Saturday, April 30, 2005
GLOBAL WARMING NO DANGER? THINK AGAIN
Western drought shrinking Big Muddy
By Patrick O'Driscoll and Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY
The "Big Muddy" is in big trouble.
The Missouri River, the nation's longest, is struggling in the dry clutches of a multiyear drought. For six years, the river's three giant reservoirs on the northern Plains have dropped slowly and alarmingly, curbing recreation, hydropower generation and commercial navigation downstream. While the drought's effects are not irreversible, river managers say it will take years for the waterway and its many users to recover.
"We're kind of in uncharted territory here," says Rose Hargrave, Missouri River program manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the river's six dams and the lakes behind them. "Reservoir levels have never been so low. The Plains snow pack is almost non-existent. It's not looking good." (Related photo gallery: A Reservoir Runs Dry)
From its roaring headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to its slow, wide confluence with the Mississippi River, the Missouri is a 2,540-mile ribbon of frontier history, world-class fishing, billions of dollars of commerce and drinking water for millions. But years of sparse snowfall at the river's source have so reduced its flow that disruptions ripple all the way to the Mississippi.
When Fort Peck Lake here is full, it sprawls 134 miles across the prairie of northeastern Montana, drawing thousands of anglers in search of trophy walleye and other game fish. But now the USA's fifth-largest reservoir is a shrinking pool. Sixty-five years after it was created by a monster earthen dam across the Missouri, the lake level is 36 feet below average and could fall another 15 feet by this time next year.
Downriver in North Dakota, 231-mile-long Lake Oahe, the nation's fourth-largest reservoir, is so low that it literally has left the state. From Bismarck to the South Dakota border, more than 60 miles have reverted to a narrow river where the lake was once up to 5 miles wide. Left behind are weedy mud flats and boat ramps stranded a mile or more from water.
The retreat of Fort Peck, Oahe and even bigger Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota is only the most obvious sign of distress. The water deficit also threatens farming and ranching, tourism, power production, shipping and the water supply for a 10-state basin. This year, "we may not be able to place a pump in the river," says farmer Neal Turnbull of Brockton, Mont., whose 550 acres of grain crops are in jeopardy without irrigation.
The drought has even clouded the outlook for this year's bicentennial celebration of the Lewis & Clark expedition, the fabled voyage of American discovery that used the Missouri as its highway through the wilderness.
The Corps of Engineers forecasts this year's flow at 16.7 million acre-feet of water, one-third less than normal. Storage behind the Missouri's six dams is now almost 21 million acre-feet below normal. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, the amount used annually by two to three families.
About 70% of the Missouri's normal flow comes from melting snow in Montana, where state officials say it would take 350% of normal snowfall to mend the damage. This winter's yield: about 65%.
'Dry sponges for soil'
Gov. Brian Schweitzer says much of Montana's runoff will soak into the ground before reaching the river because "we have dry sponges for soil." He has asked the
Pentagon to rotate some of Montana's 1,500 National Guard troops home from
Iraq this summer to help fight the wildfires expected because the state's forests are so dry.
The drought's litany of effects on the Missouri is long and painful:
•Drinking water. Riverside towns are spending millions to add or refurbish water intakes so they can reach farther and deeper into the shrinking river. Fort Yates, N.D., on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, went dry for five days last Thanksgiving when its Lake Oahe pumps clogged with sediment. It paid $3 million for a temporary fix. Kansas City, Mo., which draws 200 million gallons a day in summer, has installed new pumps twice as deep as its permanent intakes.
•Hydropower. The river's dams normally generate about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, worth about $1.7 billion. In the drought, annual production is off at least one-third. This year's forecast is for just 5.8 billion kilowatt-hours. To make up the difference for its customers, the federal Western Area Power Administration has spent $64 million since October for costlier extra power. It will spend nearly twice that by the end of September. After two rate increases, a third is in the works.
• Tourism. Fishing on the reservoirs in Montana and the Dakotas generates hundreds of millions of dollars in a region where farming is the only other major industry. But traffic at parks, campgrounds and marinas is down because dozens of boat ramps are unreachable.
There is still enough water for boating and world-class walleye fishing. But as the lakes fall, the water warms, threatening the survival of smelt, a small fish on which the game fish feed. Recovery from a smelt die-off would take years.
"It's just like someone coming in and shutting down Ford or General Motors in Detroit," says Dick Messerly, manager of Fort Stevenson State Park near Garrison, N.D.
