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The government reported that annual unemployment during this recession peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment rate has been low only because government programs, especially Social Security disability, have effectively been buying people off the unemployment rolls and reclassifying them as "not in the labor force."
In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified from "not in the labor force" to "employed" in order to reduce the unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.
Research by the economists David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mark Duggan at the University of Maryland shows that once Congress began loosening the standards to qualify for disability payments in the late 1980's and early 1990's, people who would normally be counted as unemployed started moving in record numbers into the disability system — a kind of invisible unemployment. Almost all of the increase came from hard-to-verify disabilities like back pain and mental disorders. As the rolls swelled, the meaning of the official unemployment rate changed as millions of people were left out.
By the end of the 1990's boom, this invisible unemployment seemed to have stabilized. With the arrival of this recession, it has exploded. From 1999 to 2003, applications for disability payments rose more than 50 percent and the number of people enrolled has grown by one million. Therefore, if you correctly accounted for all of these people, the peak unemployment rate in this recession would have probably pushed 8 percent.
The point is not whether every person on disability deserves payments. The point is that in previous recessions these people would have been called unemployed. They would have filed for unemployment insurance. They would have shown up in the statistics. They would have helped create a more accurate picture of national unemployment, a crucial barometer we use to measure the performance of the economy, the likelihood of inflation and the state of the job market.
Veteran observers of the Meet the Press host confirm that Pumpkinhead Tim Russert's performance today is the closest he's been to achieving orgasm since the morning of Little Russ's conception. The bloated broadcaster reveled in the details of Bush's deception of the press concerning his trip to Baghdad. A slight moan escaped Russert's lips as Mike Allen recalled the confiscation of reporters' cell phones. Russert's eyes rolled back in his head as he crowed that Bush upstaged Senator Clinton's visit to American troops, and his well-hidden pelvis began thrusting uncontrollably as he compared Bush to Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
Later, Russert shared a cigarette with Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Broder.
We're pleased to learn that the U.S. plans to release 140 detainees from Guantanamo. On the other hand, we're outraged by this:
According to Time, activities leading toward release of the 140 prisoners have accelerated since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It said U.S. officials had concluded some detainees were kidnapped for reward money offered for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. (our emphasis)
It took the U.S. over two years to figure out that up to 20% of these detainees were total innocents? During which time they were kept in cages without access to families or lawyers?
And this isn't much better.
Slated for release were "the easiest 20 percent" of detainees, a military official told the magazine. It did not identify its source, who said the military was waiting for "a politically propitious time to release them." (our emphasis)
The 1994 revolution that gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives produced a seismic shift in federal spending, moving tens of billions of dollars from Democratic to GOP districts, an Associated Press analysis shows.And Daily Kos points out the Medicare bill moved money from the big-city teaching hospitals to rural ones:
Rather than pork barrel projects for new GOP districts, the change was driven mostly by Republican policies that moved spending from poor rural and urban areas to the more affluent suburbs and GOP-leaning farm country, the computer analysis showed.
The result was an average of $612 million more in federal spending last year for congressional districts represented by Republicans than for those represented by Democrats, the analysis found.
In terms of services, for example, that translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps.
“There is an old adage,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. “To the victor goes the spoils.”
....Between 1995 and 2001, AP’s analysis found that 20 of the 30 fastest growing federal programs already had disproportionately benefited constituents in GOP districts Republicans took over in 1995.
Similarly, 20 of the 30 programs that were cut the most had disproportionately benefited Democratic districts before the takeover.
For instance, spending on child care food programs was slashed 80 percent; public and Indian housing grants were virtually eliminated; rental housing loans for rural areas and special benefits for disabled coal miners were cut by two-thirds; and the food stamp program was cut by a third.
For decades, Medicare has used formulas that pay more than average per patient to hospitals in large urban areas and to those with high labor costs, and less to those in rural areas and in places with lower labor costs. The bill passed by Congress narrows or eliminates those distinctions by raising rates for lower-paid hospitals, a change that accounts for nearly all of the $13.5 billion. Those and other formula changes will send no money to New York City, and very little to its suburbs.
Members of Congress from rural states portray the change as a matter of fairness, redressing a longstanding inequity. Their urban colleagues, and some from the suburbs, say it ignores real regional differences in the costs of health care.
If you're involved in all sorts of iffy financial transactions, don't get into a messy divorce.
Someone didn't mention this sage advice to Neil Bush.
Now it turns out that Bush is not-too-distantly connected to New Bridge Strategies, the outfit President Bush's right-hand-man Joe Allbaugh set up to play Iraqi contracts game.
Here's the run-down.
It turns out Neil is Co-Chairman of something called Crest Investment Corporation. Whatever it is Crest does, it pays 60 grand a year to get a few hours a week of advice from the President's ne'er-do-well brother on how to do it.
The other "co-chairman and principal of Crest," reports the Financial Times, "is Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies ..."
The New Bridge website says that before Daniel started up Crest he was in the international real estate biz and also "has extensive experience in structuring investing in energy and oil and gas projects throughout the U.S., Europe and the Middle East."
A small company in London, UK, claims to have developed a technique that overturns scientific dogma and could revolutionise medicine. It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's.
If the company, TriStem, really can do what it says, there would be no need to bother with conventional stem cells, currently one of the hottest fields of research. But its astounding claims have been met with bemusement and disbelief by mainstream researchers.
TriStem has been claiming for years that it can take a half a litre of anyone's blood, extract the white blood cells and make them revert to a "stem-cell-like" state within hours. The cells can be turned into beating heart cells for mending hearts, nerve cells for restoring brains and so on.
The company has now finally provided proof that at least some of its claims might be true. In collaboration with independent researchers in the US, the company has used its technique to turn white blood cells into the blood-generating stem cells found in bone marrow.
The dollar tumbled across the board yesterday, hitting an all-time low against the euro amid fears that Wall Street was betting against the US currency. The euro traded as high as $1.2018 - above $1.20 for the first time - as the dollar slid to new multi-year lows against sterling and the Canadian dollar and a six-month low against the Swiss franc.
With American markets shut for Thanksgiving, traders focused on a string of negative news on the dollar. including yesterday's report in The Independent that the leading financiers George Soros and Warren Buffett had taken "short positions".
Chris Furness, senior currency strategist at the online analysts 4CAST, said the move was "more psychological than anything else, and related at least a small extent to early US traders reading the story that both Soros and Buffett are betting on a dollar collapse".
The three Catholics in the Democratic presidential primary quickly fired off statements supporting the Massachusetts high court ruling last week that same-sex couples have the right to marry.UPDATE: The thing that pisses me off most about this is, you're not going to see them chastise Catholic senators and congressmen who voted for the war in Iraq - a war the pope said was an unjust war. No siree, it will be applied to the benefit of the right wing only.
Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark made the announcements despite two Vatican directives this year to Roman Catholic officeholders to never promote laws that endorse gay marriage.
