craig cline: My War

The Top 10 Conservative Idiots

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 20:02:44 GMT

This is so funny!

The Top 10 Conservative Idiots
(No. 218)

October 17, 2005
Stage-Managed Edition

Conservative woes increased last week as George W. Bush (1) made a fool of himself during a live teleconference, leaving Scott McClellan (2) in the line of fire. Meanwhile the Department of Homeland of Security (3) has been scaring people, Harriet Miers' (4) personal papers were released, and the the Department of Defense (5) are screwing the troops. Elsewhere, Tom DeLay (6) is still in trouble, Ann Coulter (9) demonstrates conservative integrity, and John McCain (10) plays the hypocrite. Enjoy, and don't forget the <A href="javascript:openWin('/top10/key.html');">key!

George W. Bush
What's a president to do when faced with growing public discontentment and crashing poll numbers? If you're George W. Bush, the answer is clear: try to focus the nation's attention away from what a jackass you are, and regain some of that pre-election military mojo.

Which is exactly what Our Great Leader attempted to do last week, holding a live teleconference with some troops from the 42nd Infantry Division, all of whom coincidentally happened to agree with all of the Bush administration's current talking points on Iraq.

Here's George, participating in a totally spontaneous back and forth chat with the troops:

Wait a minute... the president appears to have dyed his hair. And lost some height. And turned into a woman.

Okay, you got me. That's not George W. Bush, that's Allison Barber of the Defense Department. And what was she doing there? Unfortunately for the Bush administration, the answer was revealed by the raw satellite feed streamed to news outlets before the teleconference began. The feed showed Ms. Barber carefully coaching the troops on what Bush was going to say, the techniques they should use when responding, and giving them an opportunity to rehearse their answers. Some choice quotes:

"Master Sergeant Lombardo, when you're talking about the president coming to see you in New York, take a little breath before that so you can actually be talking directly to him. You've got a real message there, okay?"

(snip)

"If the question comes up about partnering how often do we train with the Iraqi military who does he go to?"

(snip)

"...if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit the hometown and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?"

(snip)

"But if he gives us a question that's not something that we've scripted, Captain Kennedy, you're going to have that mic, and that's your chance to impress us all."

Hmmm. "Not something we've scripted," eh?

Funnily enough, even though the event was totally stage-managed and pre-packaged, Our Great Leader still managed to make a complete hash of it . Bush forgot about the satellite delay and talked across soldiers, stumbled over words and phrases (as usual), offered a completely disingenuous invitation for the troops to drop by and visit him any time they're in Washington, and at>Scott McClellan
But it was Scott McClellan who took the brunt of Bush's tomfoolery at the White House press conference which followed the teleconference. Unfortunately for Scott, he didn't know that the reporters already knew that the event was staged. Hilarity ensued:

Q: Scott, why did the administration feel it was necessary to coach the soldiers that the President talked to this morning in Iraq?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I'm sorry, I don't know what you're suggesting.

(snip)

Q: ...we asked you specifically this morning if there would be any screening of questions or if they were being told in any way what they should say or do, and you indicated no.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I don't think that's what the question was earlier today. I think the question earlier today was asking if they could ask whatever they want, and I said, of course, the President was - and you saw -

Q: And I asked if they were pre-screened.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: You saw earlier today the President was trying to engage in a back-and-forth with the troops...

(snip)

Q: But I also asked this morning, were they being told by their commanders what to say or what to do, and you indicated, no. Was there any prescreening of -

SCOTT McCLELLAN: I'm not aware of any such - any such activities that were being undertaken...

Worst. Press Secretary. Ever.

By the way, don't miss this Keith Olbermann segment on Bush's teleconference travesty - I promise you won't be disappointed!

Olbermann Part target=_blank>Olbermann Part Two
Olbermann Part Three

Videos hosted by CanOFun.com.

The Department of Homeland Security
Unlike Mike Brown, Keith Olbermann's been doing a heck of a job lately. As well as his hilarious exposé of Our Great Leader's Giant Stupid Teleconference, Olbermann reported last week on " The Nexus of Politics and Terror," citing numerous occasions when the Department of Homeland Security raised the terror alert level immediately following either bad news for the administration, or a speech on terror by George Bush.

Former Homeland Security head Tom Ridge outright admitted back in May of this year that during his tenure "he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or 'high' risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled" (see Idiots 198).

But that didn't stop the administration from trying to pull the same tired old trick in New York City last week, causing New Yorkers to... well, yawn and go about their business as usual.

We commented recently (see Idiots 217) on George W. Bush's "major speech" on Iraq and the war on terror at the National Endowment for Democracy, which basically involved him gabbing on and on about 9/11 (again). Just seven hours after that speech, a bomb threat warning was issued by New York City officials.

According to Olbermann's blog, the warning was "based on information supplied by the Federal Government," but it was later revealed that "a Homeland Security spokesman says the intelligence upon which the disclosure is based is 'of doubtful credibility.'" That intelligence was subsequently determined to be a hoax.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg: it seems that not target=_blank>according to the New York Daily News:

At least two E-mails revealing the purported plot were sent to a select crowd of business and arts executives early last week by New Yorkers who claimed to have close connections to Homeland Security and other federal officials, authorities said.

The NYPD confirmed that it learned of the E-mails on Oct. 3 - three days before Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the FBI went public with the threat.

But surely it was mere coincidence that despite days of foreknowledge the warnings were announced just hours after Bush's big speech on terrorism. And the fact that terror warnings have coincidentally followed bad news for Bush or big terrorism speeches on multiple occasions - well, um, that must be a coincidence too.

Harriet Miers
It looks like Harriet Miers is qualified after all! Perhaps not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice, admittedly, but certainly highly qualified to lick George W. Bush's boots.

Last week a handful of Miers' personal papers were released by the Texas State Library, "most of them routine legal memos, press releases and transcripts," according to Knight Ridder. But among those papers were a few personal notes from Miers to Bush, which reveal... well, let's see:

"You are the best governor ever - deserving of great respect!" - Harriet Miers

"Cool!" - Harriet Miers

"You are the best!" - Harriet Miers

Can you imagine if she'd been on the court in 2000?

...in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail. And there is no basis for reading the Florida statutes as requiring the counting of improperly marked ballots, as an examination of the Florida Supreme Court's textual analysis shows that George W. Bush is the best governor ever - deserving of respect! We will not parse that analysis here, except to note that the principal provision of the election code on which it relied, §101.5614(5), was, as the Chief Justice pointed out in his dissent from Harris II, "cool."

The Department of Defense
Scenario: you volunteer to serve your country in the armed forces. You're sent to Iraq, where a bomb takes target=_blank>according to the Washington Post, "the government's computerized pay system is designed to 'maximize debt collection' and has operated without a way to keep bills from going to the wounded."

Now why am I not surprised? So much for "supporting the troops."

Tom DeLay
There was more bad news for Tom DeLay this week - according to the Austin American-Stateman, "Travis County prosecutors want to know how U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, purchased a 2004 Toyota Sienna minivan, subpoenaing all records surrounding the transaction, as well as telephone records from Delay, his campaign and his daughter."

The new subpoenas raise further questions - and not just about DeLay's alleged money-laundering activities. For example, why would someone so staunchly pro-American buy a Japanese car? And what would a manly Texas dude like DeLay want with the soccer mom's vehicle of choice?

Perhaps he was attracted to the 230-horsepower V-6 engine which, according to U.S. News and World Report, "shows a lot of chutzpah." And of course there's always the "numerous configurations that let you fold down any or all of the seats, depending on your hauling/chaufeurring needs," which would make it super-convenient for moving lobbyists, golf clubs, and tote-bags filled with non-sequential hundred dollar bills.

Top 10 Conservative Idiots exclusive: thanks to a talented DU cameraman with an extremely long lens, we have obtained this photograph of DeLay's actual 2004 Toyota Sienna:

The Pentagon
I just thought you should know that according to Fox News, "Pentagon officials are denying that a live video conference between President Bush and U.S. troops in Iraq was staged."

In a related story, Milli Vanilli want their Grammys reinstated.

Lou Beres
Won't somebody think of the children? Lou Beres, "longtime head of the Christian Coalition of Oregon," apparently has been. Last week he stepped down from his position and said he will "withdraw from political life" after he was accused of sexual abuse by three of his relatives.

According to the Seattle Times:

The three women - now adults - allege they were abused by Beres as preteens. Their families called the child abuse hot line last month, after the three openly discussed the alleged abuse for the first time.

"I was molested," target=_blank>website, "The Christian Coalition of Oregon is committed to representing the pro-family agenda and educating America on the critical issues facing our society."

Perhaps someone should explain to Lou Beres that "pro-family" doesn't mean "banging your pre-teen relatives."

Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter revealed the full extent of her integrity last week on Sean Hannity's radio show and you'll be unsurprised to learn that, yes, Ann Coulter has no integrity.

During a conversation with Hannity and Brent Bozell, Coulter remarked that the administration is not telling the truth about the Harriet Miers nomination. "They're treating us like liberals lying to us," she said. "When they lie to conservatives, we have a problem."

So there you have it - Ann Coulter admits that the administration is a bunch of liars, it's just that when she thought they were src="http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/icons/top10-10.gif" widthU align=left>John McCain
And finally, Sen. John McCain criticized Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week for holding "carefully staged campaign events," according to Reuters. "The benefit of an open town hall meeting is target=_blank>barred from attending. The Washington Post reported back in March that "McCain has been especially supportive of his target=_blank>loyalty oaths.

Here's a picture of McCain sternly taking Bush to task at a campaign rally in 2004:

What was that about credibility again? See you next week!

How Publishers and Their Production Teams Fared in Covering the Tragedies in New York and Washington

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:47:15 GMT

Four years ago, when I was still at Seybold Seminars, I asked Dave Winer to host a session on "How Publishers and Their Production Teams Fared in Covering the Tragedies in New York and Washington." That year, Seybold San Francisco occurred just 2 weeks after 9/11. Dave led a spirited, yet somber discussion, whic was chronicled on this web site. Check it out.

Trapped in the Big Easy

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 17:54:38 GMT

First hand account of being trapped in the Big Easy during Katrina courtesy of Anna Voog.

Trapped in New Orleans

By LARRY BRADSHAW
and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY
(Bradshaw and Slonsky are paramedics frorm California that were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans. Larry Bradsahw is the chief shop steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790; and Lorrie Beth Slonsky is steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790.
[California])

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at
the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city's historic French
Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible
through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running
water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to
spoil in the 90-degree heat.

The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens' windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New
Orleans two days ago and arrived home on Saturday. We have yet to see
any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess
that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or
affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have
been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and
police struggling to help the "victims" of the hurricane. What you will
not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the
hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a
forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged,
nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who
improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the
little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop
parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent
many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious
patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in
elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats
to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.
Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry
people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the
commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those
stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their
homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed
and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans
that was not under water.

* * *

ON DAY Two, there were approximately
500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of
foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who
had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina.

Some of us had cell phone contact
with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told
that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of
buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources
must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves.
So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come
and take us out of the city. Those who didn't have the requisite $45
each were subsidized by those who did have extra money.

We waited for 48 hours for the buses,
spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water,
food and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the
sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the
"imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later
learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were
commandeered by the military.

By Day Four, our hotels had run out
of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation
and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to
rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that
"officials" had told us to report to the convention center to wait for
more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we finally
encountered the National Guard.

The guard members told us we wouldn't
be allowed into the Superdome, as the city's primary shelter had
descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us
that the city's only other shelter--the convention center--was also
descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police weren't allowing
anyone else in.

Quite naturally, we asked, "If we
can't go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our
alternative?" The guards told us that this was our problem--and no,
they didn't have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of
our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement."

* * *

WE WALKED to the police command
center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing--that
we were on our own, and no, they didn't have water to give us. We now
numbered several hundred.

We held a mass meeting to decide a
course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We
would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible
embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn't
stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.

In short order, the police commander
came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a
solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the
greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where
the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.

The crowd cheered and began to move.
We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had
been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses
waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated
emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves, and the 200
of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we
marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and
optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about
the great news.

Families immediately grabbed their
few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled
again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches,
elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched
the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the
bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn't dampen our
enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed
sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were
close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads.
This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

As the crowd scattered and
dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of
the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the
police commander and the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed
us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to
get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross
the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the
six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to
become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city.
These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not
crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New
Orleans.

* * *

OUR SMALL group retreated back down
Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated
our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the
middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway--on the center divide, between
the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be
visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated
freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the
yet-to-be-seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families,
individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt
to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with
gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated.
Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from
self-evacuating the city on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two city shelters
sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge
was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans,
semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with
people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to
blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us.
Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck
lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the
food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now--secure with these two
necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity
flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar
poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a
storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure
for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even
organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out
parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedly
in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food
or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it
took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when
these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other,
working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had
saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days,
the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we
offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many
decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered
radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view
on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way
into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do
about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials
responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a
sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling
(along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a
sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at
our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter
arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy
structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our
food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were
forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared
threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every
congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in
numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because
the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp
raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group
of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school
bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible
criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the
police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill
policies.

The next day, our group of eight
walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire
Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban
search-and-rescue team.

We were dropped off near the airport
and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young
guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards.
They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that
meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks
they were assigned.

