Friday, October 22, 2004
BARBARA BUSH IS GUARANTEED A GOOD JOB - ARE YOU?
Bush Signs $136B Corporate Tax Cut Bill
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON - With no fanfare, President Bush on Friday signed the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades, showering $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups.
Intended to end a bitter trade war with Europe, the election-year measure was described by supporters as critically necessary to aid beleaguered manufacturers who have suffered 2.7 million lost jobs over the past four years.
But opponents charged that the tax package had grown into a massive giveaway that will add to the complexity of the tax system and end up rewarding multinational companies that move jobs overseas. It also will swell the nation's huge budget deficit.
There was no ceremony for the bill-signing. White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced it on Air Force One as Bush flew to a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania. The handling of the corporate tax bill was in contrast to Bush's action on Oct. 4 when he sat before television cameras on a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, to sign three tax-cut breaks popular with middle-class voters and reviving other tax incentives for businesses.
Bush's campaign rival, Sen. John Kerry , missed the vote on the corporate tax breaks. Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said there were many important things in the bill but that "George Bush filled the bill up with corporate giveaways and tax breaks for multinational companies that send jobs overseas. In his first budget, John Kerry will call for the repeal of all the unwarranted international tax breaks that George Bush included in this bill."
The original purpose for the legislation was to repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization. Repeal of the tax break was needed to lift retaliatory tariffs that are now being imposed on more than 1,600 American manufactured products and farm goods exported to Europe.
The bill replaces the $49.2 billion export tax break with $136 billion in new tax breaks over the next decade for a wide array of groups from farmers, fishermen and bow and arrow hunters to some of America's largest corporations.
The legislation also includes a $10.1 billion buyout of quotas held by tobacco farmers. However, a Senate provision that would have coupled this buyout with regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration was dropped by the conference committee that ironed out differences between the two chambers.
The measure is the most sweeping overhaul of corporate tax law since 1986. It provides a wide range of tax benefits for native Alaskan whalers, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and NASCAR race track owners.
The centerpiece is $76.5 billion in new tax relief for the battered manufacturing sector, but manufacturing is broadly defined to include not just factories but also oil and gas producers, engineering, construction and architectural firms and large farming operations.
The bill was seen as must-pass legislation because it repeals a $5 billion annual subsidy for U.S. exporters that has been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization. Because of that ruling, 1,600 American exports to Europe have been hit by penalty tariffs that now stand at 12 percent and are rising by 1 percentage point a month.
In addition to the $76.5 billion in tax relief for manufacturing, the measure would also provide $42.6 billion in tax relief to multinational companies.
Supporters argued that the tax relief for multinational corporations would boost the competitiveness of U.S. companies, but opponents argued that it would simply provide more tax benefits to support the movement of U.S. jobs overseas.
To pay for the $136 billion total of new tax relief over the next decade, the legislation would rely on the savings from repealing the export subsidy and would close corporate loopholes and tax shelters — thereby raising an estimated $82 billion over the next decade.
---------------------
Since when do NASCAR track owners need corporate tax relief???Thursday, October 21, 2004
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW IS TODAY
Group Warns on Consumption of Resources
By JONATHAN FOWLER, Associated Press
GENEVA - People are plundering the world's resources at a pace that outstrips the planet's capacity to sustain life, the environmental group WWF said Thursday.
In its regular Living Planet Report, the World Wide Fund for Nature said humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the earth can produce.
Consumption of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil increased by almost 700 percent between 1961 and 2001, it said. But the planet is unable to move as fast to absorb the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions that degrade the earth's protective ozone layer.
"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," said WWF chief Claude Martin, launching the conservation body's 40-page study.
"We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the earth's ability to renew them."
Populations of terrestrial, freshwater and marine species fell on average by 40 percent between 1970 and 2000, the study said. It cited destruction of natural habitats, pollution, overfishing and the introduction by humans of nonnative animals, such as cats and rats, which often drive out indigenous species.
"The question is how the world's entire population live with the resources of one planet," said Jonathan Loh, one of the report's authors.
The study, WWF's fifth since 1998, examines the "ecological footprint" — or environmental impact — of the planet's 6.1 billion-strong population.
To calculate the average size of each person's footprint, it measures land use, pollution, energy consumption, and the level of carbon-dioxide emissions.
The impact of an average North American is double that of a European, but seven times that of the average Asian or African.
Overall, the biggest culprits are the residents of the United Arab Emirates, followed by the United States, Kuwait, Australia and Sweden. The least-damaging are residents of Afghanistan (news - web sites), Somalia, Haiti, Tajikistan and Bangladesh.
Rich nations tread heavily on poorer countries, said Mathis Wacknagel, head of the Global Footprint Network, a grouping including WWF. For example, Western demand for of Asia's palm oil and soybeans from South America has fueled destruction of natural habitats in those regions.
The study also warned of increasing pressure on the planet's resources amid spiraling consumption in Asia, led by fast-growing China and India.
"We can consume energy in a way that's harmful or in a way that's sustainable," Loh told reporters. The technologies are available to enable the world's population to live within the capacity of one planet."
Governments, businesses and consumers should switch to energy efficient technology, such as solar power, Loh said, adding that high oil prices may help focus their minds.
"It's not a question of how much oil is left," he said. "The question we should be asking is how much fossil fuel consumption the earth can sustain. The earth has a limited capacity."
World Wildlife Federation, http://www.panda.orgWednesday, October 20, 2004
THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF DAYS
Iran testfires Shahab-3 missile
www.chinaview.cn 2004-10-20 17:50:22
TEHRAN, Oct. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran on Wendesday launched a new test of more accurate Shahab-3 ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers, revealed Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani.
After a cabinet meeting, Shamkhani told reporters that "a few minutes ago we carried out a new test of the Shahab-3 missile in the presence of observers."
Confronted with attack threat from the US and Israel, the Islamic Republic has been endeavoring to upgrade its missiles to the "deterrent" level.
On Aug. 11, Tehran announced a successful test firing of an upgraded version of the Shahab-3 missile, which, military experts estimated, had a range of 1300 km and was capable of striking Israel or any other enemy target in the region.
Shamkhani said late August that the Islamic Republic had achieved an "effective deterrent power" to confront its enemies in the region.
Then, at the end of September, Shamkhani announced that a new "strategic" missile has been successfully test-fired and delivered to the Iranian armed forces.
The US and Israel, accusing Iran of secretly developing atomic weapons, have threatened to launch preemptive attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities.
-------------
We are so seriously fucked.Wednesday, October 20, 2004
THE RED, WHITE AND BLUE JIHAD OF GEORGE W. BUSH
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ''He's plenty smart enough to do the job,'' Levin said. ''It's his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.'' But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president's preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source.
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.
''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''
This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)
This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''
He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect.
In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, ''How do I speak to the soul of the nation?'' He listened as each guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their journeys.
''I've never lived around poor people,'' Wallis remembers Bush saying. ''I don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?''
Wallis recalls replying, ''You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people.''
Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said, ''I want you to hear this.'' A month later, an almost identical line -- ''many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do'' -- ended up in the inaugural address.
That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant, matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this fearlessness -- a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to ranging among different types of people, searching for the outlines of what will take shape as principles.
Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been forced to wrestle with its ''left brain'' opposite -- a struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical skills so prized in America's professional class. In terms of intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at Yale and five years of drift through his 20's -- a time when peers were busy building credentials in law, business or medicine.
Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush's grasp of foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a catch phrase -- he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some who have worked under him in the White House and know about business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. -- one who had little chance to season theory with practice during the past few decades of change in corporate America -- has simply been dropped into the most challenging management job in the world.
One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case cracker'' problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various ''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.
George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter, never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters. (The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front man but never really as a boss.
Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training, what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.
His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president's father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.
Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.'' [To read more of Rubenstein's speech, go here: http://prorev.com/bushcarlyle.htm.]
Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that, he was elected leader of the free world and began ''case cracking'' on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But the pointed ''defend your position'' queries -- so central to the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds -- were infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United States is another.
Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in "The Price of Loyalty," at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.''
Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily shaped by its president, by his character, personality and priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to adopt the boss's phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the judgment. A staff channels the leader.
A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?
Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms, and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is where the real work in that state's governance gets done. The Texas Legislature's tension of opposites offered the structure of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.
