20 October 2004

AUDIO LINK
Revolution In Progress - Bush creates a divergence between 'faith-based' and 'reality-based' decision making
Faith and the Presidency
Diane Rehm Show, 20 October 2004
Both John Kerry and George W. Bush say they rely on their religious faith to guide them in their private and public lives. Diane and her guests talk about the role of religious faith in the presidential campaigns.
Guests
Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College; author of "God and George W. Bush" and author of an op-ed in the Oct. 18 New York Times entitled "What Bush Believes"
Ron Suskind, former reporter for the "Wall Street Journal"; author of "The Price of Loyalty" and author of an article in the Oct. 17 New York Times Magazine entitled "Without a Doubt"

Election 2004: Faith Against Reason
The US election has exposed a growing conflict between two world views. Can they co-exist in one country?
By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian (UK), 20 October 2004
EXCERPT: America's centre of gravity has moved rightward, creating a set of shibboleths that cannot be challenged. If liberals established a few forbidden zones in the last 20 years under the rubric of so-called political correctness - making it off-limits to demean women, gays and ethnic minorities - then the right has now erected some barriers of its own. First among these taboos is the military. No politician can utter a word that seems to question the armed services: so Kerry does not mention the Abu Ghraib scandal. Next is 9/11, which has been all but sanctified in American discourse. Because of that event, the US has re-imagined itself as a victim nation: witness the yellow-ribbon bumperstickers, usually bearing the slogan "Support America". (Ribbons were previously reserved for the suffering: red for Aids, pink for breast cancer.) As a result, any action taken in the name of 9/11 cannot be questioned. Oppose the Patriot Act, with its restrictions on civil liberties, and you are a friend of the terrorists - and, if you are a Democratic congressional candidate, Republicans will air TV ads against you placing your face alongside that of Osama bin Laden. Show concern for international opinion, and you are some kind of traitor. Kerry spoke French to a Haitian audience in Florida on Monday, the first time he had done so in public for many months: even to appear to have links with the outside world is a negative in today's politics, which has become all about America first. All this is partly caused by, and certainly reinforces, that gut feeling of certainty that animates today's American right. Bill Clinton used to joke that when Democrats are in the White House, they think they are renting it. Republicans believe they own the place.

Voters Angry at Chaos in Early US Polls
By Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian (UK), 20 October 2004
EXCERPT: Early voting in the US election has been beset by computer hang-ups, two-hour queues, frayed tempers, and the resignation of at least one election official. Voting ground to a halt in three Florida counties after the laptops used to check voter information stopped connecting to a central database. Many polling locations had only one phone line dedicated to the purpose, and voters reported hi-tech electronic voting machines standing unused while queues formed at the laptops. Early voting, which also began this week in Arkansas, Texas and Colorado, is intended in part to prevent long delays on election day. But in larger Floridian cities, including Miami and Tampa, waits of between two and three hours were reported, causing anger among voters.

Ideology and Flu Vaccine
LA Times, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: Thirty-six thousand Americans die of the flu every year. If that number rises by just a tenth because we have only half as much flu vaccine as we need, the increase in deaths will exceed the number killed by Osama bin Laden on Sept. 11, 2001. The parallels to 9/11 do not stop there. As in the 2001 catastrophe, officials of the Bush administration are claiming ignorance as if it were a virtue. They say they had no idea the vaccine shortage would happen. They are pinning the blame on neglect by previous administrations. And they are bragging about everything they are doing — now — to prevent this kind of thing in the future. But, as with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it didn't take long for various filed-and-forgotten reports to resurface, all of them warning about the danger of a flu vaccine shortage.
Hindsight is cheap, of course. Washington is the world's leading manufacturer of dire warnings. You can't heed them all. But there were other hints as well. Lesser flu vaccine screw-ups have been common in recent years. Clearly, the system was broken. Regarding 9/11, President Bush's apologists emphasize that it happened when he was still learning his way to the White House men's room. But the flu vaccine shortage comes as he is running for reelection with heavy emphasis on claims of wisdom derived from experience. The flu-shot problem could have happened under any president. But it was more likely to happen under this one because preventive measures conflict with his ideology. When frail elderly people are falling down dead as they plod from clinic to drugstore in search of vaccine, and a black market is growing to serve those who can pay hundreds of dollars for a single dose, it is not a good moment for bromides about the evils of letting big government allocate healthcare. Then there is money. A scientist quoted in the New York Times on Sunday noted that the government was spending $283 million a year on flu research and $5.6 billion on research for a vaccine against anthrax, a purely theoretical threat.
SEE ALSO:
Complaints Build Across Nation on Flu Vaccine Supplies
By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: As the flu crisis stretched into its third week, complaints are building across the country that health officials are failing to distribute the remaining vaccine supply quickly or equitably. At Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on Monday, any student who wanted to be vaccinated could obtain a shot, no questions asked. The university Web site, www.lsu.edu, did not mention any restrictions, and a staff member at the clinic, when asked whether anyone could receive a shot, said, "Yeah, you can just walk in." Dr. Timothy Honigman, medical chief of staff at the student health center, said students who wanted injections were given a fact sheet saying only students at the highest risk should receive the shots. But no one asks students who request vaccine whether they qualify. "We're trying to do the best we can following the guidelines of the C.D.C., yet not totally turning our back on our students, for whom we are here," Dr. Honigman said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A spokesman for the Louisiana Health and Hospitals Department, Bob Johannessen, said several state health officials had called the university to complain about the distribution policy. Mr. Johannessen said health care providers had a moral obligation to ensure - through direct questions and, if necessary, medical records - that people who asked for flu shots were at high risk. "To vaccinate others,'' he said, "is not responsible and is the wrong thing to do."  Influenza cases have started to appear. Through Oct. 9, scattered cases of influenza were reported in seven states, California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas and Utah, according to a report posted this weekend on the disease center's Web site, www.cdc.gov/flu/. On Monday, Minnesota reported its first case, a 44-year-old from Hennepin County. The illness was caused by the A Fujian virus, a strain included in the new vaccine.
SEE ALSO:
Bush Seeks to Allay Flu Vaccine Fears
By William Branigin and Michael Laris
Washington Post, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: In a statement today, the Kerry campaign said Bush "is trying to run away from any responsibility about the important public health crisis of the flu vaccine shortage." It questioned Bush's effort to blame the problem solely on a "major manufacturing defect," saying that "public health experts agree that the administration ignored warnings to take action to avert this crisis." It asserted, "America should not be left in a position where our public health is left vulnerable to flaws from a single company." The campaign also launched a new radio ad in Florida that bashes Bush on the vaccine shortage. "George Bush and the Republicans are so busy kowtowing to drug companies, so busy giving them billions, helping them price-gouge, pumping up their profits, so busy selling us out, they can't even get vaccines to keep pregnant women safe from the flu," a narrator says. Referring to the flu vaccine shortage and other issues, Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer said in a statement, "It's time for a fresh start with a president who is forthcoming about what he's doing to address the issues facing Americans here at home and abroad." Kerry has hit the Bush administration on the vaccine shortage in stump speeches and other public comments in recent days. The Bush campaign has responded by accusing Kerry of using "scare tactics" on the issue. In an interview aired on National Public Radio today, the Massachusetts senator said, "If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism? If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?"

Cheney: Terrorists May Bomb U.S. Cities
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
AP in YahooNews.com, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) on Tuesday raised the possibility of terrorists bombing U.S. cities with nuclear weapons and questioned whether Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) could combat such an "ultimate threat ... you've got to get your mind around."  "The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us — biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans," Cheney said.

The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket
Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
Working for Change, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago. "It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward." When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned." According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush. The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress. "What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible." ...The failure to furnish the report to Congress, said Harman, "fuels the perception that no one is being held accountable. It is unacceptable that we don't have [the report]; it not only disrespects Congress but it disrespects the American people." The stonewalling by the Bush administration and the failure of Congress to gain release of the report have, said the intelligence source, "led the management of the CIA to believe it can engage in a cover-up with impunity. Unless the public demands an accounting, the administration and CIA's leadership will have won and the nation will have lost."

Taking it to Crossfire
The Nation, Act Now by Peter Rothberg
EXCERPT: With talking heads ranting at each other in soundbite form, it's difficult for even the most dignified, articulate analyst to avoid being caught up in the calculated theater of debate shows like MSNBC's Hardball, CNN's Crossfire and Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. To steal a good line from the man I'm about to praise, TV debate shows are as much about real debate as the World Wrestling Federation is about real athletic competition.
Jon Stewart dropped that line, among many other spot-on remarks, in an amazing confrontation with Crossfire hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala this past Friday on the CNN program. Invited on to plug his (hilarious) new book, Stewart instead took the opportunity to publicly confront his hosts about why he thinks Crossfire's programming and the mainstream media in general are "hurting America." (He also told Carlson and Begala: "You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.") The result: perhaps the most direct, frank and truthful comments on the real role the media plays in shaping debate ever uttered on a major television news program. And, thanks to the internet, this remarkable moment in live TV, which clearly thrilled the in-studio audience, can live on well beyond the hundreds of thousands of people who saw it air last Friday.
Click here to watch the interview, click here to read the full transcript, and check out Stewart's comedic interpretation of the news every Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central.