In Montana, renowned for its $350 million sport fishing industry, "we see significant impacts," says Ron Aasheim, a state conservation officer. Fishing restrictions and even bans have been imposed on gold-medal streams such as the Big Hole, Madison and Blackfoot rivers to protect trout weakened by the warmer, low-flowing water.
•Agriculture. Some farmers have abandoned irrigation because they can't afford to "chase the river" with longer intake pipes. Lakefront ranchers, who pen livestock with fences that reach into the reservoirs, must extend fences as the water ebbs so cattle won't stray around them. In Nebraska, farmers on two Missouri tributaries will be paid not to irrigate up to 100,000 acres of crops for the next 10-15 years in an effort to save water.
"I've seen dry years over my lifetime in the Dakotas, but this is by far the worst," says Emmonds County, N.D., farmer Ken Moser, 64, whose grandparents homesteaded on the Missouri in the 1880s. He says the family gave up "a lot of" riverfront acreage to the Corps of Engineers when Lake Oahe was filled in the 1960s in return for irrigation water. "Now we're high and dry." Moser's irrigation intake is now a mile and a quarter from the river channel. His $2 million sprinkler system has been idle for two years, and 1,100 acres have been turned from corn back to dryland crops that yield far less.
"It won't be enough. It's just going to put us way behind," says Moser, who has asked the corps for permission to dig an emergency trench from the Missouri to his parched fields.
•Shipping. The barge trade, never huge, has shrunk to 8 million tons a year, a tiny fraction of what is shipped on the Mississippi and other waterways. MEMCO Barge Line, the largest operator, hasn't run a barge up the Missouri in two years.
•Cooling water. Nuclear and other non-hydroelectric plants that use river water for cooling must lower its temperature before piping it back into the Missouri. That's because the current is too low to dilute the return flow of warmer water enough to meet limits that protect fish and the ecosystem. A plant in Kansas is building a $20 million cooling tower.
•Wildfire. Several states fear catastrophic summer fires in dry forests and plains. Grass and timber fires in February and March surprised firefighters in Oregon, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota. "To be concerned about a fire season in March in this neck of the woods is unheard of," says Richard Opper, head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
•Artifacts. Indian relics, old homesteads and tribal graves, inundated when the reservoirs were filled, are re-emerging and may become targets for looters. "They find some of these graves and actually sell the skeletons," says Charles Murphy, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
•Endangered wildlife. Lack of water has canceled an experimental "spring rise" of the river next year to improve habitat and breeding for a rare fish, the pallid sturgeon. That artificial "flush" by releasing more water from Fort Peck Dam would mimic the Missouri's natural flow. But Mike Olson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says unless "biblical rainstorms" come, the surge won't happen until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest.
Shortage of snow the culprit
For nearly a decade, the West's drought has crept across more familiar terrain: Dead forests in California and New Mexico, shrinking desert reservoirs in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, vast wildfires in Alaska, and brown lawns everywhere.
Meanwhile, a less-visible deficit has wilted the Missouri's headwaters region. This winter, Montana golfers were playing on courses normally buried in white until April or May. Lack of snow scuttled snowmobile and dog sled events.
The worst has arrived almost exactly 200 years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reached the river's source on their westward search for a route to the Pacific. In July 1805, the explorers stopped at what today is Three Forks, Mont., where three tributaries form the river.
In his journal, Lewis took note, with customary misspelling, of how full the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers were: "All of them run with great valocity and thow out large bodies of water."
Lewis might not recognize the streams this spring and summer. An index that measures available water supplies lists 39 of Montana's 52 rivers in "very dry" conditions.
The big reservoirs would be in far better shape, says Gov. Schweitzer, if not for political decisions that favor what he calls "barge traffic that doesn't exist" on the lower river in the state of Missouri.
Shipping has long been a sore point. States upriver, dependent on tourism, complain that federal managers release too much reservoir water for barge traffic. States in the lower basin, where the Missouri is a channelized ditch adapted to commercial traffic, claim the feds hold back too much in the lakes, threatening river transport of goods. Farmers fear if barge traffic is cut off, railroads and trucking companies will charge higher rates and cripple agriculture.
By law, the Corps of Engineers must manage the river for eight different uses in commerce, recreation, ecology and flood control. In a drought, "we have to try to provide service to each of those, but at a reduced level," says Paul Johnston of the agency's Omaha office.