But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus, thoroughness and analytical potency.
For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his weaknesses -- and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty or need or confusion, even to senior officials -- must have presented an untenable bind. By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the modern era, and ''it's both exclusive and exclusionary,'' Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative policy group, told me. ''It's a too tightly managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being offered.''
On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to lead -- standing on the World Trade Center's rubble with a bullhorn -- for much of America, any lingering doubts about his abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men, and many presidents, including his father.
Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God's help. And many Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him -- or for him. It was simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he'd be up to this moment, so that he -- and, by extension, we as a country -- would triumph in that dark hour.
This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political tactics -- think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research -- now began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish. They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples the company. There's a startled look -- how'd that happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the United States government and making certain that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew exponentially.
Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the president's handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers; despite Bush's setting goals in the so-called ''financial war on terror,'' the Saudis failed to cooperate with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted to get it. Bush's approval rating approached 90 percent. Meanwhile, the executive's balance between analysis and resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped by the pull of righteous faith.
It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first used the telltale word ''crusade'' in public. ''This is a new kind of -- a new kind of evil,'' he said. ''And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.''
Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari Fleischer tried to perform damage control. ''I think what the president was saying was -- had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join.'' As to ''any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would regret if anything like that was conveyed.''
A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that the initiative was not about ''compassionate conservatism,'' as originally promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and energize that part of the base.
Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. ''Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!'' he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis's book, ''Faith Works.'' His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, '''but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.'''
Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.
''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism.''
Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.
''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on terror as a ''crusade.''
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ''Plan of Attack'': ''Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible.''
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence -- true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.
Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it.
George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.
The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed ''Ask President Bush'' events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ''I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.'' Bush simply said ''thank you'' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.
Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ''I trust God speaks through me.'' In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ''his faith helps him in his service to people.''
A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or ''born again.'' While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 -- potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.
This signaling system -- forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president's specific fingerprint -- carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush's certainty. ''This issue,'' he says, of Bush's ''announcing that 'I carry the word of God' is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not.''
Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.
Righteous rage -- that's what Hardy Billington felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in Massachusetts. ''It made me upset and disgusted, things going on in Massachusetts,'' the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo., told me. ''I prayed, then I got to work.'' Billington spent $830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town. It read: ''I Support President Bush and the Men and Women Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit Poplar Bluff.'' Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the White House scheduling office.
By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the podium. ''The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I'm not much of a talker,'' Billington, a shy man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me several days later. ''I've never been so frightened.''
But Billington said he ''looked to God'' and said what was in his heart. ''The United States is the greatest country in the world,'' he told the rally. ''President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.''
The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it -- and ''it'' was the faith.
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.
Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: ''For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart,'' he said. ''You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that needs -- when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation.''
The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge -- his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.
Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.
''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''
But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's hand, Billington remembered being reserved. '''I really thank God that you're the president' was all I told him.'' Bush, he recalled, said, ''Thank you.''
''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public.''
Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?
''I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's throat,'' George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.
The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.
He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . .
then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil.'' He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.
''Won't that be amazing?'' said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. ''Can you imagine? Four appointments!''
After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.
Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn.''
''I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going to push it,'' he said, and then tried out a line. ''Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?''
The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,'' that ''homeland security cost more than I originally thought.''
In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that ''hands down,'' he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. ''You know, I'm sitting there with Schröder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm thinking: What's Schröder thinking?! He's sitting here with two blacks and one's a woman.''
But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.
''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.'' The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.''
Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: ''I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win.'' Yet one part of Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn -- a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland -- a moment's pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him ''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.
''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said, ''But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ''I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What's that line? -- the devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll come after you.''
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.
''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.
''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.''
And what is that?
''Easy certainty.''
---------
Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most recently of ''The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill.''Tuesday, October 19, 2004
WISDOM FROM AN OLD FART
George Carlin's View on Aging
Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we're kids? If you're less than 10 years old, you're so
excited about aging that you think in fractions." How old are you?" "I'm four and a half!" You're never thirty-six and a half.
You're four and a half, going on five! That's the key.
You get into your teens, now they can't hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead." How old are you?" "I'm gonna be16!" You could be 13 , but hey, you're gonna be 16!
And then the greatest day of your life . ... you become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony. YOU BECOME 21 YESSSS!!!
But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk. He TURNED 30; we had to throw him out. There's no fun now, you're just a sour-dumpling.
What's wrong? What's changed? You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you're PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it's all slipping away.
Before you know it, you REACH 50 . . . and your dreams are gone. But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn't think you would!
So you BECOME 21, TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE it to 60. You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70!
After that it's a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday!
You get into your 80s and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30; you REACH bedtime.
And it doesn't end there. Into the 90s, you start going backwards; "I was JUST 92."Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. "I'm 100 and a half!"
May you all make it to a healthy 100 and a half!!
HOW TO STAY YOUNG
1. Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height. Let the doctors worry about them. That is why you pay them.
2. Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down.
3. Keep learning. Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever. Never let the brain idle - and that's the devil's workshop."
And the devil's name is Alzheimer's.
4. Enjoy the simple things.
5. Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.
6. The tears happen. Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with us our entire life, is ourselves. Be ALIVE while you are alive.
7. Surround yourself with what you love, whether it's family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever. Your home is your refuge.
8. Cherish your health: If it is good, preserve it. If it is unstable, improve it. If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.
9. Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, even to the next county; to a foreign country but NOT to where the guilt is.
10. Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. And if you don't send this to at
least 8 people - who cares? But do share this with someone. We all need to live life to it's fullest each day.
Never regret becoming older; too many are denied the privilege!Friday, October 15, 2004
WELL, DUH - EVERYBODY KNOWS A GAZILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT IS WAAAY BETTER THAN A BAZILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT. JEEZ.
Bush plays his deficit shell game
David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
In his final debate with Sen. John Kerry on Wednesday night, President Bush reiterated his pledge to cut the nation's record budget deficit in half by the end of one more term in office.
"It requires pro-growth policies that grow our economy and fiscal sanity in the halls of Congress," he declared.
A day later, Bush's Treasury secretary, John Snow, told the halls of Congress that he's taking the extreme step of using government workers' pension money to avoid increased borrowing that would push the Bush administration past a $7.38 trillion debt ceiling.
In a dazzling display of fiscal sanity, Snow said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee that "it is imperative that the Congress take action to increase the debt limit by mid-November," which would be, as luck would have it, after the Nov. 2 election.
So let's recap: The Bush administration finds itself unable to operate within the boundaries of the highest debt ceiling in U.S. history, so its solution is to get by on other people's money until it can secure approval to run up even more debt.
Pro-growth policies indeed.
"It certainly highlights the disconnect between rhetoric and reality," said Harry Zeeve, national field director for the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budget watchdog group.
"The government is not living within its means," he said. "It's not unlike having to raise the limit on your credit-card account, and that's a dangerous thing. Eventually you'll have to pay a price for it."
Rising national debt reflects the cumulation of continuing annual deficits. It poses a risk of higher interest rates for everything from home mortgages to car loans.
Soaring national debt also represents a danger that the nation's creditors, including a number of foreign governments, will grow distrustful of our mounting IOUs and eventually ask for their money back.
In any case, Bush isn't the first president to exploit the $56 billion Government Securities Investment Fund, or G-Fund, for a little fiscal sleight of hand.
That honor, a Treasury Department spokeswoman told me, goes to the president's dad, George H.W. Bush, who tapped government workers' pension money in 1989 when confronted with a fast-approaching debt ceiling of $2.8 trillion.
President Bill Clinton did the same in 1996 when faced with a $4.9 trillion debt limit and a nasty budget battle with Congress.
But the current occupant of the White House has made the most aggressive use of the tactic -- and required the most frequent increases in his administration's debt load.
According to the Treasury Department, Bush has had his Treasury secretary dip into the G-Fund every year for the past three years as government spending wildly exceeded revenues.
During this same period, Bush has pushed through a series of tax cuts while pursuing ambitious domestic and foreign-policy agendas, including two wars and an overhaul of the Medicare system.
"I don't know how seriously we can take Bush's attitude toward fiscal responsibility," said Alan Auerbach, an economist at UC Berkeley. "He has very little credibility on this issue."
In his letter to Congress, Snow vowed that all cash taken from the government pension fund eventually will be restored and that beneficiaries will feel "as if this temporary action had never taken place."