Politicians' practices — known as "cafeteria Catholicism" — led U.S. bishops this month to begin exploring possible penalties for officeholders who ignore church doctrine. It would be the first time the U.S. church threatened to discipline individual politicians.
"This is a miracle," said Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, a Catholic-influenced antiabortion group based in Virginia. "It takes seriously the problem of pro-choice Catholic politicians."
Punishments could range from bans on speaking appearances at Catholic institutions to excommunication.
Politicians under fire from orthodox factions of the church include Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Republican Gov. George E. Pataki of New York and some of California's most visible officeholders, including Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the House minority leader. All support abortion rights.
"I get tired of hearing Catholic politicians say, 'I am personally opposed to abortion,' or whatever, 'but I can't impose my moral standards on everybody else,' " said Bishop Joseph A. Galante of Dallas at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., this month. "That's a weaseling-out."
But some clerics and laity wonder whether the bishops' desire to sanction certain politicians is politically or theologically sound.
"People worry about Catholic politicians scandalizing the community," said Father George O'Brien, who has served Communion to former Gov. Gray Davis many times. "I think a greater scandal is for the church to be arrogant in judging others."
Neither the Pentagon nor the news media are giving the American public an accurate picture of the situation in Iraq, which is "a nightmare," says a soldier who is about to go back.
"It's nothing like what the people back home have been hearing," Army Sgt. Michael Badgley Jr. said. "They're saying the war's over. The war's not over. Now, it's more of a guerrilla war."
But despite the problems and the mixups and poor troop morale, allied forces seem to be accomplishing some great things, he said.
"The waste and frustration, everything that goes on over there, it's just a nightmare," Badgley said.
A Great Falls police officer for five years, Badgley was activated by the Army Reserve on Feb. 7. His 889th Quartermaster Company left for Fort Lewis, Texas, on Feb. 10 and arrived in Kuwait April 22. Badgley entered Iraq on May 15.
He returned home on a two-week leave Monday night. He is to report to Baltimore on Dec. 10 to return to Iraq.
Badgley said the fact he's still in Iraq speaks to confusion and changing rules. He was supposed to be there until September. Then his tour was extended 60 days, and now everyone has to stay for at least one year, he said.
A top U.S. commander in Iraq said Saturday attacks on Iraqis are rising as strikes on coalition troops are down by 30 percent -- but an al Qaeda link has not been found to any of them.Although some of the U.S.-trained police forces do seem to be involved.
"At this time, we've not conclusively established an al Qaeda" connection, said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, head of ground forces. "We firmly believe that there are links both financial and training and operational links that are present, but still haven't made that connection."
Coalition forces say foreign fighters have been assisting an Iraqi Baathist guerrilla network in launching daily hit-and-run attacks against pro-U.S. targets.
Soldiers said they were impressed to see the commander in chief in Baghdad days after a cargo plane was struck by a shoulder-fired missile.
"It was a display of confidence in our ability to protect not just us, but him," said Pfc. Telo Monahan, 20, of Woodinville.
But other soldiers grew angry that their departure from the airport was delayed for an hour, while they waited for Air Force One to leave. Finding the door barred, about 50 troops got into a shouting match with the soldier blocking their exit. The streets of Baghdad were too dangerous to delay their departure any longer, they shouted.
"Do you have any idea how many IEDs are on this road?" one soldier who didn't give his name shouted, referring to improvised explosive devices or roadside bombs. "I have to get back to my base. I don't want to lose a soldier because the president wants us to sit here."
Meanwhile, largely as a result of our preoccupation with supremacy, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the war on terrorism. Indeed, war is a false metaphor in this context. Terrorists do pose a threat to our national and personal security, and we must protect ourselves. Many of the measures we have taken are necessary and proper. It can even be argued that not enough has been done to prevent future attacks. But the war being waged has little to do with ending terrorism or enhancing homeland security; on the contrary, it endangers our security by engendering a vicious circle of escalating violence.
The terrorist attack on the United States could have been treated as a crime against humanity rather than an act of war. Treating it as a crime would have been more appropriate. Crimes require police work, not military action. Protection against terrorism requires precautionary measures, awareness, and intelligence gathering—all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which the terrorists operate. Imagine for a moment that September 11 had been treated as a crime. We would not have invaded Iraq, and we would not have our military struggling to perform police work and getting shot at.
Declaring war on terrorism better suited the purposes of the Bush Administration, because it invoked military might; but this is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Military action requires an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states harboring terrorists. Yet terrorists are by definition non-state actors, even if they are often sponsored by states.
The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush Administration cannot be won. On the contrary, it may bring about a permanent state of war. Terrorists will never disappear. They will continue to provide a pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy. That pursuit, in turn, will continue to generate resistance. Further, by turning the hunt for terrorists into a war, we are bound to create innocent victims. The more innocent victims there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn into perpetrators.
Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.Ah, but we can. And what do you want to be it happens right before the presidential election?
Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men’s lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.
In the magazine’s December edition, the former commander of the military’s Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.
Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.
If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”
Franks then offered “in a practical sense” what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.
“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”
Franks didn’t speculate about how soon such an event might take place.
If one looks over his statements, one is struck by how often Clark refers to the damage caused by Bush both to civil liberties and to the American tradition of dissent. In his first major speech after he announced his candidacy, given at the Citadel in South Carolina, he said,
The administration has done many wrong-headed things. One of the worst has been to try to define patriotism as agreement with the current administration.... No president has the right to define patri-otism. No president has the right to drape himself in the flag of patriotism and then demean those who would speak out against him.
Last March, while he was still appearing on CNN as a military analyst, he was interviewed on CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown, just after Michael Moore had delivered one of his tirades against the Bush administration, in particular its policy in Iraq. When asked by Brown how he would respond, Clark replied, "People in the military not only respect dissent, they expect dissent.... That's democratic, let's have it out." Dissent over Iraq, he said, "should be directed at the policies of the government, not the troops fighting the war." The fact that parts of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War not only opposed government policy but attacked the soldiers as well was, he told me, a factor in his voting Republican at the time. He also felt then that the Republicans would do more to build up US national security forces than the Democrats would.
Pitman - who had her hair dyed blonde while she was writing the book - says that she noticed a visible change in people's reactions to her as a blonde. She got far better service from librarians, bar tenders, and shop assistants. "People stood up to offer me a seat on the tube," she says. "It was bizarre seeing the way they reacted so differently to me just because of the colour of my hair. And in fact I even had to ask my husband if I could afford not to be blonde, because I got so much more done when I was blonde."The part she doesn't talk about, though, is that people actually assume you're stupid because you're blonde. It's happened so often, I can't count.
Here was a familiar scene: the Republicans united and disciplined, the Democrats debating among themselves. It happened with Bush's first, tilted-to-the-rich tax cuts package. That legislation passed with the support of a dozen Senate Democrats. (Baucus played an instrumental role in that debacle, too.) It happened with the war in Iraq. Twenty-nine Democrats in the Senate and 81 in the House voted to grant Bush the authority to go to war against Iraq whenever he deemed appropriate; the majority of House Democrats did not. With the Medicare bill, the White House persuaded (or muscled) enough of the conservative House Republicans, who gagged at the thought of expanding an entitlement, to win passage in an unprecedented legislative tussle that entailed keeping a 15-minute vote open for three hours. The Democrats in the Senate could not fashion a unified position.