Florida 2000: The Sequel
Five ways the election could end up in court, again.
By Richard L. Hasen
Slate, 18 October 2004
EXCERPT: Newspapers and magazines have been full of stories raising the disturbing possibility that the 2004 presidential election could once again end up in the courts: Will we wake up on Nov. 3 not knowing whether George W. Bush or John Kerry will be president for the next four years? Will the Supreme Court intervene again? How did things end up this way? Didn't the country learn anything from the Florida debacle of 2000? ...Here I consider five nightmare scenarios for how the election could remain in doubt after Nov. 2 and how all of them raise the possibility of court intervention. Ironically, the Florida debacle and our reactions to it have increased, not decreased, the chances of a post-election problem.

Sinclair Fires Journalist After Critical Comments
The broadcaster's Washington bureau chief had called an upcoming anti-Kerry program 'blatant political propaganda.'
By Elizabeth Jensen
LA Times, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. on Monday fired its Washington bureau chief after the newsman publicly protested plans for a program about Sen. John F. Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activities that is scheduled to run this week on about 60 Sinclair-owned stations.
Jon Leiberman, who had worked for the TV broadcaster for nearly five years, called the upcoming program "blatant political propaganda, not objective journalism," because it was airing so close to election day. He added that he had told his boss that he refused to work on it. Leiberman, 29, who made similar comments that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Monday, said he was fired late in the day for violating company policy by speaking to the media without prior approval. Exactly what conservative-leaning Sinclair has planned for the program is unclear. Leiberman said the Sinclair news staff, which hadn't produced any other recent one-hour news programs, was called in Sunday to a mandatory meeting at the Maryland headquarters, where they were told they had to take part in putting together the program in the next several days. Originally, the program had been assigned to the commentary unit. Sinclair had initially informed its staff, its stations and the networks with which it is affiliated that the plan was to air Carlton Sherwood's 42-minute anti-Kerry film, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal." Sherwood's film features interviews with former Vietnam POWs who allege that Kerry's 1970s antiwar activity prolonged their ordeal. The film was to have been followed by an 18-minute panel, to which Sinclair executives had invited Kerry. He declined. One person familiar with the situation said Sinclair executives told news employees in the six-hour meeting Sunday that the ad-free broadcast would probably now include about 15 minutes of "Stolen Honor," as well as several news pieces about the controversy, the Vietnam-era military service of Kerry and President Bush, and why voters should care the about 30-year-old events. The program, which isn't scheduled to be finished until just before some Sinclair stations begin to air it Thursday, might also include portions of a sympathetic film about Kerry's Vietnam years, "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry," according to the source.

19 October 2004

Bush creates new species: the faith based 'policy wonk'
Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: Why is science seemingly at war with President Bush?
For nearly four years, and with rising intensity, scientists in and out of government have criticized the Bush administration, saying it has selected or suppressed research findings to suit preset policies, skewed advisory panels or ignored unwelcome advice, and quashed discussion within federal research agencies. ...political action by scientists has not been so forceful since 1964, when Barry Goldwater's statements promoting the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons spawned the creation of the 100,000-member group Scientists and Engineers for Johnson.
This year, 48 Nobel laureates dropped all pretense of nonpartisanship as they signed a letter endorsing Senator John Kerry. "Unlike previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy making that is so important to our collective welfare," they wrote. The critics include members of past Republican administrations. And battles continue to erupt in government agencies over how to communicate research findings that might clash with administration policies. This month, three NASA scientists and several officials at NASA headquarters and at two agency research centers described how news releases on new global warming studies had been revised by administrators to play down definitiveness or risks. The scientists and officials said other releases had been delayed. "You have to be evenhanded in reporting science results, and it's apparent that there is a tendency for that not to be occurring now," said Dr. James E. Hansen, a climate expert who is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. ...Many career scientists and officials have expressed frustration and anger privately but were unwilling to be identified for fear of losing their jobs. But a few have stepped forward, including Dr. Hansen at NASA, who has been researching global warming and conveying its implications to Congress and the White House for two decades.
Dr. Hansen, who was invited to brief the Bush cabinet twice on climate and whose work has been cited by Mr. Bush, said he had decided to speak publicly about the situation because he was convinced global warming posed a serious threat and that further delays in addressing it would add to the risks. "It's something that I've been worrying about for months," he said, describing his decision. "If I don't do something now I'll regret it.
"Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something that wasn't consistent with that," Dr. Hansen said. "I got a little fed up with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now." Under the Bush administration, he said, "they're picking and choosing information according to the answer that they want to get, and they've appointed so many people who are just focused on this that they really are having an impact on the day-to-day flow of information. "Disputes between scientists and the administration have erupted over stem cell policy, population control and Iraq's nuclear weapons research. But nowhere has the clash been more intense or sustained than in the area of climate change. There the intensity of the disagreements has been stoked not only by disputes over claimed distortion or suppression of research findings, but on the other side by the enormous economic implications. Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be presented in public reports or news releases.

Election or Deification?
The Second Term Begins to Look Like the Second Coming
The Bush Presidency, 18 October 2004
EXCERPT: His speeches are suffused with phrases familiar to evangelicals. Once asked who is his favorite "political philosopher", he answered "Jesus". He told a Rev. Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, "God wants me to be president".
PBS's "Frontline" reported that, before the 2000 election, Dallas television evangelist James Robison heard a personal revelation from George W Bush: "I feel that I'm supposed to run for president. I can't explain it, but I believe my country's going to need me at this time."
He has told gatherings that he felt "called" to run for president. Campaigning in Amish country in July, he made the chilling statement, "I trust that God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job”.
The Faith-based Presidency
That gives the Christian fundamentalists their dream president. To nail down the vote with those who think the church should run the state, we now have "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House", a $14.95 DVD being distributed free to 300,000 churches. "Our documentary reveals this is the most faith-based presidency since Abraham Lincoln", says its producer. The film "clearly shows a caring, compassionate, faith-based President that the world has not seen before this documentary".
Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist who got an advance look, wrote, "Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from 'a throat full of Texas dust'), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham."
The evangelical right is presenting Bush as the anointed one, sent to save us from Saddam and Gomorrah, a latter day son of God, whose stumbling malaprops are perhaps just speaking in tongues. This is a part of the world where writer Thomas Frank, in his book "What's the Matter With Kansas", tells us that callers to the Christian radio network condemn liberal politicians for throwing off the Lord's timeline for the Rapture by trying to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Where, to hurry that schedule along, ranchers have developed red heifers for Israel, because they are essential to the Jewish side of the prophecy, the building of the Third Temple. Where the 17 percent of Americans live who expect the world to end in their lifetime, according to a Newsweek poll.
SEE ALSO:
Without a Doubt (revisited)
By RON SUSKIND
NYT Magazine, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: ''I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win.'' Yet one part of Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn -- a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland -- a moment's pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him ''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.
''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said, ''But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ''I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What's that line? -- the devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll come after you.''
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.
''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.
''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.''
And what is that?
''Easy certainty.''

'Faith Based Flu' in the U.S.
With same info as U.S., Britain avoids flu alarm
By MIKE McGRAW and DAVID GOLDSTEIN
The Kansas City Star, 17 October 2004
Courtesy of Talking Points Memo
EXCERPT: At a public clinic, almost in the shadow of the Chiron plant near the Mersey River, a poster says to “make an appointment today for your free flu jab.” Flu vaccine may be delayed in some places, but the shortage America sees is not expected in En-land, thanks in part to early action by British health officials. Late this summer, at the first sign of new problems at Chiron Corp.'s long-troubled plant, the British began searching for other suppliers of flu vaccine. “When Chiron informed us of the potential problems at the end of August, we made contingency agreements,” said Alison Langley, a spokeswoman for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA, the British equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Armed with essentially the same information, however, U.S. officials relied on Chiron's early assurances that only a small portion of the flu vaccine from its Liverpool plant was contaminated.

Feeling the Draft
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: hose who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will. There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush's budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security - which is clearly on his agenda for a second term - would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.
It's exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.
This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

As Election Begins, Dirty Tricks Return to the Sunshine State
US election begins with voting in Florida dogged by controversy over faulty machines and disenfranchised voters
By Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian (UK), 19 October 2004
EXCERPT: Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, northern Florida. An automated voice had some surprising news: did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Mr Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote - presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one - was far from unique. James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery. Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: she wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot. But the elections office makes no such calls. "It's Alice in Wonderland here now," sighed Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, Florida's capital. "Up is down, and down is up ... My feeling is that someone has essentially conned her into believing that she's going to be voting." Mr Sancho is a longstanding thorn in the side of Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, who presides from a building across the street. But even he seems astonished by the reports reaching his office these days. ... New electronic voting machines have proven error-prone, and may not be capable of accurate recounts. State authorities are threatening to withhold votes from people who forget to tick a box confirming that they are US citizens, even though they signed a statement to the same effect on the same form. And among several legal feuds, Florida Democrats are accusing the state of failing properly to implement measures designed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, when thousands of African-Americans were wrongly prevented from voting.

Poll Shows Tie; Concerns Cited on Both Rivals
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and JANET ELDER
NYT, 19 Octobber 2004
EXCERPT: Two weeks before Election Day, voters hold a sharply critical view of President Bush's record in office, but they have strong reservations about Senator John Kerry, leaving the race in a tie, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Mr. Bush's job approval rating is at 44 percent, a dangerously low number for an incumbent president, and one of the lowest of his tenure. A majority of voters said that they disapproved of the way Mr. Bush had managed the economy and the war in Iraq, and - echoing a refrain of Mr. Kerry's - that his tax cuts had favored the wealthy. Voters said that Mr. Kerry would do a better job of preserving Social Security, creating jobs and ending the war in Iraq. But a majority of Americans continue to see Mr. Kerry as an untrustworthy politician who will say what he thinks people want to hear. More than half of respondents said they considered him liberal, reflecting a dominant line of attack by Mr. Bush this fall.
The poll found the two candidates each drawing 46 percent of all registered voters in a head-to-head race. Among likely voters in a two-way race, Mr. Bush has 47 percent, with 46 percent for Mr. Kerry. The Times/CBS poll was conducted over the four days after Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry concluded the last of their three debates. Some other polls taken during that time have shown Mr. Bush in a slightly stronger position among what they described as likely voters. The variations reflect the difficulty of determining who is going to vote, particularly in a campaign in which both sides have invested so many resources in registering new voters.