Meanwhile, the White House announced Thursday that the budget deficit this year totaled $413 billion, which is a record in dollar terms but not as a percentage of the overall economy.
Administration officials, with all the exuberance of a kid who got a D in algebra instead of an F, were quick to note that the $413 billion deficit is much better than the $521 billion shortfall they'd been forecasting earlier in the year.
Just hours after raiding the G-Fund and demanding a higher debt ceiling, Snow said he was "encouraged by the progress our economy has made."
He said that "the combination of a growing economy bringing in increased revenues, along with tight controls on spending, will enable us to reach the president's goal of cutting the budget deficit in half in five years."
What Snow didn't say is that Bush's deficit-reduction goal rests in large part on a virtual spending freeze by Congress, an almost laughable aspiration.
For his part, Josh Bolten, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that the record $413 billion deficit is "a clear reflection of our strengthening economy and improving fiscal performance. "
The Concord Coalition's Zeeve was somewhat less enthusiastic.
"The fact that we have to keep raising the debt limit means that we're spending more than we take in," he observed. "This should be causing chronic heartburn for ordinary Americans.
"This administration has pursued a big-government spending policy and a small-government taxing policy. The result can only be deficits as far as the eye can see."Thursday, October 14, 2004
DUBYA TO HALLIBURTON: GO AHEAD AND PISS IN THE DRINKING WATER, GUYS!
Halliburton's Interests Assisted by White House
The administration has lent support to a lucrative drilling technique. Some in the EPA consider it an environmental concern.
Quote
"EPA produced a final report . . . that I believe is scientifically unsound and contrary to the purposes of the law."
Weston Wilson
EPA environmental engineer
"EPA selected panel members who we believed would be unbiased and fair."
Cynthia Bergman
EPA spokeswoman
---------
By Tom Hamburger and Alan C. Miller, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Over the last four years, the Bush administration and Vice President Dick Cheney's office have backed a series of measures favoring a drilling technique developed by Halliburton Co., Cheney's former employer.
The technology, known as hydraulic fracturing, boosts gas and oil production and generates $1.5 billion a year for the company, about one-fifth of its energy-related revenue. In recent years, Halliburton and other oil and gas firms have been fighting efforts to regulate the procedure under a statute that protects drinking water supplies.
The 2001 national energy policy report, written under the direction of the vice president's office, cited the value of hydraulic fracturing but didn't mention concerns raised by staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since then, the administration has taken steps to keep the practice from being regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which Halliburton has said would hurt its business and add needless costs and bureaucratic delays.
An EPA study concluded in June that there was no evidence that hydraulic fracturing posed a threat to drinking water. However, some EPA employees complained about the study internally before its completion, and others have strongly criticized it publicly since its release.
One of them, an environmental engineer and 30-year EPA veteran in Denver, last week sought whistle-blower protection in an 18-page statement sent to the agency's inspector general and members of Congress. The statement alleges that the study's findings were premature, may endanger public health and were approved by an industry-dominated review panel that included a current Halliburton employee.
"EPA produced a final report … that I believe is scientifically unsound and contrary to the purposes of the law," Weston Wilson wrote to lawmakers.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said Wednesday that the agency was reviewing Wilson's statement but did not "believe that any of the concerns raised by his analysis would lead us to a different conclusion."
Cheney declined to be interviewed or to answer specific questions for this story. His spokesman, Kevin Kellems, cited the vice president's commitment to keeping the 2001 energy policy deliberations confidential, a principle Cheney is defending in federal court.
"There is an important principle at stake in protecting the ability of the office of the president and vice president to receive the most candid and direct advice and counsel during the policymaking process," Kellems said.
Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive from 1995 to 2000, is the leader among three large companies providing most fracturing services to oil and gas drilling operations around the world. Fracturing affords access to hard-to-reach energy deposits by forcing pressurized fluids deep into the earth, creating underground fissures that permit oil and gas to flow toward surface wells.
Halliburton and other energy companies have applauded the administration's support of fracturing, which they say has proved safe for decades.
Efforts to regulate hydraulic fracturing became a concern for the industry during Cheney's tenure at Halliburton. A group of Alabama residents went to court in 1995 seeking to force regulation of the practice under the federal drinking water law. Halliburton filed a brief in the case, arguing that environmental regulation of the practice "could have significant adverse effects" on its business.
The company subsequently played a leading role in lobbying against efforts to regulate fracturing under federal drinking water laws.
Cheney, who left Halliburton in August 2000 to run for vice president, has said he has severed all ties to the company.
Since he took office in January 2001, Cheney has received $398,548 in deferred compensation, and he will continue to receive annual payments through 2005. He also has 433,333 options to purchase Halliburton stock, according to financial disclosure records filed in May 2004.
But his staff has pointed to an insurance policy that guarantees that the vice president will receive the deferred compensation no matter how Halliburton does — and to his commitment to donate any profits from the stock options to charity.
The administration's ties to Halliburton have become an issue in the presidential campaign. Democrats criticize the administration for awarding the company billions of dollars in contracts in Iraq. Cheney has said he played no role in the Iraq contracts.
Less attention has been paid to Halliburton's domestic operations. The company, like many in the oil and gas business, has benefited from an administration led by two former oil executives, both of whom have made clear their belief that too many regulatory hurdles hamper efforts to increase domestic energy production.
Energy Breakthrough
In 1949, engineers from Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. gathered in an Oklahoma field to experiment with a new drilling technique: They pumped gasoline, napalm, crude oil and sand into the ground under enormous pressure in hopes of stimulating oil from a 4,882-foot-deep well.
This successful test of hydraulic fracturing would "forever change the workings — and fortunes — of the energy business," said a Halliburton news release commemorating the experiment's 50th anniversary.
The company estimates that the technique has increased recoverable oil and gas reserves in North America by as much as a third. About 28,000 wells a year are fractured. Halliburton services at least one-third of the market, analysts say.
The ingredients used in fracturing vary with the job and the terrain. Most of them are as benign as food additives, but they can include toxic chemicals. In every case, the fluid includes water and a "propping agent" — usually fine sand or ceramics mixed with a chemical gel — that is pumped into the cracks to keep them open. A second chemical mixture liquefies the gel so that much of the injected water and chemicals can be removed before the gas is extracted.
But some of the fluid remains in the ground, a cause for concern in heavily drilled areas.
Energy companies say there is not a single proven case that fracturing fluids caused contamination.
But in Alabama, a group of residents petitioned the EPA in 1994, saying that their drinking water had been fouled by fracturing fluid used to extract methane from coal beds.
They asked the agency to force the state to regulate fracturing under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. They argued that wells subjected to fracturing should be held to the same pollution standards as wells used to dispose of waste from energy production.
The EPA denied the request. Residents asked the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the decision, and in 1997, the court ruled that fracturing should be regulated under the federal drinking water law.
The Alabama case set off a scramble in the industry, which feared it would lead to wider regulation of fracturing — imposing costly requirements for permits, inspections and testing.
While the court case was unfolding, lobbyists for Halliburton and other energy companies began pressing the Clinton administration to exempt fracturing from regulations under the drinking water law.
They made limited progress. Former EPA Administrator Carol Browner was called to Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress from gas-producing states. She said more study was needed, and the agency launched the drinking water study that ended this year.
Cheney-Led Task Force
Nine days after his inauguration in 2001, President Bush asked Cheney to head a Cabinet-level task force to draw up a national energy strategy.
The task force consisted of the vice president, nine Cabinet members and five senior administration appointees. Research and writing was directed by two aides to Cheney supported by a working group of representatives from participating Cabinet agencies. The working group met through February and March, often in the vice president's ceremonial office, to develop recommendations for the principals — Cheney and Cabinet members.
The Cheney-led task force would tackle some of the highest-priority issues on the new administration's energy agenda: expanding oil and gas production, improving pipeline and power line transmission systems and developing a new approach to regulating air and water pollution.
To the surprise of some of those involved in the effort, the Cabinet-level panel also would consider a narrower topic of importance to Cheney when he headed Halliburton: hydraulic fracturing.
Cheney has cited executive privilege to keep task force deliberations secret. But interviews and records obtained by The Times show that Cheney's office was involved in discussions about how fracturing should be portrayed in the report, and that it resisted EPA attempts to include concerns about its effects on the environment.