* * *

WE ARRIVED at the airport on the day
a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome.
We eight were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for
several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a
photo op. After being evacuated on a Coast Guard cargo plane, we
arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There, the humiliation and
dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed
on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for
hours and hours. Some of the buses didn't have air conditioners. In the
dark, hundreds of us were forced to share two filthy overflowing
porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions
(often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) were subjected to two
different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day
because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport--because the
rations set off the metal detectors. Yet no food had been provided to
the men, women, children, elderly and disabled, as we sat for hours
waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we weren't carrying any
communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp
contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary
Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was
barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with
words of welcome.

Throughout, the official relief
effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than
need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco.
They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane
Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the
flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city.

+++

here seems to be the original posting:
http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18337.shtml

i called the SF chapter of SEIU, and found out that lorrie is his wife, from the woman on the phone. she fwd me to a voicemail (his?) i left a message for him. so these ARE real people and can be contacted!

ands yes, there WAS an ems convention in new orleans on those days described in the article:

NATIONAL EMS MEETINGS 2005-2006
August 2005
Fire-Rescue International
Denver, CO
August 11-14, 2005
www.iafc.org
EMS EXPO/NAEMT
EMS Expo 2005
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
900 Convention Center Boulevard
New Orleans, LA 70130
August 23-27, 2005
www.emsmagazine.com
http://www.caas.org/meetings.html

and the people who wrote the article are listed in the phone book of san francisco. media should contact them more.
so this is all very real. please forward this to media. this story needs to get out to everyone!

Surviving the Attack

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:56:50 GMT

Firsthand account of suriving the terroist attack on the tube in London....

July 07, 2005

Fait Accompli

Surviving a Terrorist Attack

Fate is a strange thing. On this particular day a series of events transpired such that I ended up on a Tube train that was destroyed by terrorists. Fortunately it was only the carriage in front of me, but tragically it resulted in a serious amount of injuries. This is my story.

I boarded the train at King's Cross after a series of line closures forced me onto a Circle Line train; little did I know at the time that this was probably the worst thing I could have done.

Travelling just past Edgware Road Station the train entered a tunnel. We shook like any usual tube train as it rattled down the tracks. It was then I heard a loud bang.

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought "please make it stop", but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

When the train came to a standstill people were screaming, but mainly due to panic as the carriage was rapidly filling with smoke and the smell of burning motors was giving clear clues of fire.

As little as 5 seconds later we were unable to see and had all hit the ground for the precious air that remaining. We were all literally choking to death.

The carriage however was pretty sealed; no window could open, no door would slide and no hammers seemed to exist to grant exit. If there were instructions on how to act then they were impossible to see in the thick acrid black smoke.

In the end I opted to do something about the problem and began shouting to find out in which direction the fires were emanating from. I then tested with the inter-carriage door to see if venting the smoke caused fire to spread. It didn't so I held the door open trying to clear the carriage and look for escape routes.

The train was packed and so there was no escape to the other carriages. Through the gap between the carriages however I saw an escape route and it calmed me from panic; if things got bad I could see an exit along the tunnel wall.

The fire concerned me and the acrid smoke never seems to fully dissipate. I calmed passengers playing down the issue as a bad tube network and a network derailment. Naturally people were in a mixture of states from quiet to abject panic in all its colours.

People could be heard screaming from all around; people were trapped, yet no-one could move and do anything.

After an eternity a guard moved through the carriages and asked everyone to move in the opposite direction. No one however moved, I think they were all in shock.

Questions were asked and we were still trying to determine which direction could be used for escape, which directions had fire. It was all so unclear and the smoke persisted.

In the end a flow of people started and stopped after more confusion and screaming, then out of the smoke injuries started to come through.

Everyone parted, for in the next carriage there was total carnage. Serious facial and body injuries caused by smoke, glass from windows and pure shock.

Naturally we let the injured off first, but with no medical assistance in the area I feared for the others. Particularly as there was little more I could do.

Eventually I made it to the end of the train and dismounted down the wooden ladder, something curiously I've done before. We walked down the tunnel back to Edgware Road and fresh air, finally being able to breathe properly.

I called my love ones and told them what had happened; the news hadn't broken. I was lead out of the station and expected to see emergency services. There were none; things were so bad that they couldn't make it.

The victims were being triaged at the station entrance by Tube staff and as I could see little more I could do so I got out of the way and left. As I stepped out people with camera phones vied to try and take pictures of the worst victims. In crisis some people are cruel.

I prayed for the victims and injured, I truly hoped they'd get medical attention quickly, but terrorism isn't about compassion it's about pain and London's poor medical and fire services are being stretched to their limit today.

London Transport should have closed all stations immediately, but didn't. My dice with death could have been avoided with better planning. The design of trains needs to be changed and zero-visibility factored into emergency plans.

I pity the waste and loss, while thanking the gods while wondering why me - why do I get to live another day?

Edit: Thank you all for your kind comments on my experiences. If you wish to read the follow-up of my day you'll find it here.

--- Justin (8th July)

Posted by justin at 11:10 AM UTC+1 | Comments (41) | TrackBack (39)

While Others Argued, Marla Acted

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 22:19:08 GMT

Reading this euology brought tears to my eyes, becuase it was clear this guy loved her. I've known women like her and its perilous to love them because their focus is so far beyond you.....

Marla Ruzicka with Harah, who was 3 months old when her entire family was killed when a U.S. rocket struck their car.

Marla Ruzicka, RIP
While others argued, Marla acted. She gave her young life to help the innocent victims of the Iraq war. At 28, she represented the best of America.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Phillip Robertson

April 18, 2005 | This is a eulogy of a thousand words that should really be a poem. It's one I never thought I would write. In Iraq on Saturday afternoon, around 3 p.m., a suicide bomber entered Baghdad Airport road, heading east. On the same stretch was a U.S. military convoy, an Australian security detachment, and a car that carried U.S. aid worker Marla Ruzicka and her colleague Faiz Ali Salim. When the bomber detonated his explosives, Marla and Faiz were among those killed, and with that terrible act, the bomber cut short the life of a tireless champion of the victims of the war.

Marla Ruzicka founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) in 2003, an NGO that began as a one-woman operation and grew to include dedicated Iraqis who compiled statistics of Iraqi civilian casualties. It was a difficult, heart-wrenching job. Marla pursued the casualty figures by going door to door in a country that sent so many other aid agencies over the brink. Human Rights Watch works in some of the most dangerous countries in the world. But it does not have field offices in Iraq.

Marla was amazingly cheerful about the dangerous situation. Unfazed by the weight of paranoia around her, she continued to travel around the country, even when her American citizenship made her a target. Looking back to the time we spent in Baghdad last summer, when I was covering the conflict, I can't remember Marla ever talking about being afraid. This was during the height of the insurgency in Sadr City, a brutal time, and I can't remember a single instance where Marla said she was scared. It doesn't mean she didn't feel it. But fear wasn't something that slowed her down.



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I remember Marla throwing salsa parties, inviting all of us to gatherings at the Hamra pool, encouraging us to crash other people's parties. Marla was the activities director on a cruise liner in the most hellish seas, and she knew how to dance. All of us, and I mean the hundreds of people in the press corps, loved her. But we were just the beginning of the story. Marla was as open and gracious with Iraqis as she was with Westerners. Who knows how many are grieving for her now. I thought she would never get hurt out there, a superstition that bad luck was for others and would just take a detour around someone like Marla. Rita Leistner, a photojournalist who knew her, wrote me a message this evening: "I think it's possible that she didn't have a single malicious bone in her body."

Above all, Marla Ruzicka had a mission. She believed deeply that the families of civilians killed by the U.S. should receive compensation. She forcefully argued that the U.S. government had a duty to all innocents injured by its weapons, especially children who needed urgent medical care from decent hospitals. These simple principles cut straight to the heart of our collective responsibility during wartime.

She lobbied Congress, raising the most uncomfortable questions about our involvement in Iraq, and then demanded justice for the people forgotten in government policy. She won. Tens of millions of dollars were set aside to assist Iraqis who were the victims of the war.

But Marla didn't stay in Washington. How many innocent people have been killed by U.S. forces? Marla wanted to know the answer to that ugly question and so she returned to Iraq. She started looking for the truth by going door to door in Baghdad, taking a survey. She just started asking Iraqi families how many people they were missing. Of course, it was so simple -- this was her human approach.

Marla spent a great deal of time trying to help Iraqis who lost family members to the war. During the first siege of Fallujah, I once found her screaming at the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, demanding that he organize a way to bring supplies to refugees. She was furious at his apathy. It drove her crazy.

Marla told me how hard it was to try to wring compensation payments from the U.S. military and what it was like to lobby Congress for Iraqi civilians rights. To get her projects through, she described to anyone who would listen the cases of injured Iraqis and the families of those killed. She would lean on her point, even when surrounded by experts who were supposed to know the deal.

Marla also understood the power and the responsibility of the press because she thought we could help her save people. It was all true. Charming and relentless, she sought out reporters to pick up her stories, she got her quotes in print and on television. I was one of the lucky ones who learned about her projects by hearing her describe them in her own voice, her lilting California accent that camouflaged her determination and bravery.

Marla also had a wild messianic streak and was beautiful in the way girls from Northern California are often beautiful, with blond hair and clear eyes. Around the time I first met her three years ago, I was coming out of a U.N. press conference in Kabul. It was dusk and we were on the grounds of the Hotel Intercontinental on a high hill, surrounded by deep ditches. Marla was talking to me about something and I was so hypnotized by her otherworldly style, I walked right off the edge of a 15-foot cliff. When she finally found me in a gully, she didn't laugh. Anyone else would have died laughing. She was concerned and thought I was hurt. "Oh my God. Are you OK?" she yelled. I had just become an innocent victim of a cliff -- and one of her fans.

This is not a hagiography. Marla had her rough spots like anyone. She was emotionally vulnerable but her projects gained strength and she never gave up. What more can you ask of someone?

Here is one of the great things about her. In a divided nation, when so many idealistic young Americans chose a side as if it were a football team, picking the partisan fights and slugging it out over the dinner table, Marla chose the war instead. It would be her stage. She bought a ticket, organized her visas and went to Afghanistan and Iraq to see it for herself. In the end, she knew more about the true nature of conflict than any analyst in the United States, more than the president himself. If Marla's methods were unorthodox, it's because the war couldn't be handled the normal way. It needed her personality and her style. Her heart was pure.

I ran into Marla all over the world. I saw her in Afghanistan, Baghdad, and recently in New York City. We were on some kind of strange trajectory that meant we were always running into each other. I took this to be part of her magic and came to expect to see her all the time because her territory was the entire planet.

In late March, over dinner at a place on the Lower East Side, the day before she left for Iraq, Marla was talking about a medical evacuation case with my friend Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images. Chris had recently photographed a checkpoint shooting in Tal Afar, where the mother and father of an Iraqi family were killed by American soldiers. One of their orphaned children, a young boy named Rakan Hassan, had a bullet in his spine and needed medical care that he couldn't get in Iraq. As Marla and Chris talked about how to get Rakan surgery so he could walk again, I witnessed Marla in action, plotting and scheming in her ingenious way. She was planning to work on Rakan's case from Iraq and left for the Middle East as soon as she could. The moment she arrived, she wrote to her contacts in Washington and the State Department in Amman, Jordan.

Subject: Visa for little boy who needs treatment in the U.S.
Date: 12/04/2005 03:03:57 Eastern Daylight Time

Hi Karen and Tim,

We are working to get a little boy medical treatment in the U.S. We have a doctor who will treat him in San Francisco, but he needs it ASAP. He has a visa and we have his costs secured -- is there any way we could get him a humanitarian visa? Karen is there, any way the State Department in Baghdad could help with this -- if we don't get him treatment soon he may never be able to walk again. Thanks, Marla

See how she goes straight for the gut. Marla then received a long bureaucratic reply from the embassy that detailed what she would need to do to get an appointment. It made her mad.

Subject: RE: emergency
Date: April 12, 2005 2:21 P.M.

hi we have a medical emergency -- is there no compasssion? can we have the department of state help?

The diplomats replied with information that was more personal and to the point than any that ever comes from the government. Marla had called on their humanity and sympathy and won. They pledged to see the boy as soon as he made it to Amman. "The little boy must come to Amman a.s.a.p., and once he is in Amman, write me again and I will set up an appointment for him the very next day," the diplomat replied. "In the email, give me the child's full name as it appears in his passport, his passport number, and a copy of the enclosed emails."

Marla had broken through to them. She was brilliant that way. Reporters are now writing about how she became an innocent victim of the war, just like the people she championed. I know that is true because she was certainly innocent. But at the end she wasn't a powerless victim. She had already won. She fought cruelty and bloodshed and indifference. Marla Ruzicka was a true enemy of war and she triumphed over it again and again with every person she helped. The last thing she said to me that night in New York was, "You know, Phillip, I'm trying to save the world."

Marla Ruzicka was 28.

Daily Kos on the latest Polls post Schiavo

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 02:49:18 GMT

Is this mind-numbing or what? all you ahve to do is listen to the BBC or some other european news service to see the cirucs that is American politics today in the absurd, incredulous light in which folks outside our country view it. It's breathtakingly cynical.....

Daily Kos:

Schiavo political impact. It's not pretty for the GOP.

