An excerpt...From: http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/politics/90069
As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans.
On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement. McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.The theory of intelligent design says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and that a higher power must have had a hand in guiding it.
At a breakfast meeting Tuesday with the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, McCain said Sheehan is probably being used by organizations opposed to the U.S. mission in Iraq. But, he added, she is "a symptom, not a cause" of growing public discontent with the war.
? Contact reporter C.J. Karamargin at 573-4243 or ckaramargin@azstarnet.com.
Wrap...
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
BUSHCO LIED & LIED & IS LYING...
From the much admired Morialekafa at http://morialekafa.blogspot.com :
Monday, August 22, 2005
Whether he lied?
Somewhere or other I saw something to the effect there will be a committee to look into the question of whether Bush/Cheney lied. I assume this means the committee will conclude that they didn't lie. Because otherwise what would be the point of such a committee? Of course they lied. It is perfectly obvious they lied. We already know they lied. At least one of them even admitted that the used WMD's as a rationale simply because that was something they could agree on. They knew there were no WMD's. They knew there were no mobile biological labs. They knew they didn't try to buy stuff from Niger. They knew there was no danger of a mushroom cloud. They knew absolutely that Iraq was not, and could not have been, a danger to the United States. They also knew that Iraq was in compliance with the UN inspections even though to this day they want you to believe they were resisting the inspections. They knew there was no relationship between Sadam and Osama bin Laden and they still try to slip this bullshit in whenever they can.
THEY LIED! ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, BEYOND ANY DOUBT WHATSOEVER!
We do not need a phony committe to "investigate" and then tell us they didn't lie. We also don't need to be told that the intelligence was faulty. They cooked the intelligence to be what they wanted. This whole business is so outrageous that for the most part no one wants to believe it. Just like some pro-Bush woman interviewed at Camp Casey - the president wouldn't have lied.
Why would he not have lied? He's lied about everything. EVERYTHING! I don't believe he has ever told the truth about anything, even when he could have told the truth. And the biggest liar of all, who has been wrong about absolutely everything, is Dick the Slimy Cheney, president of the United States currently hiding under another rock somewhere. Rumsfeld is almost as bad as is our dear babbling Condi.
If there is anyone in the U.S. at the moment who doesn't believe this administration lied, god help us all.
Wrap...
Monday, August 22, 2005
Whether he lied?
Somewhere or other I saw something to the effect there will be a committee to look into the question of whether Bush/Cheney lied. I assume this means the committee will conclude that they didn't lie. Because otherwise what would be the point of such a committee? Of course they lied. It is perfectly obvious they lied. We already know they lied. At least one of them even admitted that the used WMD's as a rationale simply because that was something they could agree on. They knew there were no WMD's. They knew there were no mobile biological labs. They knew they didn't try to buy stuff from Niger. They knew there was no danger of a mushroom cloud. They knew absolutely that Iraq was not, and could not have been, a danger to the United States. They also knew that Iraq was in compliance with the UN inspections even though to this day they want you to believe they were resisting the inspections. They knew there was no relationship between Sadam and Osama bin Laden and they still try to slip this bullshit in whenever they can.
THEY LIED! ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, BEYOND ANY DOUBT WHATSOEVER!
We do not need a phony committe to "investigate" and then tell us they didn't lie. We also don't need to be told that the intelligence was faulty. They cooked the intelligence to be what they wanted. This whole business is so outrageous that for the most part no one wants to believe it. Just like some pro-Bush woman interviewed at Camp Casey - the president wouldn't have lied.
Why would he not have lied? He's lied about everything. EVERYTHING! I don't believe he has ever told the truth about anything, even when he could have told the truth. And the biggest liar of all, who has been wrong about absolutely everything, is Dick the Slimy Cheney, president of the United States currently hiding under another rock somewhere. Rumsfeld is almost as bad as is our dear babbling Condi.
If there is anyone in the U.S. at the moment who doesn't believe this administration lied, god help us all.
Wrap...
Do unto others....
Frankie Lake Dirty Tricksters
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/082305C.shtml
There is a good reason why the White House is trying so hard to dissociate John Roberts from his Federalist Society affiliation. The Federalist Society has its roots in the College Republicans and derives its membership from them. Frankie Lake discusses how the Federalist Society and Young College Republicans operate using "dirty tricks."
Wrap...
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/082305C.shtml
There is a good reason why the White House is trying so hard to dissociate John Roberts from his Federalist Society affiliation. The Federalist Society has its roots in the College Republicans and derives its membership from them. Frankie Lake discusses how the Federalist Society and Young College Republicans operate using "dirty tricks."
Wrap...
Mixing politics & religion...on purpose.
August 23, 2005
latimes.com
COLUMN ONE
Grooming Politicians for Christ
Evangelical programs on Capitol Hill seek to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — In the blue and gold elegance of the House speaker's private dining room, Jeremy Bouma bowed his head before eight young men and women who hope to one day lead the nation. He prayed that they might find wisdom in the Bible — and govern by its word."Holy Father, we thank you for providing us with guidance," said Bouma, who works for an influential televangelist. "Thank you, Lord, for these students. Build them up as your warriors and your ambassadors on Capitol Hill."
"Amen," the students murmured. Then they picked up their pens expectantly.
Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides — many of them aspiring politicians — have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.Through seminars taught by conservative college professors and devout members of Congress, the students learn that serving country means first and always serving Christ.They learn to view every vote as a religious duty, and to consider compromise a sin.
That puts them at the vanguard of a bold effort by evangelical conservatives to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God."We help them understand God's purpose for society," said Bouma, who coordinates the program, known as the Statesmanship Institute, for the Rev. D. James Kennedy.
At least 3.5 million Americans tune in to Kennedy's sermons, broadcast from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Since 1995, the unabashedly political televangelist has also reached out to the Beltway elite with his Center for Christian Statesmanship in Washington. The center sponsors Bible studies, prayer meetings and free "Politics and Principle" lunches for members of Congress and their staffs, often drawing crowds in the hundreds.
The Statesmanship Institute, founded two years ago, offers more in-depth training for $345.It's one of half a dozen evangelical leadership programs making steady inroads into Washington.The most prominent is Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., an hour's drive from the capital. The college was founded five years ago with the goal of turning out "Christian men and women who will lead our nation with timeless biblical values." Nearly every graduate works in government or with a conservative advocacy group.
The Witherspoon Fellowship has had similar success, placing its graduates in the White House, Congress, the State Department and legislatures nationwide. The fellowship brings 42 college students to Washington each year to study theology and politics — and to work at the conservative Family Research Council, which lobbies on such social issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.Such programs share a commitment to developing leaders who read the Bible as a blueprint. As Kennedy put it: "If we leave it to man to decide what's good and evil, there will be chaos."
"I'm sure there are people who won't appreciate the fact that this class goes on here in the Capitol," Myal Greene said one recent evening.He glanced around the stately dining room, reserved for the institute by a member of Congress. (House regulations allow private groups to hold events in the Capitol as long as they are noncommercial, nonpolitical and do not discriminate based on race, creed, color or national origin.)To Greene, there could hardly be a more appropriate location. He considers his private faith and his public duty inseparable.
Greene, the deputy press secretary for a Republican congressman from Florida, signed up for the Statesmanship Institute in part because he felt his Christian ethics were under constant assault — from lobbyists offering him free steak dinners, from friends urging him to network over beers.The seminars proved a revelation. In one, Greene learned that ministers ran many of America's earliest schools. He hadn't thought much about education policy before that class. Now he plans to fight for history lessons on the Founding Fathers' faith, science lessons drawn from the Book of Genesis and public school prayer."It's one thing to have a [biblically inspired] position on one or two issues," said Greene, 26, who was wearing a wristband printed with the slogan "Jesus Is My Homie." "This class has you look deeper. It gives you an intellectual consistency."
On this night, the topic was bioethics. As the students unwrapped deli sandwiches and brownies, prominent bioethicist Nigel M. deS. Cameron praised them for thinking about the "great questions of the day" through the prism of faith. Too often, he added — to a few startled looks — "Christians are not noted for using their brains."In an hourlong lecture, Cameron argued that Christians must move beyond denouncing abortion to see the "moral outrage" in other common practices, such as paying Ivy League students to donate eggs in the quest for a perfect baby."Taking human life made in God's image may not be as bad, from God's point of view, as making human life in your own image," said Cameron, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. "Our humanity, warts and all, is what we have been given to steward. It's not to be manipulated."
When Cameron called for questions, one student tentatively raised his hand to ask about embryonic stem cell research — specifically, the use of "spare" embryos, frozen in fertility clinics. "Under current practice, they're going to be discarded" unless they're used for research, he said. "What do we say about that, as Christians?"
Cameron did not hold back."They're going to die anyway, right?" he said, indignant. "We don't apply the same principle to death row inmates. They're going to die anyway, so why can't we get some use out of them? We'd be able to do some fascinating experiments."The principle of manipulating human life to get experimental benefit," Cameron said, "that is a very, very serious line to cross."
The philosophy animating Cameron's lecture — that federal law should be based on biblical precepts — troubles the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State."This nation was founded specifically to avoid the government making religious and theological decisions," Lynn said. "We are not to turn the Holy Scriptures of any group into public policy."
Kennedy counters that evangelicals have every right to put up candidates who vote what they believe to be God's will — and let voters judge them. To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: "He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American."
Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that's their goal.And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it.
Early evangelical leaders were determined social activists, championing causes such as the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of alcohol. But in the 1920s, a theological dispute split the movement. The more liberal ministers pushed for continued engagement in politics — and went on to take leading roles in the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests. The conservative faction called for withdrawing from politics and focusing instead on building up the church."Getting into politics didn't fix anything. It just diverted them from saving souls," said Jim Guth, a political science professor at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
With the legalization of abortion in 1973, some fundamentalists began to argue that they had an obligation to try to arrest society's moral decay."We realized we [were] having our little holy huddles but not having any influence in Washington," said George Roller, a former public school teacher who now directs Kennedy's Center for Christian Statesmanship.
Ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson jumped headlong into politics. They succeeded in helping to elect conservatives, starting with President Reagan. "But things haven't changed very much," said Robert D. Stacey, chairman of the government department at Patrick Henry College."Our candidates tick off the right policy positions, but it turns out, once they're in office, they're willing to compromise an awful lot — not just to bend but to break," he said. "Now, religious conservatives are saying they want the real thing."
To develop such steadfast politicians, evangelicals are building on decades of work by nonprofit groups such as the Leadership Institute and Young America's Foundation, which train conservatives in grass-roots activism, effective campaigning, even how to launch a right-wing magazine.The new evangelical initiatives reach out to the same up-and-coming leaders, but put them through courses that sound a lot like a seminary."If you're clinging to conservatism just because you like conservatism, you don't put yourself on the line for your beliefs," Stacey said. "Your positions need to come from something deeper and more meaningful."
That message resonates with Jessica Echard, 23, who completed the Statesmanship Institute last year.Growing up in rural West Virginia, Echard believed passionately in her church's teachings against abortion, but thought little about such issues as economic policy or foreign trade.The institute gave her a framework for evaluating those topics.
Now the director of the Eagle Forum, a conservative lobbying group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, Echard says Jesus would approve of a call for lower taxes: "God calls on us to be stewards of our [own] money." She dips into the Bible to explain her opposition to most global treaties, reasoning that Americans have a holy obligation to protect their God-given freedom by avoiding foreign entanglements."The Scripture talks of taking every thought and making it captive to Christ, and that's what the Statesmanship Institute helps us do," Echard said.
Like other evangelical training programs, the institute avoids endorsing any party or position.
Lecturers this year include a Democratic congressman and a Republican who says the Lord inspired him to buck President Bush by demanding a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.Homework includes readings from the Bible — but also from Nietzsche, Engels, Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger."We don't tell our students what to think," Roller said.
Yet professors also make clear that "there absolutely is an objective truth," in the words of Paul J. Bonicelli, academic dean at Patrick Henry College.Hannah Woody, for instance, came away from the institute's seminars confident that abolishing the Department of Education is not just a Republican goal, but also a Christian imperative.The Bible gives parents — not some distant bureaucracy — the primary responsibility for raising children, said Woody, 26, who hopes to one day run for governor in her home state of North Carolina. (For now, she's working as a legislative assistant for a Republican congressman from Kansas.)
Kennedy offers a similar take on education policy in the gilt-edged, leather-bound Bible his staff delivers to each new member of Congress. In an introductory essay, Kennedy quotes Scripture to explain God's views on taxes, capital punishment, gay rights and a dozen other issues. Most of the policy prescriptions he finds in the Bible dovetail neatly with the Republican agenda.
That focus on legislative victory disturbs some evangelical leaders, who would prefer to work on spreading Christian values throughout society."Too many programs start with the idea that if we [enact] right-wing, conservative policies, we'll change America and God will be pleased," said Ryan Messmore, who runs a leadership academy aimed at helping young Christians share their faith through the arts, the media and other professions.
But to Rep. Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican, it's clear the institute is "doing the Lord's work."The nation needs more politicians who take their cues from God, not Gallup, or "our morality will crumble," he warned. "We won't recognize America."Roller shares that fear. So he ended the recent class on bioethics with a plea: "Heavenly Father, we pray you will help us to know how we should respond to these issues."
The students answered as one: "Amen."
Wrap....
latimes.com
COLUMN ONE
Grooming Politicians for Christ
Evangelical programs on Capitol Hill seek to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — In the blue and gold elegance of the House speaker's private dining room, Jeremy Bouma bowed his head before eight young men and women who hope to one day lead the nation. He prayed that they might find wisdom in the Bible — and govern by its word."Holy Father, we thank you for providing us with guidance," said Bouma, who works for an influential televangelist. "Thank you, Lord, for these students. Build them up as your warriors and your ambassadors on Capitol Hill."
"Amen," the students murmured. Then they picked up their pens expectantly.
Nearly every Monday for six months, as many as a dozen congressional aides — many of them aspiring politicians — have gathered over takeout dinners to mine the Bible for ancient wisdom on modern policy debates about tax rates, foreign aid, education, cloning and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.Through seminars taught by conservative college professors and devout members of Congress, the students learn that serving country means first and always serving Christ.They learn to view every vote as a religious duty, and to consider compromise a sin.
That puts them at the vanguard of a bold effort by evangelical conservatives to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God."We help them understand God's purpose for society," said Bouma, who coordinates the program, known as the Statesmanship Institute, for the Rev. D. James Kennedy.
At least 3.5 million Americans tune in to Kennedy's sermons, broadcast from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Since 1995, the unabashedly political televangelist has also reached out to the Beltway elite with his Center for Christian Statesmanship in Washington. The center sponsors Bible studies, prayer meetings and free "Politics and Principle" lunches for members of Congress and their staffs, often drawing crowds in the hundreds.
The Statesmanship Institute, founded two years ago, offers more in-depth training for $345.It's one of half a dozen evangelical leadership programs making steady inroads into Washington.The most prominent is Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., an hour's drive from the capital. The college was founded five years ago with the goal of turning out "Christian men and women who will lead our nation with timeless biblical values." Nearly every graduate works in government or with a conservative advocacy group.
The Witherspoon Fellowship has had similar success, placing its graduates in the White House, Congress, the State Department and legislatures nationwide. The fellowship brings 42 college students to Washington each year to study theology and politics — and to work at the conservative Family Research Council, which lobbies on such social issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.Such programs share a commitment to developing leaders who read the Bible as a blueprint. As Kennedy put it: "If we leave it to man to decide what's good and evil, there will be chaos."
"I'm sure there are people who won't appreciate the fact that this class goes on here in the Capitol," Myal Greene said one recent evening.He glanced around the stately dining room, reserved for the institute by a member of Congress. (House regulations allow private groups to hold events in the Capitol as long as they are noncommercial, nonpolitical and do not discriminate based on race, creed, color or national origin.)To Greene, there could hardly be a more appropriate location. He considers his private faith and his public duty inseparable.
Greene, the deputy press secretary for a Republican congressman from Florida, signed up for the Statesmanship Institute in part because he felt his Christian ethics were under constant assault — from lobbyists offering him free steak dinners, from friends urging him to network over beers.The seminars proved a revelation. In one, Greene learned that ministers ran many of America's earliest schools. He hadn't thought much about education policy before that class. Now he plans to fight for history lessons on the Founding Fathers' faith, science lessons drawn from the Book of Genesis and public school prayer."It's one thing to have a [biblically inspired] position on one or two issues," said Greene, 26, who was wearing a wristband printed with the slogan "Jesus Is My Homie." "This class has you look deeper. It gives you an intellectual consistency."
On this night, the topic was bioethics. As the students unwrapped deli sandwiches and brownies, prominent bioethicist Nigel M. deS. Cameron praised them for thinking about the "great questions of the day" through the prism of faith. Too often, he added — to a few startled looks — "Christians are not noted for using their brains."In an hourlong lecture, Cameron argued that Christians must move beyond denouncing abortion to see the "moral outrage" in other common practices, such as paying Ivy League students to donate eggs in the quest for a perfect baby."Taking human life made in God's image may not be as bad, from God's point of view, as making human life in your own image," said Cameron, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. "Our humanity, warts and all, is what we have been given to steward. It's not to be manipulated."
When Cameron called for questions, one student tentatively raised his hand to ask about embryonic stem cell research — specifically, the use of "spare" embryos, frozen in fertility clinics. "Under current practice, they're going to be discarded" unless they're used for research, he said. "What do we say about that, as Christians?"
Cameron did not hold back."They're going to die anyway, right?" he said, indignant. "We don't apply the same principle to death row inmates. They're going to die anyway, so why can't we get some use out of them? We'd be able to do some fascinating experiments."The principle of manipulating human life to get experimental benefit," Cameron said, "that is a very, very serious line to cross."
The philosophy animating Cameron's lecture — that federal law should be based on biblical precepts — troubles the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State."This nation was founded specifically to avoid the government making religious and theological decisions," Lynn said. "We are not to turn the Holy Scriptures of any group into public policy."
Kennedy counters that evangelicals have every right to put up candidates who vote what they believe to be God's will — and let voters judge them. To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: "He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American."
Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that's their goal.And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it.
Early evangelical leaders were determined social activists, championing causes such as the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of alcohol. But in the 1920s, a theological dispute split the movement. The more liberal ministers pushed for continued engagement in politics — and went on to take leading roles in the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests. The conservative faction called for withdrawing from politics and focusing instead on building up the church."Getting into politics didn't fix anything. It just diverted them from saving souls," said Jim Guth, a political science professor at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
With the legalization of abortion in 1973, some fundamentalists began to argue that they had an obligation to try to arrest society's moral decay."We realized we [were] having our little holy huddles but not having any influence in Washington," said George Roller, a former public school teacher who now directs Kennedy's Center for Christian Statesmanship.
Ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson jumped headlong into politics. They succeeded in helping to elect conservatives, starting with President Reagan. "But things haven't changed very much," said Robert D. Stacey, chairman of the government department at Patrick Henry College."Our candidates tick off the right policy positions, but it turns out, once they're in office, they're willing to compromise an awful lot — not just to bend but to break," he said. "Now, religious conservatives are saying they want the real thing."