The Energy Department drafted language for the task force that described hydraulic fracturing as essential to increasing domestic gas production and that asserted that production would be hurt by regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Documents obtained by The Times show that in the spring of 2001, EPA officials corresponded with the vice president's office at least three times requesting modifications in the proposed language. The EPA specifically asked that the report note that the EPA was studying potential environmental consequences of the technique.
A May 1, 2001, e-mail from the EPA to Karen Knutson, a Cheney aide serving as deputy director of the task force, proposed the addition of the following paragraph:
"As a result of the … lawsuit on hydraulic fracturing of coalbed methane wells, the EPA recognizes this issue raises concerns and is conducting an investigation to evaluate the potential risks to ... drinking water." The proposed language described the ongoing EPA study of fracturing and water quality, and noted that it could culminate in "a regulatory determination."
On May 3, EPA employees said, they received a final pre-publication draft of the report. Agency staff members met into the evening to discuss the lack of responsiveness from Cheney's office on fracturing and several other issues. They decided to ask then-EPA Administrator Christie Whitman to write to the vice president personally to request modifications.
The following day, Whitman initialed a memo to Cheney asking him to reconsider parts of the final draft, including the section on fracturing. Her note pressed Cheney to scale back the recommendation exempting hydraulic fracturing from regulation.
Whitman warned that the administration could be "walking into a trap" by taking a public position against any regulation before the EPA completed its study of drinking-water pollution.
Whitman, who resigned last year, declined to be interviewed. Through a spokesman, she said, "EPA offered its expertise and input on relevant issues whenever possible," but she said she didn't recall details concerning the task force's handling of hydraulic fracturing.
"From my perspective, the vice president's office was driving the issue of hydraulic fracturing," said Jeremy Symons, a former EPA staffer assigned to the task force, who now works for a wildlife conservation organization.
When the task force report was released on May 16, 2001, the reference to an exemption from regulation was gone. But the report described the benefits of fracturing in detail without any mention of the EPA study.
"In certain formations, it has been demonstrated that the gas flow rate may be increased by as much as twenty-fold by hydraulic fracturing," the report said, noting that "most new gas wells drilled in the United States will require hydraulic fracturing."
Although Cheney declined to answer questions about his office's role in the fracturing discussions, his spokesman, Kellems, said the task force encouraged "environmentally sound production" of energy.
During the next three years, the administration supported a regulatory exemption for the practice on Capitol Hill and at the EPA.
Cheney participated in House-Senate conference committee negotiations last year that produced a sweeping national energy bill with a provision that would exempt fracturing from EPA drinking water regulation. Bush and Cheney immediately endorsed the energy bill. Some of those involved in the meetings said they could not recall or did not know whether Cheney intervened on behalf of fracturing.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company "did not contact Vice President Cheney or his office about hydraulic fracturing or the [provision in] the energy bill."
The bill has passed the House, but has languished in the Senate under the threat of a filibuster.
EPA Study Attacked
Although stymied in Congress, the gas and oil industry won an important victory within the administration.
In June, the EPA released its long-awaited study initiated in response to the Alabama lawsuit. The report focused on the use of fracturing to recover methane gas from coal beds, which often lie close to the surface and near groundwater used for drinking.
The report concluded that "injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into coal bed methane wells poses little or no threat" to drinking water supplies and "does not justify additional study at this time."
Hall said the study confirmed Halliburton's "long-standing belief that hydraulic fracturing poses little or no threat to drinking water sources."
But the EPA study has come under sharp attack within the agency. An EPA water expert, who reviewed drafts of the report before its release, said he complained internally about several flaws. The water expert, who did not want his name used because he was speaking without authorization, said his concerns were largely ignored.
Wilson, the EPA environmental engineer, and two other specialists from the EPA Denver regional headquarters told The Times they were not consulted, even though their territory included the country's richest coal bed methane fields and some of the nation's most vulnerable water supplies.
In his statement to the EPA inspector general and members of Congress, Wilson said the study did not follow approved methodology, relied on a panel of experts with conflicts of interest and failed to include any field investigation.
The report was based largely on a review of fracturing studies, reports of water contamination and consultations with state regulatory officials. The EPA decided against proceeding with a second phase of independent fieldwork.
"This study was hijacked," Wilson said in an interview. The EPA's multiple failures "may result in danger to public health and safety," he said.
Wilson's statement said the study found that fracturing fluids often contained hazardous chemicals. But because their patented formulas are proprietary, all the potential compounds are not publicly identified, he said.
"EPA cannot objectively nor scientifically defend its claim that this practice does not risk endangering sources of underground drinking water," Wilson said in an interview. Agency officials said the chemicals were diluted and dispersed enough to minimize the risk. And they said their analysis of incident reports found no firm proof that fracturing had directly caused drinking water contamination.
"Unless we actually see threats to drinking water supplies, the Safe Drinking Water Act admonishes EPA not to regulate injection for oil and gas production unnecessarily," said EPA spokeswoman Bergman.
The report did find that diesel fuel in fracturing fluid posed a risk to drinking water. But EPA officials said no regulatory action was necessary, because the three major fracturing companies voluntarily agreed to stop using the fuel in coal bed methane operations. Wilson's statement says the arrangement is inadequate, because the EPA has no way of enforcing it and any of the parties can drop out at will.
The EPA report was reviewed by a seven-person panel: a senior technical advisor at Halliburton, a manager from an industry-funded research institute who previously worked for Halliburton, a senior engineer with BP Amoco and two academics who had worked for the energy industry. A sixth member, a state regulator with an engineering background, also had worked for Amoco. The final member was an expert on hydraulic fracturing from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
"EPA selected panel members who we believed would be unbiased and fair in reviewing this study, and selected a representative group," the EPA's Bergman said.
One reviewer, Peter E. Clark, a professor at the University of Alabama who specializes in hydraulic fracturing fluids and previously worked for the industry, said the panel was fair. "Nobody tried to grind any axes."
He said the original draft of the report reviewed by the panel overstated the risks of fracturing and needed to be toned down. He said he requested changes and that, in the end, "EPA made the right decision."
The EPA's Bergman said the final report incorporated only changes suggested by the panel "to make the study as scientifically accurate as possible."
In addition to the peer review panel, the agency sought broad input through public meetings and notices and consultation within the EPA, including the Denver regional office, officials said.
Cynthia C. Dougherty, director of the agency's groundwater and drinking water office, said there was no political influence on the selection of the peer review panel or preparation of the report. Halliburton's Hall said the company did not recommend its employee for the panel and "had no expectation of specific benefit" from his participation.
The EPA report was a victory for Halliburton. Although only 1% of the company's fracturing business is in coal bed methane fields, it is one of the fastest-growing sources of gas production in the U.S. The study is seen as a boost to industry's efforts to win a blanket exemption for fracturing.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who has followed the fracturing study's progress, said the EPA review "made a faith-based leap to conclude that injecting toxic materials" underground posed little or no threat, he said. "The unanswered questions in EPA's report cry out for further study."
Geoffrey D. Thyne, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines who has done consulting work for energy companies and local governments, said fracturing is generally safe but needs to be monitored, particularly in areas where oil and gas deposits are close to water supplies. Exempting fracturing from EPA regulation "is premature, unwise and goes against the public interest," he said.
*
Times staff researchers Robin Cochran in Washington and Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
The fight over a drilling technique
*
When Dick Cheney led Halliburton Co. in the late 1990s, the firm opposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation of hydraulic fracturing, a technique that pumps pressurized fluid into the ground to boost oil and gas production. Halliburton and two other companies dominate worldwide use of the method. The administration of President Bush and Vice President Cheney has taken steps to keep the practice of hydraulic fracturing from being regulated by the EPA under federal drinking water
laws.
1995: Dick Cheney becomes chief executive of Halliburton Co., a leader in fracturing.
1997: Alabama residents win a ruling in U.S. appeals court that fracturing should be regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
1999: Following up on its ruling, the U.S. appeals court orders the EPA to oversee fracturing in Alabama.
2000: Halliburton lobbies in Washington to exempt fracturing from regulation under drinking water law.
2001: Vice President Cheney convenes task force to devise a national energy policy.