Democrats Signing Up More New Voters
By Robert Tanner
Associated Press, 19 October 2004
EXCEPRT: The Democrats appear to be gaining the upper hand in the battle to sign up new voters in the all-important swing states, an Associated Press analysis suggests. The AP analysis of the most up-to-date figures from across the country found that, in every state where complete data is available, the Democrats have registered more new voters than Republicans. They have the edge in Arizona, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire. Only in Florida is the story different. Registration tallies from more than half the counties show that the Republicans and the Democrats are virtually tied in the race to increase their share of voters in the state that decided the presidential election four years ago. In those counties, the Republicans have signed up just a few thousand more. As for the two other big prizes among the swing states - Pennsylvania and Ohio - Pennsylvania's numbers are too scant to draw any conclusions, and Ohio does not register voters by party.

Aboard the Good Ship USS State of Denial
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 19 October 2004
EXCEPRT: So we've entered the final run to the November 2 election and, remarkably enough, we're still inside the American bubble, with much of the grimmer news of Bushworld largely happening offshore of American consciousness. On Sunday, for instance, accounts of the mistreatment of prisoners in our black hole of injustice in Guantanamo, Cuba, finally made the front page of my hometown paper, but only described as "harsh tactics" or "harsh and coercive treatment." You had to read deep into the piece (Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base) to find the word "torture," and then just in a quote from a Clinton-era senior State Department human rights official. Similarly, if you read almost to the end of a Los Angeles Times report on 28 American soldiers (a number of whom ended up with the military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) implicated in the December 2002 torture and beating deaths of two Afghan prisoners, you found a description of American interrogation techniques in Afghanistan which, even in 2003, were said to include "repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks and prisoners being hanged upside down andŠ" -- here's a special bit of horrific detail -- "Šhaving their toenails torn off." The word "torture" was naturally never mentioned and the "spate of detainee abuse cases" in Afghanistan was, according to unnamed "Army officials" (who would want to be named saying this?), mainly attributed to a "shortage of trained intelligence officials and interrogators." (Oh, and, by the way, that was Abu what? Abu where?) What are we to make of a world where reality cannot be called by its many names? What are we to make of a world in which terrible things can be done by our representatives in our names, but we -- the American public -- are considered too fragile to have those things called what they are, or often even told to us directly on the front pages of our papers? It's true, of course, that if you're a news junkie with time on your hands, somewhere on-line or in a news account printed someplace in this country, you'll be able to find much of what you should know about the ways in which our world is at present misfiring. But for most Americans this is not an option and so the gap between how they see the world and how others see it (and us) is -- like that old "credibility gap" of Vietnam days -- yawning ever wider. On Friday, for instance, the price of a barrel of crude oil hit $55 for the first time and I don't think the news made it off the business pages. (On the TV news, the price of oil is treated like the Dow Jones Average, as just another fluctuating figure to be mentioned in passing.) Prices at the gas pump have risen more slowly in recent months than prices at the source, undoubtedly tamping down reaction to the issue here -- and that's just one of those pre-election facts that you can make of what you wish, but don't expect it to last after November second. And oil -- ain't it strange -- wasn't even mentioned in the Presidential debates. Oops, let me correct that, before the flood of e-letters begins. In the first presidential debate, John Kerry said: "When you guard the oil ministry [in Baghdad], but you don't guard the nuclear facilities, the message to a lot of people is maybe, ŒWow, maybe they're interested in our oil.'" In the second debate, Kerry said: "The president sides with the power companies, the oil companies, the drug companies" and mentioned in a phrase the need to free ourselves from Middle East oil dependency. In the third debate John Kerry spoke of "$43 billion of [corporate] giveaways" and added parenthetically, "including favors to the oil and gas industry and the people importing ceiling fans from China." The word "oil" never passed the President's lips. So in four and a half hours of TV time in the presence of 50-60 million Americans, oil got perhaps 15 seconds of mention and Chinese ceiling fans perhaps 3 seconds. Coverage of oil in our media has hardly been better. The question is: What's wrong with this picture as a description of the world?

18 October 2004

Bush Lawyer Anticipates Delay in Tally
By Jo Becker
Washington Post, 16 October 2004
EXCERPT:  President Bush's top campaign lawyer said yesterday that the winner of next month's presidential vote may not be known for "days or weeks" after Election Day if the contest is close. Experts predict that a large number of absentee ballots will be cast, which could take time to count. For the first time nationwide, voters whose names do not appear on the rolls will be allowed to cast "provisional ballots," which will be counted only after a post-Election Day review determines their eligibility. In addition, some battleground states will count overseas military ballots received after Election Day as long as they are postmarked before Nov. 3. In Florida, for instance, military ballots received through Nov. 12 will be counted. Tom Josefiak, the Bush-Cheney campaign's general counsel, said he worries that the uncertainty caused by potential delays could undermine confidence in the outcome. "If it's a close election in any one state, it may be days or weeks before we know who actually is the winner," he said. "I hope that doesn't happen.

Report: Jeb Bush Ignored Advice to Scrap Felons List
Associated Press, 17 August 2004
EXCERPT: Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a published report Saturday. In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long told his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him ``that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug''' on the voter database. ... A software program matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the list of 48,000 names. Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database in July after acknowledging that 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored. Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error. ...

Post-Debate Analysis: Bush's Free Ride on Iraq
Media Fails Obligation To Investigate Fantastic Debate Claims
By Geov Parrish
ZNet, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: At least we got one debate where ordinary citizens asked the questions -- the point at which the debates came closest to breaking through the format of dueling press conferences. The debates also highlighted, in this campaign season, the utter failure of our media to investigate more closely the claims of candidates, particularly President Bush. No issue showed this more clearly than the war in Iraq, the single topic most often mentioned in debate questions and answers -- even creeping into the domestic policy debate Wednesday night. Yet for all the words spilled regarding Iraq, curiously little attention was being paid to what¹s happening on the ground there. ... Depressing? Sure. But also easily verifiable, which makes the ongoing ability of President Bush to spin his rose-colored fantasies without serious media challenge all the more troubling. It¹s bad enough that we have a commander-in-chief who is either badly deluded or intentionally lying, ignoring the grim intelligence reports he receives each day. But it¹s even worse that he spins these fantasies with little direct challenge from John Kerry and no hard questioning by our national media. He¹s getting a free ride, and with less than three weeks until the election, there¹s no excuse for it.

Election Day Fears
By Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood
ZNet, 15 October 2004
EXCERPT: We have two great fears about Election Day 2004. The first is that George W. Bush will be elected. The second is that John Kerry will be elected. Those fears are rooted in an understanding that the threats to global justice and world peace come not from a single person or party but from systems, and that no matter who is elected, those systems -- empire and capitalism -- remain in place. There is no hope for the long-term sustainability of human life on the planet if empire and capitalism are not replaced with more ecologically viable and humane ways of organizing political and economic life. And both Bush and Kerry are committed -- by their words and deeds -- to the maintenance of the capitalist empire. But which of these imperial capitalist candidates takes office in January 2005 is not irrelevant. There are differences between the two, and some of the differences aren¹t inconsequential.

Thumbs on the Scales of Justice
Bush-appointed judges rule against environmental regs more often than others, report finds
By Amanda Griscom Little
Grist Magazine, 14 October 2004
Courtesy of TomPaine.com
EXCERPT: President Bush's remarks about Supreme Court appointees during the debate last Friday left many Americans scratching their heads, what with his perplexing reference to the 1857 Dred Scott slavery case (a coded wink to pro-life factions, as it turns out) and some classic Dubya-style language mangling: "[T]he Dred Scott case ... is where judges years ago said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. ... The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America." In a more coherent moment, Bush said that were he to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court, he would "pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law." Yet that very day, a report [PDF] released by the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute suggested otherwise: It appears that quite a number of Bush's judicial appointees may allow their personal opinions to get in the way of the law -- or at least that's how it looks to many environmental advocates.

Intimidating, too, is rightwing judicial dominance in deciding electoral cases...in the face of Bush style suppressive tactics, voting rights are becoming less and less important
GAO Says Justice Is Unprepared for a Flood of Complaints
By Jo Becker
Washington Post , 15 October 2004
EXCERPT: The Justice Department is ill prepared to handle a large influx of complaints about voting rights violations in the Nov. 2 presidential election, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. Campaign experts predict that the department's voting rights section will be flooded with calls and complaints about poll access and other irregularities in the face of a close race between President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry and uncertainty over the effects of changes in election law and procedures. Some fear a repeat of the 2000 deadlock over the presidential election results in Florida. The Justice Department "lacks a clear plan" to reliably document and track allegations in a manner that could allow monitors to swiftly pick up patterns of abuse and take corrective steps, according to the GAO, Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm. "The reason it's so important to collect this information is to look for patterns in a particular county or in a particular polling place," said William O. Jenkins Jr., who prepared the report at the request of three Democratic lawmakers. "For instance, is it only Democrats or Republicans that seem to be having this problem? Were different voters told different things?"