To develop such steadfast politicians, evangelicals are building on decades of work by nonprofit groups such as the Leadership Institute and Young America's Foundation, which train conservatives in grass-roots activism, effective campaigning, even how to launch a right-wing magazine.The new evangelical initiatives reach out to the same up-and-coming leaders, but put them through courses that sound a lot like a seminary."If you're clinging to conservatism just because you like conservatism, you don't put yourself on the line for your beliefs," Stacey said. "Your positions need to come from something deeper and more meaningful."
That message resonates with Jessica Echard, 23, who completed the Statesmanship Institute last year.Growing up in rural West Virginia, Echard believed passionately in her church's teachings against abortion, but thought little about such issues as economic policy or foreign trade.The institute gave her a framework for evaluating those topics.
Now the director of the Eagle Forum, a conservative lobbying group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, Echard says Jesus would approve of a call for lower taxes: "God calls on us to be stewards of our [own] money." She dips into the Bible to explain her opposition to most global treaties, reasoning that Americans have a holy obligation to protect their God-given freedom by avoiding foreign entanglements."The Scripture talks of taking every thought and making it captive to Christ, and that's what the Statesmanship Institute helps us do," Echard said.
Like other evangelical training programs, the institute avoids endorsing any party or position.
Lecturers this year include a Democratic congressman and a Republican who says the Lord inspired him to buck President Bush by demanding a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.Homework includes readings from the Bible — but also from Nietzsche, Engels, Machiavelli and Henry Kissinger."We don't tell our students what to think," Roller said.
Yet professors also make clear that "there absolutely is an objective truth," in the words of Paul J. Bonicelli, academic dean at Patrick Henry College.Hannah Woody, for instance, came away from the institute's seminars confident that abolishing the Department of Education is not just a Republican goal, but also a Christian imperative.The Bible gives parents — not some distant bureaucracy — the primary responsibility for raising children, said Woody, 26, who hopes to one day run for governor in her home state of North Carolina. (For now, she's working as a legislative assistant for a Republican congressman from Kansas.)
Kennedy offers a similar take on education policy in the gilt-edged, leather-bound Bible his staff delivers to each new member of Congress. In an introductory essay, Kennedy quotes Scripture to explain God's views on taxes, capital punishment, gay rights and a dozen other issues. Most of the policy prescriptions he finds in the Bible dovetail neatly with the Republican agenda.
That focus on legislative victory disturbs some evangelical leaders, who would prefer to work on spreading Christian values throughout society."Too many programs start with the idea that if we [enact] right-wing, conservative policies, we'll change America and God will be pleased," said Ryan Messmore, who runs a leadership academy aimed at helping young Christians share their faith through the arts, the media and other professions.
But to Rep. Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican, it's clear the institute is "doing the Lord's work."The nation needs more politicians who take their cues from God, not Gallup, or "our morality will crumble," he warned. "We won't recognize America."Roller shares that fear. So he ended the recent class on bioethics with a plea: "Heavenly Father, we pray you will help us to know how we should respond to these issues."
The students answered as one: "Amen."
Wrap....
"Iraq" isn't enough...
Troops' Gravestones Have Pentagon Slogans
By DAVID PACE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 24 minutes ago
Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts.
Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with "Operation Enduring Freedom" or "Operation Iraqi Freedom" at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.
The vast majority of military gravestones from other eras are inscribed with just the basic, required information: name, rank, military branch, date of death and, if applicable, the war and foreign country in which the person served.
Families are supposed to have final approval over what goes on the tombstones. That hasn't always happened.
Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.
"I was a little taken aback," Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick's tombstone. "They certainly didn't ask my wife; they didn't ask me." He said Patrick's widow told him she had not been asked either.
"In one way, I feel it's taking advantage to a small degree," McCaffrey said. "Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact."
The owner of the company that has been making gravestones for Arlington and other national cemeteries for nearly two decades is uncomfortable, too.
"It just seems a little brazen that that's put on stones," said Jeff Martell, owner of Granite Industries of Vermont. "It seems like it might be connected to politics."
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it isn't. "The headstone is not a PR purpose. It is to let the country know and the people that visit the cemetery know who served this country and made the country free for us," VA official Steve Muro said.
Since 1997, the government has been paying for virtually everything inscribed on the gravestones. Before that, families had to pay the gravestone makers separately for any inscription beyond the basics.
It wasn't until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that the department instructed national cemetery directors and funeral homes across the country to advise families of fallen soldiers and Marines that they could have operation names like "Enduring Freedom" or "Iraqi Freedom" included on the headstones.
VA officials say neither the Pentagon nor White House exerted any pressure to get families to include the operation names. They say families always had the option of including information like battle or operation names, but didn't always know it.
"It's just the right thing to do and it always has been, but it hasn't always been followed," said Dave Schettler, director of the VA's memorial programs service.
VA officials say they don't know how many families of the nearly 2,000 soldiers and Marines who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan have opted to include the operation names.
At Arlington, the nation's most prestigious national cemetery, all but a few of the 193 gravestones of Iraq and Afghanistan dead carry the operation names. War casualties are also buried in many of the 121 other national cemeteries and numerous state and private graveyards.
The interment service supervisor at Arlington, Vicki Tanner, said cemetery representatives show families a mock-up of the headstone with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or "Operation Enduring Freedom" already included, and ask their approval.
Former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam and headed the Veterans Administration under President Carter, called the practice "a little bit of glorified advertising."
"I think it's a little bit of gilding the lily," Cleland said, while insisting that he's not criticizing families who want that information included.
"Most of the headstones out there at Arlington and around the nation just say World War II or Korea or Vietnam, one simple statement," he said. "It's not, shall we say, a designated theme or a designated operation by somebody in the Pentagon. It is what it is. And I think there's power in simplicity."
The Pentagon in the late 1980s began selecting operation names with themes that would help generate public support for conflicts.
Gregory C. Sieminski, an Army officer writing in a 1995 Army War College publication, said the Pentagon decision to call the 1989 invasion of Panama "Operation Just Cause" initiated a trend of naming operations "with an eye toward shaping domestic and international perceptions about the activities they describe."
Mainline veterans groups are taking the change in stride. American Legion spokesman Donald Mooney said the organization hasn't heard any complaints from its members.
"I'm concerned that we do what the families want," said Bob Wallace, executive director of Veterans of Foreign Wars. "I don't think there's any critical motivation behind this."
Wrap...
By DAVID PACE, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 24 minutes ago
Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts.
Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with "Operation Enduring Freedom" or "Operation Iraqi Freedom" at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.
The vast majority of military gravestones from other eras are inscribed with just the basic, required information: name, rank, military branch, date of death and, if applicable, the war and foreign country in which the person served.
Families are supposed to have final approval over what goes on the tombstones. That hasn't always happened.
Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.
"I was a little taken aback," Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick's tombstone. "They certainly didn't ask my wife; they didn't ask me." He said Patrick's widow told him she had not been asked either.
"In one way, I feel it's taking advantage to a small degree," McCaffrey said. "Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact."
The owner of the company that has been making gravestones for Arlington and other national cemeteries for nearly two decades is uncomfortable, too.
"It just seems a little brazen that that's put on stones," said Jeff Martell, owner of Granite Industries of Vermont. "It seems like it might be connected to politics."
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it isn't. "The headstone is not a PR purpose. It is to let the country know and the people that visit the cemetery know who served this country and made the country free for us," VA official Steve Muro said.
Since 1997, the government has been paying for virtually everything inscribed on the gravestones. Before that, families had to pay the gravestone makers separately for any inscription beyond the basics.
It wasn't until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that the department instructed national cemetery directors and funeral homes across the country to advise families of fallen soldiers and Marines that they could have operation names like "Enduring Freedom" or "Iraqi Freedom" included on the headstones.
VA officials say neither the Pentagon nor White House exerted any pressure to get families to include the operation names. They say families always had the option of including information like battle or operation names, but didn't always know it.
"It's just the right thing to do and it always has been, but it hasn't always been followed," said Dave Schettler, director of the VA's memorial programs service.
VA officials say they don't know how many families of the nearly 2,000 soldiers and Marines who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan have opted to include the operation names.
At Arlington, the nation's most prestigious national cemetery, all but a few of the 193 gravestones of Iraq and Afghanistan dead carry the operation names. War casualties are also buried in many of the 121 other national cemeteries and numerous state and private graveyards.
The interment service supervisor at Arlington, Vicki Tanner, said cemetery representatives show families a mock-up of the headstone with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or "Operation Enduring Freedom" already included, and ask their approval.
Former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam and headed the Veterans Administration under President Carter, called the practice "a little bit of glorified advertising."
"I think it's a little bit of gilding the lily," Cleland said, while insisting that he's not criticizing families who want that information included.
"Most of the headstones out there at Arlington and around the nation just say World War II or Korea or Vietnam, one simple statement," he said. "It's not, shall we say, a designated theme or a designated operation by somebody in the Pentagon. It is what it is. And I think there's power in simplicity."
The Pentagon in the late 1980s began selecting operation names with themes that would help generate public support for conflicts.
Gregory C. Sieminski, an Army officer writing in a 1995 Army War College publication, said the Pentagon decision to call the 1989 invasion of Panama "Operation Just Cause" initiated a trend of naming operations "with an eye toward shaping domestic and international perceptions about the activities they describe."
Mainline veterans groups are taking the change in stride. American Legion spokesman Donald Mooney said the organization hasn't heard any complaints from its members.
"I'm concerned that we do what the families want," said Bob Wallace, executive director of Veterans of Foreign Wars. "I don't think there's any critical motivation behind this."
Wrap...
Monday, August 22, 2005
A Soldier's question...
From: http://misoldierthoughts.blogspot.com
Friday, August 19, 2005
Special Forces
A couple of days ago I was talking to 2 U.S. Special Forces Soldiers and I was very surprised to find that they thought that we were loosing over here in Iraq and that it would take, "10, 20, 30 years until we are done here."
