat to the United States when we entered the war. George W. Bush's arrogant actions to jump into Iraq when he had no plan how to get out have alienated the United States from our most trusted allies and weakened us immeasurably around the world... This imperialistic, stubborn adherence to wrongful policies and known untruths by the Cheney-Bush administration -- and that's the accurate order -- has simply become more than I can stand."

-- Former Minnesota Governor Elmer Andersen, a Republican, endorsing Kerry in an opinion piece published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, October 13, 2004. Andersen argued in the piece that, "I am more fearful for the state of this nation than I have ever been -- because this country is in the hands of an evil man: Dick Cheney. It is eminently clear that it is he who is running the country, not George W. Bush."

"The Bush George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naive belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American enemies -- a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky's concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft."

-- Scott McConnell, executive editor, The American Conservative, endorsing Kerry in the November 8, 2004 issue.

"I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep the secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court."

-- Former U.S. Senator Marlow Cook, Republican from Kentucky, endorsing Kerry in an opinion piece that appeared in The Louisville Courier-Journal, October 20, 2004.

"My Republican Party is the party of Theodore Roosevelt, who fought to preserve our natural resources and environment. This president has pursued policies that will cause irreparable damage to our environmental laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the public lands we share with future generations."

-- Former Michigan Governor William Milliken, from a statement published in the Traverse City Record Eagle, October 17, 2004.

"As an environmentalist who served as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, I know that this administration has turned environmental policy over to lobbyists for the oil, gas and mining interests. On the other hand, I know first-hand of your commitment to a more balanced approach to environmental policy -- one where we can have both jobs and profit for industry as well as clean air and water. There is no stronger evidence of this than your outstanding leadership and support in the restoration of the Florida Everglades. John, for each of these reasons I believe President Bush has failed our country and my party. Accordingly, I want you to know that when I go into the booth next Tuesday I am going to cast my vote for you."

-- Former U.S. Senator Bob Smith, Republican from New Hampshire, from an endorsement letter sent to John Kerry, October 28, 2004.

"Nixon was a prince compared to these guys."

-- Former U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey, R-California, from an article in the Palo Alto Weekly, September 8, 2004. McCloskey, who is active with Republicans for Kerry, says of members of the Bush administration, "These people believe God has told them what to do. They've high jacked the Republican Party we once knew."

"The war is just a misbegotten thing that's spiraling down. It's a matter of conscience for me. After 9/11, the whole world was behind us. That's all gone now. That's been squandered. Now we've made the entire Muslim world hate us. And for what? For what?"

-- Former State Senator Al Meiklejohn, Republican from Colorado and World War II combat veteran, explaining his decision to support John Kerry in an interview with The Denver Post, September 19, 2004.

"We need a leader who is really dedicated to creating millions of high-paying jobs all across the country."

-- Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, who campaigned for George W. Bush in 2000 and appeared in television advertisements for the Republican Party of Michigan that year. Iacocca, who complains that under Bush deficit spending is "getting out of hand," endorsing Kerry on June 24, 2004.

"In a dangerous epoch -- made more so by a president who sees the world in stark black and white because simplicity polls better and fits into sound bites -- John Kerry may seem out of place. He is, in fact, in exactly the right place at the right time to lead our country."

-- Tim Ashby, who served during the Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush administrations as director of the Office of Mexico and the Caribbean for the U.S. Commerce Department and acting deputy assistant Secretary of Commerce for the Western Hemisphere, endorsing Kerry in a Seattle Times, October 14, 2004.

"I have always been, and I still am, a registered Republican, but I shall enthusiastically vote for John Kerry for president on November 2... If the Bush administration stays in power four more years, it will pack the Supreme Court with neocons who reject the idea that the Constitution is a living document designed to protect the freedom of the citizens."

-- Anne Morton Kimberly, widow of former Republican National Committee chair Rogers C.B. Morton, Secretary of the Interior during the Nixon administration and Secretary of Commerce during the Ford administration, endorsing Kerry in a an opinion piece that appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 14, 2004.

"Mainstream Republicans believe in fiscal responsibility, internationalism, environmental protection, the rights of women, and putting middle-class families ahead of big business lobbyists. Moderate Republicans should not be asked to swallow the right-wing policies of George W. Bush."

-- Clay Myers, who was Oregon's Republican Secretary of State for 10 years and the state's Treasure, endorsing Kerry at a press conference for Oregon Republicans for Kerry, September 1, 2004.

"The current administration has run the largest deficits in U.S. history, incurring massive debts that our children and grandchildren will have to pay. Two and a half million people have lost their jobs; trillions have been wiped out of savings and retirement accounts. The income of Americans has declined two years in a row, the first time since the IRS began keeping records. George W. Bush will be the first president since Hoover to have a net job loss under his watch... President Bush wanted to be judged as the CEO president, it is time to say, 'you have failed, and you're fired."