Teachers Ousted from Bush Rally for Pro-Civil Liberties T-Shirts
Bend.com, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony ­ or tragedy ­ Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said ³Protect Our Civil Liberties,² the Democratic Party of Oregon reported. The women were ticketed to the event, admitted into the event, and were then approached by event officials before the president¹s speech. They were asked to leave and to turn over their tickets ­ two of the three tickets were seized, but the third was saved when one of the teachers put it underneath an article of clothing. "The U.S. Constitution was not available on site for comment, but expressed in a written statement support for ³the freedom of speech² and ³of the press² among other civil liberties," a Democratic news release said.

Bush's American Dream come true...
Boom Time for Billionaires
By Holly Sklar
The Progressive Populist, November issue
EXCERPT: The economy is booming again, if you're a billionaire. The new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans has 313 billionaires -- up 51 billionaires from 262 last year. Donald Trump is just an average Joe among the Forbes 400. Trump's $2.6 billion net worth puts him right about the Forbes 400 average of $2.5 billion. Microsoft's Bill Gates leads the list with $48 billion, followed by Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett with $41 billion. The heirs to the founder of low-wage Wal-Mart hold down half the Forbes 400 top ten spots, ranking numbers four through eight on the list, with $18 billion each. It took a minimum of $750 million to make the Forbes 400 this year. That's way up from last year's $600 million. It won't be long before the Forbes 400 is billionaires only. What's a billion dollars anyway? You'd have to rake in $1 million every day for 1,000 days to reach a billion bucks. The $1 trillion in combined wealth held by the 400 richest Americans is nearly as much as the combined wealth of the more than 100 million households in the less moneyed half of the population. It's boom time for billionaires, not for most Americans. The economy is growing, but wages are falling, poverty is rising and the middle class is shrinking. As the Census Bureau reported recently, the number of Americans below the poverty line grew by more than a million people in 2003, reaching 36 million. The official poverty rate rose to 12.5% -- up from 12.1% in 2002, 11.7% in 2001 and 11.3% in 2000. The poverty rate would be much higher if the poverty line were adjusted to realistically reflect the cost of minimally adequate housing, healthcare, food and other necessities such as childcare for employed parents. A family of four was not considered poor unless their income was below $18,810 in 2003. A week's worth of income at $18,810 -- $362 -- wouldn't cover the $663 box of 25 cigars on the Forbes 400 "Cost of Living Extremely Well" index.

Abu Ghraib fits with how prisons are run under Bush...
Former Texas Inmate's Suit Offers View into Sexual Slavery
By Adam Liptak
New York Times, 16 October 2004
EXCERPT: The inmates at the Allred Unit, a tough Texas prison, mostly go by names like Monster, Diablo and Animal. They gave Roderick Johnson, a black gay man with a gentle manner, a different sort of name when he arrived there in September 2000. They called him Coco. Under the protocols of the prison gangs at Allred, gay prisoners must take women's names. Then they are assigned to one of the gangs. "The Crips already had a homosexual that was with them," Mr. Johnson explained. "The Gangster Disciples, from what I understand, hadn't had a homosexual under them in a while. So that's why I was automatically, like, given to them." According to court papers and his own detailed account, the Gangster Disciples and then other gangs treated Mr. Johnson as a sex slave. They bought and sold him, and they rented him out. Some sex acts cost $5, others $10. Last month, a federal appeals court allowed a civil rights lawsuit that Mr. Johnson has filed against prison officials to go to trial. The ruling, the first to acknowledge the equal protection rights of homosexuals abused in prison, said the evidence in the case was "horrific." ... The phenomenon of sexual slavery in prison has only recently emerged from the shadows. Prison rape, in general, has received sporadic notice over the years and sustained attention more recently, with the passage last year of a federal law that aims to eliminate it. But there has never been a comprehensive study of incarcerated gay men subjected to sexual abuse. Discussing any form of prison rape is difficult. It makes many people uncomfortable. Some find it amusing. "It has been the subject of mockery and almost sadistic glee," said Margaret Winter, associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But Roderick is a human being who doesn't deserve this, not in a civilized society." The civil liberties union represents Mr. Johnson in his lawsuit, which will go to trial next summer.

Follow the Money: Bush Bolsters Evangelicals with Federal Dollars
By Esther Kaplan
The Nation, 1 November 2004 issue
EXCERPT: Five years ago the Christian right was in a tenuous position. Its standard-bearer, the Christian Coalition, was under investigation by the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, and many of its state chapters were nearing collapse. Its lead organizers were fleeing so fast that one former field director called the organization "defunct." Groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, undergoing their own leadership transitions, had not yet risen to take the coalition's place. The movement had staked nearly everything on the drive to impeach Bill Clinton, and after that effort collapsed, its leaders projected a palpable sense of gloom. Paul Weyrich, the master coalition builder who had inspired Jerry Falwell to build a "moral majority" in America, wrote a Dear Friend letter that resounded with defeat. "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," he wrote in February 1999. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values." He declared that the right had lost the culture war and that America was becoming "an ever-widening sewer." He encouraged activists to give up, to quarantine themselves from this infectious immorality, "to drop out of this culture, and find places...where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives." Weyrich's letter sparked enormous controversy on the Christian right, but many saw it as the harbinger of a new evangelical separatism, marked by a retreat from political life. Now, five years later, thanks to George W. Bush, the Christian right is on top of the world. Bush has not only bucked up the movement by ceding huge swaths of his domestic and international policy to this lobby, from his efforts to block abortions and gay marriage to his expenditure of significant political capital to support abstinence education, church-based social services and socially conservative judges. He has also revived the movement by injecting tens of millions of federal dollars directly into the coffers of the Christian right's grassroots organizations, while at the same time starving their most vigorous political opponents of funds--singling out family planning and AIDS organizations for special punishment. While these groups receive a steady diet of financial audits, investigations and outright defunding, the President has turned his faith-based initiative into what the Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston calls "a financial watering hole for the right-wing evangelicals."As Weyrich told the conservative Christian magazine World shortly after Bush took office, "The Bush administration came along just in time to save many of these pro-family organizations. Four more years of a Gore administration--of being on the outside--and I think a lot of them wouldn't have made it."

Our Electors, Ourselves
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
NYT Magazine, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: This Election Day, voters in Colorado will be asked to decide how their state's electoral votes should be apportioned to the presidential candidates who appear elsewhere on the ballot. Voting ''Yes'' will award electoral votes in proportion to the votes that are cast; a ''No'' will retain the winner-take-all system Colorado shares with 47 other states. Nationwide, the likelihood of a debacle along the lines of 2000 -- tied states, court challenges, a mismatch between popular and electoral votes -- is still small. But asking a state's citizens to vote for president in ignorance of the electoral system they are using seems an open invitation to the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
Even if the Coloradans who put this referendum on the ballot are inviting trouble, you can see what they're thinking. This year's election has been poisoned thoroughly by the contested outcome of 2000. Partisans may claim their stridency arises from the importance of the issues. But the rebarbative tone of the campaign so far -- from the Swift-boat ads to the ''60 Minutes'' forgeries -- owes less to Iraq or Sept. 11 than to what happened in 2000. Each side seems to believe that there was a brazen attempt to steal the election four years ago. Democrats think it succeeded; Republicans think it failed. One paramount ''issue'' is responsible for the vitriol of recent months: the issue of whether President Bush governs legitimately.

Corporate favoritism even in times of disaster
Large Farms Allowed to Collect on Hurricane Damage
By COURTNEY C. RADSCH
NYT, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: The Agriculture Department has reversed itself to allow the biggest farms to receive compensation under a special program for Florida growers hurt by this year's hurricanes. The change has raised fears among small farmers that their share of the available aid will shrink. Most disaster relief programs for farmers limit eligibility to those with an adjusted gross income of up to $2.5 million or to those farmers who derive at least 75 percent of their income from farming, thus excluding large corporations. The policy change, however, made Oct. 8, separates crop loss from tree damage and cleanup costs, opening the doors to claims from big growers that would usually be ineligible for these payments. Crop loss payments are still subject to income limits and are capped at $80,000 per farmer, but there are no restrictions on compensation for tree damage and cleanup costs. Floyd Gaibler, a deputy under secretary of the Agriculture Department, said the decision to separate crop replacement payments from damage payments was made after negotiations with the industry because the department decided that the losses were so great. Four hurricanes hit the state this year. But advocates for small farmers expressed concern that the change in eligibility would let big farms and corporate farms take a large share of the approximately $500 million that the Agriculture Department has said is available for relief to Florida growers.

Labels That Don’t Stick
The liberal label is even more laughable than that of the flip-flopper.
By Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Going into last night's climactic debate, President Bush switched his line of attack against John Kerry. Gone from Bush's stump speech was the charge that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Now he's a liberal -- and not just any liberal, but the most liberal senator of them all. This shift was prompted by a chorus of conservative consiglieri -- most prominently Newt Gingrich. The Newtster, you'll recall, is the master strategist who forced the government to shut down during the 1995 Christmas season to dramatize Bill Clinton's commitment to liberalism. Gingrich's ploy probably contributed more to Clinton's reelection the following year than anything Clinton himself did. Now Gingrich is back, counseling Karl Rove that the liberal label is even more damaging to Kerry than that of a guy in strange and costly swim trunks going whichever way the wind blows. There's just one problem with this new line of attack: John Kerry may be the most die-hard of liberals or a charter member of the Flip-Flop Hall of Fame -- but he can't be both.