The Democrats had a similar problem with the energy bill. Most opposed it, but not Daschle. "He's drunk the Kool-Aid," one Senate Democrat against the bill complained to me. "That is, the ethanol." Daschle's home state would make out under the measure's ethanol provisions. The drafters' pork-for-all strategy had succeeded in nabbing Daschle and other Democrats. The bill failed by a narrow margin of two votes. That was mainly because a sweetheart provision that protected the manufacturers of MTBE—a gasoline additive that has contaminated drinking water in at least 28 states—upset several Republican senators, including the two from New Hampshire, which has filed a MTBE-related lawsuit against 22 oil and chemical companies. The defeat of the bill, though, was hardly decisive. Republicans are saying they will revive the bill in January, and they may well be able to concoct a deal.
The war in Iraq—which at the moment appears to be growing uglier with each day—and the economy will dictate the terms of the 2004 election. And there's no telling what conditions will be like in Baghdad or Pittsburgh 11 months from now. But other stuff may well matter. And Bush is setting himself up well in the other-stuff category. Perhaps his crew is even becoming giddy, for they have begun talking about pushing Social Security "reform" as a campaign issue. When he pitched partial privatization of Social Security during the 2000 campaign, he could at least point to the projected surplus as a source for the trillion dollars or so that would be needed to cover such an initiative. Where's the money now? Perhaps Bush intends to keep flashing his credit card—which he has whipped out to pay for the Iraq war, the Medicare bill and his tax cuts.
Whatever else Bush has planned, he will have $200 million or so to sell it during his campaign. With that much money to spend, his campaign can be expected to carpetbomb the Democratic nominee and depict whoever the challenger is as worse than Saddam Hussein and in favor of civil unions.
The polls—pre-Medicare bill—were not looking too hot for Bush, but parts of the political landscape have been moving in his favor. It's not merely good fortune. As the saying goes, you-know-who helps those who help themselves. The question is, why do the Democrats have to help him as well?
But on the campaign trail, Dean's throw-down-the-gauntlet mantra is woven with another message, one strikingly different in tone, that preaches the virtue of community and the evil of corporate behemoths unconcerned, he says, with the collective good.
"Bigger and bigger corporations might mean more efficiency, but there is something about human beings that corporations can't deal with, and that's our soul, our spirituality, who we are," Dean told a breakfast crowd in Sidney, Iowa. "We need to find a way in this country to understand and to help each other understand that there is a tremendous price to be paid for the supposed efficiency of big corporations. The price is losing the sense of who we are as human beings."
This Dean message, delivered in a lilting cadence different from the partisan fire and brimstone he serves up in television ads and debates, strikes a chord in some quarters.
"I love that talk about community because we are supposed to be a Christian nation, and if we are a Christian nation, I have to be concerned about you, I have to be concerned about him," said Paul McFarland, 62, a retired military man who listened to Dean at an Ottumwa VFW Hall. "That's the way God wanted it, that's what a Christian nation is all about and we have strayed away from that."
Yet I keep coming back to the big good news of the past 25 years: in a world with more or less free trade, development is possible. We are not, it turns out, condemned to live forever on a planet where only a small minority of the global population has a decent standard of living.
Will this good news continue? Growing tensions over world trade worry me. The steady trickle of U.S. protectionist moves, against everything from steel to Chinese bras, hasn't yet become a torrent. But there's a definite sense that the grown-ups have left the building.
What's particularly striking is the contempt this administration has for the rules. I was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration (those were nonpolitical jobs back then); one thing I remember was that if the experts said a proposed trade restriction violated international trade law, that was that. By contrast, just about every protectionist step taken by the Bush administration has been clearly in violation. And if the major economic powers stop honoring the rules that preserve open global markets, the chances of future development in poor nations will be much reduced.
But none of this cancels the fact that over the past 25 years more people have seen greater material progress than ever before in history. That's something to celebrate.
Iraqis may be reassured that the United States will put down the insurgency and restore order in their country. Or they may take the image of Bush landing unannounced at night without lights and not venturing from a heavily fortified military installation as confirmation that the security situation in Iraq is dire indeed.If it made those soldiers feel any better, I'm all for it. Although I think straightening out the problems with their pay and health coverage would have been even nicer.
But one thing is certain. Bush's Thanksgiving Day surprise ties him, for better or worse, ever more tightly to the outcome of the Iraq struggle.
During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.If I was from Michigan, I'd be screaming long and loud about this. But I forgot, people are too busy shopping. Oh well.
Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.
You can see something in the eyes of most all the Democratic candidates: the pugnacity of Howard Dean, the idealism of Dennis Kucinich, even (surprisingly) the elaborate sense of humor just under the surface of Joe Lieberman.
Not Wesley Clark. His eyes are blank. Like a turtle resting on a rock in the middle of a pond, he simply seems never to move, no matter how long you stare. But then, just as you're about to pack up your picnic basket and go home, you catch him: His head pops out, and he slides off into the water...
.....Now Clark is presenting himself as a White Knight to the modern version of that same demographic, and he is being welcomed with open arms. He appeals to roughly the same class of people as Howard Dean, with a subtle difference. The Dean crowd self-consciously sees itself as a political force. When Dean tells supporters, "You have the power!" they holler like banshees, creating a Mike-Dukakis-teach-in-meets-Who-Let-the-Dogs-Out? kind of effect. But the chief crowd ritual in the Clark campaign is that of a group of hushed, groveling supplicants staring dewy-eyed at their savior Caesar. The vibe is all about ceding power, not empowerment.
Troops and their families and employers will soon find out if they will be affected by the Pentagon's latest mobilization of 17,000 reservists for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition those mobilized Wednesday, nearly 8,000 reservists have been alerted for deployment to Iraq and around 700 for deployment to Afghanistan.
The announcements affect Army and Air Force National Guard and Reserves as well as Navy and Marine Corps Reserves.
The Pentagon also said three battalions of Marines and support units -- as many as 3,000 people -- will get orders for deployment to Iraq.
The Marines will be used to make up for the failure of the United States to get enough commitments from other countries to field a third multinational division. There are already divisions led by the Polish and British.
The reservist mobilizations and alerts are part of a troop rotation plan for Iraq and Afghanistan that was announced at a Pentagon briefing earlier this month. Most of the troops will be deployed to Iraq.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who boasted during his campaign that he would not be beholden to special interests, has accepted a $53,000 donation from a company operating a private prison in the state slated to be shut down.
The donation last week to the Republican, who has refused contributions from the state prison guards union, came from Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, which operates a private prison in the Central Valley scheduled to be closed at the end of the year, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.