CBS News. 3/21-22. MoE 4%. (February results)

Congress Job Approval
Approve 34 (41)
Disapprove 49 (44)
Bush Approval Ratings
Approve 43 (49)
Should Congress and the President be involved in the Schiavo matter?
Yes 13
No 82

This is turning into a disaster of epic proportions for the GOP. They thought they had the Dems wedged, and instead they have wedged themselves from the American public. Congress is being exposed as the cynical, power-mad, ethics-free zone that it has become under DeLay's leadership.

Read the poll. It has nothing but bad news for Republicans. And don't miss Bush's numbers on Iraq - his approval ratings in the war are down six points in the last month - from 45 percent to 39 percent.

Update: The party breakdown for this poll is:

Republican 44
Democrat 29
Independent 28

If the poll represented the actual partisan breakdown of the US public, the numbers would be far, far worse. [Daily Kos]

Bloggers in the Cross Hairs

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 04:02:35 GMT

FEC Considers Restricting Online Political Activities

New Rules May Apply to Web Ads, Bloggers' Endorsements

By Brian Faler

Special to The Washington Post
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A17

The Federal Election Commission has begun considering whether to issue new rules on how political campaigns are waged on the Internet, a regulatory process that is expected to take months to complete but that is already generating considerable angst online.

The agency is weighing whether -- and how -- to impose restrictions on a host of online activities, including campaign advertising and politically oriented blogs.

Election officials are reluctantly taking up the issue, after losing a court case last fall. The FEC, which enforces federal election law, had issued scores of regulations delineating how the campaign finance reform legislation adopted in 2002 ought to be implemented. But Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), who sponsored the legislation, complained that many of those rules were too lax, and they successfully sued to have them rescinded. The commission must now rewrite a number of those directions, including ones that left online political activities virtually free from government regulation.

"We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance because it means that people who are conducting political activity on the Internet are suddenly going to have to worry about or at least be conscious of certain legal distinctions and lines they didn't used to have to worry about."

Which people, what activities and where those lines should be drawn, though, have yet to be determined. The rise of the Internet as a political tool, the variety of ways in which it can be used to promote a campaign and the fact that most federal election laws were written long before the Internet became a household word have combined to present the agency's commissioners with plenty of knotty legal questions to consider.

Should bloggers who work for political campaigns, for example, be required to disclose that relationship? Should their writings include a disclaimer indicating that they were paid for by a campaign? What if a campaign supporter links his Web site to a candidate's home page? Is that considered a campaign contribution subject to government regulation? What if an independent blogger endorses a candidate? Or posts a campaign's news release? Are those contributions?

The panel, which has been criticized for being slow to decide contested points of the law -- but is loath to do anything that would chill free speech -- is free to address whatever issues it chooses. The three Democrats and three Republicans who compose the commission have not settled on an agenda for this latest round of rulemaking. That is expected to come later this month. But several commissioners have begun making their suggestions public.

Republican Commissioner Bradley A. Smith, who opposed some previous attempts to impose regulations on online political activities, sparked a furious debate among bloggers earlier this month, when he told the online technology magazine CNET that the FEC might regulate their activities. He argued, for example, that the laws that allow publications such as this newspaper to make political endorsements without having them considered akin to financial contributions to those campaigns -- and therefore subject to government regulation -- may not apply to bloggers who back candidates.

His comments quickly ricocheted across the Web, as bloggers began wondering if they might have to bone up on election law. Two of the authors of the campaign finance legislation, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) issued a joint statement denouncing Smith's remarks, saying they would "whip up baseless fears." A few prominent online political strategists and bloggers sent a letter recently to the FEC, urging it not to restrict unpaid political activities on the Internet. Their letter has since been endorsed by more than 2,500 other supporters. Republican Commissioner Michael E. Toner said he has begun receiving "very heated" e-mails on the issue.

Four commissioners -- Democrats Scott E. Thomas and Ellen L. Weintraub, along with Toner and Mason -- said in interviews that they oppose regulating independent bloggers.

"I really see no appetite at the agency for regulating bloggers," Weintraub said. "I would be very, very surprised if that was the result."

She said the commission would likely focus on other issues, such as whether to subject expenditures on Internet ad campaigns to the agency's contribution rules. The FEC requires campaign supporters who spend money on political ads in coordination with a candidate to report those expenses to the government and subjects them to contribution limits -- but the rules apply only to offline ads. So if, for example, a campaign supporter pays for an ad in the Los Angeles Times at the request of a candidate, that expenditure must be reported and counted against those limits. But if the supporter pays for an ad on the Los Angeles Times's Web site, it does not.

Weintraub also predicted that many of the activities mentioned as possible items on the FEC's agenda would ultimately fall outside its jurisdiction.

"We regulate campaign finance. We don't regulate speech in the abstract. We only regulate when money is spent," she said. "One of the great things about the Internet is that it's really cheap, and if people are not spending money, then it's really none of our business. Most of the time when people are sitting at their home computers, blogging, e-mailing -- whatever they're doing -- there really isn't any money being spent."

Some longtime FEC observers said they believed the commission would tackle a relatively narrow slate of issues.

"I don't think this is going to be as broad a rulemaking as some are threatening," said Larry Noble, a former FEC general counsel who now runs the watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics. "I think what the FEC is going to focus on is political activity undertaken by campaigns, by political committees, by possibly corporations and labor unions on the Internet . . . how you regulate that, how you make sure that's reported."

The commission is not expected to reveal its agenda until later this month, when it releases its "notice of proposed rulemaking." The FEC is scheduled to then invite public comments on that draft, hold a public hearing on the proposed rules and, later this summer, vote on the final regulations.

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Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:50:12 GMT

My favorite Republican has provided a hard-hitting analysis of the current balance of trade situation and why it isn't a no brainer situation. Its well worth reading, and th next issue should be a dozzy too cause he's going to talk about - gasp! - why Bush and the congressional republicans are making it worse.....

Thoughts From The Frontline
John Mauldin's Weekly E-Letter

Bretton Woods, Part Two
by John Mauldin
February 18, 2005

Bretton Woods, Part Two
A Beautiful Equilibrium
Staying Vigilant Against Complacency
Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold
Stability Breeds Instability
Why Long Term Rates Are So Low
Connecticut, Florida and Guacamole

"Another G-7 meeting has come and gone. And what has been accomplished? Next to nothing, in my view. The club of the world's wealthiest nations has punted on the big issues facing the global economy - namely, unprecedented current-account imbalances, currency misalignments, mounting trade tensions, and the liquidity- prone biases of central banks. The G-7's latest communique is emblematic of the increasingly vacuous rhetoric of globalization. This is a perilous course of inaction for a global economy beset with record imbalances." (Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley)

In his talks to Congress this week, Chairman Greenspan dropped in these words, which did not make the highlight reels, but nonetheless should be listened to: "People experiencing long periods of relative stability are prone to excess. We must thus remain vigilant against complacency."

The record imbalances which Roach alluded to are inherently unstable. They are the proverbial unsustainable trend. Yet things seem to be rocking along just fine. One of America's finest theoretical economists, Hyman Minsky, gave us this great quote, "Stability is unstable." What he meant by that is that the longer things remain the same, the more we expect them to remain the same and the more complacent we get. Thus, when things actually do change, the shock is much greater. Few have "remained vigilant." The long-term stability of trends is the seedbed for asset and credit bubbles of all types.

This week, we begin a multi-part series on that most unsustainable of all trends, the US trade balance. While the game can go on for much longer than reason would dictate, there will be an end to it. Will it be the soft landing with nations agreeing to work together to find a sort of Nash equilibrium; or, the hard landing where the "vacuous rhetoric of globalization" masks the reality of each nation going its own way, in a kind of "devil take the hindmost" world?

A Beautiful Equilibrium

In game theory, the Nash equilibrium (named after John Nash) is a kind of optimal strategy for games involving two or more players, whereby the players reach an outcome to mutual advantage. If there is a set of strategies for a game with the property that no player can benefit by changing his strategy while (if) the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium. John Nash, the Nobel laureate in mathematics was featured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." (Highly recommended, by the way.)

The US is living, many say, on the kindness of strangers. If it were not for the willingness of Chinese and Japanese central banks, along with their smaller Asian counterparts, to finance our trade deficit, we would be in perilous circumstances. If Asian currencies saw the dollar fall by 33%, they stand to lose over $600 billion in buying power due to their massive $1.8 trillion US dollar reserves. That is a massive amount of confidence.

Yet it works both ways. Exports to the US alone accounted for about 12% of China's GDP, and that was up from 9% in 2000. At current growth rates, US imports could be responsible for 20% of China's GDP by 2008. It may be that China is depending upon the kindness of strangers, in this case US consumers. Other Asian countries have similar, if not as dramatic, dependence upon US consumers. And many of them ship materials to China which eventually find their way to the US.

The elephant in the world economic room is the now $660 billion US current account deficit. At least $465 billion of that comes from foreign central banks. It is an odd Nash equilibrium. They take our paper, which they know will one day be worth less than it is today, in order to be able to sell us products which keeps factories growing. How long can the game continue? In the case of China, it may continue until the have established their own internal equilibrium of jobs for the hundreds of millions of peasants moving from the farms looking for a better life.

It is not a matter of things staying the same. There is in fact no Nash equilibrium into which the world has settled. We are still "playing the game" and some players may be opting to take advantage of others. The system itself is inherently unstable, as we will see. And if you have trouble understanding how the game is played, then take comfort in the fact that a US Senator, whose staff at least should know better, clearly does not understand the basics of how the economy works. I quote this from good friend Dennis Gartman:

"Secondly, we are now firmly convinced that Sen. 'Debbie' Stabenow (D-Michigan) is an utter and complete idiot. Why mince words, for clarity is what we are after here, and in her questioning of Mr. Greenspan yesterday Sen. Stabenow removed any and all possibilities that she is not an idiot. Taking a page from the manners of H. Ross Perot and waving a piece of paper upon which one of her staff had obviously listed the foreign buyers of US treasury securities, Sen. Stabenow roared before the television audience and wondered aloud what Mr. Greenspan was going to do about this problem!

"Sen. Stabenow was indignant that so many 'foreigners' owned US treasury securities, and she hoped that Mr. Greenspan would somehow come to his sense and prohibit them from doing so in the future... or at least expose this as a problem that must needs be addressed immediately.

"Mr. Greenspan, visibly torn between laughing aloud at the Senator's idiocy and between disdain, but summoning up all of the will power necessary to answer her properly, said that he knew of no laws that these 'foreigners' had broken; that he knew of nothing he could do to stop them from making investments that they thought were well advised and reasonable; that without their purchases US interest rates might well have been a good deal higher than they are, and that there seems to be no movement on their part to create an untoward market circumstance by selling those securities presently. The only comment he missed making and one we wish he had made is that their purchases are a huge 'vote of confidence' in the US economy, not an indictment of same. Sen. Stabenow proved the wisdom of the old aphorism that it is far better to remain silent and thought of as an idiot than to say something and remove all doubts. In her case, there were few doubts before her appearance; now there are none."

As a prelude to a paper we are going to examine in detail in the next few weeks, there is reason to believe that long term interest rates might be at least 1% higher and perhaps as much as 2% without foreign buying of US government debt. 10 year treasuries at 6% would mean that 30-year mortgages would be well over 7%. That would create quite a slowdown in housing construction and at least put a lid on the rise in home values, if not reverse the trend. That would certainly slow the economy down.

While it is doubtful the Senator would wish for such an economic slowdown, this illustrates that there are consequences for individual investors to the "international trade game" that we will be discussing. It is not played in a vacuum.

Staying Vigilant Against Complacency

What I want to do over the next few weeks is to show you why Greenspan is right. You must remain vigilant against complacency. The last "Big Thing" to come upon the world was the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000-2002. There was a new paradigm. The next Big Thing is likely to be the fallout from the rebalancing of global trade. You do NOT want to be on the wrong side of that trade. The good news is that we will muddle through. It is not the end of the world. However, the transition will not be fun. It will affect your bonds, your stocks, your home values and maybe your job. Assuming that tomorrow will be like today is a complacency that you cannot afford.

To start us off, I want to quote a few paragraphs about what Hyman Minsky wrote about financial balance.

"...Minsky characterized the financial balance along a scale of running from 'fragile' to robust.' 'Fragile finance' refers to states in which cash commitments are relatively heavy compared to cash flows, so that there is some danger of widespread failure to meet commitments, failure that might cause general breakdown in coherence. 'Robust finance' refers to states in which commitments are relatively light compared to cash flows, so that the danger of incoherence is relatively remote. The emphasis on the threat of incoherence is one way of reading the scale.

"Viewed more positively, what is so appealing about a state of 'robust finance' is that it leaves open many different possible future paths for subsequent social freedom. What is so tragic about a state of 'fragile finance' is that previous commitments leave open only very few possibilities for the future, and maybe no possibilities at all that are consistent with existing commitments. Fragile finance is a state of social constraint. The degree of fragility or robustness in the economy as a whole ultimately depends on the fragility or robustness of financing arrangements at the level of the constituent economic units." (Perry Mehrling, The Vision of Hyman P. Minsky, 1998)

Or put more simply, if you have cash, you have more options. It would seem that the United States has fewer options, as we are the borrower, not the lender. But that is not entirely the case. While Europe does not feel the need to build up dollar reserves, thus lowering the values of their currency and financing our trade deficit, clearly Asia does. While they may have "cash." They also have "existing commitments," as Minsky put it, to support export growth as a way to increase employment and improve their national well-being.