16-17 October 2004

BOOKS
The Brownshirting of America
by Paul Craig Roberts
Antiwar.com, 16 October 2004
EXCERPT: Three recent books address this question. Thomas Frank, in What's the Matter With Kansas?, locates the movement in legitimate conservative resentments of people who feel that family, religious, and patriotic values are given short shrift by elitist liberals. These resentments festered and multiplied as offshore production, jobs outsourcing, and immigration took a toll on careers and the American dream. An audience was waiting for right-wing talk radio, which found its stride during the Clinton years. Clinton's evasions made it easy to fall in with show hosts, who spun conspiracies and fabricated a false consciousness for listeners who became increasingly angry. Show hosts, who advertise themselves as truth-tellers in a no-spin zone, quickly figured out that success depends upon constantly confronting listeners with bogeymen to be exposed and denounced: war protesters and America-bashers, the French, marrying homosexuals, the liberal media, turncoats, Democrats, and the ACLU. Talk radio's "news stories" do not need to be true. Their importance lies in inflaming resentments and confirming that America's implacable enemies are working resolutely to destroy us.
David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine lacks the insights of Thomas Frank's book, but it provides a gossipy history of the right-wing takeover of the U.S. media. Brock is unfair to some people, myself included, and mischaracterizes as right wing some media personalities who are under right-wing attack. Brock is as blindly committed to his causes as the right-wing zealots he exposes are to theirs. Unlike Frank, he cannot acknowledge that the right wing has legitimate issues. Nevertheless, Brock makes a credible case that today's conservatives are driven by ideology, not by fact. He argues that their stock in trade is denunciation, not debate. Conservatives don't assess opponents' arguments, they demonize opponents. Truth and falsity are out of the picture; the criteria are: who's good, who's evil, who's patriotic, who's unpatriotic. These are the traits of brownshirts. Brownshirts know they are right. They know their opponents are wrong and regard them as enemies who must be silenced if not exterminated. ...Today there is no one to correct a lie once it is told. The media, thanks to Republicans, has been concentrated in few hands, and they are not the hands of newsmen. Corporate values rule. If lies sell, sell them. If listeners, viewers, and readers want confirmation of their resentments and beliefs, give it to them. Objectivity turns listeners off and is a money loser.
In his book, Cruel and Unusual, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, explains how right-wing influence has moved the media away from reporting news to designing our consciousness. "The Age of Information," Miller writes, "has turned out to be an Age of Ignorance." Miller makes a strong case. His description of how CNN and Fox News destroyed the credibility of Scott Ritter, the leading expert on Iraq's weapons, reveals a media completely given over to propaganda. Ritter stood in the way of the neocons' invasion of Iraq. CNN's Miles O'Brien, Eason Jordan, Catherine Callaway, Paula Zahn, Kyra Phillips, Arthel Neville, and Fox News' David Asman and John Gibson portrayed Ritter as a disloyal American, a Ba'athist stooge on the take from Saddam Hussein, and compared him to Jane Fonda in North Vietnam. With this, the right-wing talk radio crazies were off and running. Anyone with the slightest bit of real information about the state of weapons development in Iraq was dismissed as a foreign agent who should be shot for treason. By substituting fiction for reality, the U.S. media took the country to war. The CNN and Fox News "journalists" are as responsible for America's ill-fated invasion of Iraq as Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle. With a sizable percentage of the U.S. population now addicted to daily confirmations of their resentments and hatreds, U.S. policy will be increasingly driven by tightly made-up minds in pursuit of unrealistic agendas. American troops are in Iraq on false pretenses. No one knows all the fateful consequences of this mistaken adventure. Bush's reelection would be seen as a vindication of aggression, and more aggression would likely follow. A continuing expenditure of blood, money, alliances, good will, and civil liberties is not a future to which to look forward.

NY Times Endorses John Kerry -- Not a Surprise, But Worth a Read
NYT, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.
Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.
When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.
If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.
The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.
He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.
BWUSA COMMENTARY
On the Prospects of a Second Term for Bush
There is an additional concern that we have here at BWUSA. It is drawn largely from Dr. Justin Frank's psychoanalytical profile of Mr. Bush. We believe there is credible evidence in Dr. Frank's composite to extrapolate the substance of Bush's second term. The radical and risky nature of Bush administration policy has been moderated only by the Bush team's desire to be re-elected. Still the damage to the United States in world affairs, the catastrophe of Iraq, the tepid recovery of the economy, the fundamental restructuring of tax burden, harmful policies for the environment, threats and suppression of civil liberties, etc., etc., have brought America to the edge of a precipice. There will be no similar moderating circumstance operating during the next four years. The character of George Bush's second term will be driven by who the man really is. In answering that question we can plainly see that Mr. Bush appears to be addicted to risk and his results have not been very good. We believe that his personality is such that he will be driven toward more and more risky behavior. His larger agenda is to see that America is set on a course determined by a radical rightwing, corporate and fundamentalist Christian vision. There will be no price too high to ensure the nation passes the point of "no return" on his grand transformative adventure. In his book, Dr. Frank explains why Bush is compulsively driven to the point of failure. And this is exactly our concern. A second term for Bush will very likely bring tragedy and failure. If Bush is elected, America will probably stand eye to eye with a failed presidency and with an American state well on the path to failure, too.

'Oops. I Told the Truth.'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT. 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: Sometimes it's useful to stand back and ask yourself: If I could vote for anyone for president other than George W. Bush or John Kerry, whom would I choose? I'd choose Bill Cosby - on the condition that he would talk as bluntly to white parents and kids about what they need to do if they want to succeed as he did to black kids and parents a few months ago.
The one thing that has gone totally missing, not only from this election, but from American politics, is national leaders who are actually ready to level with the public and even criticize their own constituencies. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that in American politics "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." We could use a few really big gaffes right now. Because we have not one, but three baby booms bearing down at us, and without a massive injection of truth-telling they could all explode on the next president's watch.
The leading edge of the American baby boom generation is now just two presidential terms away from claiming its Social Security and Medicare benefits. "With unfunded entitlement liabilities at $74 trillion in today's dollars - an amount far exceeding the net worth of our entire national economy - and with payroll taxes needing to double to cover the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare, how can any serious person not call entitlement reform the transcendent domestic policy issue of our era?" asks former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson, whose book on this subject, "Running on Empty," provides a blueprint for a bipartisan solution to this problem for any president daring to lead.

Preventive medicine is not a viable market commodity
With Few Suppliers of Flu Shots, Shortage Was Long in Making
By DENISE GRADY
NYT, 17 October 2004
EXCERPT: Scene by disheartening scene, the spectacle of a severe shortage of flu vaccine is unfolding around the country. ...The shortage caught many Americans by surprise, but it followed decades of warnings from health experts who said the nation's system for vaccine supply and distribution was growing increasingly fragile. "We're in the middle of a crisis that could have been averted,'' said Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of its national center for disaster preparedness. In particular, public health experts have long cautioned against the country's dependence on a few vaccine makers, and yet this has become standard practice. There are now only two major manufacturers for the nation's supply of flu vaccine, and at least a half-dozen other vaccines are made by single suppliers. Britain, by contrast, has spread its order for flu vaccines among five suppliers, precisely to avoid the kind of predicament America now faces.
In recent years there have been many significant disruptions of vaccine supplies. Between November 2000 and May 2003, there were shortages of 8 of the 11 vaccines for childhood diseases in the United States, including those for tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps and chicken pox. There have been flu vaccine shortages or miscues for four consecutive years.
In recent decades, many drug companies in the United States abandoned the manufacture of vaccines, saying that they were expensive to make, underpriced and not profitable enough. Flu vaccine can be a particular gamble, because the demand for it varies from year to year and companies throw away what they do not sell because a new vaccine must be made each year to deal with changing strains of the virus. Some companies dropped out because of lawsuits, and others because they determined that it would not pay to retool aging vaccine plants to meet regulatory standards.
The government did little to stop companies from quitting the business, and in some cases may have created policies that made matters worse. A report last year by the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that 30 years ago, 25 companies made vaccines for the United States, whereas today there are 5. [BWUSA emphasis]

Halliburton's Interests Assisted by White House
The administration has lent support to a lucrative drilling technique. Some in the EPA consider it an environmental concern.
By Tom Hamburger and Alan C. Miller
Los Angeles Times, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Over the last four years, the Bush administration and Vice President Dick Cheney's office have backed a series of measures favoring a drilling technique developed by Halliburton Co., Cheney's former employer. The technology, known as hydraulic fracturing, boosts gas and oil production and generates $1.5 billion a year for the company, about one-fifth of its energy-related revenue. In recent years, Halliburton and other oil and gas firms have been fighting efforts to regulate the procedure under a statute that protects drinking water supplies. The 2001 national energy policy report, written under the direction of the vice president's office, cited the value of hydraulic fracturing but didn't mention concerns raised by staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency. Since then, the administration has taken steps to keep the practice from being regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which Halliburton has said would hurt its business and add needless costs and bureaucratic delays. An EPA study concluded in June that there was no evidence that hydraulic fracturing posed a threat to drinking water. However, some EPA employees complained about the study internally before its completion, and others have strongly criticized it publicly since its release. One of them, an environmental engineer and 30-year EPA veteran in Denver, last week sought whistle-blower protection in an 18-page statement sent to the agency's inspector general and members of Congress. The statement alleges that the study's findings were premature, may endanger public health and were approved by an industry-dominated review panel that included a current Halliburton employee. "EPA produced a final report that I believe is scientifically unsound and contrary to the purposes of the law," Weston Wilson wrote to lawmakers.