Besides the prison in McFarland housing 224 inmates, Wackenhut has three other private correctional institutions in the state.
A spokesman for the governor said that the donation from Wackenhut would have no bearing on the company's contract. "... Prison contracts such as this are handled as a routine matter of course by the Department of Corrections," said spokesman Vince Sollitto.
Wackenhut also donated $5,000 to Schwarzenegger's recall campaign, said company spokesman Pablo Paez. He said the governor did not solicit the donations and may not have even known about them when they were made.
The hotel trysts took place while Mr Bush was working as a consultant for Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which is backed by the son of former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, for which he was paid $2m in stock options over five years.Bagmen and fixers, the lot of them.
It is not the first time that he has been involved in corporate controversy. In the late 1980's he was director of Denver-based Silverado Savings & Loan, which collapsed at a cost to taxpayers of $1bn. At the time he denied any wrongdoing but was sanctioned by the federal government for his part in the failure.
During the deposition Mr Brown asked: "Now, you have absolutely no education background in semiconductors, do you Mr Bush?"
"That's correct," said Mr Bush.
Mr Brown also questioned him about work for Crest Investment Corporation, where he was paid $5,000 a month for work that totalled no more than four hours a week. Bush said he provided Crest with "miscellaneous consulting services". "Such as?" asked Brown.
"Answering phone calls when the other co-chairman called and asked for advice," said Mr Bush.
Having beaten back price controls on prescription drugs in the United States, the American pharmaceutical industry is trying to roll them back overseas, with help from the administration and Congress.Hahahahahahahaha....... boy, that's a good one. Haven't laughed so hard since ... well, I don't know when. Don't laugh much these days, for some reason.
In talks over a free trade agreement with Australia, American officials are pressing to water down the system under which the Australian government negotiates the prices it pays for prescription drugs, Mark Vaile, the Australian minister for trade, said here Wednesday. Mr. Vaile said that the American negotiators had raised this "in amongst a range of issues, not as a core issue."
If successful, the United States could use this agreement as a benchmark for trade deals with other rich nations. Loosening price controls is a priority for the drug industry, which gets most of its profits in the United States and argues that prices here could be lower if other nations paid their share of the cost of developing drugs.
A provision benefiting a specific hospital in Tennessee was added to the Medicare bill at the last minute in an effort to get the vote of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee.
The hospital was not named in the bill, but was described in terms that apply to only one hospital in the United States, the Regional Medical Center at Memphis. Mr. Ford's father, a former congressman, is a lobbyist for the hospital.
In the end, Mr. Ford voted against the bill. Bush administration officials now say they will probably not provide any extra money, even though the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, is urging them to do so because the hospital is in his state.
"We are the largest charity hospital in Tennessee," said Dr. Bruce W. Steinhauer, the hospital president. "We also provide millions of dollars worth of care to poor people from Mississippi and Arkansas."
The Medicare bill also increases payments for doctors in Alaska for a cancer treatment known as brachytherapy and for health maintenance organizations that have been dropping out of the Medicare market.
The energy bill includes $1 billion for a new nuclear reactor in Idaho, $800 million in federal loan guarantees for a coal gasification plant in Minnesota and tens of millions of dollars in subsidies for timber companies to log national forests for energy production.
My new book is called "Hope Dies Last." I must have been crazy to try it. But something just occurred to me and I had to do it. Years ago, in an earlier book, "American Dreams Lost and Found," I interviewed an old Mexican farm worker, Jessie de la Cruz, who was one of the first women to work with Cesar Chavez. And she said there's a saying in Spanish when times are bleak or bewildering: La esperanza muere última. "Hope dies last." And somehow the damn thing stuck with me.
Remember, all the other books have dealt with visceral experience, something you could put your hand on. The Great Depression: What was it like to be a little kid, 10 years old, who sees her old man come home with his toolbox on his shoulder, a good carpenter, and then he doesn't work for the next five or six years? Until the government comes along, the New Deal! When free enterprise -- it's called the free market today, the new religion -- fell on its ass completely, and fell on its knees and begged the government to save it.
The irony is, the very ones whose daddies and granddaddies' butts were saved are those who most condemn "big gummint," as Molly Ivins would put it. Health, education, welfare. Not the Pentagon, of course! That's what I call the national Alzheimer's disease: There's no memory of it, it didn't happen really. All my books you might call memory books, trying to recreate a memory of what it was like to be that ordinary person -- a phrase I don't like, by the way; it's patronizing -- a non-celebrated person.
The Bush divorce, completed in April after 23 years of marriage, was prompted in part by Bush's relationship with another woman. He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.What a piece of work. Even in that family, what a piece of work.
The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.
"Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," Brown said.
"It was very unusual," Bush said.
Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, is an army of one, the David in an era of Goliath-strength government stealth.
Armed with a pocket-size copy of the Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act and an investigator's patience for source-building, Aftergood is out to slay what he sees as the arbitrariness of the U.S. system for classifying documents to keep them secret.
To do that, he asks foundations and donors for $150,000 a year ("in a good year") to keep his online newsletter, Secrecy News, and staff of one -- himself -- going. He often scoops the national media with anecdotes about government attempts to keep information secret.
In fact, the government's classification chief, J. William Leonard, has bookmarked Aftergood's Web site because it is usually easier to find critical national security documents there than on government Web sites. As director of the Information Security Oversight Office, Leonard has one goal for enhancing his office's Web offerings: "I want my information to be posted on my Web site before it's posted on Steve's. It's a matrix we have yet to meet."
Wow! Not one, but two huge, horrible, last-minute life-changing bills, and the second is even worse than the first! Record-shattering bad legislation immediately eclipsed by record-shattering bad legislation. These Republicans have talent: It is not easy to do this much damage to people's lives with a straight face and that unctuous air of piety.
I like the timing, too -- slipped that Medicare deform bill through just in time for the drug companies, the insurance companies and the HMOs to give loud hosannas around their Thanksgiving tables. Let us hear their hymns of praise, paeans, benedictions and blessings upon the Republican Party rise from their groaning and appreciative boards forever, amen.
I first observed these qualities during Dean's second-to-last term as governor. Vermonters were inflamed--everyone was coming after him--when he and Democratic legislators enacted the infamous Act 60, a school-financing-equalization law that compelled the "gold towns" to share their property-tax revenues with poorer townships. Faced with general outrage, Dean barked back at the storm. The remark I remember reading in the Rutland Herald went something like this: "I know why people are angry at me. They've been getting away with low tax rates and well-financed schools. They're not going to be able to do that anymore."
Wow, I thought. This is a different kind of politician--no ducking the blame, no cute obfuscation. The law isn't perfect, Dean added. We will fix it later if we have to. (They did.) Vermont progressives were upset, too, because Dean had refused to consider raising income taxes to finance the schools. His logic, however, was more liberal than it appeared. Raising income taxes would put all the burden on Vermonters, many of whom are poor. Raising property taxes--with a generous homestead exemption for full-time residents--put the big hit on the out-of-state people who own so many lovely vacation homes there. Dean did not explain this to the "flatlanders," but we figured it out.