-- William Rutherford, former State Treasurer of Oregon, endorsing Kerry as a press conference for Oregon Republicans for Kerry, September 1, 2004.

"I served 20 years in the Ohio General Assembly as Republican. People have asked me why I oppose George w. Bush for president. My first response is, 'He is incompetent.' His behavior, his bad judgment, his record, all demonstrate a failure as president. He certainly misled the country into a no-win war in Iraq. Following his preemptive invasion, he totally misjudged the consequences of his action. He made a bad situation worse, fomenting widespread terrorism, all done with a frightful loss of lives and money."

-- Former Ohio State Representative John Galbraith, a Republican legislator for 20 years, endorsing Kerry in a letter to The Toledo Blade, September 28, 2004.

"Before the current campaign, it might have been argued that at least in affirming the importance of faith and respecting those who profess it the administration had embraced traditional conservative views. But in the wake of the Swift Boat ads attacking John Kerry, even this argument can no longer be maintained. As an elder of the Presbyterian Church, I found that those ads were not at all in the Christian tradition. John McCain rightly condemned them as dishonest and dishonorable. The president should have, too. That he did not undermines his credibility on questions of faith.

Some say it's just politics. But that's the whole point. More is expected of people of faith than "just politics."

The fact is that the Bush administration might better be called radical or romantic or adventurist than conservative. And that's why real conservatives are leaning toward Kerry."

-- Clyde Prestowitz, counselor to the secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration and an elder of the Presbyterian Church, from "The Conservative Case for Kerry," published in the Providence Journal and other newspapers, October 15, 2004.

Cheney on Bin Laden

2004-10-30T10:08:00.000-05:00

Dick Cheney in Cedar Rapids, IA last week: "We haven't seen much of him (Osama bin Laden)... frankly because we think he's in a deep hole somewhere, hiding."

It is clear that the Bush Administration has not made us safer.

Be Afraid.

2004-10-30T08:54:00.000-05:00

"Global war on terrorism."

"Weapons of mass destruction."

"Saddam Hussein."

"September 11th."

"Terrorists."

Osama Bin Laden Video and Transcript

2004-10-30T08:35:00.000-05:00

Watch the video here.

October 29, 2004
Transcript of Al Jazeera Tape
By REUTERS

DUBAI, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Following are excerpts from a speech by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden addressing the American people in a video tape, parts of which were aired by Al Jazeera television on Saturday, as translated by Reuters.

"O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.

"Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.

"It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.

"I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.

"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

"In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.

"He (Bush) adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.....

"We had agreed with the (the Sept. 11) overall commander Mohammed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This had given us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God...

"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic presidential candidate John) Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.

Vatican City: John Paul II Appeals to Iran for Religious Freedom

2004-10-29T23:42:00.000-05:00

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 29, 2004 (Zenit.org) - John Paul II appealed to Iranian authorities to respect the religious freedom of Christians and of all their citizens, when he received Tehran's new ambassador to the Holy See.

Mohammed Javad Faridzadeh, the new ambassador, has been working as the Iranian president's special representative for international cultural and political issues.

Addressing the ambassador in French, the Pope requested "the support of the Iranian authorities to allow the faithful of the Catholic Church present in Iran, as well as other Christians, the freedom to profess their religion."

The Holy Father also called for "recognition of the juridical personality of the ecclesiastical institutions, in order to facilitate their work within Iranian society."

Among the fundamental rights, in the first place is "the right to religious freedom, which is an essential aspect of freedom of conscience and which reveals, precisely, the transcendental dimension of the person," he said during today's audience.

"Freedom of worship is an aspect of religious freedom, which must be extended to all the citizens of the country," the Pope added.

Last Feb. 12 a congress held in Rome marked the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Iran. The vast majority of Iran's 69 million people are Shiite Muslims; Catholics number only 23,000.

In this connection, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican secretary for relations with states, said on Vatican Radio that "the Holy See is ready to defend and protect its freedom of conscience, faith [and] religion, lived both individually as well as in community."

Iran "assures us that there is full freedom of conscience for Catholics, and also of worship," the archbishop reported.

"We have questions that remain to be resolved," he added. He referred "first of all, to freedom of worship, freedom of organization, the granting of entry visas to religious from abroad, whose presence is necessary for the small number of Catholics in Iran."

"Then we have problems that affect schools, which at the beginning of the '80s were expropriated from the Catholic institutions that administered them," said Archbishop Lajolo.

"Our relations with Iran, nonetheless, are animated by a mutual willingness to understand and by ever greater concord," added the Vatican official.