Rove Testifies in CIA Leak Investigation
CURT ANDERSON
AP via Charlotte Observer, 15 October 2004
EXCERPT:  President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, testified Friday before a federal grand jury trying to determine if an administration official leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer. Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, which White House spokesman Scott McClellan said showed that Rove was "doing his part to cooperate" in the probe, as ordered by Bush. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said prosecutors have assured Rove he is not a target of the criminal investigation. "He appeared voluntarily today. He answered every question that was put to him," said Luskin, who added that he would provide no further details because prosecutors "have advised us that public disclosure would interfere with the investigation." Before testifying, Rove was interviewed at least once by investigators probing the leak. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have also been interviewed in their offices, with Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and McClellan among the administration officials appearing before the grand jury. Rove's testimony in the yearlong investigation comes as the hotly contested presidential race between Bush and Democrat John Kerry enters its final weeks. Democrats wasted no time in turning Rove's appearance into criticism of the president. Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart issued a statement calling on Rove and other aides to "come clean about their role in this insidious act." "If the president sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of this potential crime, he'd stop the White House foot-dragging and fully cooperate with this investigation," Lockhart said.
SEE ALSO:
Karl Rove in a Corner (revisited)
Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics
By Joshua Green
Atlantic Monthly, November 2004 issue
EXCERPT: Rather than soften Bush's appeal to reach moderates, Rove, as he has done throughout his career, is attempting to control the debate by expertly spotlighting issues sure to inspire his core constituency: the drive for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the pronouncements about love of country, the unremitting attack against anything in an opponent that seems impregnable. All these tactics stand out in Rove's most memorable past victories. Privately, Rove has been challenged and even denounced for his approach. A common refrain I heard from Republican consultants a few months ago was that his approach is foolish, because for the sake of an ideologically intense campaign, Rove is ceding to the Democrats the moderates Kerry is pursuing. And, these consultants fear, it puts Bush in jeopardy of seeing outside events decide the race. But an interesting thing happened as I worked on this piece. Early in the summer, as Bush was struggling, even Rove's allies professed to doubt his ability to control the dynamics of the race in view of an unrelenting stream of bad news from Iraq. Several insisted that he was in over his head‹with an emphasis that seemed to go deeper than mere professional envy. Yet by August, when attacks by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were dominating the front pages, such comments had become rarer. Then they died away entirely. If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone's quite registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He seems to understand‹indeed, to count on‹the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others. Rove isn't bracing for a close race. He's depending on it.

As U.S. Debt Ceiling Is Reached, Bush Administration Seeks to Raise It Once Again
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT:  Less than a day after President Bush implied that Senator John Kerry lacked "fiscal sanity," the Bush administration said on Thursday that the federal government had hit the debt ceiling set by Congress and would have to borrow from the civil service retirement system until after the elections. Federal operations are unlikely to be affected because Congress is certain to raise the debt limit in a lame-duck session in November. Congressional Republicans had wanted to avoid an embarrassing vote to raise the debt ceiling just a few weeks before Election Day. Since Mr. Bush took office in January 2001, the federal debt has increased about 40 percent, or $2.1 trillion, to $7.4 trillion. Congress has raised the debt ceiling three times in three years, raising it most recently by $984 billion in May 2003. On Thursday, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said that the federal government was about to breach the limit again and would be able to keep operating only if it started tapping money intended for the civil service retirement fund, the pension system for federal workers. "Given current projections, it is imperative that the Congress take action to increase the debt limit by mid-November,'' Mr. Snow warned in a statement, declaring that his arsenal of financial tools "will be exhausted'' at that point. The announcement came a few days after Congress adjourned and one day after Mr. Bush battled Mr. Kerry over economic and social policy in their final televised debate. In that debate, Mr. Bush accused Mr. Kerry of proposing major new programs without the money to pay for them. "My opponent talks about fiscal sanity,'' the president said. "His record in the United States Senate does not match his rhetoric.''  White House officials and Congressional leaders knew for at least two months that federal borrowing would soon exceed the legal limit. Mr. Snow warned on Aug. 2 that the ceiling would soon be reached, asking lawmakers to raise the limit then. Senate Republicans tried to insert an increase in borrowing authority into a military spending bill this summer, but were blocked by Democrats and a handful of Republican lawmakers who sought tougher restrictions on spending increases and tax cuts. As the election season moved into the final phase, Congressional leaders tacitly agreed to address the issue, along with about 10 unfinished spending bills, in a session after the November elections.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and John O'Neill (Unfit for Command) Sunk by ABC Nightline
ABC News, 15 October 2004
EXCERPT: "Nightline" traveled to Vietnam and found a number of witnesses who have never been heard from before, and who have no particular ax to grind for or against Kerry. Only one of them, in fact, even knew who Kerry is. The witnesses, all Vietnamese, are still living in the same villages where the fighting took place more than 35 years ago. A "Nightline" producer visited them and recorded their accounts of that day. The accounts were subsequently translated by a team of ABC News translators. ...Vo Thi Vi, 54, said Feb. 28, 1969, is a day that the villagers of Nha Vi hamlet will never forget. "Everything was destroyed," she said. "There's no houses left. They leveled everything. There was no leaves left. The fighting was very fierce."
According to the citation for Kerry's Silver Star, when the boats approached the hamlet, "a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard PCF 94" -- Kerry's boat. He "personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy," the citation says, before commending Kerry's "extraordinary daring and personal courage" for "attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire."
That account is disputed by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, author of "Unfit for Command," who maintains in his book that the statement "is simply false. There was little or no fire."
Different Accounts
Villagers say this is what they saw:
"Firing from over here. Firing from over there. Firing from the boat," Vo Thi Vi told "Nightline." She was only a couple hundred yards away when a Swift boat turned and approached the shore, she said, adding that the boat was unleashing a barrage of gunfire as it approached.
"I ran," she recalled, "Running fast. ... And the Americans came from down there, yelling 'Attack, Attack!' And we ran."
Her husband, Tam, said the man who fired the B-40 rocket was hit in this barrage of gunfire. Then, he said, "he ran about 18 meters before he died, falling dead."
Was the man killed by Kerry or by fire from the Swift boat? It was the heat of battle, Tam said, and he doesn't know exactly how the man with the rocket launcher died. But he knows the man's name -- Ba Thanh. He was one of the 12 reinforcements sent to the village by provincial headquarters, and after he died, the firefight continued, according to Tam.
"When the firing started, Ba Thanh was killed," Tam said. "And I led Ba Thanh's comrades, the whole unit, to fight back. And we ran around the back and fought the Americans from behind. We worked with the city soldiers to fire on the American boats."
According to the after-action report, after beaching the Swift boat, Kerry "chased VC inland, behind hooch, and shot him while he fled, capturing one B-40 rocket launcher, with round in chamber."
None of the villagers seems to be able to say for a fact that they saw an American chase the man who fired the B-40 into the woods and shoot him. Nobody seems to remember that. But they have no problem remembering Ba Thanh, the man who has been dismissed by Kerry's detractors as "a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Vietcong in a loincloth." (The description comes from "Unfit for Command," by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill.)
"No, this is not correct," Nguyen Thi Tuoi, 77, told ABC News. "He wore a black pajama. He was strong. He was big and strong. He was about 26 or 27." Tuoi said she didn't see Ba Thanh get shot either, but she and her husband say they were the first to find his body. They say they found him a good distance from his bunker, though she could not confirm that Kerry -- or anyone else -- had pursued him into the bush.

Block the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 15 October 2004
EXCERPT: Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks. But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations. That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular. Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late. Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations. The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names. And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.

Pattern of voter repression continues
GOP Official, Accused in Phone Dispute, Quits his Post
By Erik Stetson, Associated Press | October 16, 2004
Boston Globe, 16 October 2004
EXCERPT:  James Tobin, President Bush's New England campaign chairman, has stepped down after state Democrats accused him of involvement in the jamming of their telephone lines on Election Day 2002. ...Democrats and Republicans fought in court this week over whether Democrats could question GOP officials, including Tobin, as part of a lawsuit about the illegal jamming. Democrats won a ruling Wednesday that cleared the way for the questioning, but depositions scheduled for Thursday and yesterday were called off after the Justice Department said it would seek to delay them. The 2002 jamming consisted of computer-generated calls to get-out-the-vote phones run by Democrats and the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters' union. More than 800 hang-up calls tied up phones for about 1 hours.

AUDIO LINK
'Military Times' Poll Says Military Overwhelmingly Supports Bush and the Extreme Right
NPR's Morning Edition, 15 October 2004
A recent Military Times poll showed President Bush with a huge advantage over Sen. John Kerry among those serving in the armed forces. The survey was heavily weighted toward career military personnel, rather than the ranks of the enlisted. Hear Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver and NPR's Steve Inskeep.
SEE ALSO:
Military Are Rallying Behind Bush, Says Survey
Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian, 16 October 2004
EXCERPT: US soldiers have far greater trust in President George Bush as commander-in-chief than in John Kerry, preferring the incumbent by a nearly three-to-one margin, a poll showed yesterday.
SEE ALSO:
BWUSA COMMENTARY
Supporting the Troops
"Support the Troops." has become a mantra and a Billy club in American politics. It's a sentiment said to have come out of the Viet Nam experience, when the troops met considerable hostility as they returned home from an increasingly unpopular war.
The Army Times reports that polls show military members support extreme rightwing politics of the Bush administration by a majority between 60 and 80%. This is a surprise to many pollsters. My own experience of more than thirty years with the Air Force gives me a sense that general existing attitudes within the service would yield something much closer to 90%. I  cannot begin to describe the vehement and disdainful encounters I've had whenever I made statements that challenged a philosophy that embraced unfettered capitalism, the dominance of individual self interest in economy, or a highly aggressive and violent militaristic foreign policy. It is accurate to say the officer corps is in the mid-80% range of support for these sort of extreme rightwing political views.
Given these facts, a few thoughts naturally arise... When individuals join the uniformed services of the state, in which participation is voluntary, and then so predominantly support policies, views and actions which are demonstrable at odds with the well being of themselves and the nation, it seems obvious to question what it means to "support the troops."
I have understood for many decades that the sacrifices made by the military were in defense of a democratic system of government that advocates freedom of its citizens to hold a diversity of views. For the large majority of those troops and veterans to support or take political action inimical to the core values they profess to defend in war undermines the call for unconditional support now demanded by so many. I draw the line at offering a sincere wish for their safety, but I will not, personally, go beyond paying my taxes and passing debt to my children and grandchildren to support a mission or policy that I consider to be unjustified and immoral.