The governor has shown flashes of the same bluntness in his prime-time campaigning. Last summer, he told a revealing story on himself--a conversation with Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and Wall Street's main money guy for Democrats. Rubin had warned that unless Dean stopped attacking NAFTA and the multinationals for the migration of US jobs, he couldn't raise contributions for him from the financial sector. As Dean told it, "I said, 'Bob, tell me what your solution is.' He said, 'I'll have to get back to you.' I haven't heard from him." What I like so much about the story is that powerful, influential Bob Rubin pokes Dean in the chest, and he pokes him back. Then Dean discloses the exchange to the Washington Post.
In the higher realms of politics, this is not done. But he is not one of them. And this is no longer the era for "triangulation" between the business-financial money patrons and the party's main constituencies. That new spirit, more than any single issue, is what has drawn together Dean's vibrant and growing base, buoying his candidacy with millions in small contributions. Dean is opening the possibility of transforming politics--shaking up the tired, timid old order, inviting plain-wrapper citizens back into an active role--and that's why so many people, myself included, are for him. Full disclosure: I am among the throngs who have been invited to contribute "forward-looking ideas" to his campaign (I was flattered to be asked and pleased to oblige, with no naïve expectations).
Dean, I suspect, learned in the up-close-and-personal politics of Vermont that you don't win elections by keeping the people at a safe distance. You can't do it in that state, even if you try. He governed with strong, well-organized progressives and environmentalists on one flank, conservative business interests on the other and a mass of native working-class Vermonters who don't much care for either. Dean collected a lot of lumps and resentments, many compromises and setbacks, in ten years as governor. Insiders remember him as shifty and unreliable. But he also learned how to stand his ground in a fight.
All that helps explain why the party establishment had a hard time understanding the man and is so upset by the thought that he might be the nominee. Corny as it sounds, he might actually bring voters back into the story. Washington's smugness was shattered in the past few weeks as Dean picked up pathbreaking endorsements from Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and SEIU and AFSCME, the two largest unions and heads-up, aggressive organizations. Dean continues to up the ante for his rivals--calling for reregulation of key industries and confronting the concentrated power of corporations and wealth. These are solid liberal ideas others are afraid to express so directly. The guy is a better politician than the insiders imagined, indeed better attuned to this season than they are.
Garner also complained of bad relations between the Pentagon and State Department, saying he didn’t learn of a detailed study by Secretary of State Colin Powell for post-war Iraq until just a few weeks before the war began in March.
The former lieutenant general said that after learning of the State Department plan in February he had brought in Tom Warrick, a senior planner at the State Department involved in the study. But Garner said he was forced to fire Warrick by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“Tom was just beginning to get started with us when one day I was in the office with the secretary of defense, and he said ’Jay, have you got a guy named Warrick on your team?’ I said, ‘yes, I do.’ He said, ’well, I’ve got to ask you to remove him.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to remove him; he’s too valuable.’
“But he said, ’This came to me from such a high level that I can’t overturn it, and I’ve just got to ask you to remove Mr. Warrick.”’
The House Republicans' manipulation of the Medicare vote was characteristic of the bullying, win-by-any-means style that has become the congressional norm. More than at any time during their nine years in control, congressional Republicans have been unabashed in their exercise of raw political power. However poisonous relations between the parties were heading into the 108th Congress, this session has witnessed levels of partisanship unhealthy not only for both sides but for the people they're supposed to represent.
Hardball isn't new to politics; Democrats happily employed the rules to their advantage when they held power, and, in the Senate, where the minority has greater protections, they still do. Republicans once clamored for fair treatment and railed against their subjugation at Democratic hands. But their use of the rules to impose their will is making the Democrats look benevolent by comparison. "The Republicans had better hope that the Democrats never regain the majority," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the day after the House Medicare vote.
Longtime party strategist Harold Ickes was at a loss to see any upside to a Republican victory in an area Democrats have always owned. He said he was flabbergasted that key Democratic senators, led by John Breaux (La.) and Max Baucus (Mont.), went along with it.
“It’s totally beyond me,” Ickes said. “I think it has seriously undermined our ability to change occupants of the White House next year. Republicans will make it sound like they invented Medicare. That’s a big piece of political real estate to give up.”
He paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “We just don’t have the discipline on our side that’s needed.”
Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future blamed Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) for the collapse. In the House, he said, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) managed to hold the line so effectively that Republicans had to hold open their middle-of-the-night vote for nearly three hours on Saturday — the longest flouting of the 15-minute rule in House history — just to eke out a win. After which the Democratic filibuster in the Senate swiftly collapsed.
“There’s clearly an absence of forceful leadership at the top of the Senate,” Borosage said. “In the Senate we saw the difference between the other side’s discipline and our lack of it, and I think Democrats are disappointed in the extreme.”
The Vatican has consistently opposed condoms and safe-sex education, even claiming falsely that condoms don't protect against AIDS. That's on par with the church under Pope Urban VIII putting Galileo under house arrest — except that this will have more deadly results.This is especially pertinent in light of recent Church scandals.
Yet I take my hat off to the much broader Catholic Church that is toiling in the barrios of Latin America and the slums of Africa and Asia. Catholic Relief Services, one of the most vigorous aid organizations in the third world, is an example of humanitarianism at its noblest.
At ground level, priests apply doctrine with a flexibility that must drive the pope wild. In the desperately poor Salvadoran hillside village of Chucita, where campesinos live in shacks without water or electricity, a teacher explained how his fifth-grade class learns about dealing with AIDS.
"A social worker comes in with a banana and puts a condom on it," said the teacher, Eduardo Antonio Ascencio Mata. The priests, he says, have no objection.
In the remote Guatemalan town of Coatepeque, Maryknoll sisters run a first-rate AIDS clinic and prevention program, saving lives on a vast scale. They work with prostitutes and school children and explain how condoms can protect against AIDS.
So what about Vatican teachings?
"Certainly, God does not want us to kill each other," responded Marlene Condon, who works with AIDS patients. "You've got to do something."
The unhappy tradition continues today. The Bush administration spends billions spreading freedom abroad while at home it devises legislation to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians. What is it with you people, anyway? Are you so insecure about the way you handle marriage that you're scared gay folk will show you up? Trust me, we will make as much of a mess out of matrimony as you do. Just give us a chance.
In the end all I can say is this: If I really was Santa's life partner, you can believe that he would ask and I would tell about who has been naughty or nice on this issue. Still, as we approach the holiday season I'd like to imagine that fear and bigotry will not prevail in this land. Maybe this holiday season we can toss out some of the intolerance that nests in our hearts and make room for more love and acceptance.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said Tuesday he had put one of his staffers on administrative leave for improperly obtaining data from the secure computer networks of two Democratic senators.
Hatch, R-Utah, said preliminary interviews suggested that a former Republican member of the committee staff may have also been involved in penetrating the Democratic computers.