One of the SF soldiers told me that he is so sick of coming over here that he will do anything when he gets home just so he doesn't have to come back over here.Even our most elite troops are seeing the grim reality that we have here in Iraq.
Why can't you see it too America?
Wrap...
Friday, August 19, 2005
Special Forces
A couple of days ago I was talking to 2 U.S. Special Forces Soldiers and I was very surprised to find that they thought that we were loosing over here in Iraq and that it would take, "10, 20, 30 years until we are done here."
One of the SF soldiers told me that he is so sick of coming over here that he will do anything when he gets home just so he doesn't have to come back over here.Even our most elite troops are seeing the grim reality that we have here in Iraq.
Why can't you see it too America?
Wrap...
No Child Left...what a joke...
Just rec'd this from a Prof/writer:
I just heard that one of the primary researchers from Reading Recovery (a program for first grade reading instruction for seriously at-risk kiddoes, a program with a success rate of about 85%, but an instructional effort which does not adhere to the program line of the National Reading Panel, the primary "brain" behind No Child Left Behind) wrote a letter urging that an independent contractor investigate the National Reading Panel for conflict of interest with publishers of instructional materials and tests. All federal offices in control of funding sources in reading instruction and testing have been informed by the White House that they are to avoid any contact with Reading Recovery personnel and in addition are barred from funding any proposal that associates with Reading Recovery.
Wrap...
I just heard that one of the primary researchers from Reading Recovery (a program for first grade reading instruction for seriously at-risk kiddoes, a program with a success rate of about 85%, but an instructional effort which does not adhere to the program line of the National Reading Panel, the primary "brain" behind No Child Left Behind) wrote a letter urging that an independent contractor investigate the National Reading Panel for conflict of interest with publishers of instructional materials and tests. All federal offices in control of funding sources in reading instruction and testing have been informed by the White House that they are to avoid any contact with Reading Recovery personnel and in addition are barred from funding any proposal that associates with Reading Recovery.
Wrap...
And finally....
From Independent Clearing House, a challenge:
Exposed: The Carlyle Group:
I defy you to watch this 48 minute documentary and not be outraged about the depth of corruption and deceit within the highest ranks of our government.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3995.htm
http://snipurl.com/dqz1
Wrap...
Exposed: The Carlyle Group:
I defy you to watch this 48 minute documentary and not be outraged about the depth of corruption and deceit within the highest ranks of our government.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3995.htm
http://snipurl.com/dqz1
Wrap...
Cowards and liars...
From Independent Clearing House:
No Accountability
By Charley Reese
08/22/05
What Americans should demand from their governments at all levels is accountability.
Accountability is far more important than transparency, which can be easily faked. Accountability is not complicated. It simply means people must take responsibility for their actions. If the actions are successful, take responsibility; if they are a failure, take responsibility. This principle applies daily to Americans in their private lives. It is the heart of the tort system. If we wrongly injure someone, we are held accountable.
Of all the sins one might list of the Bush administration, failure to be accountable is the worst. As a justification to go to war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It did not. The Bush people insisted Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida. There were none. They insisted Iraq was a threat to its neighbors. It was not, as all of its neighbors publicly said.
So, obviously, it was a case of lies or blunders — take your pick. In either event, people should have been held accountable for misinforming the American public and going to war on false pretenses. Not one single person, not a clerk or messenger or janitor even, has been held accountable. In fact, the people who made the blunders or told the lies have all been rewarded with promotions or medals.
This stone-cold refusal to admit mistakes and to be held accountable is what gives the Bush administration the eerie atmosphere of being totally disconnected from reality. Whatever President Bush says or does is always correct and successful, no matter how copious is the evidence to the contrary. Members of the administration just don't talk about the weapons or the ties to al-Qaida anymore. You must be mistaken, they say. We went to war because we love the Iraqi people so much, we wanted them to have a democratic government.
Excuse me. You want me to believe that you love a people — who for 13 years we bombed and impoverished with sanctions — so much that you will gladly spend 2,000 American lives to relieve them of a dictator the U.S. once supported? This is insane. The very gas attack against the Kurds that Bush so often trotted out in the buildup to war was defended and in fact blamed on the Iranians by an official U.S. investigation at the time it happened.
I can live with crooks. I can live with differences of opinion and of politics. After all, those are parts of a democratic society. But the Bush administration scares me because it seems on its face irrational. That's a fancy word for crazy. The world is too dangerous for us to have a president who seems unable to connect to reality and who surrounds himself with people whose chief qualification is that they agree with whatever he says.
I think there might be an arrogance gene in the Bush family. His father might well have been re-elected if he had gone to the American people, apologized for breaking his promise that he would veto any new taxes and explained why he thought it was necessary to do so. But, no. It was "read my hips" as he stalked away from reporters. Apparently, in the Bush family's eyes, it is impossible for anybody named Bush to make a mistake, tell a lie or do anything wrong.
Of course, in fairness, most American politicians refuse to be accountable. Members of Congress in particular will pass bad laws and then act as if they had been sneaked onto the books by Martians in the dead of night. I've been an observer and a participant in politics for a number of decades, and I honestly cannot recall a single politician ever saying: "You remember when I said such and such? Well, I was wrong, and I'm sorry."
But politicians don't take responsibility because the American people and the media don't demand it of them. If the American voters continue to act like ignorant sheep and the media continue to concentrate on trivia, you can't blame the politicians for taking advantage of them. As an outlaw said in an old cowboy movie: "It may even be sacrilegious (not to rob the villagers). If God did not want them sheared, why did he make them sheep?"
Indeed, why?
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.
© 2005 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Wrap...
No Accountability
By Charley Reese
08/22/05
What Americans should demand from their governments at all levels is accountability.
Accountability is far more important than transparency, which can be easily faked. Accountability is not complicated. It simply means people must take responsibility for their actions. If the actions are successful, take responsibility; if they are a failure, take responsibility. This principle applies daily to Americans in their private lives. It is the heart of the tort system. If we wrongly injure someone, we are held accountable.
Of all the sins one might list of the Bush administration, failure to be accountable is the worst. As a justification to go to war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It did not. The Bush people insisted Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida. There were none. They insisted Iraq was a threat to its neighbors. It was not, as all of its neighbors publicly said.
So, obviously, it was a case of lies or blunders — take your pick. In either event, people should have been held accountable for misinforming the American public and going to war on false pretenses. Not one single person, not a clerk or messenger or janitor even, has been held accountable. In fact, the people who made the blunders or told the lies have all been rewarded with promotions or medals.
This stone-cold refusal to admit mistakes and to be held accountable is what gives the Bush administration the eerie atmosphere of being totally disconnected from reality. Whatever President Bush says or does is always correct and successful, no matter how copious is the evidence to the contrary. Members of the administration just don't talk about the weapons or the ties to al-Qaida anymore. You must be mistaken, they say. We went to war because we love the Iraqi people so much, we wanted them to have a democratic government.
Excuse me. You want me to believe that you love a people — who for 13 years we bombed and impoverished with sanctions — so much that you will gladly spend 2,000 American lives to relieve them of a dictator the U.S. once supported? This is insane. The very gas attack against the Kurds that Bush so often trotted out in the buildup to war was defended and in fact blamed on the Iranians by an official U.S. investigation at the time it happened.
I can live with crooks. I can live with differences of opinion and of politics. After all, those are parts of a democratic society. But the Bush administration scares me because it seems on its face irrational. That's a fancy word for crazy. The world is too dangerous for us to have a president who seems unable to connect to reality and who surrounds himself with people whose chief qualification is that they agree with whatever he says.
I think there might be an arrogance gene in the Bush family. His father might well have been re-elected if he had gone to the American people, apologized for breaking his promise that he would veto any new taxes and explained why he thought it was necessary to do so. But, no. It was "read my hips" as he stalked away from reporters. Apparently, in the Bush family's eyes, it is impossible for anybody named Bush to make a mistake, tell a lie or do anything wrong.
Of course, in fairness, most American politicians refuse to be accountable. Members of Congress in particular will pass bad laws and then act as if they had been sneaked onto the books by Martians in the dead of night. I've been an observer and a participant in politics for a number of decades, and I honestly cannot recall a single politician ever saying: "You remember when I said such and such? Well, I was wrong, and I'm sorry."
But politicians don't take responsibility because the American people and the media don't demand it of them. If the American voters continue to act like ignorant sheep and the media continue to concentrate on trivia, you can't blame the politicians for taking advantage of them. As an outlaw said in an old cowboy movie: "It may even be sacrilegious (not to rob the villagers). If God did not want them sheared, why did he make them sheep?"
Indeed, why?
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.
© 2005 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Wrap...
Nextel? Hah.
So here's a nail. Right in the center of my brand new tire. Just what I always wanted. Right.
After breakfast on the hotel patio, off I go to the Firestone tire people. Gonna take an hour.
Okay. I stroll over to kill time at the Target store. Up one aisle and down another until I see the printer ink cartridges. My black ink needs replacing.
And into the books section. There's a Balducci I haven't read. Got it.
Onward to checkout after more wandering around and waiting in the air conditioned store, and back to Firestone.
Tire is fixed. Decide to get car washed.
Go sit on their patio. Guy on the next bench is on his cell phone and getting more frustrated by the second. He's called Nextel. One of the 300-plus numbers he has on his phone is not working. Nextel tells him that before they'll deal with it, there have to be FOUR numbers not working. He is pissed. Says he'll give Nextel four numbers all right! Ouch! Some customer service that is.
Guy on another bench is reading and hears this conversation. He's not fond of Nextel either. I ask what he's reading. "The Historian". Says it's terrific. He can't put it down.