The 2004 Report on Religious Freedom in the World, prepared by Aid to the Church in Need, described the difficulties of Muslims in Iran who decide to convert to Christianity. In particular, it mentioned the case of an Iranian citizen who was given political asylum by a court in Germany after his conversion.

A U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, published Sept. 15, also highlights the repression suffered by religious minorities in Iran.

Iran: UN Offers to Guarantee Nuclear Fuel for Iran

2004-10-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

* Iran sees small chance of UN economic sanctions
* Rafsanjani says Iran will continue talks but rejects threats

VIENNA: The UN nuclear watchdog has offered to guarantee Iran a supply of fuel for its nuclear power plants so that Tehran would not need to enrich its own uranium, Western diplomats said on Friday.

Diplomats said that the head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, made this offer to help France, Britain and Germany in their talks with Iran aimed at persuading the Islamic republic to abandon its controversial uranium enrichment programme. More>>

Jordan Renews Territorial Dispute Against Syria

2004-10-29T23:28:00.000-05:00

Acting in coordination with Washington, to pressure Bashar Assad to cease ongoing cooperation with Iraqi insurgents and vacate Lebanon.

Jordan has decided to renew a long dormant territorial dispute with Syria, and has issued Damascus with a formal demand to return territory illegaly seized in 1970.

This has been confirmed by western intelligence sources. Jordanian officials have refused to comment. More>>

Lebanon: Karameh defends Lebanon's ties with Syria

2004-10-29T23:25:00.000-05:00

Lebanese PM attacks efforts to distance his country from Syria, proposes opening talks with his political opponents.

BEIRUT - Lebanon's new Prime Minister Omar Karameh has denounced international efforts to distance his country from Syria and said he wanted peace with his political opponents, local media reported Friday.

"Our nation is going through a very delicate situation. Lebanon and Syria are subject to strong foreign pressure aimed at breaking tight links between our two countries," Karameh was quoted as saying. More>>

The Economist and Financial Times Back Kerry

2004-10-28T23:32:00.000-05:00

The weekly bible of the world's top movers and shakers, The Economist, has thrown its support behind the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, in the US presidential election.

"With a heavy heart, we think American readers should vote for John Kerry on November 2...."

"This year's battle has been between two deeply flawed men: George Bush, who has been a radical, transforming president but who has never seemed truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have made up his mind conclusively about something only once, and that was 30 years ago," it said.

"But on November 2, Americans must make their choice, as must The Economist. It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush."

Meanwhile, Britain's respected Financial Times endorsed John Kerry as the best choice for US president, saying incumbent George W. Bush had polarized the world with his radical foreign policy and led a reckless economic policy.

The paper, one of the world's leading financial dailies, called Bush "a polarizer, exploiting the war on terror to cow domestic opposition and divide the world into Them and Us."

"Over the past three years, the gap between ambition and reality has created what could be termed a 'Bush bubble'," it said.

Ugly, Tasteless, Terrifying and Wild... Count Me In!

2004-10-28T20:56:00.000-05:00

Hunter S. Thompson

He's been America's most unorthodox political commentator for more than 30 years. But for Dr Hunter S Thompson the Bush presidency is evil beyond belief - and judgment is nigh.

by Hunter S. Thompson

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election day - especially when it's a presidential election - is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to them.

Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.

That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The weak suck up to the strong, for fear of losing their jobs and money and all the fickle power they wielded only 24 hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public. Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.

"What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It's making me sick."

"That is the smell of a loser, senator. He came in to apply for a job, but we tossed him out immediately. Sgt Sloat took him down to the parking lot and taught him a lesson he will never forget."

"Good work, Tex. And how are you coming with my new enemies list? I want them all locked up. They are scum."

"We will punish them brutally. They are terrorist sympathizers, and most of them voted against you. I hate those bastards."

"Thank you, Sloat. You are a faithful servant. Come over here and kneel down. I want to reward you."

That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni, vidi, vici, especially among Republicans. It's like the ancient Bedouin saying: "As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn."

Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush - Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain - all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

That is why George W Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the US Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November.

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early, and he had no response to "It's the economy, stupid." Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous "trickle-down" theory of US economic policy. If the rich get richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow "trickle down" to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to pre-industrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

Things haven't changed much where George W Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West - which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

Houston is also the unnatural home of two out of the last three presidents of the United States of America, for good or ill. The other one was a handsome, sex-crazed boy from next-door Arkansas, which has no laws against any deviant practice not specifically forbidden in the New Testament, including anal incest and public cunnilingus with farm animals.

Back in 1948, during his first race for the US Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and told him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.

His campaign manager was shocked. "We can't say that, Lyndon," he supposedly said. "You know that it isn't true."

"Of course it's not!" Johnson barked. "But let's make the bastard deny it!"

Johnson - a Democrat, like Bill Clinton - won that election by fewer than 100 votes, and after that he was home free. He went on to rule Texas and the US Senate for 20 years and to be the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. Until now.