2001: The EPA chief presses Cheney to scale back language recommending the exemption of fracturing from a task force report. The exemption recommendation is removed, but the report notes the benefits of fracturing.
2003: Bush and Cheney back a sweeping energy bill that includes a provision to exempt fracturing from EPA drinking water regulation.
2004: An EPA study concludes that fracturing does not threaten drinking water.
2004: An EPA environmental engineer seeks whistle-blower protection after telling the agency inspector general and lawmakers that the EPA fracturing study is scientifically unsound.
*
Sources: Federal court records, national energy policy report, EPA records, interviews and news accountsThursday, October 14, 2004
JOCKS VS. GEEKS
The Two Tribes of American Politics
By Ted Rall
SEATTLE--We Americans are about to vote on what kind of country we want to be. Will we continue down the same road we've followed for over two centuries, as an imperfect nation dedicated to the preservation and expansion of individual liberties, whose Bill of Rights stands both as its greatest achievement and its most shamefully unfulfilled ideal? Or will we lurch to the right, voluntarily cashing in our personal freedom in exchange for citizenship in an empire constantly at war, reviled by the rest of the world but--until history spawns a worthy challenger--its undisputed master?
Issues like gay marriage and partial-birth abortion lead to a lot of spilled ink but are relatively inconsequential in the big picture of American politics. What divides our left from our right--each of which considers the other dangerous, if not treasonous--are competing visions of the United States. Were America's military and economic dominance over the globe to fade while our living standards and constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms remained intact, liberals wouldn't fret all that much. As we've seen since September 2001, on the other hand, conservatives don't lose sleep over increasing poverty, police checkpoints, censorship or racially motivated arrests or indefinite detentions since they see those developments as supporting the primary aim--remaining the world's sole superpower.
John Edwards (news - web sites) talks about "two Americas," two classes for whom opportunity is either a birthright or a pipe dream. What he describes is real, yet the other gap--between those who see the U.S. as a nation based on individual rights and those who see it first and foremost as a powerful empire--is almost impossible to bridge. Individualists and imperialists can't agree to disagree because they don't even agree on what the United States of America is, or what it should become. Republicans, who view George W. Bush as a commander in chief leading the empire into dangerous battles abroad against hostile savages, equate him with the nation itself. "Why do you hate America?" they reply to his critics. Liberals, who view presidents as taxpayer-funded employees, are inherently hostile to the notion that any one man can be the embodiment of a democratic America. They roll their eyes at what they believe to be a cheap rhetorical advice although, in fact, the conservatives are dead serious about the question.
American politics are just as tribal-based as those of Afghanistan (news - web sites). But where they have Pashtuns and Tajiks, we have jocks and cheerleaders versus freaks and geeks.
There are two types of high school students: the sunny kids whose eyes light up at the announcement of a pep rally, who race to the gymnasium to shout the fight song, and the sullen black T-shirt-wearing hordes who let out disgusted sighs while hunting for a hiding place to smoke cheap cigarettes. Conformists versus contrarians, extroverts versus introverts, fans of Top 40 music versus fans of obscure, critically-acclaimed bands, people who believe those in authority versus those who don't. Athletes grow up to vote Republican, dorks Democratic. The great divide was chronicled by the John Hughes films of the 1980s--aggressive, bland privilege meets victimized, appealing alienation and wins--and it lives on in a classic right-wing Internet reposte to leftist posters: "You got beat up in school a lot, didn't you?" Members of the in crowd can marry those of the out crowd, work together and even be friends, but they will never share basic assumptions about the way the world works.
It's hazy now, but our two tribes used to agree about a lot more stuff. Democrats and Republicans both thought that Jimmy Carter was a nice man but an ineffective administrator, that Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) was a good speaker, that Bill Clinton (news - web sites) was a womanizer. Then the 2000 election was stolen and Bush exploited the 9/11 attacks as an excuse for wars of conquest and domestic political clampdowns. Republicans demanded total obeisance, Democrats refused, and both sides began spewing red-hot rhetoric that makes them irreconcilable.
So half the electorate looks at George W. Bush and sees a courageous, plainspoken man of integrity, comparable to Churchill, whereas the other half thinks he's a dullard and a pipsqueak whose strings are pulled by corrupt corporate executives. Since support for Bush or Kerry has more to do with tribal affiliation than issues or suitability for office, neither the incumbent nor his opponent's performance on the campaign trail nor the latest news on the economy or the wars budge the polls more than a few points back and forth. Incredibly, only one or two percent of the electorate remains undecided.
In a few weeks, either the imperialists or the individualists will emerge triumphant. The winning constituency will claim the right to decide what kind of country the U.S. is and should be. In truth, however, the two tribes of postmodern American politics are too closely matched for any election to settle that question.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
DUBYA IS A BAD PREZ
because:
• Upon taking office after the most controversial election in American history, he had a responsibility to ensure that the nation's broken voting systems were fixed - and that he failed to meet that responsibility in time for this year's election.
• The massive tax cuts for the rich that he advocated have starved the federal treasury to such an extent that deficits are skyrocketing.
• He was wrong to promote trade policies that have done deep damage to U.S.-based manufacturing industries.
• He was wrong to neglect the economic slowdown that has caused a net loss of jobs during his presidency and has led to rising poverty rates.
• He was wrong to oppose calls to extend unemployment benefits as long-term unemployment approached a 20-year high during his tenure.
• He was wrong to set up an energy task force that took its cue from energy industry insiders while paying no heed to the concerns of environmentalists, consumers and communities.
• His administration should not have scrapped new workplace safety rules.
• It was wrong to tell Congress his Medicare reform bill would cost $400 billion over 10 years when his own analysts had reported that the bill would cost more than $500 billion - with much of the money going to increase pharmaceutical industry profits.
• The Alaskan wilderness, and our national parks and forests, are precious resources that should not be exploited.
• His appointees to the Federal Communications Commission were wrong to try to eliminate protections against media monopoly at the national and local levels.
• It was a dumb idea to push for enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act and then fail to fund it.
• He has failed to provide for homeland security because of his refusal to order inspections of cargo entering U.S. ports and being shipped in the cargo holds of U.S. planes.
• The Patriot Act was so broadly written as to pose a threat to the individual rights and liberties of Americans.Wednesday, October 06, 2004
"TELL A LIE LOUD ENOUGH AND LONG ENOUGH, IT BECOMES THE TRUTH" - JOSEF GOEBBELS
Cheney persists in seeing Qaeda-Saddam link
Wed 6 October, 2004 05:14
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney has linked prewar Iraq with al Qaeda in the vice-presidential debate, despite assessments from the CIA and the September 11 Commission that have found no conclusive tie.
Cheney, often criticised for saying Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies to justify last year's invasion of Iraq, said of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein: "He had an established relationship with Al Qaeda."
Cheney's opponent, Democrat John Edwards, repeatedly said the vice president was trying to mislead the public because there were no definitive links established between al Qaeda and Saddam or Iraq and the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"You've gone around the country suggesting that there is some connection. There is not," Edwards said. "And in fact the CIA is now about to report that the connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein is tenuous at best."
A CIA report found no conclusive evidence that Saddam's regime had harboured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, now the most wanted man in Iraq and an al Qaeda ally.
Before the U.S.-led invasion, the Bush administration had said Zarqawi's presence in Baghdad was evidence that Iraq was helping him. Polls show many Americans believe Iraq was behind the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"There's no conclusive evidence the Saddam Hussein regime had harboured Zarqawi," a U.S. official said on Tuesday about the CIA report.
But the official stressed that the report did not make any final judgements. "To suggest the case is closed on this would not be correct," the official said.
Cheney said the report also points out that when some of Zarqawi's people were arrested, "Saddam personally intervened to have them released, supposedly at the request of Zarqawi."
"What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action," Cheney said.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday said he knew of no "strong, hard evidence" linking Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda.
But on Tuesday, in a statement, Rumsfeld said he was misunderstood. "I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq," Rumsfeld said.
The September 11 Commission report in July said there was no evidence of a "collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda or an Iraqi role in attacking the United States.Wednesday, October 06, 2004
WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY?
Tonight, the one and only veep debate was on TV. Online polls (and anyone with more than just half a brain) say John Edwards beat the crap out of Dick Vader, errr, Dick Cheney.
The debate by the numbers.