And, he's wearing a t-shirt with "Billabong" on it. Turns out a billabong is what the Australians call a swamp, but in this case it's a brand name for a sports outfit.
Learn all kinds of things when out among 'em.
Wrap....
After breakfast on the hotel patio, off I go to the Firestone tire people. Gonna take an hour.
Okay. I stroll over to kill time at the Target store. Up one aisle and down another until I see the printer ink cartridges. My black ink needs replacing.
And into the books section. There's a Balducci I haven't read. Got it.
Onward to checkout after more wandering around and waiting in the air conditioned store, and back to Firestone.
Tire is fixed. Decide to get car washed.
Go sit on their patio. Guy on the next bench is on his cell phone and getting more frustrated by the second. He's called Nextel. One of the 300-plus numbers he has on his phone is not working. Nextel tells him that before they'll deal with it, there have to be FOUR numbers not working. He is pissed. Says he'll give Nextel four numbers all right! Ouch! Some customer service that is.
Guy on another bench is reading and hears this conversation. He's not fond of Nextel either. I ask what he's reading. "The Historian". Says it's terrific. He can't put it down.
And, he's wearing a t-shirt with "Billabong" on it. Turns out a billabong is what the Australians call a swamp, but in this case it's a brand name for a sports outfit.
Learn all kinds of things when out among 'em.
Wrap....
Any argument about this?
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 - (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) - Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)
Wrap...
: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 - (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) - Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)
Wrap...
Ah, Dennis....
From the AP via Publishers Lunch:
Mystery Novelist Dennis Lynds Dies at 81
By ALEX VEIGA
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 21, 2005; 1:36 AM
LOS ANGELES -- Dennis Lynds, whose tautly written mysteries featuring the one-armed Dan Fortune were praised for reflecting contemporary political and social issues, has died. He was 81.
Lynds, who wrote under the name Michael Collins, among others, died Friday at a San Francisco hospital from septic shock caused by bowel necrosis and multiorgan failure, Mark Powning, an investigator with the medical examiner's office, said Saturday.
Lynds collapsed Thursday in the parking lot of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center while trying to visit his eldest daughter, who had been hospitalized there, said Kathleen Sharp, a family friend.
He died the next day at San Francisco General Hospital, Powning said.
Sharp said the author, who lived in Santa Barbara, had been ill for some time and had undergone several surgeries for a stomach condition.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Lynds wrote more than 80 novels and short stories, according to his Web site.
The first Dan Fortune novel, "Act of Fear," was published in 1967 and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel. The last novel in the series, "Fortune's World," was published in 2000.
The Fortune novels were praised for their writing and for their willingness to reflect on contemporary political and social controversies.
"I write mysteries to say something, not just for entertainment," Lynds told the Santa Barbara News-Press in 1982.
Lynds was born in New York and moved to Santa Barbara in 1965.
Wrap...
Mystery Novelist Dennis Lynds Dies at 81
By ALEX VEIGA
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 21, 2005; 1:36 AM
LOS ANGELES -- Dennis Lynds, whose tautly written mysteries featuring the one-armed Dan Fortune were praised for reflecting contemporary political and social issues, has died. He was 81.
Lynds, who wrote under the name Michael Collins, among others, died Friday at a San Francisco hospital from septic shock caused by bowel necrosis and multiorgan failure, Mark Powning, an investigator with the medical examiner's office, said Saturday.
Lynds collapsed Thursday in the parking lot of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center while trying to visit his eldest daughter, who had been hospitalized there, said Kathleen Sharp, a family friend.
He died the next day at San Francisco General Hospital, Powning said.
Sharp said the author, who lived in Santa Barbara, had been ill for some time and had undergone several surgeries for a stomach condition.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Lynds wrote more than 80 novels and short stories, according to his Web site.
The first Dan Fortune novel, "Act of Fear," was published in 1967 and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel. The last novel in the series, "Fortune's World," was published in 2000.
The Fortune novels were praised for their writing and for their willingness to reflect on contemporary political and social controversies.
"I write mysteries to say something, not just for entertainment," Lynds told the Santa Barbara News-Press in 1982.
Lynds was born in New York and moved to Santa Barbara in 1965.
Wrap...
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Replay Vietnam...
CRAWFORD, Texas
Anti-war protesters camping out near President Bush's ranch are getting support from a prominent figure in the anti-Vietnam war movement: folk singer Joan Baez.Baez is planning a free concert in Bush's adopted hometown tonight that's expected to draw more than one-thousand people. It's being held on a one-acre lot offered by a landowner who opposes the war.
Not far away, protesters are continuing a camp-out started by grieving Vacaville mother, Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan's son -- Army Specialist Casey Sheehan -- died last year in Iraq.
Meanwhile, more Bush supporters have been arriving at a downtown pro-Bush camp. As of this afternoon, more than 150 people had visited "Fort Qualls."
The camp is named for Marine Lance Corporal Louis Wayne Qualls, who was killed in Fallujah last fall.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press.
Wrap...
Anti-war protesters camping out near President Bush's ranch are getting support from a prominent figure in the anti-Vietnam war movement: folk singer Joan Baez.Baez is planning a free concert in Bush's adopted hometown tonight that's expected to draw more than one-thousand people. It's being held on a one-acre lot offered by a landowner who opposes the war.
Not far away, protesters are continuing a camp-out started by grieving Vacaville mother, Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan's son -- Army Specialist Casey Sheehan -- died last year in Iraq.
Meanwhile, more Bush supporters have been arriving at a downtown pro-Bush camp. As of this afternoon, more than 150 people had visited "Fort Qualls."
The camp is named for Marine Lance Corporal Louis Wayne Qualls, who was killed in Fallujah last fall.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press.
Wrap...
A no-win situation....
From the Washington Post:
No-Win Situation
Call It a Day
We've Done All We Can Do in Iraq
By Andrew J. BacevichSunday, August 21, 2005; Page B01
The banner decorating the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, when President Bush announced an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq, turns out to have been accurate after all. If only the president himself had taken to heart the banner's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished." For by that date, having deposed Saddam Hussein, the United States had achieved in Iraq just about all that it has the capacity to achieve. The time has come for Bush to dig the banner out of the closet, drape it across the front of the White House and make it the basis for policy instead of continuing under the inglorious banner of "Mission Impossible."
Ironically, ever since the presidential victory lap of two years ago, the Bush administration has been in the forefront of those insisting that the U.S. mission in Iraq is not accomplished -- that there is ever so much more that the United States can and must do on behalf of the Iraqi people. Hence the grandiose U.S. promises of reconstruction, economic and political reform, and nation-building.
The chief effect of efforts to fulfill these promises has been to convert a short, economical and purportedly glorious war into a long, costly and debilitating one.
Moreover, senior U.S. military leaders have increasingly concluded that the long war is an unwinnable one. "[T]his insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, acknowledged earlier this summer. "It's going to be settled in the political process." However self-serving it may be -- the military's eagerness to offload responsibility for the course of events in Iraq has become palpable of late -- Alston's analysis is correct.
Alas, the Bush administration adamantly insists that any such political process can only proceed with constant American coaching and oversight. Underlying this insistence is the assumption, seldom voiced openly, that the Iraqi people are incapable of managing their own affairs. They need us.
Do they? In fact, apart from consuming $300 billion and many thousands of lives (including more than 1,850 U.S. soldiers), the attempt to tutor Iraqis on their journey to American-style freedom has yielded results quite opposite from those intended: Rather than producing security, our continued massive military presence has helped fuel continuing violence. Rather than producing liberal democracy, our meddling in Iraqi politics has exacerbated political dysfunction. And by signaling the importance that it attributes to satisfying the core interests of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds alike, Washington has encouraged all three factions to increase their demands. Convinced that the Americans will never permit a cataclysmic collision, each faction is committed to playing a high-stakes game of chicken. If Iraq in August 2005 qualifies as the political equivalent of a clapped-out, self-abusing dependent, then the Bush administration ought to be recognized as being an enabler.
Wisdom requires that the Bush administration call an end to its misbegotten crusade. While avoiding the appearance of an ignominious dash for the exits, but with all due speed, the United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We've done all that we can do.
Getting out now makes sense not just to avoid further running up our bill, but because doing so holds out the prospect of a more favorable result. Granted, constructing a positive case for withdrawal requires a redefinition of purpose. From the outset, the Bush administration has focused on the wrong political objective. Rather than attempting to democratize Iraq as a first step toward "transforming" the Middle East, our proper aim should be to stabilize the country so that we can concentrate our energies on containing and eventually reducing the threat posed by violent Islamic radicals.
Stability -- defined as preserving a unified Iraq and reducing the insurgency -- cannot be imposed. It can only be negotiated by the various factions constituting the Iraqi polity. The issues dividing those factions are by no means trivial. But their common interest in maintaining the integrity of the state is also great. Announcing the U.S. departure will concentrate the minds of Iraqi leaders of all stripes. It will clear away any misconceptions regarding the consequences of secession.
In addition to assuming that Iraqis require American supervision, the Bush administration's insistence on staying the course also implicitly assumes that a U.S. withdrawal would leave a dangerous political vacuum in the region. But this assumption too is suspect. More likely, the American departure would foster a political dynamic in which Iraq's neighbors would exert themselves to keep Iraq from spinning out of control -- not out of any concern for the well-being of the Iraqi peoplebut out of sheer self-interest.
Among the autocrats holding sway in the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein was the last remaining quasi-revolutionary. The regimes that control Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and even Iran are not maneuvering to overturn the political order in the region. This is not to say that they are benign. But they do share one overriding interest, namely preserving their own hold on power -- an objective not at all served by allowing Iraq to wallow in perpetual turmoil. Iraq's neighbors have a compelling interest in facilitating a political process that just might bring a semblance of order to that country. For religious, cultural and historical reasons, they are also far better positioned than the United States to offer assistance that might actually prove helpful.