"I was shocked to learn that this may have occurred," Hatch said in a statement. "I am mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Hatch launched an investigation after Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., protested what they said was the theft of memos from their servers. The memos, concerning political strategy on blocking confirmation of several of President Bush's judicial nominations, were obtained and reported on by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.
According to legal documents disclosed Tuesday, Sharon Bush's lawyers questioned Neil Bush closely about the deals, especially a contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, that would pay him $2 million in stock over five years.
Marshall Davis Brown, lawyer for Sharon Bush, expressed bewilderment at why Grace would want Bush and at such a high price since he knew little about the semiconductor business.
"You have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors do you?" asked Brown.
"That's correct," Bush, 48, responded in the March 4 deposition, a transcript of which was read by Reuters after the Houston Chronicle first reported on the documents.
"And you have absolutely over the last 10, 15, 20 years not a lot of demonstrable business experience that would bring about a company investing $2 million in you?"
"I personally would object to the assumption that they're investing $2 million in me," said Bush, who went on to explain that he knew a lot about business and had been working in Asia for years.
Bush, who inked the Grace deal in August 2002, said he had not yet received any stock from the company, which built a plant in Shanghai that began production in September. He is supposed to consult for the company and be on the board of directors, he said.
He said he joined the Grace board at the request of Winston Wong, a co-founder of the company and the son of Wang Yung-ching, the chairman of Taiwan's largest business group, Formosa Plastics Corp. Bush never mentioned Jiang Mianheng in the deposition.
Wong, he said, also is an investor in his latest venture, Ignite!, an Austin, Texas, educational software firm.
A representative at Grace's U.S. office in California had no comment on the Bush contract.
Dear Tom,
The Republican attacks against our federal government endanger Social Security, Medicare and education funding, prevent a real prescription drug benefit and middle class tax cut and raise our national debt to dangerous levels. We need you in the U.S. Senate to stand up for our Democratic ideals! Enclosed is my contribution to your re-election campaign.
Few if any Democratic, Independent or Republican swing voters (most of whom are moderates) are going to look at the Democratic candidate for president and say, "Okay, I like his economic policies, and I like his foreign policy positions, and I like his views on this and this and this. But I don’t know, I’m not into his support of gays now that the same-sex marriage issue is in the media, so I’m voting for Bush." If anyone is voting on that one issue, they’re already voting for Bush and are part of the religious right.
And if Bush and the Republicans aren’t going to back an amendment to the constitution, which is what the Christian conservatives want–"We fully intend to use this as a litmus test for offices from president to street sweeper," Rios told the New York Times–then they can’t really talk about same-sex marriage, or the Democrats’ support of civil unions, all that much in the election campaign. If they do, the zealots will once again point to a Constitutional amendment as the only way to stop same-sex marriage, while those like Frist will say that the Defense of Marriage Act has already done the trick. That will only serve to underscore that same-sex marriage is not an issue, angering the religious right further.
Hey, it was only the third person they've killed in three years. If they don't watch out, the next person they kill might cost them $500.No wonder they love the GOP down there.
Regular ejaculation, through sex or masturbation, may prevent carcinogens accumulating in the prostate gland, the researchers suggest.
Then there's a study showing women are less depressed if they have sex without condoms, and another showing regular sex helps to avoid colds. While the research method used for the depression study is rather shaky, both studies, according to Robertson, are based on legitimate scientific reasoning.
There's also research suggesting regular sex can improve sense of smell, reduce risk of heart disease, aid in weight loss, pain relief and soothing PMS symptoms, and even help people live longer.
The work never stops. Across the world male scientists are trying to prove to women that they need it. Often.
Thinking is presumed to be the bread and butter of higher education. Beyond simply getting a diploma to land a job that pays well, the promise of sharpening thinking skills still looms as a key reason millions apply to college.
Yet some say there is a remarkable paucity of critical thinking taught at the undergraduate level - even though the need for such skills seems more urgent than ever.
Americans can now expect to change jobs as many as a half-dozen times in their lives - a feat requiring considerable mental agility. The ability to sift, analyze, and reflect upon large amounts of data is crucial in today's information age.
Yet a major national report released last year entitled "Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College" raises serious questions as to whether undergraduates are absorbing these essential skills.
"Outsiders who find college graduates unprepared for solving problems in the workplace question whether the colleges are successfully educating their student to think," the report notes.
Critical thought certainly receives considerable lip service on many campuses. College websites beckon students to "learn to think critically." Classes with "critical thinking" in the title are abundant.
But Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Washington isn't convinced.
"Critical thinking, social responsibility, reflective judgment, and evidence-based reasoning ... are the most enduring goals of a first-rate liberal education," says Ms. Schneider. Yet research shows "many college graduates are falling short in reaching these goals."
Bush is dealing with a more pliable opposition. Whatever discontent liberals expressed toward Kennedy was mild compared with their irritation toward Sens. John Breaux of Louisiana and Max Baucus of Montana.
Breaux and Baucus were the only two Democrats allowed to negotiate the Medicare bill with the Republicans, House Democrats having been totally excluded. Would Republicans have put up with such an arrangement?
Over the weekend, several Democrats complained that Breaux and Baucus promised to report back to their colleagues before reaching a deal. Instead, they announced their support for the Republican bill, setting in motion its rush to passage. And Baucus poured salt into his party's wounds when he opened his speech in defense of the bill on Sunday by taking issue with how House Democratic leaders had described his legislation. Bush must have been laughing as Baucus drove a wedge through the Democratic Party.
If Democrats wanted to give Bush a political victory, they could have insisted on a much better deal. Instead, their negotiators sold out for a bill full of subsidies to the HMOs that will make it harder to control drug costs. The moral, yet again, is that Republicans are much tougher than Democrats and fight much harder to win.
The ad was clearly intended to insinuate once again — without saying anything falsifiable — that there was a link between Iraq and 9/11. (Now that the Iraq venture has turned sour, this claim is suddenly making the rounds again, even though no significant new evidence has surfaced.) But it was also designed to imply that critics are soft on terror.
All this fuss about civility, then, is an attempt to bully critics into unilaterally disarming — into being demure and respectful of the president, even while his campaign chairman declares that the 2004 election will be a choice "between victory in Iraq and insecurity in America."
And even aside from the double standard, how important is civility? I'm all for good manners, but this isn't a dinner party. The opposing sides in our national debate are far apart on fundamental issues, from fiscal and environmental policies to national security and civil liberties. It's the duty of pundits and politicians to make those differences clear, not to play them down for fear that someone will be offended.
An indepth analysis performed by Consumers Union of the proposed Medicare prescription drug benefit reveals a plan that not only falls embarrassingly short of giving seniors a real drug benefit, it likely will threaten Medicare’s viability.
The analysis of the conference committee proposal found:
∙ The funds set aside for this “benefit” -- $400 billion over 10 years -- covers just 22 percent of the anticipated drug costs, leaving consumers to foot the rest of the bill.