What would happen, do you think, if China were to see their exports to the US decrease? What about all the spare capacity and who would use it? What about the bank loans made that are predicated on the kindness of US consumers being willing to forego savings and purchase Chinese goods? What about the expectations of the masses of poor who are looking for jobs, not to mention the loss of jobs from those currently employed? The Chinese must feel an existing commitment to be willing to take dollars that they surely must know will not be worth as much in the future.

Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." - William Butler Yeats

Yeats was not describing what has come to be called Bretton Woods 2, but it seems apropos to start with that quote. The first Bretton Woods system came about when representatives of most of the world's leading nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 to create a new international monetary system. Because the US at the time accounted for over half of the world's manufacturing capacity and held most of the world's gold, the leaders decided to tie world currencies to the dollar, which, in turn, they agreed should be convertible into gold at $35 per ounce.

Under the Bretton Woods system, central banks of countries other than the US were given the task of maintaining fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. They did this by intervening in foreign exchange markets. If a country's currency was too high relative to the dollar, its central bank would sell its currency in exchange for dollars, driving down the value of its currency. Conversely, if the value of a country's money was too low, the country would buy its own currency, thereby driving up the price.

The dollar became the world's reserve currency. Yet there were limits. Each country had to police its own reserves and currency or be forced to revalue. And the US was constrained because the dollar was fully convertible into gold. This changed in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.

Now we have what many are coming to call a Bretton Woods 2 system. That is where much of the world, but primarily the Asian countries, have more or less informally agreed to peg their currencies to the dollar. They do this in order to maintain their relative competitive ability to sell their products to the world and specifically to the US.

But this system is inherently more unstable than the first Bretton Woods. There is no gold conversion constraint upon the reserve currency. The US has few reasons to protect the value of the currency, and many reasons why they should want it to drop. And there is no formal agreement among the nations. Any nation at any time could begin to act unilaterally to change. Russia has specifically said they would start to have a larger euro component to their growing national reserves. Thailand has said the same, and indications are that they are putting actions behind their words.

For the rest of today's letter, and probably much of next week's, we are going to look at a rather remarkable paper called: "Will the Bretton Woods 2 Regime Unravel Soon? The Risk of a Hard Landing in 2005-2006" It is by Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business at New York University and Brad Setser, Research Associate Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford University. It was done for a symposium held this month in San Francisco sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and University of California - Berkley. The symposium was called "Revived Bretton Woods System: A New Paradigm for Asian Development?"

Let's look at a few paragraphs from the introduction that helps us get our bearings to the problems that Roubini and Setser want to point out:

"The defining feature of the global economy right now is the $660 billion US current account deficit. The world's largest economy - and the world's preeminent military and geo-strategic power - is also the world's largest debtor. The current account surpluses of most other regions of the world are the mirror image of the US deficit. The US absorbs at least 80% of the savings that the rest of the world does not invest at home. Barring an economic slump in the US or a major fall in the dollar, the US current account deficit looks set to expand significantly in 2005 and 2006.

"The defining feature of the current international financial and monetary system is that it finances the United States' enormous external deficit - and the associated fiscal deficit -- at low interest rates. The world's central banks, not private investors, provide the bulk of the financing the United States needs to sustain its deficits.

"...Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber, in a series of influential papers, have argued that the nations of the Pacific have constituted a new Bretton Woods system. In the original Bretton Woods system, Europe and Japan tied their currencies to the dollar; today the industrialized - and rapidly industrializing - Asian economies formally or informally tie their currencies to the dollar. Dooley, Folkerts-Landau and Garber, argue that this system of fixed and heavily managed exchange rates is fundamentally stable, and the intervention required to prevent Asian currencies from appreciating will continue to provide the bulk of the financing the US needs to run ongoing current account deficits.

"For countries on the periphery, the benefits of stable, weak exchange rates exceed the costs of reserve accumulation. China relies on rapid export-led growth to absorb surplus labor of hundreds of millions of low-skill poor workers from its vast agricultural sector into the modern, industrial and traded sector. Continued reserve accumulation by Asian - and other - central banks, in turn, allows the US to continue to rely on domestic demand to drive its growth, and to run the resulting large current account deficits. Indeed, the external deficits financed through a new renminbi-dollar standard are far larger than any deficits associated with the original gold-dollar standard or the original Bretton Woods system.

"Initially, Garber, Dooley and Folkerts-Landau suggested the new system of fixed and quasi-fixed exchange rates would last a generation, until China's agricultural labor surplus was absorbed in a new urban industrial sector. More recently, Peter Garber backed off a bit, but he still maintained that the new Bretton Woods system would last another eight years. Michael Mussa has suggested it will not last another four years. We believe it may have difficulty lasting for another two years.

"...we argue that there is a meaningful risk the Bretton Woods 2 system will unravel before the end of 2006."

Stability Breeds Instability

They find several sources of instability. Let's look at a few of them briefly. (I will try to find a web link for the paper by next week.)

First, as alluded to above, they see a tension between the growing need for financing by the US and the "large losses that those lending to the US in dollars are almost certain to incur as part of the adjustment needed to reduce the US trade deficit."

The world's central banks hold roughly $2.5 trillion of the $3.8 trillion worth of reserves in dollars. Asian central banks have roughly $1.8 trillion in dollars. If Asian currencies were to depreciate by 33%, that means Asian central banks would lose $600 billion, which is not a small sum. And it cannot be dismissed as merely a paper loss.

Most of the countries "sterilize" their dollar holdings in order to maintain the relative value of their currency and maintain control of their money supply and thus inflation. "To the extent that central banks have to sterilize their reserve accumulation, their dollar assets are offset by local currency liabilities that have to be paid. Central banks can always be recapitalized by taxpayers, but the new government bonds given to the central bank to make up for exchange rate losses have to be serviced out of the government's budget. That is a real cost."

Let's see if I can explain this. A business sells $ billion dollars worth of widgets to the US. When it comes back to the country, the business needs local currency to pay suppliers and employees, so they convert it to the local currency. This increases the money supply. At some point, that is inflationary, so the local central banks issues government debt to soak up the excess cash and try and maintain a stable money supply. That local debt has to eventually be paid. It is a real cost. If the dollar goes down, so does the value of its reserves, yet its debt in local currency has stayed the same. Someone (read taxpayer) has to make up the local currency losses.

For some smaller economies, these losses can be significant. As they point out in a footnote: "As Higgins and Klitgaard (2004) note, reserve holdings of some Asian economies are so large that the losses for some central banks from even small moves in their exchange rate as significant: a 10% appreciation of the Singapore dollar might reduce the local currency value of Singapore's reserves by 10% of GDP; a 10% move in the Taiwanese dollar would generate local currency losses of 8% of Taiwan's GDP." This is just one more reason why central banks would be reluctant to see the dollar drop.

Of course, that could change. What if Singapore started to move it reserves out of the dollar and into yen and euros? At some point, it makes sense to do so. But when? And if one country starts, do others follow? Is there some new Nash equilibrium out there?

Why Long Term Rates Are So Low

"Developing a clean test of the impact of central bank demand on interest rates is hard, and estimates of the impact vary substantially. Goldman Sachs (2004) has presented an analysis suggesting that central banks intervention is narrowing Treasury yields by only 40bps; Sack (2004) provides a similar estimate.13 Truman (2005) notes that sustained intervention from central banks is similar to a sustained reduction in the fiscal deficit: his ballpark estimate suggests a $300 billion in central bank intervention might have a 75 bp impact. Research from Federal Reserve suggests a 50 to 100 bps impact (see Bernanke, Reinhart and Sack (2004)); PIMCO's Bill Gross puts it at closer to 100 bps, and Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach puts it at between 100 and 150 bps."

Since 2000, Roubini and Setser tell us that all of the net new supply of Treasuries has been bought by non-residents, and that between 80-90% has been by central banks. One last quote and then I will wrap up for this week:

"Central bank demand made it easier for the US Treasury to shorten the maturity of the US debt stock, and thus to reduce relative supply of long term US Treasuries. By eliminating the 30 year bond and supplying very little of the 10 year bond, the US reduced the share of ten year and longer Treasuries in the overall marketable stock from 40% in 2001 to 31% at the end of fiscal 2004. The overall stock of marketable treasuries went up by $931 billion in FY 2002-04, but the stock of ten-year notes and longer-term bonds went up only by $35 billion. Had the share of longer term Treasuries in stock stayed constant, the increase would have been closer to $365 billion. Central banks clearly are not just buying short-dated bills and two and three year Treasury notes: US data indicates that they have been important participants in the five and ten year note auctions. Consequently, the stock of ten-year notes in private US hands has presumably gone down over the past few years despite the large increase in the overall Treasury stock. Treasuries of different maturities are a close substitutes, but the relative scarcity of the ten-year note and other longer dated Treasuries could nonetheless have had an impact on its yield.

"Consequently, the 40bp [basis point] Goldman estimate seriously understates the effects of the Asian intervention on the market. Considering the size of recent central bank purchases, the indirect impact of central bank intervention on private demand for Treasuries, the interaction between central bank reserve accumulation and Treasury debt management policy and the effects of Asian reserve accumulation on inflation and growth (general equilibrium effects), we would bet the overall impact would be closer to 200bps."

Part of the reason they think the affect is higher is that such large purchases by foreign central banks distorts the value of the dollar and inflation, as well as US GDP and trade. These all have an impact on interest rates, and are usually not taken into account by those who look at the impact of foreign currency buying upon US interest rates.

Yes, with a much lower dollar, the trade deficit would be lower. We would be investing in industry which would make things for trade, as we would be more competitive. Fewer jobs would go offshore.

But we would also be paying much higher prices for nearly everything. Inflation would be a problem, or the Fed would be fighting it with higher interest rates. That means a much slower economy, and the increase in value in your house? Forget about it.

There are no economic free lunches. There is a trade-off for everything. I prefer the market to make those decisions, but we do not have a free market in currencies. It is manipulated by Asian central banks, and that distortion is going to cause pain down the road.

The interesting exercise for us is to try and understand how all the "players" in the game will act. What kind of odd Nash equilibrium will they settle into? Will they all share some pain so as to lessen the total amount of pain, or will they seek to avoid as much personal pain as possible thereby causing more pain for everyone else? I am not entirely optimistic, given the current level of the "vacuous rhetoric of globalization." But one can always hope. It will take more than a few beautiful minds to work this equilibrium equation out.

But that's enough for this week. There is a lot more to come the next few weeks on this topic.

And just for fun and a little surprise, next week I will tell you why the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans are making the problem worse. It is not a pretty picture.

Jeff Gannon, White House Insider and Gay Hooker

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:18:08 GMT

This is a scanadal that, ahd it happened in the Clinton White House, would have resulted in his impeachment and conviction. But its just par for the course in the Bush White House.

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Monday, February 14, 2005

A man called Jeff
by John in DC - 2/14/2005 11:26:00 PM

WARNING: A number of the links in this story are to x-rated photographs, and some of those might prove shocking to some people. Please exercise your own discretion when clicking. (And, as you read, please forgive the necessary typos - I'm going for rock-solid facts, rather than spelling.)

WOLF BLITZER: Because one of the things, as you know, that were said is that you had some sexually explicit Web sites that you were working on. I don't understand what that is, but maybe you could explain that.

JEFF GANNON: Well, several years ago, before I came to Washington, I had registered various domain names for a private client. I was doing Web site development. Those sites were never hosted. There's -- nothing ever went up on them. And the client went on to do something else. - CNN, 2/10/05

Site 1

The Web sites reflects the era in which it was built. A simple black background, white text, lots of kitschy images and bad puns. The theme is decidedly military. The logo at the top is borrowed from the US Marine Corps, an eagle standing atop an anchor. The letters USMCPT run across the logo, written in the colors of the flag. Below the strange acronym are four words: “Personal Trainer, Bodyguard, Escort.” Above it stands a muscular and headless man in black military boots, white socks, buck naked.

In 1999, Paul Leddy, a Web designer and photographer, says he received an email from a man named Jeff from Wilmington, Delaware. Jeff wanted Paul to build him a new Web site for his business. Paul accepted the job, provided Jeff mailed him a check with half the money up front (Jeff had not provided a last name, and Paul wanted to make sure he was for real). Jeff sent the check, it cleared, and Paul built the site and launched it online for Jeff.

Paul didn’t think about Jeff much until last week when he heard about a breaking scandal involving a man named Jeff who owned several military escort service Web addresses. “I saw the name Jeff Gannon, knew our Jeff, saw the militarystud.com Web address, and thought ‘hmmm, everything was military, that sounds like Jeff who we did the site for.’”

Paul searched the Internet WhoIs director for militarystud.com and saw that the owner was Bedrock Corp of Wilmington, Delaware. “That’s definitely him,” Paul said. (Paul and a second source both recall Jeff paying with a check in the name of Bedrock Corp. The name stuck in their heads at the time because they asked Jeff why “Bedrock”? He replied something about the Flintstones, they recall.)

Paul then went and checked his files. He found five invoices to Jeff from August 31, 1999 to March 30, 2000. (The file properties say they were created on those dates by Paul Leddy.)

The invoices are from BELDesigns for “Website Design”and “hosting.” The billing address?

Bedrock Corp
5721 Kennett Pike
Centreville, DE 19807

(Paul Leddy’s address, phone number and email were removed from this invoice by me before publishing, at Paul’s request. I am happy to show the full invoice to journalists.)