Will a U.S. withdrawal guarantee a happy outcome for the people of Iraq? Of course not. In sowing the seeds of chaos through his ill-advised invasion, Bush made any such guarantee impossible. If one or more of the Iraqi factions chooses civil war, they will have it. Should the Kurds opt for independence, then modern Iraq will cease to exist. No outside power can prevent such an outcome from occurring anymore than an outside power could have denied Americans their own civil war in 1861.
Dismemberment is by no means to be desired and would surely visit even more suffering on the much-abused people of Iraq. But in the long run, the world would likely find ways to adjust to this seemingly unthinkable prospect just as it learned to accommodate the collapse of the Soviet Union, the division of Czechoslovakia and the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
What will pulling out of Iraq mean for the United States? It will certainly not mean losing access to Iraqi oil, which will inevitably find its way to the market. To be sure, bringing the troops home will preclude the Pentagon from establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq -- but the Bush administration has said all along that we don't covet such bases anyway. In addition, withdrawal will put an end to extravagant expectations of using Iraq as a springboard for democratizing the Islamic world -- but that notion never qualified as more than a pipe dream anyway.
For Bush personally, the consequences of leaving Iraq might be the most painful. The prospect of looking antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan in the eye to explain exactly what her son died for will become even more daunting. But as it is, the president can't dodge that question indefinitely. Postponing the issue simply swells the ranks of those with similar questions to ask.
Author's email : bacevich@bu.edu
Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and professor of international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" (Oxford).
Wrap...
No-Win Situation
Call It a Day
We've Done All We Can Do in Iraq
By Andrew J. BacevichSunday, August 21, 2005; Page B01
The banner decorating the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, when President Bush announced an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq, turns out to have been accurate after all. If only the president himself had taken to heart the banner's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished." For by that date, having deposed Saddam Hussein, the United States had achieved in Iraq just about all that it has the capacity to achieve. The time has come for Bush to dig the banner out of the closet, drape it across the front of the White House and make it the basis for policy instead of continuing under the inglorious banner of "Mission Impossible."
Ironically, ever since the presidential victory lap of two years ago, the Bush administration has been in the forefront of those insisting that the U.S. mission in Iraq is not accomplished -- that there is ever so much more that the United States can and must do on behalf of the Iraqi people. Hence the grandiose U.S. promises of reconstruction, economic and political reform, and nation-building.
The chief effect of efforts to fulfill these promises has been to convert a short, economical and purportedly glorious war into a long, costly and debilitating one.
Moreover, senior U.S. military leaders have increasingly concluded that the long war is an unwinnable one. "[T]his insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, acknowledged earlier this summer. "It's going to be settled in the political process." However self-serving it may be -- the military's eagerness to offload responsibility for the course of events in Iraq has become palpable of late -- Alston's analysis is correct.
Alas, the Bush administration adamantly insists that any such political process can only proceed with constant American coaching and oversight. Underlying this insistence is the assumption, seldom voiced openly, that the Iraqi people are incapable of managing their own affairs. They need us.
Do they? In fact, apart from consuming $300 billion and many thousands of lives (including more than 1,850 U.S. soldiers), the attempt to tutor Iraqis on their journey to American-style freedom has yielded results quite opposite from those intended: Rather than producing security, our continued massive military presence has helped fuel continuing violence. Rather than producing liberal democracy, our meddling in Iraqi politics has exacerbated political dysfunction. And by signaling the importance that it attributes to satisfying the core interests of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds alike, Washington has encouraged all three factions to increase their demands. Convinced that the Americans will never permit a cataclysmic collision, each faction is committed to playing a high-stakes game of chicken. If Iraq in August 2005 qualifies as the political equivalent of a clapped-out, self-abusing dependent, then the Bush administration ought to be recognized as being an enabler.
Wisdom requires that the Bush administration call an end to its misbegotten crusade. While avoiding the appearance of an ignominious dash for the exits, but with all due speed, the United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We've done all that we can do.
Getting out now makes sense not just to avoid further running up our bill, but because doing so holds out the prospect of a more favorable result. Granted, constructing a positive case for withdrawal requires a redefinition of purpose. From the outset, the Bush administration has focused on the wrong political objective. Rather than attempting to democratize Iraq as a first step toward "transforming" the Middle East, our proper aim should be to stabilize the country so that we can concentrate our energies on containing and eventually reducing the threat posed by violent Islamic radicals.
Stability -- defined as preserving a unified Iraq and reducing the insurgency -- cannot be imposed. It can only be negotiated by the various factions constituting the Iraqi polity. The issues dividing those factions are by no means trivial. But their common interest in maintaining the integrity of the state is also great. Announcing the U.S. departure will concentrate the minds of Iraqi leaders of all stripes. It will clear away any misconceptions regarding the consequences of secession.
In addition to assuming that Iraqis require American supervision, the Bush administration's insistence on staying the course also implicitly assumes that a U.S. withdrawal would leave a dangerous political vacuum in the region. But this assumption too is suspect. More likely, the American departure would foster a political dynamic in which Iraq's neighbors would exert themselves to keep Iraq from spinning out of control -- not out of any concern for the well-being of the Iraqi peoplebut out of sheer self-interest.
Among the autocrats holding sway in the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein was the last remaining quasi-revolutionary. The regimes that control Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and even Iran are not maneuvering to overturn the political order in the region. This is not to say that they are benign. But they do share one overriding interest, namely preserving their own hold on power -- an objective not at all served by allowing Iraq to wallow in perpetual turmoil. Iraq's neighbors have a compelling interest in facilitating a political process that just might bring a semblance of order to that country. For religious, cultural and historical reasons, they are also far better positioned than the United States to offer assistance that might actually prove helpful.
Will a U.S. withdrawal guarantee a happy outcome for the people of Iraq? Of course not. In sowing the seeds of chaos through his ill-advised invasion, Bush made any such guarantee impossible. If one or more of the Iraqi factions chooses civil war, they will have it. Should the Kurds opt for independence, then modern Iraq will cease to exist. No outside power can prevent such an outcome from occurring anymore than an outside power could have denied Americans their own civil war in 1861.
Dismemberment is by no means to be desired and would surely visit even more suffering on the much-abused people of Iraq. But in the long run, the world would likely find ways to adjust to this seemingly unthinkable prospect just as it learned to accommodate the collapse of the Soviet Union, the division of Czechoslovakia and the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
What will pulling out of Iraq mean for the United States? It will certainly not mean losing access to Iraqi oil, which will inevitably find its way to the market. To be sure, bringing the troops home will preclude the Pentagon from establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq -- but the Bush administration has said all along that we don't covet such bases anyway. In addition, withdrawal will put an end to extravagant expectations of using Iraq as a springboard for democratizing the Islamic world -- but that notion never qualified as more than a pipe dream anyway.
For Bush personally, the consequences of leaving Iraq might be the most painful. The prospect of looking antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan in the eye to explain exactly what her son died for will become even more daunting. But as it is, the president can't dodge that question indefinitely. Postponing the issue simply swells the ranks of those with similar questions to ask.
Author's email : bacevich@bu.edu
Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and professor of international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" (Oxford).
Wrap...
Cheering for Fitzgerald!!!
Fitzgerald Has Reputation for Pursuing the Man at the Top
By Shawn McCarthy
The Globe and Mail, Canada
Saturday 20 August 2005
Attorney alluded to 'chairman's' role in the payment plan.
Chicago - U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has prosecuted mobsters, terrorists and even journalists. He has investigated and charged state and city officials in this notoriously crooked state with pit bull tenacity.
And always, he has methodically, inexorably pursued his investigations to target the man at the top of the organizational pyramid.
On Thursday, Mr. Fitzgerald announced that a U.S. grand jury laid fraud charges against David Radler, who is a long-time business partner of Conrad Black and former publisher of Hollinger International Inc.'s Chicago Sun-Times, and against Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International's top corporate counsel.
At a news conference, the Justice Department lawyer several times alluded to the "chairman's" role in the allegedly fraudulent payments made to Hollinger executives -- though he didn't name Lord Black. Also charged was Ravelston Corp., the holding company that is controlled by Lord Black and through which he controlled Hollinger.
Mr. Radler has agreed to plead guilty and co-operate with the continuing investigation, leading to speculation that Lord Black may be in Mr. Fitzgerald's sites. Clearly, it would be an uncomfortable position to be in.
The 6-foot, 2-inch, 215-pound former rugby player is considered one of the most aggressive and uncompromising prosecutors in the country.
Mr. Fitzgerald is slavishly devoted to his work. At 45, the Harvard law school alumnus remains unmarried and is known for sending e-mails to co-workers in the wee hours of the morning.
A Brooklyn-raised son of Irish immigrants, whose father worked as a doorman in Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, he has evinced no political ambition. That's a sharp contrast to such former high-profile federal attorneys as Chicago's James Thompson, who became Illinois governor, or New York's Rudolph Giuliani, who went on to become a most celebrated mayor.
Before coming to Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald was an assistant federal prosecutor in New York City. There, he indicted Osama bin Laden in 1998 for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, and won convictions against defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman.
He also put Mafia boss John Gambino behind bars.
He won the high-profile job in Chicago when Illinois' maverick senator, Peter Fitzgerald, (no relation) recommended him to the White House as someone who would be "untouchable" -- a modern-day Elliot Ness -- by the political power brokers in the state.
While he quickly made an impression locally, Mr. Fitzgerald gained national notoriety as the special prosecutor assigned to investigate the leak in 2003 that revealed the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
To the outrage of newspaper editorialists across the country, he prosecuted reporters Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper, of Time magazine, for refusing to testify in the investigation. While Mr. Cooper eventually did co-operate, Ms. Miller went to jail and remains behind bars.