There were 20 questions tonight—5 about Iraq, 3 about al Qaeda or Homeland Security, 2 on gay marriage, 2 about lawsuit reform, 2 on VP experience, 1 on Iraq, 1 on poverty, 1 on fiscal responsibility, 1 on aids, and 1 on unity.
Here is a sampling of the words repeated:
VP Cheney
Terrorists—31
John Kerry—15
Wrong—12
Taxes—9
Security—8
Sen. John Edwards
Truth—11
Pres. Bush—7
Halliburton—6
Iraq—25
Plan—13
Health Care—14Tuesday, October 05, 2004
OFFICER, I'VE BEEN A B-A-A-A-A-A-D BOY....
Stockings, High Heels for Women Riot Police
KABUL (Reuters) - Fishnet stockings and high heels are not the norm for riot police, but this is Afghanistan.
Masouma was one of five women being trained by U.S. forces early on Sunday to cope with civil disturbances during the country's first ever presidential vote on Oct. 9.
Surrounded by nearly 200 men in dark blue uniforms, matching caps and black military-style boots, the small female contingent stood out with their colorful headscarves, lipstick, silver fingernails and gold earrings dangling under headscarves.
"We have asked our American friends to give us boots and hats so we have proper uniforms," Masouma told reporters during a break in training. All the women wore a blouse and a long skirt, but some had on stockings and high-heeled shoes underneath.
"They (the men) are well equipped, so we must be too." In an apparent breakdown in communications, U.S. Sergeant Damian George did not believe there was a major problem.
"The women expressed that they have been in high heels their whole life, and they feel they can accomplish the mission in those."
High heels or no high heels, there is a serious point to including women in the fledgling police force in this conservative Muslim country.
Men are not allowed to search women, and females are still under-represented despite new freedoms enjoyed since the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban militia late in 2001. "We're trying to incorporate females into the police," George said on a field in central Kabul, as recruits in the background learned to handle their new plastic riot shields and batons. "We're trying to force the issue and get more females out there."Saturday, October 02, 2004
SING IT, FEE!
YOUNG AND GAY IN REAL AMERICA : Brick City
Braving the Streets Her Way
By Anne Hull, Washington Post, Sunday, October 3, 2004; Page A01
The belt buckle says SEXY. The silk jersey says Denver Nuggets. Both are laid out on the bed as Felicia Holt stands at the ironing board, trying to press some perfection into her Friday night. Her T-shirt is fresh from the store package and goes on warm. Two dabs of Egyptian musk oil on the neck. Hair braided short like an NBA star. A do-rag carefully tied over her braids.
A voice rolls down the hall. "Felicia, is your room clean?"
"Yeah, Ma."
Felicia picks a cap from her vast collection on the dresser and stands in front of the mirror. With sleepy eyes and a smooth jaw, she cocks her chin with satisfaction. What stares back is the creamiest thug on the block. To be a young lesbian from the trash-blown and violent streets of Newark takes a measure of imagination. Felicia uses a soapy toothbrush to buff her Timberlands, diligent and delicate, still believing that a Friday night can hold some wonder. She contemplates the splendor of Jersey Gardens mall until she remembers the weekend crowds on a city bus, everyone packed like sardines and breathing each others' necks.
"No seats," Felicia says, fastening her rainbow necklace. "I got a date, and I don't want her to stand."
What is gay America? It is this 17-year-old who lives with her mother and two teenage sisters in an apartment on working-class Eckert Avenue. There is a Bible on the coffee table and fish frying in the kitchen. With no cell phone to receive text messages, Felicia keeps her folded love notes in a shoe box. I just want to kick it with you, one girl writes.
In courtrooms and city halls across the country, a historic battle is being fought over the expansion of rights for gay people. Far below the revolution is Felicia Holt, whose life is as hidden from the national debate as her box of stashed love notes. She cares less about wedding bells than dodging stray bullets and storefront preachers who keep the word "abomination" on the tips of their tongues, reserved for the likes of this high school senior now pulling the brim of her hat low over one eye.
Newark. Brick City. Twenty-eight percent living in poverty, 54 percent African American, 30 percent Hispanic, Newark is just a $1.50 PATH train ride from Manhattan, but Felicia hardly ever crosses the river. Her world is Newark and she knows every inch of it, every shortcut through every vacant field. The Pabst brewery has been boarded up since her childhood, but the giant bottle on the roof is still the neighborhood North Star.
Leafy suburbs have after-school gay organizations and parent support groups. Felicia's Newark has nothing. On Friday nights, a rattletrap teen dance hall called the African Globe is the one beacon in an otherwise empty landscape for gay teenagers. They descend by the hundreds, Felicia among them, waiting to get inside their dingy sanctuary.
Felicia felt none of the windfall of victory many American gays experienced last year when the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized homosexual relations between adults, or when the Massachusetts high court allowed gays to marry in that state. Getting married was someone else's dream. Felicia was more worried about staying alive.
Survival is a part of everyday Newark, but for Felicia it intensified in May 2003 with the killing of her friend, a 15-year-old lesbian named Sakia Gunn, who was at a bus stop downtown when she rejected a man's pickup attempt with the declaration that she was gay. A fight followed and Sakia was stabbed to death. The slaying was Newark's version of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student found beaten and lashed to a fence post in 1998 in Wyoming. In Shepard's case, gay and lesbian organizations flew into the town of Laramie to maximize the political moment. President Bill Clinton spoke out against the hate crime, and in New York thousands of protesters marched down Fifth Avenue. No such forces rallied around the poor black teenager from Newark.
When Felicia heard the news about Sakia, she hurried downtown to the bus stop where her friend had been killed. Dozens of other young black lesbians were already gathered at the corner of Broad and Market, and more kept arriving, bringing Knicks jerseys, Mass candles and cardboard eulogies that said "Stop the Killing" or "Rest Your Head, Baby Girl." The shrine grew in gaudiness and emotion, and not even rain or darkness sent the mourners home. The teenagers clung to the patch of bloody sidewalk in a stubbornness that suggested a political awakening.
The vigil was just the start. A few days later, nearly 500 marched from the bus shelter to City Hall, demanding that Newark Mayor Sharpe James do more to protect gay youths. By the day of her funeral, Sakia Gunn had become a martyr. Perry's Funeral Home had prepared for only a modest crowd, but hours before the service began, young people were lining up to view Sakia's body in a small room upstairs. She was laid out in a blue tracksuit. When the 1 p.m. service started, the funeral director, Samuel Arnold, glanced out the window and all he could see, on the lawn and up and down Mercer Street in front, were young people. He guessed there were 2,000 mourners standing outside.
Before the coffin lid closed, a friend of Sakia's dropped in a white-gold necklace that spelled in cursive script "Lesbian Pride."
After the funeral, Felicia took stock of her life. She looked like Sakia, dressed like Sakia and braided her hair like Sakia. The smart thing would've been to ditch the men's clothing and rainbow gear. That struck Felicia as cowardly, if not disingenuous. She decided to go out into the world just as she was.
For the next nine months, The Washington Post spent hundreds of hours in Newark with Felicia, her family, her friends and her teachers. The events and direct quotes that appear in this story were witnessed by this reporter, unless otherwise noted.
The thumpty-thump of rap is how she seems, but deep down Felicia is old school. Her earliest memories are of the R&B music that her parents, before the divorce, listened to as they drove around with her in a car seat. The songs today are about Glocks and bitches, but Felicia clings to Patti LaBelle. Her eyelashes curl like a fawn's. She has milk-chocolate skin as smooth as blown glass. A cubic zirconium glints from her left earlobe. Felicia can strut with the best of them, talking about what girl she "souped" or "smashed," Timbs unlaced and "yo, yo, yo," but her ankle socks say "Hug Me."
When her mother was hospitalized last year with pneumonia, Felicia was so frightened that she wore a dress for her senior photo, knowing it was the one gift that could cheer up her ailing mom. Then it was back to the T-shirts that hung like bedsheets at her kneecaps.
Felicia's natural state is a tomboy state: jumbo clothes, inhaling bags of ranch chips, storing a rolled-up chemistry notebook in her back pocket and giving girls playful headlocks in the halls at West Side High School. Even in the sixth grade, she knew she was on a different path. Her sisters wore foxy lingerie and gold chains, but Felicia felt right -- deeply right -- in sports bras and undershirts known as "wife beaters." She went swirly watching Aaliyah videos. The grooves of her yearnings cut deeper. She told no one. She'd spent enough Sundays in church pews to know that homosexuality is considered a sin. The preachers said it was a choice, something that could be overcome with prayer and willpower; the matter seemed out of Felicia's hands.