According to the date the html files were created for the USMCPT Web site – files Paul still has - Paul built the site for Jeff in September 1999. Paul says he launched it within a matter of weeks. The site was eventually migrated to its own URL, USMCPT.com. While the site is no longer live on the Internet, archived copies of it show that it was live at the USMCPT.com address at least from October 31, 2001 until May 8, 2003. When asked what USMCPT meant, Paul said he asked Jeff that very question. The answer: United States Marine Corps, Part Time. Paul recalls Jeff telling him he was still in the Marines, but only part time. Paul also recalls Jeff being around 40 years old, even though the Web site said he was 32.

The military theme continues at USMCPT.com. The “Ammunition” section contains the description of the escort. It reads: White, 200 pounds, hair “high and tight,” chest “46’ Usually Shaved or Clipped,” and under “Weapon” it says "8 inches cut." The escort mentions that he takes clients in the Washington, DC, Virginia and Maryland area, and that he prefers to “travel to your location or travel with you.”

The USMCPT home page never specifically mentions sex, though it’s clear this is not your run-of-the-mill personal trainer or bodyguard. Under a section entitled “Mission,” it says:

Ex-USMC Jock: Available for hourly, overnight, weekend or longer travel - OUT ONLY!

Personal Trainer: Safe-Sane-Strenuous-Satisfying workouts, Sports training, and competition, especially wrestling....

Big SPORTS Fan: Will go to the game with you, then take you home and....

"AGGRESIVE, VERBAL, DOMINANT TOP"
I DON'T LEAVE MARKS....ONLY IMPRESSIONS

Further on down the page, on at least the early versions of the Web site (several versions over the span of a year and a half are cached online), you can see the logo for BELDesigns, Paul's Web design business. There's also a button that says “SEE MORE OF ME.” This brings you to a page comprising 43 or so thumbnail-sized pictures of Jeff, in various states of undress. In one photo he’s lounging spread eagle on some pillows, fully erect. In another he’s bent over, naked, apparently checking something on his nightstand (while revealing a great set of lats), and in a third set of photos he is urinating. If you click on the thumbnail photos, you can see larger-sized versions (though not for all the photos, the archive is incomplete). If you look at the html source on this page, you will see that numerous of the photos are named “Jeff.” In several of the photos you will see Jeff wearing a distinctive silver watch with a solid black band. He likes to wear it on his left hand, slightly above the wrist joint.

The site also contains a third page, called “Bulldog.htm.” (The bulldog is recurring theme on the site.) On this page we learn that Jeff is available as a travel companion, a workout partner/trainer, an event companion (“Want to see the Orioles, Caps, Wizards, or ‘Skins?”), tour guide, and bodyguard. Jeff then provides his email address, USMCPT@aol.com

The USMCPT site has a link on its home page that, depending on which version in time of the home page you’re examining, says either “See more of me and my buddies at: Male Corps” or “Featured on Studfiles.”

Site 2

The Male Corps link takes you to another of Jeff’s escort pages, housed on a different escort service Web site called MaleCorps.com. The page contains the same spread-eagle picture that was on Jeff’s personal site, notes that his branch of service is “United States Marine Corps,” provides more personal information, and the email address for contact is USMCPT@malecorps.com. There’s also a link to see 30 more “x-pics” of Jeff, including “full bod, dick shots, jocks.” The link appears to be no longer accessible.

Site 3

The StudFiles link on Jeff’s USMCPT site takes you to an escort Web site that is still live today. It’s for an escort named “Bulldog.” On the page there’s a picture of Bulldog’s torso, shirtless, wearing dog tags. He’s 32 years old, lives in Washington, DC, is “5’9”, 200 pounds, brown high and tight haircut, green eyes, 8+cut!” Under “position” it says “Top!” For an email – or “emale," as it says – contact it gives usmcpt@aol.com. There is also a link to visit “the Adult Photos” in Gallery 16. In order to access those photos, you need to buy an electronic Web ID that proves you are over the age of consent...

Site 4

Once you buy the ID, for $20 a year (it’s a write-off), you enter the WorkingBoys.net Web site. You click on Gallery 16 and arrive on Bulldog’s adult page. It’s not unlike the PG-rated page except that Bulldog is now wearing a pair of dog tags, sitting spread eagle, and hard as a rock. The profile also has as link “Visit Bulldog on the Net!” – it links back to http://www.USMCPT.com

The WorkingBoys.net escort profile is still live today. Interestingly, the name of the html file for the page is “DC007.”

You can see a screen capture of that x-rated profile here and here.

Site 5

A bit more Internet sleuthing turned up even more escort profiles for apparently the same escort on various other sites. Meetlocalmen.com contains a profile with the same spread-eagle picture as was on the other sites. This site includes the escort’s name as Jeff/Bulldog. His location, DC. His Internet address is yet another Web site that is no longer active. His rates, $1200/weekend. (While the profile is still live at MeetLocalMen.com, it takes a bit of hunting to find it. You need to click on "Meet Local Escorts," then click on DC, then skip through 16 pages or so until you find Jeff in DC, then click on that picture.)

Sites 6 and 7

-

A search for USMCPT on Google turns up two more escort sites for Bulldog, one in DC and one in Philly (both are still online, but in inactive status). One mentions the weekend rate of $1200/weekend, the other an hourly rate, $200. The sites also include feedback from satisfied customers. The most recent review is from 11/12/2002, from a man named Spaceman. An earlier review, dated 7/11/2000, is from a man who says he’s an active duty senior officer in the US Army. He notes that Jeff has a Marine background.

There’s much more. Paul has additional photos that Jeff provided him. Some of the photos are exact copies of those on the USMCPT.com Web site, and then some. The buck naked photo on the logo, for example. Paul provided me with the entire complete photo. The head of the man in question looks remarkably like Jeff Gannon.

Regarding the photo of "Jeff" urinating (it's actually a series of photos). Paul provided the entire photo of a man who looks remarkably like Jeff Gannon, even wearing the signature Gannon watch. Paul provided several more photos that he says Jeff gave him. Each photo looks remarkably like Jeff Gannon:

Compare the above photos from the Web developers with photos, below, that we KNOW are of Gannon:

Even more photos show Jeff wearing the same silver watch with a black band that Jeff Gannon is known to sport. Some show that Jeff and Jeff Gannon have the same short and pointed eyebrows, same ears, same face structure, chest structure and nipples. Same wrinkles/creases in their stomachs when they bend forward. The resemblance is astonishing.

Jeff Gannon was contacted and asked to comment on the specific allegations that he is the owner of USMCPT.com and several other profiles that offer his services as an escort. He did not respond to this request.

Why does this matter?

So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?

This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we're talking about. It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a "daily basis." They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, "inappropriate," whatever. Monika wasn't a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can't find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?

None of this is by accident.

Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?

Ultimately, it is the hypocrisy that is such a challenge to grasp in this story. This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers? While they use a gay hooker to write articles for their gay hating political base? While they use a gay hooker to destroy a political enemy? Not to mention the hypocrisy of a "reporter" who chooses to publish article after article defending the ant-gay religious-right point of view on gay civil rights issue.

Who in the White House is at the center of all of this? Who allowed this to go on in the People's House? Who committed the crime of exposing Valerie Plame? Jeff Gannon has the answers to these questions, and boy we know he loves to talk.

Let him talk to Patrick Fitzgerald.

[Please use this URL to link to this story, sorry, it kept changing with blogger:
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html ]

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Slate's Take on Bush's Sleight of Hand

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:40:53 GMT

Slate on the State of the Disunion

S.S. S.O.S. B.S.
By Eric Umansky
Posted Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005, at 12:42 AM PT

Everybody leads with the State of the Union, during which President Bush offered a few details on his plan for partially privatizing Social Security: Starting in 2009, most workers 55 or younger should be able to put up to a third of their payroll tax into government-controlled market accounts. Those older than 55 wouldn't see any changes. People who opt into the proposed plan would have their defined benefits trimmed in some still-undefined way.

The president also seemed to acknowledge—as a White House official said in a background briefing earlier in the day—that partial privatization won't do anything to shore up Social Security, so some of sort additional cuts will be needed. Bush said he's open to suggestions—except for raising taxes in any way. (He also said, inaccurately, that Social Security is projected to be in "bankrupt" in 2042.)

Slate's Mickey Kaus sees Bush's untangling of privatization from the funding shortfall as a way for the president to cover his tush should the privatization plan get pummeled. Kaus isn't the only one. "Oh my god," one GOP politico told the Los Angeles Times. "Politically, the White House has made a lot of Republicans walk the plank on this. Now it sounds like they are sawing off the board.'

The New York Times' Page One Social Security piece takes some serious swings, past the jump: "The president did not address the cost to the government of paying full benefits to retirees for decades while tax money was being diverted into private accounts. Nor did he say how much this would increase the annual budget deficit. There was no mention of what would happen to workers who become disabled, or the minor children of workers who die. No one in the administration mentioned how workers who retired when the market was in a slump would be protected financially." And that's just a partial excerpt.

The Wall Street Journal does a "lessons learned" from the roughly 20 countries that have partially privatized their state pension systems. One: Don't give workers too many choices; they'll screw it up. Another: Going private can add lot of debt, helping to explode the economy. (See Argentina and Bolivia.)

Bush also proposed a big increase in aid to Palestinians, to $350 million. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas announced they're going to hang for a summit in Egypt next week.

The Washington Post fronts, and others stuff, GOP leaders' interestingly timed sacking of the chair of the ethics committee after he showed some independence and went ahead with rebukes of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Two other Republicans were also appointed to the committee, both of whom have contributed to DeLay's defense fund.

The NYT's Dexter Filkins says on Page One that with Iraq's Sunni turnout appearing to be "quite low," as one "western diplomat" put it, they still might try to participate in politics, namely by killing the constitution. Under current rules, that happens if any three provinces vote against it. And Sunnis are a majority in three provinces. (A report from the well-regarded non-profit folks at IWPR quotes one Sunni leader saying, "We are part of Iraq, so we have the right to reject" the constitution.) The WP has a different angle: "SUNNI CLERICS OFFER THEIR COOPERATION."

According to early morning reports, 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed near Kirkuk.

The NYT notes that in January the Marines (just barely) missed their monthly recruiting goal, the first time that's happened in a decade.

The WP says inside about 700,000 Iraqis have fled to Syria since the war began.

Back to SOTU ... A number of the papers solidly compare and contrast the president's talking points with reality, especially on Social Security. The LAT's piece is particularly good. But the most unvarnished fact-checking by the papers, not surprisingly, isn't actually in any of them. Post associate editor Robert Kaiser was asked in a Web chat, "Anything [the president] said strike you as objectively untrue?" He responded, in part:

Yes. Bush often describes a world whose features are all highly debatable, if not simply invented. He proposes "a comprehensive health care agenda" that will leave perhaps 50 million Americans without health insurance. Is that comprehensive in any meaningful sense? He promises big economic benefits from legal changes, "tort reform," that independent economists say cannot have more than a small economic effect even if enacted, which is not likely. [And] he promises to increase the size of Pell Grants, not noting that they have shrunk far below the level he promised when he came into the White House.

Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com .

The Arrogance of Bush will Destory Ameirca Yet

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 22:56:35 GMT

Slate

war stories
2020 Vision
A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could end in 15 years.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005, at 2:48 PM PT

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council--the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.

The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players--similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19^th century and a powerful United States in the early 20^th century--will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"--probably the single most powerful country--but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"--not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others--will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war--far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."

To the extent that these new powers seek others to emulate, they may look to the European Union, not the United States, as "a model of global and regional governance."

This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but also--as these things do--a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.

The trends should already be apparent to anyone who reads a newspaper. Not a day goes by without another story about how we're mortgaging our future to the central banks of China and Japan. The U.S. budget deficit, approaching a half-trillion dollars, is financed by their purchase of Treasury notes. The U.S. trade deficit--much of it amassed by the purchase of Chinese-made goods--now exceeds $3 trillion. Meanwhile, China is displacing the United States all across Asia--in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.

Meanwhile, as the European Union becomes a coherent entity, the dollar's value against the euro has fallen by one-third in the past two years (one-eighth just since September). As the dollar's rate of return declines, currency investors--including those who have been financing our deficit--begin to diversify their holdings. In China, Japan, Russia, and the Middle East, central bankers have been unloading dollars in favor of euros. The Bush policies that have deepened our debt have endangered the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

What is the Bush administration doing to alter course or at least cushion the blow? It's hard to say. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings last week, Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D?Md., raised some questions about the nexus between international economics and political power. Rice referred him to the secretary of the treasury.

The NIC issued the report a few weeks before Bush's inaugural address, but it serves to dump still more cold water on the lofty fantasy of America delivering freedom to oppressed people everywhere. In Asia, the report states, "present and future leaders are agnostic on the issue of democracy and are more interested in developing what they perceive to be the most effective model of governance." If the president really wanted to spread freedom and democracy around the planet, he would (among other things) need to present America as that "model of governance"--to show the world, by its example, that free democracies are successful and worth emulating. Yet the NIC report paints a world where fewer and fewer people look to America as a model of anything. We can't sell freedom if we can't sell ourselves.

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A Google hunt reveals that, among mainstream American papers, only Knight Ridder, USA Today, and Dan Sneider's foreign-affairs column in the San Jose Mercury News caught the main points of the NIC report. In an otherwise excellent story, the Washington Post emphasized what the report said about political Islam and terrorism; it mentioned the rise of China and India only in the final paragraph. The New York Times appears not to have covered the report at all.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

The Speech Bush Should have Given

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 18:54:36 GMT

We're so blind as a nation.......

The Speech Bush Should have Given This is the s.... The Speech Bush Should have Given

This is the speech that I wish President Bush had given in fall, 2002, as he was trying to convince Congress to give him the authority to go to war against Iraq.