His investigation is continuing and senior White House staffers, including top presidential adviser Karl Rove, have been implicated in the leak, which may have contravened federal law that prohibits the identification of a CIA agent.
People who have watched Mr. Fitzgerald operate in Chicago, and before that as assistant U.S. Attorney in New York City, are not surprised by his zeal in pursuing the journalists. But don't expect him to stop there.
That's how he operates: Apply maximum pressure to reluctant witnesses in order to build an air-tight case against the most senior member of a criminal conspiracy.
As a federal prosecutor in Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald is working in a "target rich environment," to borrow a phrase from the U.S. military.
After a series of guilty pleas and successful convictions of lower officials, he has charged former Republican governor George Ryan in a "pay for play" scandal involving state contracts. Mr. Ryan's trial is scheduled to start this fall.
He has also gutted the Democratic machinery of Mayor John Daley at Chicago's City Hall, with a series of charges against Mr. Daley's top advisers and departmental commissioners.
Cindy Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said Mr. Fitzgerald has "stepped up the pace of prosecutions tremendously" since taking the job in September, 2001.
"You get the sense that there are absolutely no sacred cows with him. He aims straight for the top."
Wrap....
By Shawn McCarthy
The Globe and Mail, Canada
Saturday 20 August 2005
Attorney alluded to 'chairman's' role in the payment plan.
Chicago - U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has prosecuted mobsters, terrorists and even journalists. He has investigated and charged state and city officials in this notoriously crooked state with pit bull tenacity.
And always, he has methodically, inexorably pursued his investigations to target the man at the top of the organizational pyramid.
On Thursday, Mr. Fitzgerald announced that a U.S. grand jury laid fraud charges against David Radler, who is a long-time business partner of Conrad Black and former publisher of Hollinger International Inc.'s Chicago Sun-Times, and against Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International's top corporate counsel.
At a news conference, the Justice Department lawyer several times alluded to the "chairman's" role in the allegedly fraudulent payments made to Hollinger executives -- though he didn't name Lord Black. Also charged was Ravelston Corp., the holding company that is controlled by Lord Black and through which he controlled Hollinger.
Mr. Radler has agreed to plead guilty and co-operate with the continuing investigation, leading to speculation that Lord Black may be in Mr. Fitzgerald's sites. Clearly, it would be an uncomfortable position to be in.
The 6-foot, 2-inch, 215-pound former rugby player is considered one of the most aggressive and uncompromising prosecutors in the country.
Mr. Fitzgerald is slavishly devoted to his work. At 45, the Harvard law school alumnus remains unmarried and is known for sending e-mails to co-workers in the wee hours of the morning.
A Brooklyn-raised son of Irish immigrants, whose father worked as a doorman in Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, he has evinced no political ambition. That's a sharp contrast to such former high-profile federal attorneys as Chicago's James Thompson, who became Illinois governor, or New York's Rudolph Giuliani, who went on to become a most celebrated mayor.
Before coming to Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald was an assistant federal prosecutor in New York City. There, he indicted Osama bin Laden in 1998 for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, and won convictions against defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman.
He also put Mafia boss John Gambino behind bars.
He won the high-profile job in Chicago when Illinois' maverick senator, Peter Fitzgerald, (no relation) recommended him to the White House as someone who would be "untouchable" -- a modern-day Elliot Ness -- by the political power brokers in the state.
While he quickly made an impression locally, Mr. Fitzgerald gained national notoriety as the special prosecutor assigned to investigate the leak in 2003 that revealed the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
To the outrage of newspaper editorialists across the country, he prosecuted reporters Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper, of Time magazine, for refusing to testify in the investigation. While Mr. Cooper eventually did co-operate, Ms. Miller went to jail and remains behind bars.
His investigation is continuing and senior White House staffers, including top presidential adviser Karl Rove, have been implicated in the leak, which may have contravened federal law that prohibits the identification of a CIA agent.
People who have watched Mr. Fitzgerald operate in Chicago, and before that as assistant U.S. Attorney in New York City, are not surprised by his zeal in pursuing the journalists. But don't expect him to stop there.
That's how he operates: Apply maximum pressure to reluctant witnesses in order to build an air-tight case against the most senior member of a criminal conspiracy.
As a federal prosecutor in Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald is working in a "target rich environment," to borrow a phrase from the U.S. military.
After a series of guilty pleas and successful convictions of lower officials, he has charged former Republican governor George Ryan in a "pay for play" scandal involving state contracts. Mr. Ryan's trial is scheduled to start this fall.
He has also gutted the Democratic machinery of Mayor John Daley at Chicago's City Hall, with a series of charges against Mr. Daley's top advisers and departmental commissioners.
Cindy Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said Mr. Fitzgerald has "stepped up the pace of prosecutions tremendously" since taking the job in September, 2001.
"You get the sense that there are absolutely no sacred cows with him. He aims straight for the top."
Wrap....
Make it so!!!
An excerpt from http://morialekafa.blogspot.com ...
I don't know for sure but I cannot help but believe this may be "the lull before the storm."
Fitzgerald may finally decide to indict someone, the Iraqis may fail to come up with a constitution, Bush and Rumsfeld are both scheduled to appear before Congress, Sybil Edmonds is still pursuing her charges, Rumsfeld is being sued, Bush cannot escape from the scrutiny of Cindy Sheehan and her growing band of followers. There is going to be a massive march on Washington on September 24th. Something may actually happen in the Tom DeLay scandal. The Ohio Republican party is in truly deep do-do. Immigration is becoming a national scandal. The nation is finally waking up to the realization that Bush/Cheney and the neocons lied to start an illegal and unnecessary "war" in which American troops continue to die on a daily basis. We now have an absolutely unprecedented national debt, the neocons want to attack Iran (but happily don't have the troops to do it), Arlen Spector has rebuked Rumsfeld for his stupid attack on Chavez and Venezuala, Bolton is just beginning his attack on the UN, and on and on. Something, it seems to me, is going to have to give in the not too distant future.
Wrap...
I don't know for sure but I cannot help but believe this may be "the lull before the storm."
Fitzgerald may finally decide to indict someone, the Iraqis may fail to come up with a constitution, Bush and Rumsfeld are both scheduled to appear before Congress, Sybil Edmonds is still pursuing her charges, Rumsfeld is being sued, Bush cannot escape from the scrutiny of Cindy Sheehan and her growing band of followers. There is going to be a massive march on Washington on September 24th. Something may actually happen in the Tom DeLay scandal. The Ohio Republican party is in truly deep do-do. Immigration is becoming a national scandal. The nation is finally waking up to the realization that Bush/Cheney and the neocons lied to start an illegal and unnecessary "war" in which American troops continue to die on a daily basis. We now have an absolutely unprecedented national debt, the neocons want to attack Iran (but happily don't have the troops to do it), Arlen Spector has rebuked Rumsfeld for his stupid attack on Chavez and Venezuala, Bolton is just beginning his attack on the UN, and on and on. Something, it seems to me, is going to have to give in the not too distant future.
Wrap...
Pity the BushCo's deluded families...
Saturday, August 20, 2005
War Backers Start Camp Near Bush Ranch
By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer
Cindy Sheehan supporters have erected a new camp closer to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Anti-war protestors now have two camps on the road leading to Bush's ranch one with a modern tent purchased with donations.
CRAWFORD, Texas— A patriotic camp with a "God Bless Our President!" banner sprung up downtown Saturday, countering the anti-war demonstration started by a fallen soldier's mother two weeks ago near President Bush's ranch.The camp is named "Fort Qualls," in memory of Marine Lance Cpl. Louis Wayne Qualls, 20, who died in Iraq last fall."If I have to sacrifice my whole family for the sake of our country and world, other countries that want freedom, I'll do that," said the soldier's father, Gary Qualls, a friend of the local business owner who started the pro-Bush camp. He said his 16-year-old son now wants to enlist, and he supports that decision.
Qualls' frustration with the anti-war demonstrators erupted last week when he removed a cross bearing his son's name that was among hundreds the group had put up along the road to Bush's ranch.
Qualls called the protesters' views disrespectful to soldiers, and said he had to yank out two more crosses after protesters kept replacing them.
Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died last year in Iraq, started the anti-war demonstration along the roadside on Aug. 6. "Camp Casey" has since grown to about 100 core participants, and hundreds more from across the nation have visited.
Sheehan vowed to remain there until Bush agreed to meet with her or until his monthlong vacation ended, but she flew to Los Angeles last week after her 74-year-old mother had a stroke. Her mother has some paralysis but is in good spirits, and if she improves, Sheehan may return to Texas in a few days, some demonstrators said.
In her absence, the rest of the group will keep camping out for the unlikely chance to question the president about the war that has claimed the lives of about 1,850 U.S. soldiers.
Bush has said he sympathizes with Sheehan but won't change his schedule to meet with her. She and other families met with Bush about two months after Casey Sheehan died, before she became a vocal opponent of the war.
Large counter-protests were held in a ditch near Sheehan's site a week after she arrived, and since then, a few Bush supporters have stood in the sun holding signs for several hours each day.Bill Johnson, a local gift shop owner who created "Fort Qualls," said he wanted to offer a larger, more convenient place for Bush supporters to gather.
He and others at "Fort Qualls" have asked for a debate with those at the Crawford Peace House, which is helping Sheehan.It's unclear if that will happen. But a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, co-founded by Sheehan and comprised of relatives of fallen soldiers, said her group would not participate."
We're asking for a meeting with the president, period," said Michelle DeFord, whose 37-year-old son, Sgt. David W. Johnson, was in the Army National Guard from Oregon when he was killed in Iraq last fall. "We don't want to debate with people who don't understand our point of view."