15 October 2004

Even horrible news can be good news for Bush these days...
Federal Deficit Surges to Record $413 Billion
By Alan Fram
Associated Press, 15 October 2004
EXCERPT: The federal deficit surged to a record $413 billion in 2004, the Treasury Department announced Thursday, injecting the figure into a presidential campaign in which the two parties have clashed over President Bush's management of the economy and the budget. The number was a significant improvement from the shortfalls that analysts projected earlier this year, including a $521 billion estimate the Bush administration made in February. In March, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a deficit of $477 billion. Both the administration and the Congressional Budget Office had lowered their deficit forecasts as the year progressed, due to stronger than expected revenue collections and lower spending. Even so, the final deficit figure easily surpassed the previous record in dollar terms - a revised $377 billion deficit run up last year. With inflation filtered out, the $413 billion shortfall was the worst since World War II.

Captain America: The Pentagon's Super Sci-Fi Warriors
By Nick Turse
TomDispatch, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Even if you never read the comic book or watched the hopelessly low-production-value 1960s cartoon, chances are you've at least seen the image of Captain America -- the slightly ridiculous looking superhero in a form-fitting, star-spangled bodysuit. If you're still hazy on "Cap," he was Steve Rogers, a 4-F weakling during World War II who, through the miracle of "modern science" (a "super soldier serum") became an Axis-smashing powerhouse -- the pinnacle of human physical perfection and the ultimate American fighting-man. In the 1940s comic, Rogers had taken part in a super-soldier experiment, thanks to the interventions of an Army general and a scientist in a secret government laboratory. He was to be the first of many American super-soldiers, but due to poor note-keeping methods and the efforts of a Nazi assassin, he became the sole recipient of the serum. Today, however, the dream of Captain America turns out to be alive and well -- and lodged in the Pentagon. The U.S. military aims to succeed where those in the four-color comic book world failed. By using high technology and cutting edge biomedicine, the military hopes to create an entire army of Captain Americas -- a fighting force devoid of "Steve Rogers" or any other "Joe Average," and made up instead of super-soldiers whose human-ness has been all but banished.

Cutbacks in Environmental Programs May Imperil Military Readiness
BushGreenWatch, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Military training exercises on U.S. Army bases around the country are in "potential jeopardy" because of deep cuts in environmental programs, according to a Pentagon memorandum obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Over the past three years, in the name of national defense, Congress has granted the military exemptions from complying with important environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under the changes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cannot designate as critical habitat any lands controlled by the Department of Defense, provided the Pentagon has prepared a plan that "addresses special management consideration or protection." Moreover, Congress essentially granted the Pentagon a blanket exemption from protecting migratory birds or their nesting grounds during readiness training. But in the September 24 memo obtained by PEER, Major General Larry Gottardi notes that in fiscal year 2005 and beyond, funding for environmental projects on military bases will drop by more than a third, a consequence of the war in Iraq. Without the funds needed to prepare the required plans, Gottardi raises the concern that lawsuits could result in court-ordered injunctions that halt training exercises altogether.

FILM REVIEWS
An Incredible, Almost Irrefutable Duo...
Get them to show any 'undecideds' you know
The Corporation
a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot and Joel Bakan
This is a riveting documentary that effectively uses two hours and forty minutes to delve into the nature of the dominant institution of our time, the corporation. Using the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to define itself as a "person," the corporation has successfully transformed nearly every aspect of western civilization to its advantage. All of this has resulted in the creation of an entity possessing legal rights of a 'super person.' A person with no moral conscience. The film makers use a checklist produced by the World Heath Organization to document a half-dozen or more characteristics and behaviors common which would lead any psychotherapist to diagnosis a severe psychopathic personality disorder. Those factors include: a callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt and a failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior. This film documents the underlying causes for the demise of democracy and standards of fairness and justice in the world today. It also offers some hope that specific action can still be taken by individuals to deter and effectively counter corporate power. Do not miss the opportunity to see this enlightening piece of film making.
Uncovered: The War On Iraq
a film by Rober Greenwald
This is an uncompromising account of how the Bush administration created its case for war by using questionable sources for intelligence, selected and then exaggerated 'information' to effectively shut down any debate about the necessity for military action. It documents the basis upon which many false assertions were made. It provides an exceptional record of who said what and when.  Manipulation and deception were how the Bush team moved to achieve its objectives. "The film deconstructs the administration’s case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials, foreign service experts, and U.N. weapons inspectors – including a former CIA director, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even President’s Bush’s Secretary of the Army. Their analyses and conclusions are sobering, and often disturbing, regardless of one’s political affiliations." The recounting of all this should outrage both the fervent supporters and the sworn enemies of the Bush Doctrine. It's just head shaking how this incompetent bunch of loonies (the Bush team and their neoconservative underlings) are not being held accountable for such an unmitigated catastrophe as our situation in Iraq!

Iraq Contractor Accused of Offshore Shell Game
By David Phinney
CorpWatch, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Cartoonist: Khalil Bendib
Former managers working for Custer Battles, a high-profile private security company in Iraq, are accusing the firm of using subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other "tax haven" countries to fraudulently overcharge on government contracts by tens of millions of dollars. The accusations are spelled out in a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act and made public Oct. 8. The company, headquartered in McLean, Va., first grabbed headlines in The Wall Street Journal after winning a $13 million contract in June 2003 to provide security for the Baghdad International Airport. The nine-month-old firm had no track record in security and employed only a handful of people at the time. The two co-founders, Scott Custer and Michael Battles boast of making their first payroll with personal loans and credit cards. Since then, the company has landed contracts totaling an estimated $100 million including protecting Iraq¹s new currency and training the Iraqi army. But once on the ground in Iraq, the company resorted to using crooked accounting and "sham" subsidiaries in far-flung countries including the Cayman Islands, Cyprus and Lebanon, to dramatically pump up charges on contracts by as much as 162 percent or more on equipment, construction supplies and services, claim plaintiffs Robert Isakson and W.D. "Pete" Baldwin, both of who worked for Custer Battles. "When I see crooks come into a war zone where people are fighting and dying, I just turn them in," Isakson says. "In my opinion they were cheating the government and taxpayers and just being rewarded with more contracts."

Sept. 11 Panel's Chief Wants Help From Bush
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: The chairman of the independent Sept. 11 commission called on President Bush on Thursday to become personally involved in pressuring Congress to overhaul the nation's intelligence community, warning that the legislation recommended by the panel might die in Congress without Mr. Bush's intervention before the election next month. "I'm very worried," said the chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "I think it's a 50-50 situation now. We've come a long way; we're right up to the finish line. But we have some powerful adversaries."  "I would certainly urge the president to do everything in his power to get a final bill to his desk before the election," Mr. Kean said in a telephone interview, a week after the House and Senate produced sharply different versions of a bill to enact the commission's major recommendations, including creation of the job of national intelligence director. "I would hope that he would urge his friends in Congress to act," Mr. Kean said of the president. "I will reach out to the White House to urge them to do everything they can." The Republican author of the Senate bill, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, also called for Mr. Bush to become involved in the Congressional negotiations, even if that meant taking time off the campaign trail. "It would be very helpful for the president to be involved, even though I realize this is an extraordinarily busy period for him," Ms. Collins said.

Washington Considers Purchasing Flu Vaccine For Next Year
By ANDREW POLLACK
NYT, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: The government is considering making commitments to buy a certain number of flu shots each year to help bolster supplies and avoid severe shortages like the current one, officials said yesterday. "It's clearly on everybody's front burner," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview. "How many people do we want to vaccinate next year? Let's buy that amount." Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, also mentioned the idea yesterday to a group of reporters in Washington, calling it a "Bioshield for flu," according to his spokesman. Bioshield is a program that spurs companies to develop vaccines and treatments for anthrax and other biological weapons by guaranteeing that the government will buy them. Such commitments would not do much to solve the current problem, which has brought a lack of vaccines in many places, long lines and sharply rising prices around the country.