My fellow Americans:

I want us to go to war against Iraq. But I want us to have our eyes open and be completely realistic.

A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq's oil revenues will pay for it all, but that's ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it's going to need that just to run the new government we're putting in. No, we're going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I'm going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I'm going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don't like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I'm going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I'm going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades. In the meantime, your dollar isn't going to go as far when you buy something made overseas, since running those kinds of deficits will weaken our currency. (And I've set things up so that most things you buy will be made overseas.) We'll have to keep interest rates higher than they would otherwise have been and keep the economy in the doldrums, because otherwise my war deficits would cause massive inflation.

So I'm going to put you, your children, and your grandchildren deeply in hock to fight this war. I'm going to make it so there won't be a lot of new jobs created, and I'm going to use the excuse of the Federal red ink to cut way back on government services that you depend on. For the super-rich, or as I call them, "my base," this Iraq war thing is truly inspired. We use it to put up the deficit to the point where the Democrats and the more bleeding heart Republicans in Congress can't dare create any new programs to help the middle classes. We all know that the super-rich--about 3 million people in our country of 295 million-- would have to pay for those programs, since they own 45 percent of the privately held wealth. I'm damn sure going to make sure they aren't inconvenienced that way for a good long time to come.

Then, this Iraq War that I want you to authorize as part of the War on Terror is going to be costly in American lives. By the time of my second inaugural, over 1,300 brave women and men of the US armed forces will be dead as a result of this Iraq war, and 10,371 will have been maimed and wounded, many of them for life. America's streets and homeless shelters will likely be flooded, down the line, with some of these wounded vets. They will have problems finding work, with one or two limbs gone and often significant psychological damage. They will have even more trouble keeping any jobs they find. They will be mentally traumatized the rest of their lives by the horror they are going to see, and sometimes commit, in Iraq. But, well we've got a saying in Texas. I think you've got in over in Arkansas, too. You can't make an omelette without . . . you gotta break some eggs to wrassle up some breakfast.

I know Dick Cheney and Condi Rice have gone around scaring your kids with wild talk of Iraqi nukes. I have to confess to you that my CIA director, George Tenet, tells me that the evidence for that kind of thing just doesn't exist. In fact, I have to be frank and say that the Intelligence and Research Division of the State Department doesn't think Saddam has much of anything left even from his chemical weapons program. Maybe he destroyed the stuff and doesn't want to admit it because he's afraid the Shiites and Kurds will rise up against him without it. Anyway, Iraq just doesn't pose any immediate threat to the United States and probably doesn't have anything useful left of their weapons programs of the 1980s.

There also isn't any operational link between a secular Arab nationalist like Saddam and the religious loonies of al-Qaeda. They're scared of one another and hate each other more than each hates us. In fact, I have to be perfectly honest and admit that if we overthrow Saddam's secular Arab nationalist government, Iraq's Sunni Arabs will be disillusioned and full of despair. They are likely to turn to al-Qaeda as an alternative. So, folks, what I'm about to do could deliver 5 million Iraqis into the hands of people who are insisting they join some al-Qaeda offshoot immediately. Or else.

So why do I want to go to war? Look, folks, I'm just not going to tell you. I don't have to tell you. There is little transparency about these things in the executive, because we're running a kind of rump empire out of the president's office. After 20 or 30 years it will all leak out. Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

[Informed Comment]

Corporate Insders Inside Government and Out

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 08:19:18 GMT

Corporate Insiders Enrich Each Other, Continued.

Gretchen Morgenson (NY Times; reg req): In the Timing of Options, Many, Um, Coincidences. As executives have binged on stock options in recent years, academic studies have detailed the opportunities for fatter pay that well-timed option grants represent. By analyzing stock price behavior after option awards, these studies concluded that corporate managers systematically receive options at prices that do not reflect favorable nonpublic information.

The binge of insider enrichment continues, and regulators need to do much more about this. Will they? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Not likley under Bush. In fact, Bush's presidency is run more like a corporation than any since the late 20s. The earmark of a coproration is to be on message all the time regardless of whether the company's message is truthful or not. People would udnerstand Bush's government mroe if they imaged it to be more like General Electric than Reagan's or Clinton's White House. What you see on West Wing is how a government should be run - policies for the btterment of the commonweal. Bush is simply trying to maxmize shareholder value - with teh shareholders being the money men and evangelicals that helped put him in office twice.

This is what makes four more years of Bush so scary - he doesn't ahve the coutnry's best interests at heart, just the corporation's.

Hypocrits and Intolerance

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 22:36:17 GMT

I particularly like the Lincoln Quote....

----------------------------------------------------------

Intolerance Is Not a 'Value'

By Timothy M. Gay

Tuesday, November 16, 2004; Page A25

One of my favorite teachers was a wiry little man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses who taught us fifth grade. It's been 40 years, but I can still see his crooked grin and hear his voice cracking with excitement.

He made learning fun, constantly getting the class to act out skits to reinforce one lesson or another. His eyes were keen and his heart was big: He always made sure that kids from broken homes or the wrong side of the tracks got starring roles in our productions. He helped implant in me a lifelong love of history. I was out sick with the flu for a couple of days that year; he waited until I returned to resume class readings of a Civil War book that he knew I loved. He was everything a great teacher is supposed to be: unfailingly kind, considerate and dedicated.

He was, also, we learned much later, gay. But because this was the mid-1960s in a small town, he didn't dare live as such -- especially since he doubled as the school's principal. Only in his twilight years did he follow his heart, moving to a city to live as a gay American.

Imagine for a moment, however, that it wasn't four decades ago but four days ago that my teacher was reaching out to help a less fortunate kid with a thorny math problem. And imagine that he'd had the courage in that small town to "come out" and had taken up residence with his partner. In the new world order dictated by champions of "moral values," this wonderful, caring teacher might be branded dangerous. Emboldened by national conservative leaders, the town's evangelicals -- and there are plenty of them -- could well have raised a hue and cry to keep this teacher and "his kind" away from their children. And the town's young people would have been denied the chance to have their lives shaped by a remarkable educator.

Here's what Republicans of conscience have to understand about the machinations of Karl Rove and company. Fear isn't some emotion that can be easily bottled back up after it's been -- viciously -- unleashed. It isn't a once-every-four-years vehicle that can be wheeled out for a few months, then stowed back in the garage to be retooled for the next election cycle. Encouraging fundamentalist preachers to pound their pulpits and inveigh against gay people has consequences. It puts men and women in communities across this country at personal and professional risk. There's nothing more despicable than creating a phony political issue (just how many gay couples are clamoring for marriage certificates in the state of Ohio, anyhow?) and preying on people's prejudices.

So now it's up to discerning Republicans to wrestle with this quandary: You won all right, but at what cost? What happened to the party that once shared Abraham Lincoln's faith in the "better angels of our nature"? That fifth-grade teacher taught me to appreciate how -- through Lincoln's resolve -- our nation overcame a cataclysm of hate to stop the Union from dissolving. Back then, certain avatars of ignorance were called Know-Nothings, which, come to think of it, is an apt description of more than a few right-wingers today.

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," Lincoln wrote in the years leading up to the Civil War. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

There are a lot of Republicans troubled by their party's exploitation of contemporary know-nothingism. You know who you are. And before your party's degeneracy is complete, you ought to do something about it. Because camouflaging the fear and loathing of gay people as "moral values" isn't the base alloy of hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy itself.

Timothy M. Gay is a Washington writer.

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Chrisitain Nation - Love it or Forsake It

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:44:31 GMT

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Slapping the Other Cheek

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: November 14, 2004

ou'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged."

Yet somehow I'm not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office.

I'm getting more the feel of a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude - running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.

One fiery Southern senator actually accused a nice Catholic columnist of having horns coming up out of her head!

Bob Jones III, president of the fundamentalist college of the same name, has written a letter to the president telling him that "Christ has allowed you to be his servant" so he could "leave an imprint for righteousness," by appointing conservative judges and approving legislation "defined by biblical norm."

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," Mr. Jones wrote. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." Way harsh.

The Christian avengers and inquisitors, hearts hard as marble, are chasing poor 74-year-old Arlen Specter through the Capitol's marble halls, determined to flagellate him and deny him his cherished goal of taking over the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Not only are they irate at his fairly innocuous comment after the election that anti-Roe v. Wade judges would have a hard time getting through the Senate. They are also full of bloodthirsty feelings of revenge against the senator for championing stem cell research and for voting against Robert Bork - who denounces Mr. Specter as "a bit shifty" - 17 years ago.

"He is a problem, and he must be derailed," Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, told George Stephanopoulos.

Sounding more like the head of a mob family than a ministry, Dr. Dobson told Mr. Stephanopoulos about a warning he issued a White House staffer after the election that the president and Republicans had better deliver on issues like abortion, gay marriage and conservative judges or "I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."

Certainly Mr. Specter has done his part for the conservative cause. He accused Anita Hill of "flat-out perjury" for a minor inconsistency in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, that good Christian jurist who once had a taste for porn films.

Some in the White House thought of giving Mr. Specter the post and then keeping him on a short leash. But the power puritans have no mercy. They say he's a mealy-mouthed impediment to the crusade of evangelicals and conservative Catholic bishops - who delivered their vote with ruthless efficacy - to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Dr. Dobson about his comment to The Daily Oklahoman that "Patrick Leahy is a 'God's people-hater.' I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people," noting that it was not a particularly Christian thing to say about the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. (Especially after that vulgar un-Christian thing Dick Cheney spat at Mr. Leahy last summer.)

"George," Dr. Dobson haughtily snapped back, "do you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about?" Why not? The TV host is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.

Acting as though Mr. Bush's decisions should be taken on faith, John Ashcroft lashed into judges for not giving Mr. Bush unbridled power in his war against terror.

Speaking Friday before an adulatory Federalist Society, a group of conservative lawyers, Mr. Ashcroft echoed remarks he made to the Senate soon after 9/11 arguing that objecting to the president's antiterror proposals could give "ammunition to America's enemies."

He asserted that judges who interfere in or second guess the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war can jeopardize the "very security of our nation in a time of war."

And since the president has no end in sight to his war on terror, that makes him infallible ad infini- tum?

The Republicans probably stole the election once again.

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:23:49 GMT

Let's face it folks, Republicans are neo-fascists, and will stiop at nothing to win an election, since they feel entitlted to rule the country. We may naver have a free election agian. welcome to Germany 1933.....

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Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

The Red Man Speaks

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 18:14:45 GMT

You wonder why we lost? Because I have had my hotmail address since the beginning of time (ccline@hotmail.com) I receive all kinds of misdirected emails from folkslooking for another "ccline." Sometimes this can be amusing, like when some guy is trying to get hold of a female ccline and writes all kinds of mushy stuff. zBut at other times it gives me a sobering insight into the mindset of the "red" half of our country. Here's an example:

---------------------------------

From: "Tom Whitaker"

To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: editorial
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:48:13 -0600

From: "Tom Whitaker"
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: editorial
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:48:13 -0600

This is an editorial written by an American citizen,
published in a Tampa newspaper He did quite a job; didn't
he? Read on, please!

IMMIGRANTS, NOT AMERICANS, MUST ADAPT.

I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are
offending some individual or their culture. Since the
terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, we have experienced a surge
in patriotism by the majority of Americans. However, the
dust from the attacks had barely settled when the
"politically correct! ! " crowd began complaining about
the possibility that our patriotism was offending others. I
am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against
anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to America.
Our population is almost entirely made up of descendants of
immigrants. However, there are a few things that those
who have recently come to our country, and apparently some
born here, need to understand. This idea of America being a
multicultural community has served only to dilute our
vereignty and our national identity. As Americans, we
have our own culture, our own society, our own language and
our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over
centuries of struggles, trials, and victories by millions of
men and women who have sought freedom. We speak ENGLISH, not
Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese,
Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to
become part of our society, learn the language!

"In God We The RedTrust" is our national motto. This is not some Christian,
right wing, political slogan.. We adopted this motto
because Christian men and women, on Christian principles,
founded this nation, and this is clearly documented It is
certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our
schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider
another part of the world as your new home, because God is
part of our culture. If Stars and Stripes offend you, or
you don't like Uncle Sam, then you should seriously consider
a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our
culture and have no desire to change, and we really don't !
care how you did things where you came from. This is OUR
COUNTRY, our land, and our lifestyle. Our First Amendment
gives every citizen the right to express! his opinion and we
will allow you every opportunity! to do
so. But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping
about our flag, our pledge, our national motto, or our
way of life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one
other great American freedom, THE RIGHT TO LEAVE.

It is Time for America to Speak up!
If you agree -- pass this along; if you don't agree --
delete it!

AMEN

I figure if we all keep passing this to our friends (and
enemies) it will also, sooner or later get back to the
complainers, lets all try, please.

-----------------------------

Notice that these emails always end with a statement to pass it long if you agree to it, and to delete it if you don't. Clearly, if you don't, the implication is you should be one of the onese to leave. Also note the vague opening - appeared in "a Tampa newspaper." It's highly likely this was enver published, but adding that at the oepnign gives the rant more legitmacy than it deserves.

I received dozens of these leading up to the election, each a part of a mass mailing to several dozen people, each with the command to pass it along. And Dem's wonder how the Republicans managed to get more Reds out to the polls this year than they did with the Blues.....