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with John Kerry turned into a series of embarrassments that broke his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful... I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President", and then I felt ashamed.

Karl Rove, the President's political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St Louis and Tempe. That is Rove's problem. His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters.

Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally had to speak without his teleprompter. It was a Cinderella story brought up to date in Florida that night - except this time, the false prince turned back into a frog.

Immediately after the first debate ended, I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."

This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. No mas.

Indeed. The numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics. That's exactly what the debates did. John Kerry looked like a winner, and it energized his troops. Voting for Kerry is starting to look like serious fun for everyone except poor George, who now looks like a loser. That is fatal in a presidential election.

I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about 46 per cent, plus five points for owning the US Supreme Court - which seemed to equal 51 per cent. Nobody really believed that, but George W Bush moved into the White House anyway.

It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new boss of Germany. Karl Rove is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked for a while, and it was sure fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal biphetamine and stay awake for eight days in a row with his maps and bombers and his dope-addled general staff.

They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for war, as long as you are winning, and Hitler thought he was king of the hill forever. He had created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. They were fanatics. That was 66 years ago, and things are not much different today. We still love war.

George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it.

BULLETIN: KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT; DR THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT".

"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.

"Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush. He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November." Thompson, well known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas goat with no moral compass."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States."

Which is true. I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for 30 years as a good man with a brave heart - which is more than even the President's friends will tell you about George W Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him. Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, and he is no fun at all.

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I won't make that mistake again. The joke is over for Nader. He was funny once, but now he belongs to the dead. Nader is a fool, as is anybody who votes for him in November - with the obvious exception of professional Republicans who have paid big money to turn him into a world-famous Judas goat. Nader is so desperate that he's paying homeless people to gather signatures to get him on the ballot. In Pennsylvania, the petitions he submitted contained tens of thousands of phony signatures, including Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse and John Kerry. A judge dumped Ralph from the ballot there, calling it "the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this court".

But they will keep his name on the ballot in the long-suffering Hurricane State, which is ruled by the President's younger brother, Jeb, who also wants to be the next president of the United States. In 2000, when they sent Jim Baker to Florida, I knew it was all over. In that election, 97,488 people voted for Nader in Florida, and Gore lost the state by 537 votes. You don't have to be from Texas to understand the moral of that story. It's like being out-coached in the Super Bowl. Only losers play fair, and all winners have blood on their hands.

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, we had a quick rendezvous on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. I told him that Bush's vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't. Kerry suggested I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead rat over a black-spike fence and on to the President's lawn. We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon - which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river. That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

U.S. Senate Candidate's Racist Remark Draws Fire

2004-10-28T20:14:00.000-05:00

Tom Coburn

By RON JENKINS, Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY - A remark from a U.S. Senate candidate that black males have a "genetic predisposition" for a lower life expectancy has created a new furor in what has been an especially tight — and nasty — campaign.

Black legislators Thursday blasted former congressman Tom Coburn, saying his remark implied that black males are genetically inferior.

In a television debate Wednesday, the Republican said black males are being penalized by the Social Security (news - web sites) system "because they had a genetic predisposition to have less of a life expectancy."

In a statement, Democratic state Sen. Angela Monson, chairwoman of the Black Legislative Caucus, said blacks are insulted by anyone suggesting "that they are genetically inferior and thus predisposed to die before they reach retirement age."

State Democratic chairman Jay Parmley called the remark racially insensitive, but Coburn's spokesman John Hart defended the assessment.

"Social Security, as it is structured today, discriminates against African Americans because they have a lower life span," he said. "The reality is there are a lot of facts that lead to a low life expectancy. The legacy of discrimination itself has led to inequality."

He dismissed criticism from black lawmakers as "an 11th-hour character attack" to help Coburn's Democratic opponent, Rep. Brad Carson (news, bio, voting record).

Coburn and Carson are locked in what has been an especially nasty campaign to replace Sen. Don Nickles (news, bio, voting record), an Oklahoma Republican retiring after 24 years.

Polls have shown the pair about even in a contest that will help determine control of the Senate, where the GOP now holds a majority of 51-48 with one independent.

Republicans Now Attacking U.S. Troops for Not Securing Weapons

2004-10-28T17:50:00.000-05:00

In attempts to deflect Bush's inadequate preparation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Republicans now attack the troops for not thoroughly searching and completing the job of securing the missing weapons. See video.

Note: The story is no longer that the weapons were not there. The video, referenced below, all but proves that they were there after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Republican party line has now shifted to blaming the troops.

Al Qaqaa Explosives? Watch the Video

2004-10-28T15:23:00.000-05:00

Video from an embedded American news crew may prove that the explosives were in fact in the Al Qaqaa area and left unguarded by U.S. soldiers.