But if reservoir storage slips below 31 million acre-feet - it is now about 35 million and falling - the corps must cease flows for barge traffic. Unless the forecast changes, the Missouri will hit that "navigation preclude" next year. The corps already plans to cut short this year's season by two months.
Even if navigation flows cease, the water savings will be small, Johnston says, because the corps still must supply drinking water downstream. He says the lakes might only rise a foot or two.
The drought also could muffle a tourism boom expected from the Lewis & Clark bicentennial.
"We're very concerned," says Clint Blackwood, executive director for the observance in Montana, where some of the biggest gatherings are planned.
If Montana has a wildfire season like it did in 2000, when nearly a million acres burned statewide, Blackwood knows what could happen. "The news media will report that Montana is on fire," he says. "And it takes only a little bit of that and people then (say), 'I'm not going to Montana this year.' "
But the most visible sign of drought remains on the reservoirs. Lake Sakakawea, named for the Indian woman who guided and translated for Lewis & Clark (her name often is spelled Sacajawea), is down 50 feet from its high-water mark in 1997. By summer's end, Lake Oahe could be 54 feet below its record level that same year.
To fish, 'take your own water'
Allan Burke, publisher of the Emmons County Record in Linton, N.D., says many locals have sold their boats. He recounts a grim joke told in town is that "you can go fishing, but you have to take your own water." This winter was the first in memory without ice fishing on nearby Beaver Bay, an inlet off Lake Oahe just above the South Dakota line. That's because Beaver Bay is gone, too. So is most of the tourist trade at Bosch's Bayside, a small resort there.
"People don't come anymore," laments Randy Bosch, 47, who says he had just four overnight campers in his 40-space RV park in all of 2004. He may have to close for good this year. Bosch says he doesn't go down anymore to where the bay used to be, except "when the TV crews come" to shoot drought footage. "I can't," he explains. "I get too upset."Saturday, April 30, 2005
GLOBAL WARMING SMOKING GUN
Experts: New Data Show Global Warming
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, Associated Press
NEW YORK - Climate scientists armed with new data from deep in the ocean and far into space have found that Earth is absorbing much more heat than it is giving off, a conclusion they say validates projections of global warming.
Lead scientist James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist, described the findings on the planet's out-of-balance energy exchange as a "smoking gun" that should dispel doubts about forecasts of climate change. A European climate expert called it a valuable contribution to climate research.
Hansen's team, reporting Thursday in the journal Science, said they also determined that global temperatures will rise 1 degree Fahrenheit this century even if greenhouse gases are capped tomorrow.
If carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions instead continue to grow, as expected, things could spin "out of our control," especially as ocean levels rise from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the researchers said. International experts predict a 10-degree leap in Fahrenheit readings in such a worst-case scenario.
The NASA-led researchers were able to measure Earth's energy imbalance because of more precise ocean readings collected by 1,800 technology-packed floats deployed in seas worldwide beginning in 2000, in an international monitoring effort called Argo. The robots regularly dive as much as a mile undersea to take temperature and other readings.
Their measurements are supplemented by better satellite gauging of ocean levels, which rise both from meltwater and as the sea warms and expands.
With this data, the scientists calculated the oceans' heat content and the global energy imbalance. They found that for every square meter of surface area, the planet is absorbing almost one watt more of the sun's energy than it is radiating back to space as heat — a historically large imbalance. Such absorbed energy will steadily warm the atmosphere.
The 0.85-watt figure corresponds well with the energy imbalance predicted by the researchers' supercomputer simulations of climate change, the report said.
Those computer models factor in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, methane and other gases — produced by everything from automobiles to pig farms. Those gases keep heat from escaping into space. Significantly, greenhouse emissions have increased at a rate consistent with the detected energy imbalance, the researchers said.
"There can no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant cause of observed warming," said Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "This energy imbalance is the `smoking gun' that we have been looking for."
Fourteen other specialists from NASA, Columbia and the
Department of Energy co-authored the study.
Scientists have found other possible "smoking guns" on global warming in recent years, but Klaus Hasselmann, a leading German climatologist, praised the Hansen report for its innovative work on energy imbalance. "This is valuable additional supporting evidence" of manmade climate change, he told The Associated Press.
In February, scientists at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography said their research — not yet published — also showed a close correlation between climate models and the observed temperatures of oceans, further defusing skeptics' past criticism of uncertainties in modeling.