Post election opportunities and perils

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 23:17:31 GMT

A sober, "conservative" assessment of Bush's 2nd term foriegn policy options

THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

The Second Term
November 05, 2004 0503 GMT

By George Friedman

The election is over and the worst did not happen. The United States is not
locked in endless litigation, with the legitimacy of the new government
challenged. George W. Bush has been re-elected in a clear victory. Depending
on your point of view, this might have been the best imaginable outcome or
the second-worst possible outcome. Possibly, for some, it is the worst
outcome, with complete governmental meltdown being preferable to four more
years of Bush. However, these arguments are now moot. Bush has been
re-elected, and that is all there is to that.

This means that for slightly more than four years the United States will be
governed by a president who will never run for political office again. In
general, two-term presidents tend to be less interested in political process
than in their place in history. They tend to become more aggressive in trying
to complete their perceived missions, and less cautious in the chances they
take. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all encountered serious
problems in their second terms, most due to their handling of problems they
experienced in their first terms. Nixon had Watergate, while Reagan was
handling Central American issues and hostages. Clinton wound up impeached for
his handling of matters in his second term.

Going further back in the century, Woodrow Wilson had the League of Nations
fiasco in his second term, and Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the
Supreme Court. Dwight Eisenhower alone, his place in history assured, did not
suffer serious setbacks from misjudgments, unless you want to view Sputnik,
Yuri Gagarin and the shooting down of the U-2 over Soviet air space as
personal failures.

Second-term presidents tend to look at re-election as vindication of their
first-term policies and as a repudiation of their critics. They see
themselves as having fewer constraints placed on them, and they become less
sensitive to political nuances.

Bush is an interesting case because he was not particularly sensitive to
political nuance in his first term. It is difficult to remember a president
in his first term who was less constrained by political considerations or
political consequences. For better or worse, Bush did not govern with one eye
on public opinion polls. As we learned in the course of his term, he was not
particularly flexible, even when he was running for re-election. We therefore
need to imagine a George W. Bush who is not relatively, but completely,
indifferent to political nuance.

Add to this that his legacy is far from assured. Bush's presidency will be
measured by one thing: Sept. 11 and his response to it. It is far from clear
how history will judge him. There are many parts to the puzzle -- from Iraq,
to homeland defense to Pakistan and so on. They are moving parts. For Bush to
assure his legacy, he must bring the conflict to a successful conclusion --
not easy for a conflict in which success remains unclear.

We therefore have two forces at work. First, second-term presidents tend to
feel much greater freedom of action than first-term presidents -- and tend to
take greater risks. Second, Bush enters his second term with greater pressure
on his legacy than most presidents have. Bush needs to make something happen,
he needs to get the war under control, and he does not have all that much
time to do it. If he is to complete his task before the end of his second
term, he needs to start acting right now. It is our expectation that he will.

His re-election represents the first step. Globally, there was a perception
that Bush had blundered massively. There has also been a long-standing myth
that the United States cannot stand its ground because casualties generate
decisive antiwar movements. In spite of the fact that Nixon buried George
McGovern in 1972, and followed with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, global
expectations have always been that events in Iraq would generate a massive
antiwar movement that would force Bush from office.

This expectation was first shaken by Sen. John Kerry's campaign. For all his
criticism, Kerry did not campaign against the war. He campaigned against
Bush. This was explained in many circles as merely what Kerry had to say to
get elected, and that after election his true colors would emerge. However,
to more sensitive ears, the fact that Kerry had to campaign as he did in
order to have a hope of election was jarring. The antiwar vote was too small
for the theory. With Bush's victory, one of the fundamental assumptions about
the United States went out the window. In spite of casualties and grievous
errors, not only was there no antiwar candidate (save Ralph Nader), but Bush
actually won the election.

This puts in motion two processes in the world. First, there is a major
rethinking of American staying power in the war going on. The assumption of a
rapid conclusion of the Iraq campaign due to U.S. withdrawal is gone -- and
it is surprising just how many non-Americans believed this to be a likely
scenario. The reassessment of the United States is accompanied by the
realization that the United States will not only maintain its pressure in
Iraq, but on the region and the globe itself.

American pressure is not insubstantial. Virtually every country in the world
wants something from the United States, from a trade agreement to support on
a local conflict. They can do without an accommodation with the United States
for months, but there is frequently serious pain associated with being at
odds with the United States for years. Throughout the world, nations that
have resisted U.S. actions in the war -- both within and outside of the
region -- must now consider whether they can resist for years.

We can expect two things from Bush in general: relentlessness and linkage.
Having won the election, Bush is not going to abandon his goal of crushing al
Qaeda and pacifying Iraq and, indeed, the region. That is understood. Equally
understood is that Bush will reward friends. Bush's test of friendship is
simple: support for the United States and, in particular, support for the
policies being pursued by his administration in the war. For Bush, active
support for the war was a litmus test for good relations with the United
States during the first term. The second term will make the first term look
gentle.

Countries that made the decision not to support Bush did so with the
assumption that they could absorb the cost for a while. They must now
recalculate to see if they can absorb the cost for four more years -- and
even beyond, if Bush's successor pursues his policies. For many countries,
what was a temporary disagreement is about to turn into a strategic
misalignment with the United States. Some countries will continue on their
path, others will reconsider. There will be a reshuffling of the global deck
in the coming months.

The same analysis being made in the world is also being made in Iraq. There
are the guerrillas, most of whom are committed to fighting the United States
to the death. But the guerrillas are not a massive force, and they depend for
their survival and operational capabilities on a supportive population. In
Iraq, support comes from the top down. It is the tribal elders, the senior
clergy and the village leaders who make the crucial decisions. They are the
ones who decide whether there will be popular support or not.

There has been an assumption in Iraq -- as there has in the world -- that as
the pressure builds up in Iraq, the United States will move to abandon the
war. Bush's re-election clearly indicates that the United States will not be
abandoning the war. They are therefore recalculating their positions in the
same way that the rest of the world is. Holding out against the Americans and
allowing their populations to aid the guerrillas made a great deal of sense
if the United States was about to retreat from Iraq. It is quite another
matter if the United States is actually going to be increasing pressure.

It is no accident that as Election Day approached, U.S. forces very publicly
-- and very slowly -- massed around Al Fallujah. Al Fallujah was the town in
which the United States signed its first accord with the guerrillas. As the
election approached, the town went out of control. Now the election is over,
the town is surrounded and Bush is president. It is a time for recalculation
in Al Fallujah as well, as there can be no doubt but that Bush is free to
attack and might well do it.

Throughout the Sunni areas of Iraq -- as well as Shiite regions -- elders are
considering their positions, caught between the United States and the
guerrillas, in light of the new permanence of the Americans. The United
States will be aggressive, but in an interesting way. It will be using the
threat of American power as a lever to force the Sunni leadership into
reducing support for the guerrillas. Coupled with the carrot of enormous
bribes, the strategy could work. It might not eliminate the guerrilla war,
but could reduce it to a nuisance level.

The basic reality thus creates the strategy. The re-election of Bush creates
a new reality at all levels in the international system. His intransigence,
coupled with American power, forces players to think about whether they can
hold their positions for at least four years, or whether they must adjust
their positions in some way. As the players -- from sheikhs to prime
ministers -- reconsider their positions, U.S. power increases, trying to pry
them loose. It opens the possibility of negotiations and settlements in
unexpected places.

It also opens the door to potential disaster. The danger is that Bush will
simultaneously overestimate his power and feel unbearable pressure to act
quickly. This has led some previous presidents into massive errors of
judgment. Put differently, the pressures and opportunities of the second term
caused them to execute policies that appeared to be solutions but that blew
up in their faces. None of them knew they would blow up, but in their
circumstances, no one was sufficiently cautious.

It is precisely Bush's lack of caution that now becomes his greatest
bargaining chip. But his greatest strength can also become his greatest
weakness. The struggle between these two poles will mark the first part of
his presidency. We will find out whether the second part will be the success
of this strategy or his downfall. The book on George W. Bush will now be
written.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

What the Dems Should Do

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 08:18:27 GMT

A good selction of articles and essays on what the Dems should do from Slate....

--------------------------------

Why Americans Hate Democrats—A Dialogue
Depressed liberals analyze what ails them.
Updated Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 1:15 PM PT

The day after the election, Slate's political writers tackled the question of why the Democratic Party—which has now lost five of the past seven presidential elections and solidified its minority status in Congress—keeps losing elections. In response to those pieces, Slate also asked a number of wise liberals to take up the question of why Americans won't vote for the Democrats.

"Why Kerry Lost: He was good. Bush was better," by Christopher Suellentrop, posted Nov. 3.

"Democratic Values: How to start winning the red states," by William Saletan, posted Nov. 3.

"Whither Liberalism? Again? Here comes the usual bad advice," by Timothy Noah, posted Nov. 3.

"Moralize, Liberally," by Robert Wright, posted Nov. 4.

"Gotta Have Faith," by Robert Reich, posted Nov. 4.

"More Policy Plans, Please," by Jason Furman, posted Nov. 4.

"The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States," by Jane Smiley, posted Nov. 4.

"The Party's Message Is Low Risk, Low Reward," by Tom Tomorrow, posted Nov. 4.

"The Indomitable Question That Plagues Liberals," by Katha Pollitt, posted Nov. 5.

"Let's Talk About Faith," by Steven Waldman, posted Nov. 5.

"Maybe It's Not As Bad As We Think," by Walter Dellinger, posted Nov. 5.

"Morality Is the New 'Race,' " by Diane McWhorter, posted Nov. 5.

"Tapping Into the 'Obama' Factor," by Donna Brazile, posted Nov. 5.

Butterfly Effect

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 21:37:05 GMT

Another excellent article

Charles Cutter

Suicide by Ballot
By Charles Cutter (www.cuttersway.com)
Nov 4, 2004, 16:21

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Police officers are familiar with the phenomenon whereby an individual - through despair, desperation, and/or insanity - orchestrates an event that forces the police to end their life. The technical term is "victim precipitated homicide."

The police call it "suicide by cop."

Examining the results of the presidential race, we’re now faced with an electorate - motivated by a combination of fear, hatred, and religious/cultural intolerance - that seek to destroy the very heart of our democracy through the voting booth.

Let’s call it "suicide by ballot."

Fifty-nine million Americans - a slight but sufficient majority - will not have the luxury to claim retroactive ignorance in the years to come. George W. Bush, in his first term as president, showed us his vision of America - where capitalism means corporate welfare and unbridled greed, where U.S. soldiers are handmaidens to Halliburton, where the anti-abortion candidate slaughters Iraqi children. With another term in office - coupled with Republican gains in the House and Senate, and the attendant freedom to replace retiring Supreme Court justices with radical activists - America’s dark fate has been sealed for decades to come.

It’s the will of the slim majority. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, the Bush supporters "don’t just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

Who are these people?

They support the separation of church and state in matters of taxation, but believe we should have Christian prayers and the Ten Commandments in public schools and courtrooms. They believe in God and Jesus and a blissful afterlife in Heaven, but are irrationally afraid of facing death in a terrorist attack.

They believe the government has no business keeping track of gun purchases, but it’s okay for the Justice Department to monitor your medical history and check your library interests, to search your house without your knowledge. They argue for "less government interference" in people’s lives, while simultaneously arguing that women should be legally forced to endure a full-term pregnancy, and that gay Americans should be denied their civil rights.

Indeed, homophobia runs rampant throughout this country and is a major issue among Mr. Bush’s constituency. On Tuesday, proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages passed overwhelmingly everywhere they appeared on the ballot. Nine of these states voted in favor of Mr. Bush, while in the other two - Oregon and Michigan - the measures passed, but with significantly smaller margins of victory.

The key state was Ohio, where Mr. Bush’s slim majority - which put him over the top electorally - may well have been the result of the anti-gay measure. It’s been credited with the strong Republican turnout in the areas of the state dominated by evangelical Christians.

The so-called "cultural divide" may, in fact, be unbridgeable.

A Kerry campaign worker in West Virginia, working door-to-door, reported an encounter with a six year old girl. Upon seeing the "Kerry for President" literature, the child said, "He’s the man that kills babies," a reference to Mr. Kerry’s pro-choice stance. Obviously indoctrinated by her parents, this illustrates the enormity of the challenge: How do you reason with people who embrace both Mr. Bush’s pro-life rhetoric and his "bring-it-on" bloodlust?

In Ray Bradbury’s prescient short story, "A Sound of Thunder," several time travelers take a trip to the age of dinosaurs. They depart just after a presidential election, celebrating the loss of an extreme right-wing candidate: "’If Deutscher had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you, a militarist…anti-human, anti-intellectual…’" While in the past, one man inadvertently steps on an insect, setting forth a chain of events over millions of years. When the men return to the present, they find an altered world, an America leaning toward fascism. Asking who won the election, they’re told, "’You know damn well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that damn weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts, by God!"

Mr. Bradbury suggests that humanity’s core of decency is a fragile thing, that seemingly minor events create opportunities for catastrophic change.

In his story, it all begins with the death of an insect.

Specifically, a butterfly.

In Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000, candidate Pat Buchanan received an unexpected 3,407 votes. Even he admitted it was a mistake, the result of a confusing ballot; most of the votes were obviously intended for Al Gore.

Those votes were far more than needed to tip the election away from George W. Bush.

And this would have meant no war with Iraq, which would have meant thousands of people still living who have since been brutally killed. It’s reasonable to speculate that we would have seen the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. Certainly - barring the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy - we would not be facing record budget deficits as far as the eye can see.

All resulting from a clumsy ballot layout.