Wrap...
War Backers Start Camp Near Bush Ranch
By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer
Cindy Sheehan supporters have erected a new camp closer to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Anti-war protestors now have two camps on the road leading to Bush's ranch one with a modern tent purchased with donations.
CRAWFORD, Texas— A patriotic camp with a "God Bless Our President!" banner sprung up downtown Saturday, countering the anti-war demonstration started by a fallen soldier's mother two weeks ago near President Bush's ranch.The camp is named "Fort Qualls," in memory of Marine Lance Cpl. Louis Wayne Qualls, 20, who died in Iraq last fall."If I have to sacrifice my whole family for the sake of our country and world, other countries that want freedom, I'll do that," said the soldier's father, Gary Qualls, a friend of the local business owner who started the pro-Bush camp. He said his 16-year-old son now wants to enlist, and he supports that decision.
Qualls' frustration with the anti-war demonstrators erupted last week when he removed a cross bearing his son's name that was among hundreds the group had put up along the road to Bush's ranch.
Qualls called the protesters' views disrespectful to soldiers, and said he had to yank out two more crosses after protesters kept replacing them.
Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died last year in Iraq, started the anti-war demonstration along the roadside on Aug. 6. "Camp Casey" has since grown to about 100 core participants, and hundreds more from across the nation have visited.
Sheehan vowed to remain there until Bush agreed to meet with her or until his monthlong vacation ended, but she flew to Los Angeles last week after her 74-year-old mother had a stroke. Her mother has some paralysis but is in good spirits, and if she improves, Sheehan may return to Texas in a few days, some demonstrators said.
In her absence, the rest of the group will keep camping out for the unlikely chance to question the president about the war that has claimed the lives of about 1,850 U.S. soldiers.
Bush has said he sympathizes with Sheehan but won't change his schedule to meet with her. She and other families met with Bush about two months after Casey Sheehan died, before she became a vocal opponent of the war.
Large counter-protests were held in a ditch near Sheehan's site a week after she arrived, and since then, a few Bush supporters have stood in the sun holding signs for several hours each day.Bill Johnson, a local gift shop owner who created "Fort Qualls," said he wanted to offer a larger, more convenient place for Bush supporters to gather.
He and others at "Fort Qualls" have asked for a debate with those at the Crawford Peace House, which is helping Sheehan.It's unclear if that will happen. But a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, co-founded by Sheehan and comprised of relatives of fallen soldiers, said her group would not participate."
We're asking for a meeting with the president, period," said Michelle DeFord, whose 37-year-old son, Sgt. David W. Johnson, was in the Army National Guard from Oregon when he was killed in Iraq last fall. "We don't want to debate with people who don't understand our point of view."
Wrap...
Wedge Document--know what a wedge is?
From http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html
August 21, 2005
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs - and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities - and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards. Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr. Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J. Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org, a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between 1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell," saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. "They're political - that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group, including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in - no one else is," Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation - and their potential allies here at the institute - by dropping all references to evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear.' "
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum - so long as criticism of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those people."
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Wrap...
August 21, 2005
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs - and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities - and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards. Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr. Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J. Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org, a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between 1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell," saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. "They're political - that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group, including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in - no one else is," Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation - and their potential allies here at the institute - by dropping all references to evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear.' "
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum - so long as criticism of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those people."
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Wrap...
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Candles on the beach...
From Voice Of San Diego, an online newspaper:
A President's Silence Questioned on a Moonlit Beach
By MICHAEL SCHUDSON
Contributing Voice
Friday, Aug. 19, 2005
Cindy Sheehan has captured a lot of people's attention with her vigil in Crawford, Texas, including mine. So when I heard by e-mail about local peace vigils to support her, I signed up on the MoveOn.org Web site for my wife and I and two of our children to attend in Encinitas. Maybe, in this cyber-planned protest, it should have been no surprise that at least three people who spoke at the vigil urged us to visit other political Web sites, repeating the URL several times so we'd get it.
The setting at Moonlight Beach was beautiful, with a brilliant full moon setting off several hundred candles, some outlining a large circle in the sand within which we all stood, a hundred more held in the hands of vigil-ers, including us. We were by far the largest crowd on the beach; other groups enjoying themselves at nearby blazing fire-pits kept to their business and we kept to ours. This was one of at least a dozen San Diego vigils, among some 1,500 across the country.
You can only sing "All we are saying/Is give peace a chance" a few times without wishing someone would think of another song to switch to. "Give peace a chance" works only if you aren't holding candles so you can link arms and sway together. And Web sites are great, but with the sound of the surf bearing down, an old-fashioned bullhorn would have been nice! We seem a little rusty in anti-war protest.
But the vigil was clearly not a first time for many of those attending. Most of the protesters looked middle-aged. That could be because parents can easily identify with Cindy Sheehan. One sober-voiced man told the group that he lost his own son in the war, a remark that quickly reminded us all -- or at least those who could hear him -- of just how serious the occasion was. This gave me all the more reason to wince when the folks with the simple answers and the easy conspiracy theories began to speak up. I wish they would keep their crackpot ideas to themselves.
My children, ages 17 and 13, and I disagree about whether President Bush will ever speak to Mrs. Sheehan. They have no faith in Bush at all, no expectation that he will ever, by choice or by shame, do the right thing. But I think he might. And I imagine what he could say:
"Mrs. Sheehan, I am sorry for your terrible loss. All I can tell you is that Casey died in a good cause. We removed a tyrant from Iraq, someone who did not hesitate to use chemical weapons against his own people. We are helping Iraq establish a democracy. It's a lot tougher to do than we realized and it is costing a lot in human life. If we had known that before the war, if we had also known there were no weapons of mass destruction, maybe we could have chosen another path, but we acted with the best information we had. I hope you can understand that a president's vision is limited and his knowledge incomplete, and yet he still has to act. I truly hope you can understand that.
"Mrs. Sheehan, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Bixby who lost five sons in the Civil War. He wrote that any words of his own to assuage her grief must be 'weak and fruitless,' but he still felt compelled to offer her 'the thanks of the Republic' that her sons 'died to save.'
"I, likewise, offer you the thanks of your country. I owe you that, and I apologize for having kept you waiting these weeks."
Why doesn't he say that? To her, personally, out of the reach of cameras and microphones? Is the justification for the war so unmistakably threadbare that there is nothing left that he can say?
That's the question in my mind. The President's continued silence speaks tragic, misguided volumes.
Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award.
Wrap...
A President's Silence Questioned on a Moonlit Beach
By MICHAEL SCHUDSON
Contributing Voice
Friday, Aug. 19, 2005
Cindy Sheehan has captured a lot of people's attention with her vigil in Crawford, Texas, including mine. So when I heard by e-mail about local peace vigils to support her, I signed up on the MoveOn.org Web site for my wife and I and two of our children to attend in Encinitas. Maybe, in this cyber-planned protest, it should have been no surprise that at least three people who spoke at the vigil urged us to visit other political Web sites, repeating the URL several times so we'd get it.
The setting at Moonlight Beach was beautiful, with a brilliant full moon setting off several hundred candles, some outlining a large circle in the sand within which we all stood, a hundred more held in the hands of vigil-ers, including us. We were by far the largest crowd on the beach; other groups enjoying themselves at nearby blazing fire-pits kept to their business and we kept to ours. This was one of at least a dozen San Diego vigils, among some 1,500 across the country.
You can only sing "All we are saying/Is give peace a chance" a few times without wishing someone would think of another song to switch to. "Give peace a chance" works only if you aren't holding candles so you can link arms and sway together. And Web sites are great, but with the sound of the surf bearing down, an old-fashioned bullhorn would have been nice! We seem a little rusty in anti-war protest.
But the vigil was clearly not a first time for many of those attending. Most of the protesters looked middle-aged. That could be because parents can easily identify with Cindy Sheehan. One sober-voiced man told the group that he lost his own son in the war, a remark that quickly reminded us all -- or at least those who could hear him -- of just how serious the occasion was. This gave me all the more reason to wince when the folks with the simple answers and the easy conspiracy theories began to speak up. I wish they would keep their crackpot ideas to themselves.
My children, ages 17 and 13, and I disagree about whether President Bush will ever speak to Mrs. Sheehan. They have no faith in Bush at all, no expectation that he will ever, by choice or by shame, do the right thing. But I think he might. And I imagine what he could say:
"Mrs. Sheehan, I am sorry for your terrible loss. All I can tell you is that Casey died in a good cause. We removed a tyrant from Iraq, someone who did not hesitate to use chemical weapons against his own people. We are helping Iraq establish a democracy. It's a lot tougher to do than we realized and it is costing a lot in human life. If we had known that before the war, if we had also known there were no weapons of mass destruction, maybe we could have chosen another path, but we acted with the best information we had. I hope you can understand that a president's vision is limited and his knowledge incomplete, and yet he still has to act. I truly hope you can understand that.
"Mrs. Sheehan, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Bixby who lost five sons in the Civil War. He wrote that any words of his own to assuage her grief must be 'weak and fruitless,' but he still felt compelled to offer her 'the thanks of the Republic' that her sons 'died to save.'
"I, likewise, offer you the thanks of your country. I owe you that, and I apologize for having kept you waiting these weeks."
Why doesn't he say that? To her, personally, out of the reach of cameras and microphones? Is the justification for the war so unmistakably threadbare that there is nothing left that he can say?
That's the question in my mind. The President's continued silence speaks tragic, misguided volumes.
Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" award.
Wrap...
Fanatical fools! Brain-washers for the gullible.
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling:
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.
The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."
"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.
Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.
"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.
"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."
"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.
"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."
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Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling:
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.
The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."
"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.
Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.
"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.
"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."
"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.
"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."
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