"I didn't choose nothin'," she says. "It choosed me."
In the 1950s, a black lesbian who identified with masculine traits and clothes would have been called butch or a bulldagger. Growing up, Felicia heard the word clucked in gossip -- bulldagger -- and just hearing it sent a ripple of curiosity. Now it seems old-fashioned to Felicia, even though she is the modern-day version of it.
Felicia describes herself as an "A-G," short for "aggressive." Her body is 100 percent female, but she has a masculine approach to life. She prefers women who are ultra-feminine: hoop earrings, tight jeans and French-wrap nails. Felicia finds zero attraction in another A-G. "They're my peoples, not my girls," she says.
Identifying strictly as butch or femme has diminished in recent generations of lesbians, but human sexual identity is fluid and there are infinite ways to express it. What comes naturally to Felicia -- despite her delicate features and hormonal moodiness -- is letting her khakis ride low around her boxers.
Wearing men's clothes is not enough. Felicia believes she must also display the traits of strength and invincibility that women supposedly want in men. She mimics all the distorted and magnified qualities of manhood. In Felicia's neighborhood, a public performance of bravado is mandatory for survival. "You gotta represent," Felicia says. "It just goes with the territory."
Being an A-G is a double-edged sword. At times, Felicia experiences a respect unknown by most women, free from objectification. When she sees the fellas on the corner, she greets them by jutting her chin out. "S'up?" she says. "S'up?" they say back, returning the chin jut and exchanging the neighborhood handshake. When she goes into the chicken shack, she sweeps in like a king, shaking hands with the owner -- "Ali, my man!" -- and pulls wadded-up bills and coins from her cavernous pockets.
But there is the other edge of the sword. Felicia has been jumped and beaten. Men press her for sex. After Sakia Gunn was killed, Felicia had to become more discerning about the overtures. Some have a hint of playfulness, and she can handle those. Others have menace. Felicia says that some men view her as competition for their women and want to remind her of their dominance. She has developed her own radar that tells her who might be trouble.
"They know that under the clothes, we got a shape," Felicia says. "They think they can change us. They just can't let it go. They'll say, 'Felicia, you too pretty to be gay.' "
Anita Holt had two rules for her girls as they were growing up: Any daughter who became pregnant or gay could find another place to call home. Felicia waited until the 11th grade to break the news. Her mother was in the bathroom getting ready for work. The moment of truth arrived, and Anita couldn't make good on her threat. "I don't care what you are," she told Felicia, after letting the news settle, "just don't bring it in my face." It was the best Felicia could hope for.
Her father's reaction was harsher. He told Felicia that he didn't like to see her touching her younger sisters anymore. Last fall, at the beginning of her senior year, he invited Felicia to accompany him to church with his girlfriend. Felicia was careful to wear her best plaid shirt and to double-starch her khakis, but nothing seemed to recapture her father's affections.
Anita Holt had not dwelled much on the details of Felicia's life until Sakia Gunn was stabbed. On the day of Sakia's funeral, Anita, a bus driver for the Newark school system, was behind the wheel of a van patrolling for truants when she noticed all the teenagers walking in the direction of the funeral home. Instead of collaring them, she drove them to the service. So many looked like her Felicia. "I know what my daughter is," Anita says. "I don't like it, but that's my child."
Her struggles with homosexuality have less to do with religious dogma than the rules of nature. "God put us on this earth for a woman to be with a man and a man to be with a woman," Anita says. On occasion, her curiosity outweighs her discomfort. "What do two women do?" she asks Felicia, who is too mortified to answer. Anita has some idea because her younger sister, Shakira, is gay. Shakira is 24 and looks like Mary J. Blige, with a platinum wig feathering out from beneath her suede cap. When she wanted a baby, she hooked up with a man to get pregnant, and then it was back to women for love. All of this mystifies Anita.
One autumn Saturday afternoon, Felicia is home cleaning the apartment when there's a knock on the door. "Aunt Shakira!" Felicia says with delight. In walks Shakira wearing gold hoop earrings and high-heeled boots. She drops into a chair across from Anita. Big sigh. She's having love troubles. Her girlfriend has stopped paying attention to her and isn't helping around the house.
These conversations irritate Anita. "Why would you put up with that from a female?" she asks her sister. "You could just be with a man."
"Because a female gives you something a man can't," Shakira says.
"And what is that?" Anita asks. Felicia stops sweeping and listens.
"Friendship," Shakira says.
"Well, I'm friends with my man," Anita challenges.
"It's different," says Shakira, whose baby is now 3. She folds her arms and sighs again. "Just like with a man, it ain't that easy to get up and leave."
If one theme unites the Holt household, it's the hunt for love. Anita goes out dancing with a gentleman friend but not often enough. Felicia's 15-year-old sister drags the phone around like an IV pole, calling her boyfriend who is always MIA. It is not lost on the women of the house that Felicia -- the sexual oddity -- has more nibbles than anyone.
And yet Felicia is not really looking for love. She'd rather be out riding with her crew. On this Saturday night, her ride is a city bus and her crew consists of her friend Paige, an 11th-grade A-G whose mom recently probed her sexuality by asking: "Are you really over the gate? You aren't gonna come back, are you?"
Felicia and Paige dress with great care and ritual, assembling nearly identical outfits and fresh-fitted caps.
"Abbott and Costello," Anita says, looking at the two creatures.
"Tom and Jerry," says Felicia's 15-year-old sister.
Felicia is out the door. "What you wanna do, son?" she asks Paige. They zip up their hoodies against the autumn night, walking by the corner stores where last-minute lottery dreamers buy their tickets. A midget stands on a crate, talking on a pay phone. The sidewalk sparkles with shards from a smashed bottle. A Pentecostal church glowers in the dark stillness. Two children dance together under a yellow porch light.
"I wish I had a video camera right now to get all this," Paige says. "The street, us walking, just everything about this life."
Five months after Sakia Gunn's death, the concrete near the bus shelter where she was stabbed is still scrawled with RIP farewells. The sun pounds down, the rain pounds down, and though thousands of tired feet hoof over the scribblings every day, somehow they stay. Newark's mayor still has not come through with his pledge to build a center for gay youths. Felicia and some of her friends have formed their own organization, Sakia Gunn Aggressive'z and Femme'z, and they hold bake sales and buy fresh flowers for Sakia's grave site, but they get no help from the city.
When a group of black gay activists plans a rally, Felicia is asked to sing. It is a gray and raw Saturday in October as police set up barricades to block off the area around the bus shelter where Sakia was killed. Haggard storefronts display wigs and discount fashions. "Rise and Shine With Us" banners hang from light poles, but Foot Locker and Footaction are the only two national retailers on the corner, looming like titans across from each other.
There are already more than 300 people gathered by the time Felicia arrives, carrying her gym bag from basketball practice. She is greeted by her friend Jai Marsh, the president of the Aggressive'z and Femme'z group. Felicia scans the crowd nervously. She has tried to put Sakia's death behind her, but now she stands in the middle of hundreds of lesbians, young and old, rainbow colors flying, forcing Felicia to confront her emotions. Jai grabs her hand and they squeeze toward the front.
"There is nothing here for us," says Newark Pride Alliance founder Laquetta Nelson, standing on the plywood stage. "Most gay and lesbian people are living in the closet of fear. We are about to kick that closet wide open."
The national president of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays takes the microphone and announces a $2,500 annual college scholarship in Sakia Gunn's name. The crowd quiets as a frail woman makes her way to the platform. It is LaTona Gunn, Sakia's mother. She has appeared publicly several times over the past few months. At an awards banquet in Washington for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, she received a standing ovation for urging parents to support their gay children. Someone asked afterward, "Can I have your e-mail address?" LaTona didn't even have a phone.
Today at the rally she is drained of energy. She seems less like a spokeswoman and more like a mother whose daughter is gone. As the wind picks up and torn billboards flap in the cold, LaTona sags. She tries to speak but can't. The crowd coaxes her. One girl buries her face in her hands and then calls out, imploring, "Say it, Mommy."