Specifically, the infamous "butterfly" ballot.

A seemingly small thing, but the impact is immeasurable - and it’s only starting.

And it didn’t take millions of years.

Two Nations, One Future.....

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 21:34:57 GMT

The best summary of what happened I've read yet......

---------------------------------------------------------

November 4, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Two Nations Under God

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

ell, as Grandma used to say, at least I still have my health. ...

I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself. I did that yesterday, asking myself this: Why didn't I feel totally depressed after George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, or even when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore? Why did I wake up feeling deeply troubled yesterday?

Answer: whatever differences I felt with the elder Bush were over what was the right policy. There was much he ultimately did that I ended up admiring. And when George W. Bush was elected four years ago on a platform of compassionate conservatism, after running from the middle, I assumed the same would be true with him. (Wrong.) But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.

Is it a country that does not intrude into people's sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn't trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us - instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?

At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.

The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.

This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.

My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends.

"The Democrats have ceded to Republicans a monopoly on the moral and spiritual sources of American politics," noted the Harvard University political theorist Michael J. Sandel. "They will not recover as a party until they again have candidates who can speak to those moral and spiritual yearnings - but turn them to progressive purposes in domestic policy and foreign affairs."

I've always had a simple motto when it comes to politics: Never put yourself in a position where your party wins only if your country fails. This column will absolutely not be rooting for George Bush to fail so Democrats can make a comeback. If the Democrats make a comeback, it must not be by default, because the country has lapsed into a total mess, but because they have nominated a candidate who can win with a positive message that connects with America's heartland.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk that Mr. Bush has a mandate for his far right policies. Yes, he does have a mandate, but he also has a date - a date with history. If Mr. Bush can salvage the war in Iraq, forge a solution for dealing with our entitlements crisis - which can be done only with a bipartisan approach and a more sane fiscal policy - upgrade America's competitiveness, prevent Iran from going nuclear and produce a solution for our energy crunch, history will say that he used his mandate to lead to great effect. If he pushes for still more tax cuts and fails to solve our real problems, his date with history will be a very unpleasant one - no matter what mandate he has.

| | | | | | |

dumbass moves

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:54:18 GMT

What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?. Mark Frauenfelder: Eric Lawrence sez: "My friend Rich Malley, creator of Thot4ThDay (a daily humor email, over 8 years and running), sends these dead-on thoughts:"

"WWADRD?
Dear Friends:
If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
Get depressed?
Get down?
Feel defeated?
Go away?
Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?
Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?
Mute his howls of indignation?
Question his convictions?
Hell, no!
Here's what a Dumbass Republican would do:
Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.
Refuse to let the "facts on the ground" deter his belief in what he's got coming.
Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.
Refuse to shut the fuck up.
Refuse to go away.
Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.
Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on their pillows at night.
Have a glint in his eye that says, "I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I'm just waiting for an opportunity to slip this knife in."
See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.
Friends, join me.
Do not accept.
Do not waver.
Do not shut up.
Do not give comfort with your distress.
Be an unrelenting irritant.
Be a dumbass.
Right now, attitude is everything.
Together, we can help each other bear the present while shortening the time - and it will come - when we prevail."

[Boing Boing]

Values Killed Us

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:52:44 GMT

Values. It wasn't the war or the economy that killed us. It was the notion of "values". Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, yet Kerry was bad because he had "Massachusetts values" or other such nonesense. We need to retake the language. We need to reframe the notion of "value". That's why Obama's speech below is so brilliant. He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me. It's faith used for the purpose of living a good life, rather than faith wielded as a weapon against a whole class of people. The wedges: gays, abortion, and guns. Democrats have abandoned guns as an issue, and over the next three or four cycles it will prove an increasingly ineffective wedge. The NRA won. Good for them. That leaves the two "faith based" wedges -- gays and abortion. And with great skill, the Republicans have equated those two issues with the word "value". That's going to have to change. [Daily Kos]

Election summary

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:27:49 GMT

a good reference

----- Original Message -----

From: washingtonpost.com

To: ccline@msn.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 12:58 PM

Subject: Campaign Report: A Recount of Election 2004

Wednesday, November 03, 2004




		LIVE DISCUSSIONS Each Wednesday, share your comments and quiz The Washington Post senior staff. From the front page to the comics page, just Ask The Post. Managing Editor Steve Coll discussed Post coverage and Election 2004. Election 2004 Analysis Wednesday, Nov. 3: • The Post's Bob Kaiser • E-Voting • White House Talk • The Post's Marc Fisher • Brookings' Thomas Mann About Last Night: Read our live election night coverage, complete with instant analysis from The Post newsroom, as it unfolded. Ode to Election Day: Read the best (and the worst) of your reax in verse

A Recount of Election 2004

Shades of 2000? Some. Exit poll data was murky and difficult to interpret in some key states. Races in a handful of battlegrounds were too close to call on election night. There were questions about counting the provisional ballots in Ohio. After early morning announcements by both the Bush and Kerry campaigns -- and the Ohio secretary of state -- Americans were left to wonder how long it would take before a presidential winner would be declared.

But the end game was brief. Bush won a clear majority of the national popular vote, and held a slim but decisive edge over Kerry in electoral college votes that determine the winner of the White House. Kerry conceded defeat and Bush won a second term.

In today's Campaign Report, we provide up-to-the minute news and analysis of Election 2004, including the presidential race, key Senate contests and congressional races, including some that have not yet been called. We cover state gubernatorial elections and track ballot initiatives and referenda on same-sex marriages. And exit poll data gives an in depth look into the mindset of American voters.

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TODAY'S SPEECHES • Bush Declares Victory • Kerry Concedes WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING How Did He Do It? Some possible factors emeged from the overnight press coverage, such as the super-charged "moral minority," the country's social, cultural and geographic divides and Bush's simple message. • Photo Gallery: President Bush Wins Second Term • Bush Aides Pushed to Declare Victory • Pano: Bush Supporters Cheer Victory Declaration

ANALYSIS For Bush and GOP, a Validation Four years later, it is still a divided country -- perhaps more sullenly than ever -- but as a long election night bled into morning the evidence was clear that it is becoming a more Republican one. • GOP Adds to Senate Majority with Wins in South • Republicans Keep House Majority

BALLOT ISSUES Same-Sex Marriage Ban Succeeds Tallies from all 11 states where the issue appeared on the ballot showed constitutional amendments restricting marriage to a man and woman would pass by substantial margins.

FILTER Bloggers Let Poll Cat Out of the Bag Web logs shook up the mainstream media Tuesday by providing an early look at exit polls, proving once and for all their influence not only in the coverage of politics but perhaps in the electoral process itself -washingtonpost.com

POST EDITORIAL Election 2004 As election night turned into Wednesday morning, the country found itself where many had predicted it would be: closely divided. ...

EXIT POLLS BY STATE • Alabama • Alaska • Arizona • Arkansas • California • Colorado • Connecticut • District of Columbia • Delaware • Florida • Georgia • Hawaii • Idaho • Illinois • Indiana • Iowa • Kansas • Kentucky • Louisiana • Maine • Maryland • Massachusetts • Michigan • Minnesota • Mississippi • Missouri • Montana • Nebraska • Nevada • New Hampshire • New Jersey • New Mexico • New York • North Carolina • North Dakota • Ohio • Oklahoma • Oregon • Pennsylvania • Rhode Island • South Carolina • South Dakota • Tennessee • Texas • Utah • Vermont • Virginia • Washington • West Virginia • Wisconsin • Wyoming

UNDECLARED RACES President • Iowa • New Mexico • Full Results \| State-by-State Breakdown Senate • Full Results House • Louisiana 7th District • Louisiana 3rd District • New York 27th District Governor • Washington • Full Results

NEW SENATOR PROFILES
North Carolina
Richard M. Burr (R)

Oklahoma
Tom A. Coburn (R)

South Carolina
James W. DeMint (R)

Georgia
John H. Isakson (R)

Illinois
Barack Obama (D)

Colorado
Ken L. Salazar (D)

Florida
Mel Martinez (R)

Louisiana
David Vitter (R)

NEW REPRESENTATIVE PROFILES
California
Dan Lungren (R)
Jim Costa (D)

Colorado
John Salazar (D)

Florida
Connie Mack (R)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D)

Georgia
Cynthia McKinney (D)
Thomas Price (R)
Lynn Westmoreland (R)
John Barrow

Illinois
Daniel Lipinski (D)
Melissa Bean (D)

Kentucky
Geoffrey Davis (R)

Louisiana
Bobby Jindal

Louisiana
Bobby Jindal

Michigan
John "Joe" Schwarz (R)

Missouri
Russ Carnahan (D)
Emanuel Cleaver (D)

Nebraska
Jeff Fortenberry (R)

New York
John Kuhl (R)

North Carolina
Virginia Foxx (R)
Patrick McHenry (R)

Oklahoma
Dan Boren (D)

Pennsylvania
Mike Fitzpatrick (R)
Allyson Schwartz (D)
Charlie Dent (R)

South Carolina
Bob Inglis (R)

Texas
Louis Gohmert (R)
Ted Poe (R)
Al Green (D)
Michael McCaul (R)
Mike Conoway (R)
Kenny Marchant (R)
Henry Cuellar (D)

Virginia
Thelma Drake (R)

Washington
Cathy McMorris (R)

Wisconsin
Gwen Moore (D)

NEW GOVERNOR PROFILES
Indiana
Mitch Daniels (R)

Montana
Brian Schweitzer (D)

Missiouri
Matt Blunt (R)

New Hampshire
John Lynch (D)

Utah
Jon M. Huntsman (R)

West Virginia
Joseph Manchin (D)

Simplicity Wins

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 17:00:26 GMT

It's sad, but I think he nails it. We all wanted Kerry to win, but in our hearts we knew that what the Republicans were saying about him - being a french speaking, lattee drinking, volve driving Northeast liberal - was essentially true. In my heart I know Edwards would've been the better candidate - and will certainly be in four years time.

-------------------------------

Simple but Effective
Why you keep losing to this idiot.
By William Saletan
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 12:05 AM PT

12:01 a.m. PT: Sigh. I really didn't want to have to write this.

George W. Bush is going to win re-election. Yeah, the lawyers will haggle about Ohio. But this time, Democrats don't have the popular vote on their side. Bush does.

If you're a Bush supporter, this is no surprise. You love him, so why shouldn't everybody else?

But if you're dissatisfied with Bush—or if, like me, you think he's been the worst president in memory—you have a lot of explaining to do. Why don't a majority of voters agree with us? How has Bush pulled it off?

I think this is the answer: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don't—and there are more of them than there are of us. If you don't believe me, take a look at those numbers on your TV screen.

Think about the simplicity of everything Bush says and does. He gives the same speech every time. His sentences are short and clear. "Government must do a few things and do them well," he says. True to his word, he has spent his political capital on a few big ideas: tax cuts, terrorism, Iraq. Even his electoral strategy tonight was powerfully simple: Win Florida, win Ohio, and nothing else matters. All those lesser states—Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire—don't matter if Bush reels in the big ones.

This is what so many people like about Bush's approach to terrorism. They forgive his marginal and not-so-marginal screw-ups, because they can see that fundamentally, he "gets it." They forgive his mismanagement of Iraq, because they see that his heart and will are in the right place. And while they may be unhappy about their economic circumstances, they don't hold that against him. What you and I see as unreflectiveness, they see as transparency. They trust him.

Now look at your candidate, John Kerry. What quality has he most lacked? Not courage—he proved that in Vietnam. Not will—he proved that in Iowa. Not brains—he proved that in the debates. What Kerry lacked was simplicity. Bush had one message; Kerry had dozens. Bush had one issue; Kerry had scores. Bush ended his sentences when you expected him to say more; Kerry went on and on, adding one prepositional phrase after another, until nobody could remember what he was talking about. Now Bush has two big states that mean everything, and Kerry has a bunch of little ones that add up to nothing.

If you're a Democrat, here's my advice. Do what the Republicans did in 1998. Get simple. Find a compelling salesman and get him ready to run for president in 2008. Put aside your quibbles about preparation, stature, expertise, nuance, and all that other hyper-sophisticated garbage that caused you to nominate Kerry. You already have legions of people with preparation, stature, expertise, and nuance ready to staff the executive branch of the federal government. You don't need one of them to be president. You just need somebody to win the White House and appoint them to his administration. And that will require all the simplicity, salesmanship, and easygoing humanity they don't have.

The good news is, that person is already available. His name is John Edwards. If you have any doubt about his electability, just read the exit polls from the 2004 Democratic primaries. If you don't think he's ready to be president—if you don't think he has the right credentials, the right gravitas, the right subtlety of thought—ask yourself whether these are the same things you find wanting in George W. Bush. Because evidently a majority of the voting population of the United States doesn't share your concern. They seem to be attracted to a candidate with a simple message, a clear focus, and a human touch. You might want to consider their views, since they're the ones who will decide whether you're sitting here again four years from now, wondering what went wrong.

In 1998 and 1999, Republicans cleared the field for George W. Bush. Members of Congress and other major officeholders threw their weight behind him to make sure he got the nomination. They united because their previous presidential nominee, a clumsy veteran senator, had gone down to defeat. They were facing eight years out of power, and they were hungry.

Do what they did. Give Edwards a job that will position him to run for president again in a couple of years. Clear the field of Hillary Clinton and any other well-meaning liberal who can't connect with people outside those islands of blue on your electoral map. Because you're going to get a simple president again next time, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that president will be from your party or the other one.