Average atmospheric temperatures rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-organized network of scientists, says computer modeling predicts temperatures rising between 2.5 degrees and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
Besides raising ocean levels, global warming is expected to intensify storms, spread disease to new areas, and shift climate zones, possibly making farmlands drier and deserts wetter.
___
On the Net:
Goddard Institute for Space Studies: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Friday, April 29, 2005
SAME BUSHIT, DIFFERENT DAY
Bush's Social Security Plan Cuts Benefits
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - After nearly 60 days on the road pitching Social Security changes, President Bush is offering a new plan to fix its finances by cutting benefits of more prosperous future retirees. Democrats still aren't buying it.
In a prime-time news conference, Bush refused to back off his desire to carve private retirement accounts out of Social Security. Democrats say those personal accounts are a deal-breaker that would keep most of them from supporting Bush's revisions.
But for the first time he proposed changes under which Social Security checks for low-income workers retiring in the future would grow faster than those for people who are better off.
"By providing more generous benefits for low-income retirees, we'll make this commitment: If you work hard and pay into Social Security your entire life, you will not retire in poverty," Bush said.
The White House said Bush's proposal could be accomplished with a "sliding-scale benefit formula." That would mean lower Social Security payments for future middle- and upper-income retirees than they are currently guaranteed — a fact Bush himself did not mention in his 60-minute session with reporters.
Bush's plan immediately drew renewed ire from Democrats.
Bush would "gut benefits for middle-class families," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said in a joint statement.
They reiterated their opposition to Bush's desire to let younger workers divert some of their Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts. "All the president did was confirm that he will pay for his risky privatization scheme by cutting the benefits of middle-class seniors," Pelosi and Reid said.
Bush held his first prime-time televised news conference in more than a year as he scrambles to generate momentum for his stalled Social Security plans and to calm anger over $2-a-gallon gasoline prices. Those two issues have dragged his approval ratings down.
The president appeared at ease in the East Room of the White House as he fielded questions from reporters after a 7-minute opening statement. At times, he twisted the toe of his shoe on the carpeted riser.
He discussed major foreign policy challenges, the troubled nomination of John Bolton to be U.N. ambassador and his quest to get Senate votes on some of his controversial nominees for the federal bench. He playfully insisted he didn't take polls too seriously.
"You know, if a president tries to govern based on polls, you're kind of like a dog chasing your tail," he said.
On international issues, Bush:
_Praised
Iraq's National Assembly for approving on Thursday the country's first democratically elected government, but declined to set a date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Bush said he is pressing Iraq's incoming prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, to keep hands off the Iraqi security force that the U.S. military is creating and training.
_Called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "a dangerous person" and defended multination talks aimed at curbing his nuclear-weapon ambitions. The president said the missile defense system the United Stated is developing is part of his strategy for dealing with Kim.
_Expressed dismay with Russian President
Vladimir Putin's decision to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Syria.
_Stated that the United States, Britain, France and Germany all believe "we can't trust the Iranians when it comes to enriching uranium."
On domestic topics, Bush said he understood that motorists and businesses were unhappy about gasoline prices that are expected to stay above $2 a gallon through summer. Increasing world demand for oil, particularly from fast-growing nations like China, and lack of new U.S. refineries are putting upward pressure on prices, he said.
He pledged to encourage oil-producing nations to maximize production and promised to protect U.S. consumers. "There will be no price gouging at gas pumps in America," Bush said.
He spoke on the same day the world's largest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil Corp., announced that its profit for the first three months of the year had risen 44 percent to $7.86 billion from the corresponding quarter a year ago.
And he said would work on long-term ways to reduce America's need for foreign oil.
He prodded Congress to get an energy bill to his desk by summer but acknowledged that measure was "certainly no quick fix" for high fuel prices. The House has passed energy legislation; a companion measure awaits Senate action.
Bush disagreed with the conservative Family Research Council's contention that his judicial appointments were being held up in the Senate because of their religious faith. "I think people are opposing my nominees because they don't like the judicial philosophy of the people I've nominated," he said. "Some would like to see judges legislate from the bench. That's not my view."
Bush continued to back Undersecretary of State Bolton to be ambassador to the
United Nations. Bolton's confirmation has been stalled by allegations he dressed down subordinates, unease over his past hostility toward the United Nations and accusations he tried to pressure career intelligence analysts into twisting facts for political reasons.
"John Bolton is a blunt guy," Bush said. "Sometimes people say I'm little too blunt."