∙ Medicare is being moved down the road to privatization by requiring competition between private health plans and Medicare in up to six metro areas without requiring private plans to demonstrate cost savings that result from efficiency. Rather, the proposal provides additional subsidies to these private plans and allows them to benefit financially by cherry-picking the healthiest members.
∙ Private Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) get to pick what drugs are covered under the plan, with no transparency, methodology or public accountability. This means patients who are sensitive to the choice of drug will be out of luck if their needed drug is not on the plan. It also means drug coverage will vary between different parts of the country.
∙ And most important, a provision that actually prohibits the government from negotiating deep prescription drug discounts for consumers, meaning the average Medicare beneficiary will pay more out-of-pocket for drugs in 2007 when the benefit begins, then what they currently pay now without the “benefit.” Consider this: the average Medicare recipient in 2003 who spends $2,318 a year for drugs without prescription drug coverage will pay $2,911 out-of-pocket in four years under the plan if drug costs continue their historical increase.
“It is nothing short of tragic that legislation that was meant to offer relief from high prescription drug costs to seniors is laden down with so many dangerous provisions that it will harm Medicare beneficiaries and threaten the program’s long-term viability,” said Gail Shearer, senior health policy analyst for Consumers Union and author of the analysis.
Boeing (BA) dismissed chief financial officer Mike Sears "for cause" effective immediately. The dismissal is related to the hiring of a former U.S. government official, Darleen Druyun, who has also been dismissed for cause. Sears violated company policy by communicating with Druyan about future employment before she had disqualified herself from acting in an official government capacity on matters involving Boeing.
The rotors of the President's Marine Force One helicopter and two support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria's reign.
And Bush's army of clod-hopping security service men trampled more precious and exotic plants.
The Queen's own flock of flamingoes, which security staff insisted should be moved in case they flew into the helicopter rotors, are thought to be so traumatised after being taken to a "place of safety" that they might never return home.
The historic fabric of the Palace was also damaged as high-tech links were fitted for the US leader and his entourage during his three-day stay with the Queen.
The Palace's head gardener, Mark Lane, was reported to be in tears when he saw the scale of the damage.
"The Queen has every right to feel insulted at the way she has been treated by Bush," said a Palace insider.
"The repairs will cost tens of thousands of pounds but the damage to historic and rare plants will be immense. They are still taking an inventory.
"The lawns are used for royal garden parties and are beautifully kept. But 30,000 visitors did not do as much damage as the Americans did in three days.
With Congress poised for final action on a major Medicare bill this week, some of the fiercest debate is focused on a section of the bill that prohibits the government from negotiating lower drug prices for the 40 million people on Medicare.Oh sure. Spend $400 billion on this alleged drug benefit - at top price, of course.
That provision epitomizes much of the bill, which relies on insurance companies and private health plans to manage the new drug benefit. They could negotiate with drug companies, but the government, with much greater purchasing power, would be forbidden to do so.
Supporters of the provision say it is necessary to prevent the government from imposing price controls that could stifle innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Critics say the restriction would force the government and Medicare beneficiaries to spend much more for drugs than they should.
Although my doctors tell me they're not real, I can't stop these thoughts that keep running through my head.
The Republican-controlled House approved a bitterly contested Medicare prescription drug bill early Saturday in an epic struggle settled near dawn. The vote was 220-215.What Pelosi means is, when the fifteen minute vote period was over it stood at 216 yea, 218 nay.
Passage of the measure capped an extraordinary roll call that began at 3 a.m. and consumed nearly three hours before the GOP leadership could overcome a rebellion by conservatives in their own ranks and the overwhelming opposition of Democrats.
"In the end, democracy works," said Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, as weary Republicans marked their overtime victory.
"We won it fair and square and they stole it by hook and crook," countered House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
But California? After the Right's power-grab in the state, there should be no reason for the state's legislature to amend the law to allow Bush on the ballot.
And WV is a Dem-led state as well, and an important swing state to boot.
It's time for Democrats to play hardball. It's time to take the initiative away from the GOP and go on the offensive. And what better way to do so than to simply let existing law stand?
Krugman mostly gave his standard talk which you would have seen on C-Span, and answered questions.
One interesting point he made has to do with why the markets have yet to go into panic mode. He said he gets various letters from hedge funds, etc..., and all of them contain some version of the line "we expect a return to fiscal discipline after the '04 elections." As Krugman rightly noted, this is just crazy. The Bushies claim that the deficit will be cut in half by 2008 - but even this rosy scenario can only happen only if none of what they are continuing to propose to do - namely making all of the various expiring tax cuts "permament." The odds of a return to fiscal discipline - either with a 2nd Bush term, or with a President Democrat and House Majority Leader DeLay are pretty close to 0.
I do wonder what these people are thinking. The baby boomers start hitting retirement age at 2011. Nothing's going to stop them from voting for huge transfers from working age folks for SS, Medicare, and all kinds of yummy new programs. They may be playing the "starve the beast" game to cause a government fiscal crisis - but the real result will be a full economic crisis. Grover may be trying to drown the government, but he'll only succeed if he drowns the country.
The recent surge in terrorist strikes on "soft targets" like consulates, banks and synagogues in places like Turkey and Saudi Arabia is worrying, but paradoxically reflects progress by the United States and Europe in disrupting Al Qaeda, especially its leadership structure, American and European intelligence officials said Friday.
"We continue to disrupt Al Qaeda's activities and capture more of their leaders, but the attacks are escalating," a senior counterterrorism official in Europe said. "This is a very bad sign. There are fewer leaders but more followers."
The officials said they regard Al Qaeda as less capable than before of striking at American embassies, military targets and landmarks that were the hallmarks of its campaign before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But the terrorist threat has evolved, they said, into a much broader, more diffuse phenomenon than before, with a new strategy of attacks by loosely affiliated groups against highly vulnerable targets.
In mid-2002, Cheney made at least two visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters to talk with the analysts on the intelligence assembly line, who warned that they had no evidence showing that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. These visits have been chewed over in the press, decried by retired Agency officials, and condemned as attempts to pressure the CIA into producing more damning intel. But they only begin to capture the depth of the vice president's personal involvement in shaping Iraq intelligence. In addition to trekking to Langley, his former aides say, Cheney paid calls to analysts at the DIA, the National Security Agency, and even the National Intelligence Mapping Agency. "He visited every element of the intelligence community," says a former Cheney staffer. When he wasn't visiting these agencies, his staff snowed them with questions. According to one former CIA analyst, "The Agency [would write] something on WMD, and it would come back from the vice president with a thousand questions: 'What's this sentence mean?' 'What's your source for this line?' 'Why are you disregarding sources that are saying the opposite?'"