Another excuse for the Bush economy?
Broker Accused of Rigging Bids for Insurance
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
NYT, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: Eliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney general, yesterday accused the world's largest insurance broker of cheating customers by rigging prices and steering business to insurers in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks  The lawsuit brought by Mr. Spitzer against the broker, Marsh Inc., a unit of the Marsh & McLennan Companies, contends that Marsh conducted sham bidding to mislead customers into thinking that they were getting the best price for the coverage they needed. The lawsuit cites several examples of customers - including Fortune Brands, which sells Titleist golf balls and Jim Beam spirits, and the school district of Greenville, S.C. - who were misled that way. In addition to the lawsuit, two executives of the American International Group, one of the world's largest insurance companies, pleaded guilty to criminal charges of rigging bids with Marsh. While Mr. Spitzer's target yesterday was Marsh, he made clear that he was taking aim at a widespread practice in the insurance industry. "This investigation is broad and deep and it is disappointing,'' he said. Mr. Spitzer suggested that he had also come across indications of wrongdoing in the sale of many kinds of personal insurance, including coverage on cars, homes and health insurance. "Virtually every line of insurance is implicated,'' he said. The lawsuit names American International, or A.I.G., and three other insurers, as participants in the bid rigging and steering: the Hartford, a unit of Hartford Financial Services; Ace Ltd., which is based in Bermuda but is a major player in the American insurance market; and Munich American Risk Partners, a unit of Munich Re with offices in Princeton, N.J. "There will be numerous criminal and civil cases,'' Mr. Spitzer promised.

14 October 2004

Bush does his best, but
The Results Are In, Kerry Wins!
by kos, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT:
CBS News Poll
Kerry 39
Bush 25

CNN Focus Group
24 on the panel
Kerry 10
Bush 7
Undecided 7

ABC News
Kerry 42
Bush 41
Sample:
38% GOP
30% Dem
28% Independent

Qualitative Substance of Bush False Statements Far Outweigh those of Kerry
Washington Post via Union Leader, 14 October 2004
Content adapted from
Fact Check: Attacks misleading, out-of-context
By GLENN KESSLER and MIKE ALLEN
Washington Post, 14 October 2004
Kerry charged that the top 1 percent of income-earners in the United States got $89 billion of Bush's tax cut last year
Fact Check: Correct but was out of context - the top 1 percent got about 34 percent of the tax cut - and they pay about 35 percent of individual income taxes. The bottom 80 percent pay 14 percent of federal income taxes but got 32 percent of Bush's tax cut. (The top 1 percent pays 24 percent of all federal taxes, including payroll taxes, while the bottom 80 percent pays 29 percent of all federal taxes.) Taxes for all income groups have decreased, although the share of taxes paid has gone up by a minuscule amount for "middle class" taxpayers in the 40 percent to 80 percent of income groups, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Kerry said that "they've cut the Pell Grants ... they're not getting the $5,100 the president promised them." Bush countered: "He said we cut Pell grants. We've increased Pell grants by a million students."
Fact Check: In the 2000 campaign, Bush promised a maximum grant of $5,100 for each freshman. When Bush released his budget in February, it capped the maximum Pell Grant award to $4,050 for the third year in a row, and the American Association of Community Colleges called it a freeze that would be "a severe blow" to students from low-income families at a time of declining state and local support for public higher education. The White House has argued that the program has a $3.7 billion shortfall, and that raising the maximum award while making the shortfall worse would be irresponsible. Since 2001, the number of Pell Grant recipients has risen by 1 million, in part - as Kerry pointed out - because the program is based on eligibility according to a formula, and low incomes can raise the number of students eligible.

Kerry said that Bush had once said he was "not that concerned" about finding Osama bin Laden. Bush replied that Kerry's comment was "one of those exaggerations."
Fact Check: Bush said the bin Laden ," but in a news conference on March 13, 2002, Bush said when asked about the search for the al-Qaida leader: "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, we haven't heard much from him. ... And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I - I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him." [We offer this as evidence that Bush does not learn from his mistakes - BWUSA]

Kerry said that Bush had not met with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bush replied that he had.
Fact Check: Bush did meet with the Congressional Black Caucus during his first two weeks in office - on Jan. 31, 2001 - but Kerry's overall charge was correct: Bush has repeatedly turned down requests to meet with the group since then. Caucus members have complained that not only has Bush refused to meet with them on specific issues, including his plans to attack Iraq, but the White House often has not even responded to their letters.

AUDIO LINK
Excellent Debate Analysis/Discussion
Diane Rehm Show, 14 October 2004
Diane and her guests discuss the third and final debate of the presidential campaign. They'll talk about the domestic proposals and problems that were raised Wednesday night in Tempe, Arizona, and predict how Bush and Kerry's performances may affect strategy going into the last few weeks before Election Day.
Guests
Tom Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

The Final Debate
NYT, 14 October 2004
EXCERPT: The mission of last night's presidential debate was to engage George Bush and John Kerry in a discussion of "domestic issues" - a grab bag of topics that included both questions of money, like taxes and trade, and matters of morals, like abortion and gay marriage. Mr. Bush, however, tends to regard even policy choices as matters of faith. The numbers on his Social Security plan may never add up; last night, when asked about the $2 trillion hole in the proposal, he simply ignored the question. But to the president, all of his initiatives are success stories, and the devil take the details.
Mr. Bush took every possible opportunity to note that Mr. Kerry was once rated by a magazine as the most liberal senator and is from Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry, for his part, seemed to be vying to see how many times he could mention that Mr. Bush was the first president in 72 years to preside over an economy that has lost jobs. In a way, those efforts summarized the entire evening. Listeners certainly came away knowing that Mr. Kerry was a liberal senator and that under Mr. Bush, working people have fared poorly. The election may depend on which they decide is worse.
Mr. Kerry, who has been trying for the entire campaign to get people to pay attention to his health care plan, got the chance to talk about it last night, and he did a good, succinct job of explaining his idea. (The Kerry campaign may want to consider carrying that two-minute light everywhere.) Mr. Bush described the plan, which centers on making it easier for businesses to provide insurance for their employees, as a government hydra that would usurp people's right to pick their own doctors.

MSNBC's Rightward Slant on Debate Coverage
FAIR Action Alert, 12 October 2004
EXCERPT: After standing virtually alone among mainstream media outlets in declaring Dick Cheney the clear victor in his October 5 debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards, MSNBC made an odd decision about its coverage of the subsequent Bush-Kerry debate: It added more conservative voices to its panel discussion. MSNBC's panel for the October 9 Bush-Kerry debate consisted of host Chris Matthews, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan and Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who had to leave Bush's campaign when his links to anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans were revealed. Providing "balance" was Ron Reagan Jr., an MSNBC political analyst whose main liberal credential is that he does not embrace the views of his father, the most famous conservative politician of the 20th century. In other words, two right-wingers, two centrist journalists (both of whom praised Cheney's performance nights earlier), and the not particularly ideological Reagan. While the right-wingers offered unvarnished praise for Bush (Bush "was outstanding at times and he was spectacular at times," according to Buchanan), there was no one on the panel to offer similar support for Kerry, or substantive criticisms of Bush.

Campaign Distortions on Terrorism Hurt Bush
The polls show that Kerry has turned around his ratings on key issues. Meanwhile, campaign distortions on terrorism are undoing some of Bush’s own diplomacy
By Richard Wolffe
Newsweek, 13 October 2004
EXCERPT: Campaigns and candidates like to think they can escape the laws of physics. So both the Bush and Kerry campaigns claim with equal certainty they have gained momentum out of last week’s TV debates. But as Isaac Newton correctly noted, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Bush and Kerry cannot both be rising in the polls, unless Ralph Nader has suddenly nosedived from his 1-point rating to, well, zero.
Bush’s aides were almost giddy with delight at the improved performance of the president after last week’s contest in St. Louis. But they may well have celebrated too early. As the latest batch of polls suggest, it’s Kerry who is emerging from the debates as the clear winner. NEWSWEEK’s poll  after the first debate gave him a 40-point victory over Bush, with 61 percent of those who watched seeing Kerry as the clear winner and a mere 19 percent picking Bush as the victor. Sixteen percent called it a draw. Gallup’s poll after the second debate gave the challenger a 15-point lead. Kerry’s wins seem to grow over time; according to Gallup’s snap poll immediately after the second debate, Kerry was ahead by just 2 points.
Even as the horserace numbers remain deadlocked, the underlying numbers suggest Kerry has turned around his ratings across the range of issues that voters care about. Before the debates, Kerry was losing to Bush on who could handle the economy by 9 points; today it’s Kerry who has a 4-point lead. On Iraq, Kerry is still trailing Bush, but he has halved the president’s lead from 14 to 7 points. And on the commander in chief’s only remaining issue of strength—the war on terrorism—his lead has declined from 23 to 17 points.
...The Bush campaign may find itself winning the war of the election and losing the peace. By campaigning so strongly against consulting with allies and so strongly for pre-emptive strikes, the president is effectively undoing his own diplomacy over the last year or more. If he wins re-election, Bush may well find himself rediscovering the laws of physics. For every action on the campaign trail, there’s an equal and opposite reaction in the outside world.

Security Scholars Say Iraq War Most Misguided Policy Since Vietnam
by Jim Lobe
Common Dreams, 13 October 2004
EXCERPT: The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the “most misguided” policy since the Vietnam War, according to an open letter signed by some 500 U.S. national-security specialists. The letter, released Tuesday by a Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy (S3FP), said that the current situation in Iraq could have been much better had the Bush administration heeded the advice of some of its most experienced career military and foreign service officers. But the administration’s failure to do so has actually fueled “the violent opposition to the U.S. military presence,” as well as the intervention of terrorists from outside Iraq. “The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests,” according to the group which called for a “fundamental reassessment” in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation. “We’re advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging,” said Prof. Barry Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the organizers of S3FP which includes some of the most eminent U.S. experts on both national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world. Among the signers are six of the last seven presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and professors teach in more than 150 colleges and universities in 40 states.