In trying to reassure lower-income Americans they had nothing to fear from a Social Security overhaul, he advocated a proposal similar to one by Robert C. Pozen, a Democrat with MFS Investment Management, a Boston mutual fund company.
Pozen's plan addresses the way Social Security benefits are increased to compensate for rising living costs. The Social Security benefits of low-income workers would remain indexed to wages — as they are now. But the benefits of higher-income workers would track price indexes. Prices tend to rise more slowly than wages so the Social Security benefits of higher-income workers would grow more slowly than under the current rules.Tuesday, April 26, 2005
HOLY CIVIL WARRIORS, BATMAN!
RIGHT-WING JIHADISTS CHIP AWAY AT AMERICANS' LIBERTY
By Cynthia Tucker
It would be comforting -- but naive -- to dismiss House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as a harmless, charmless churl who appeals only to a tiny, ineffectual group inhabiting the far religious right. In fact, the DeLay wing of the Republican Party is on the rise, and its antediluvian agenda represents a serious threat to American democracy.
That's no exaggeration.
If the DeLay wing gets its way, the entire nation will live according to the rigid rules of a handful of self-righteous folks who distrust modernity. They would dictate the way we worship, live, work, have sex and even die.
While five years' worth of political analysis has made much of the nation's cultural divide -- a bitter disagreement over social issues that cleaves the nation roughly in half -- the fact is that the entire country is being manipulated by a much smaller group. (Only 13 percent of Americans approved of Congress' intervention in the painful Terri Schiavo case.)
After President Bush's re-election, the news media swooned over vaguely worded polls showing "moral values" were the most important consideration for 22 percent of voters. But we don't really know what voters had in mind: Did they mean opposition to gay marriage, or did they mean support for programs for the poor?
Nevertheless, the generals among the religious extremists -- men such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- have used those polls to exaggerate their influence and browbeat less reactionary Republicans into supporting their agenda. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has presidential ambitions, is the latest to bow before them.
Don't be fooled into believing that the DeLay-Dobson axis represents the beliefs of most ordinary, God-fearing Americans, Christian or otherwise. It doesn't. Consider just two issues that represent the extremists' views -- the chorus of complaint against federal judges, as well as an increasingly vocal opposition to contraception.
After judges refused to ignore the law in the Schiavo case, religious extremists stepped up their attacks, suggesting that the federal judiciary is dominated by liberals out to ruin a moral America. In fact, more than half of the 821 active federal judges (445, or 54 percent) were appointed by Republicans, according to the Federal Judges Biographical Database.
Florida Judge George Greer, the main judge in the Schiavo case, was elected to the circuit court after a stint as a Republican on the Pinellas County Commission. He has been described as a conservative Christian. But Greer, who has weathered death threats, is apparently not conservative enough to satisfy the DeLay faction.
In one of his recent harangues, DeLay claimed Congress should have stopped the courts' expansion of individual liberties long ago. "The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them," he said, according to The Washington Times.
Perhaps most Americans associate the phrase "right to privacy" with the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. But the high court supported a constitutional right to privacy in its 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, when it struck down a state law that made birth control illegal. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas said, "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights ..."
According to recent polls, 94 percent of Americans find contraception morally acceptable, and 78 percent of Americans believe pharmacists have no right to refuse to fill the prescriptions. Yet there is an increasingly vocal group of extremists who want to deny adults the right to contraception.
Across the country, women are complaining of ultraconservative pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions, sometimes quizzing women on their marital status before making a decision. The next thing you know, they'll be barging into your bedroom to make sure you're wearing your flannel nightgown.
These extremists have much in common with the jihadist wing of Islam. While Christian extremists usually don't practice violence, but merely threaten it (see Greer, above), they share with extremist Muslims the belief that all people should be forced to live according to their views. That's about as un-American as it gets.Monday, April 25, 2005
SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL
The Oblivious Right
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
According to John Snow, the Treasury secretary, the global economy is in a "sweet spot." Conservative pundits close to the administration talk, without irony, about a "Bush boom."
Yet two-thirds of Americans polled by Gallup say that the economy is "only fair" or "poor." And only 33 percent of those polled believe the economy is improving, while 59 percent think it's getting worse.
Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so: President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all, everyone they talk to says so.
Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins, Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-term president on record.
What's going on? Actually, it's quite simple: Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.