LaTona is led from the stage. The rawness of the moment is too much for Felicia, but there is no escape. It's her turn.
By now the crowd has grown, and Felicia climbs up on the wobbly stage. She takes off her cap and holds it in front of her face to gather her concentration. Without musical accompaniment, she sings "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The crowd sways to the hymn. When the last note is sung, Felicia bolts from the stage. She pushes through the bodies, hurrying away, with Jai trying to follow.
Jai looks everywhere for Felicia. In the pizzeria, the fish place and among the sidewalk vendors and their cardboard boutiques. Nothing. The last place to check is the video arcade. Jai ducks into the dim and noise-shattering gallery where young men with backward baseball caps take target practice. Simulated gunfire echoes off the walls, and computerized voices shout, "RELOAD, RELOAD." Jai walks through the battlefield.
Finally, in the corner, in the scrap heap of long-gone video games, she finds Felicia, working the joystick to Ms. Pac-Man, tears rolling down her cheeks.
West Side High, home of the Rough Riders, is the poorest high school in one of Newark's most high-crime neighborhoods. Students are greeted each morning by metal detectors, hand-held wands and, finally, a search of the backpack. Guards are stationed at every exit. The halls are joyous, but there is no ignoring the vista from the left side of campus: Fairmont Cemetery and its 100 acres of headstones.
After Sakia's death, the A-Gs started traveling the hallways of West Side with new respectability. In a neighborhood perforated by violence, they had earned a perverse standing. By weathering death, the odd girls were odd no longer. A oneness sweeps them all down the same river. They forget they are straight or gay. They are just Rough Riders.
Felicia manages to transcend the cliques and rivalries with her singing voice, a wood-smoked alto strengthened by years of hymns. A guidance counselor calls her the school canary. Every morning, she shambles up to the front office to sing the West Side High alma mater over the PA system, like Sarah Vaughan in K-Swiss sneakers.
As homecoming approaches, Felicia auditions to sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the football game and wins the honor. Homecoming day is crisp, all russet and copper. Without a football stadium of their own, the Rough Riders load onto buses for the ride across town to a loaner field, where the marching band runs through its routine before clearing the way for the opposing West Milford Highlanders. As the Highlanders raise their instruments to play in perfect formation, four gold tubas flash in the autumn sun.
From the bleachers, the tuba-less West Side band looks on with a familiar feeling: outgunned by the white suburbs again.
Hassan Vann, West Side's band director, senses their sinking spirits and claps his hands for attention. "We have a beautiful day out here," Mr. Vann says, regarding his troops. "The sun is out. The wind is down. So let's wake the people up! AMEN!"
The Rough Riders knock out an R-rated version of "24's" and "Get Low" while the crop-topped Hot Ice dancers swivel their hips over the 50-yard line. The Highlanders cheerleaders, dressed in Burberry plaid, watch from the sidelines with stony admiration.
The most dignified moment of homecoming is the a cappella national anthem sung from high in the press box, floating out over the quiet stadium.
No one can see the XXL clothes from the men's department because there is only the voice, "that gospel Baptist voice she's used to get through the emotions of her life," as Mr. Vann says. The voice that makes West Side feel like it has a genuine advantage.
From the bleachers, a student cries out, "Sing it, Fee!"
Felicia tells her friends that they need some church in their life. Their choices would seem without limit. Just beyond the gates of West Side High, there are seven: Full Gospel Monument of Faith Church, Pentecostal Soul Saving Temple, House of Prayer, Deliverance Christian Fellowship Church, Living World Healing Temple, Macedonia Baptist Church and Mount Sinai Church of God in Unity.
But there is only one choice for Felicia and her friends.
After Sakia was slain, most of the pulpits in Newark were silent. There was one that raged. Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church is a full-gospel, sweat-under-the-armpits, rosewater-scented African American church for gay people. Services are held downtown on Sunday afternoons in a 260-year-old stone church borrowed from the Episcopalians. The culture of Newark churches is patriarchal and cuff-linked, but Liberation in Truth is a world apart. The clergy is all lesbian, mixing priestly robes with African kente.
"Good afternoon, family!" one of the ministers calls from the front of the sanctuary. "Let's stand on our feet. Let's pray for love right now!"
The tambourines start, and a few hundred congregants raise their hands as the volume reaches higher. Unlike a lot of white gay churches, children are everywhere, the product of earlier liaisons and a shared attitude that no family is complete without kids.
The Rev. Jacquelyn Holland appears, dreadlocked and regal. It was Elder Holland who arranged counseling for Sakia's friends after her slaying. Now she looks out over the pews, noticing Felicia and a few of the girls.
"No matter how you identify yourself, no matter how you look, no matter what you are wearing, God loves you," Elder Holland tells the congregation. "Jesus had a moment when he had to go off and pray in the wilderness. God does not intend for us to stay out there. We need to come out, shouting, praising victory. We are living in the wilderness!"
Whispers of "Yes, Lord," ripple across the rows.
"It's time to embrace freedom and come out," Elder Holland beseeches. "Bring all the victory with you. Bring your voice. This is the new wine. God gave you something different. Our blessing is on the way."
The music begins again, a rising syncopation of keyboards and tambourines. Suddenly the instruments stop, leaving only the voices, working harder and harder to be heard.
Monday: Felicia's song.
Friday, October 01, 2004
THAT'S INFOTAINMENT
The Media, Losing Their Way
By David S. Broder, Washington Post
We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered.
In a year when war in Iraq the threat of terrorism and looming problems with the federal budget and the nation's health care system cry out for serious debate, the news organizations on which people should be able to depend have been diverted into chasing sham events: a scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry and a forged document charging President Bush with disobeying an order for an Air National Guard physical.
With these events coming after the editors of two respected national newspapers, the New York Times and USA Today, were forced to resign because their organizations were duped by lying staff reporters, it is hard to overcome the sense that the professional practices and code of responsibility in journalism have suffered a body blow.
After almost a half-century in this business, I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance. The feeling is not relieved by the awareness that others in journalism not only did fine work on other stories but took the lead in exposing these instances of gross malpractice.
The common feature -- and the disturbing fact -- is that none of these damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised.
We need to be asking why this collapse has taken place.
My suspicion is that it stems from a widespread loss of confidence in both the values of journalism and the economic viability of the news business.
The first symptom of wavering confidence that I spotted came when news organizations -- television particularly, but print as well -- began offering their most prestigious and visible jobs not to people deeply imbued with the culture and values of newsrooms, but to stars imported from the political world. Journalists learn to be skeptical -- of sources and of their own biases as well. If they are any good, they are tough on themselves. Politicians learn something very different -- how to please the public. They try to satisfy others, not themselves.
As the path from the White House and political campaigns to the slots as TV anchor or interviewer or op-ed columnist or editor was trod by more and more people, the message to aspiring young journalists was clear.
The way to the top of journalism was no longer to test yourself on police beats and city hall assignments, under the skeptical gaze of editors who demanded precision in writing and careful weighing of evidence. It was to make a reputation as a clever wordsmith, a feisty advocate, a belligerent or beguiling political personality, and then market yourself to the media.
These hires were made by executives who themselves had little commitment to the solid and steady journalistic values that come from working a beat for a sustained period of time. They were looking for quick fixes for their circulation or ratings -- and they thought the star system or the "big story" would save them.
But to their dismay, TV news show ratings continued to decline, newspaper circulations slumped and the fickle public -- whose wishes editors now took as their command -- switched to even more sensational outlets: the cable talk shows and infotainment formats that put argument, gossip and amusement at the top.
When the Internet opened the door to scores of "journalists" who had no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering, the bars were already down in many old-line media organizations. That is how it happened that old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip.
Time was when any outfit such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that came around peddling an ad with implausible charges would have run into a hard-nosed reporter whose first questions -- before he or she ran with the story -- would have been, "Who the hell are you guys? What's your angle? What's your proof?"
Any Texan with a grudge against George Bush and the National Guard who suddenly produced a purported photocopy of an explosive 30-year-old order signed by a dead man would have been treated with the deep distrust he deserved by the reporters to whom he offered his wares. And no professional journalist would have made a call to the Kerry campaign encouraging a flack to contact this dubious source.
We've wandered a long way from safe ground in the news business. Sometimes I wonder if we can find our way back.
davidbroder@washpost.com