Among Cheney's aides, resentment of the CIA went far beyond a healthy skepticism of fallible intelligence analysts and an Agency with a decidedly mixed record. Whereas Cheney's questioning of intelligence during the Gulf war had been probing but respectful, now his staff belittled the intelligence community's findings, irrespective of their merits. For years, Libby and Hannah in particular had believed the Agency harbored a politically motivated animus against the INC and irresponsibly discounted intelligence reports from defectors the INC had brought forward. "This had been a fight for such a long period of time, where people were so dug in," reflects a friend of one of Cheney's senior staffers. The OVP had been studying issues like Iraq for so many years that it often simply did not accept that contrary information provided by intelligence analysts-- especially CIA analysts--could be correct. As one former colleague of many OVP officials puts it, "They so believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, 'We want to show these fuckers that they are wrong.'"
Foes of the Bush administration's proposed rules changing which workers would qualify for overtime pay abandoned their fight on Friday in the face of unrelenting pressure from the White House and the House.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who had been the chief Republican opponent of the new rules, agreed Friday to drop a provision killing the regulations from a massive spending bill, said numerous congressional aides and lobbyists speaking on condition of anonymity.
It was unclear what, if anything, Specter received in return for his decision.
Specter and his aides could not immediately be reached for comment. But earlier in the day, he and his supporters told reporters they would continue their fight even if they lost their provision in the spending bill.
The dispute on overtime was the biggest hurdle to completion of a huge, overdue spending bill that Congress' leaders want to complete before lawmakers leave town for the year.
The Bush administration says the new rules are a badly needed modernization of overtime rules that in many cases are vague and decades old. Opponents like Specter said the regulations could enable employers to end overtime for millions of workers.
I'm not saying that this bill won't generate some energy. It will certainly fuel the coffers of big oil and gas corporations. It will propel the wealthy special interests. And it will boost the deficit into the stratosphere. Indeed, this legislation can be fairly called the Leave no Lobbyist Behind Act of 2003.
There are also four proposals known as 'green bonds' for construction of commercial buildings that will cost taxpayers $227 million to finance approximately $2 billion in private bonds. One of my favorite green bond proposals is a $150 million riverfront area in Shreveport, Louisiana. This river walk has about 50 stores, a movie theater and a bowling alley. One of the new tenants in this Louisiana Riverwalk is a Hooters restaurant. Yes, my friends. Here we have an energy bill subsidizing both hooters and polluters.
- Senator John McCain
Perhaps the single biggest winner in the energy bill, according to lobbyists and critics, is the Southern Co. One of the nation's largest electricity producers, it serves 120,000 square miles through subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power and Savannah Electric, along with a natural gas and nuclear plant subsidiary.
The repeal of PUHCA, for example, would create new opportunities to buy or sell facilities; "participation" rules determining how utilities share the costs of new transmission lines that are particularly favorable to Southern; two changes in depreciation schedules for gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines with a 10-year revenue loss to the Treasury of $2.8 billion; and changes in the tax consequences of decommissioning nuclear plants, at a 10-year revenue loss of $1.5 billion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
At least five Bush Pioneers serve as a Southern Co. executive or as its lobbyists: Southern Executive Vice President Dwight H. Evans; Roger Windham Wallace of the lobbying firm Public Strategies; Rob Leebern of the firm Troutman Sanders; Lanny Griffith of the firm Barbour Griffith and Rogers; and Ray Cole, of the firm Van Scoyoc Associates.
The railroad industry also has a vital interest in the energy bill. For years, it has been fighting for the elimination of a 4.3 cent-a-gallon tax on diesel fuel, and, at a cost to the Treasury of $1.7 billion over 10 years, the measure repeals the tax. Richard Davidson, chairman and CEO of Union Pacific, is a Ranger, and Matthew K. Rose, CEO of Burlington Northern, is a Pioneer.
Among the major lobbying firms in Washington, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feldhas been one of the most successful collecting fees for work on the energy and Medicare bills. In the first six months of this year, Akin Gump, which has two partners who are Pioneers -- Bill Paxon and James C. Langdon Jr. -- received $1.6 million in fees from medical and energy interests.
Now, being of the liberal persuasion, I believe the ways to stop corporate rip-offs and harm caused to the public by greed is government regulation and suing the bastards. But let's suppose for a moment here that we try The Wall Street Journal's preferred methods for fixing all this -- transparency, accountability and responsibility. And let us apply these methods to the Bush administration, which proudly bills itself as the CEO administration. It is certainly an administration of CEOs. After the unspeakable Harvey Pitt was forced to resign as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bush brought in Bill Donaldson as corporate watchdog, the CEO of a huge Wall Street firm, Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, currently under investigation by the SEC for fraud. Ooops.
Transparency: We started with Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, then Bush decided neither his father's presidential papers nor Reagan's could be made public, then we got the PATRIOT Act, and everything went to hell. We couldn't find out who had been "detained" when, where, why or for how long, with no lawyers and no family notification. And of course, secret phone taps, wiretaps, sweeps, etc., all on "suspicion."
Accountability: What does it take to get fired by this administration? Outing a CIA agent for petty political revenge? Completely contravening administration policy with jackass statements about Islam, like Gen. Boykin, while you're the head of a sensitive Pentagon department on the subject? Obviously, you can get fired for standing up for the environment -- or at least not lying down quickly enough for those who are busy trashing it. RIP, Christine Todd Whitman. And for standing up and saying something populist, like the IRS should quit going after working poor people and try nailing a few rich tax cheats, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill did.
Responsibility: Have you ever heard this administration admit it has made a mistake? It won't even take responsibility for dumb stuff like the "Mission Accomplished" sign, much less admit it had no idea what it was doing in Iraq after Saddam fell. Even now, administration folks keep trying to wiggle out of their own ... I don't know whether it was lies or misinformation -- there was no nuclear weapons program, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there were no ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. But there they come again, with some leaked list of questionable intelligence trying to prove what isn't true.
To me, what's consistently stunning about the Iraq coverage is how hard journalists are trying, even in the face of such disasters, to capture the rays of sunshine in postwar Iraq. This was happening before Bush had his "filter" moment, and it's happening still. Far from being the naysayers the White House says they are, American media people often seem, way down in their heart of hearts, to be rooting for the mission in Iraq. Sometimes, the effort is downright poignant.
As I wrote the last few sentences, I could hear the howls from the White House. I wonder, did they even open their New York Times on October 26, just days before Rumsfeld issued his "darn good" complaint, and notice the headline: "Iraqis Get Used to Life Without Hussein, and Many Find They Like It"? Digging into the story, readers learned, among other things, that "when school reopened on Oct. 1, hundreds of parents, afraid for their children, waited out front at the end of the day to walk their children home. Now very few do. On Friday evening, the American authorities lifted the curfew on Baghdad starting early Sunday morning, saying life here was returning to normal. Across the city on Saturday, numerous Iraqis agreed and provided ample evidence. Streets swarmed with people shopping and socializing. Coffee houses were packed. Families strolled; vendors clogged the sidewalks."
True, that story ran far away from the front page, deep inside the front section. But considering what's happened in Iraq since it appeared, you might conclude it deserved to be buried.
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