The administration's upbeat view of the economy is a case in point. Corporate interests are doing very well. As a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, over the last three years profits grew at an annual rate of 14.5 percent after inflation, the fastest growth since World War II.
The story is very different for the great majority of Americans, who live off their wages, not dividends or capital gains, and aren't doing well at all. Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't part of the base.
The same obliviousness explains Mr. Bush's decision to make Social Security privatization his main policy priority. He doesn't talk to anyone outside the base, so he didn't realize what he was getting into.
In retrospect, it was a terrible political blunder: the privatization campaign has quickly degenerated from juggernaut to joke. According to CBS, only 25 percent of the public have confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about Social Security; 70 percent are "uneasy."
The point is that people sense, correctly, that Mr. Bush doesn't understand their concerns. He was sold on privatization by people who have made their careers in the self-referential, corporate-sponsored world of conservative think tanks. And he himself has no personal experience with the risks that working families face. He's probably never imagined what it would be like to be destitute in his old age, with no guaranteed income.
The same syndrome has been visible on cultural issues. Republican leaders in Congress, who talk only to the religious right, were shocked at the public backlash over their meddling in the Schiavo case. Did I mention that Rick Santorum is 14 points behind his likely challenger?
It all makes you wonder how these people ever ended up running the country in the first place. But remember that in 2000, Mr. Bush pretended to be a moderate, and that in the next two elections he used the Iraq war as a wedge to divide and perplex the Democrats.
In that context, it's worth noting two more poll results: in one taken before the recent resurgence of violence in Iraq, and the administration's announcement that it needs yet another $80 billion, 53 percent of Americans said that the Iraq war wasn't worth it. And 50 percent say that "the administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Democracy Corps, the Democratic pollsters, say that there is a "crisis of confidence in the Republican direction for the country." As they're careful to point out, this won't necessarily translate into a surge of support for Democrats.
But Americans are feeling a sense of dread: they're worried about a weak job market, soaring health care costs, rising oil prices and a war that seems to have no end. And they're starting to notice that nobody in power is even trying to deal with these problems, because the people in charge are too busy catering to a base that has other priorities.Monday, April 25, 2005
DON'T WORRY SEZ GOVT THE STUFF IS PERFECTLY SAFE
Sun Apr 24,11:24 PM ET
Sunday, April 24, 2005
POPE TO PRIESTS: KEEP IT UNDER YOUR CASSOCKS
Pope 'obstructed' sex abuse inquiry
Confidential letter reveals Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep allegations secret
Jamie Doward, The Observer (UK)
Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.
The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001.
It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as John Paul II's successor last week.
Lawyers acting for abuse victims claim it was designed to prevent the allegations from becoming public knowledge or being investigated by the police. They accuse Ratzinger of committing a 'clear obstruction of justice'.
The letter, 'concerning very grave sins', was sent from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that once presided over the Inquisition and was overseen by Ratzinger.
It spells out to bishops the church's position on a number of matters ranging from celebrating the eucharist with a non-Catholic to sexual abuse by a cleric 'with a minor below the age of 18 years'. Ratzinger's letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been 'perpetrated with a minor by a cleric'.
The letter states that the church's jurisdiction 'begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age' and lasts for 10 years.
It orders that 'preliminary investigations' into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger's office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the 'functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests'.
'Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,' Ratzinger's letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.
The letter is referred to in documents relating to a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a church in Texas and Ratzinger on behalf of two alleged abuse victims. By sending the letter, lawyers acting for the alleged victims claim the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice.
Daniel Shea, the lawyer for the two alleged victims who discovered the letter, said: 'It speaks for itself. You have to ask: why do you not start the clock ticking until the kid turns 18? It's an obstruction of justice.'
Father John Beal, professor of canon law at the Catholic University of America, gave an oral deposition under oath on 8 April last year in which he admitted to Shea that the letter extended the church's jurisdiction and control over sexual assault crimes.
The Ratzinger letter was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone who gave an interview two years ago in which he hinted at the church's opposition to allowing outside agencies to investigate abuse claims.
'In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded,' Bertone said.
Shea criticised the order that abuse allegations should be investigated only in secret tribunals. 'They are imposing procedures and secrecy on these cases. If law enforcement agencies find out about the case, they can deal with it. But you can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10 the priest will get away with it,' Shea added.
A spokeswoman in the Vatican press office declined to comment when told about the contents of the letter. 'This is not a public document, so we would not talk about it,' she said.