So JJ, one of the writers, heard an author interviewed, was immediately intrigued by the book, and went looking for more info about it. Telling me about it, she said:
"Heard this gal on Jon Elliott's show. Sounds like a good book. She interviewed over a thousand people. Says New Orleans terrified her. Water rising even on sunny days -- but also afraid for herself because of the questions she was asking."
Here's a short description of author, book subject, and the reason she was worried about her own safety:
Biographer Joan Mellen met New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1969. In 1997, Mellen started to work on the story of his life and his relentless search for the truth about what happened to President Kennedy. It turned into a new investigation of the assassination itself. She joins Jon Elliott to discuss the new book, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assasination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
JJ also read a commentor's complaint about the arrangement of the footnotes, so used Mellen's
explanation during the interview to explain the problem:
Re the page references being off (shame on the editor!) and the notes. Mellen delivered a 1500 page mss. The information in what is now the notes was contained in the body of the mss. The publisher wanted the book but, bowing to the sales staff demands, asked her to cut the length which she did as much as she felt she could -- but it was still not enough.
So then someone (can't remember if she said who) suggested pulling this and that info out and putting it as supporting notes. Thus the mss. would be shortened but the info would still be there. The first version, she said, had the notes in print so small you literally had to work with a magnifier to read it. She wouldn't go for that, so they settled on whatever print the notes are in now -- still small, but, Jon said, legible.
She--and he--said not to ignore the notes because they tell a story that has now been pulled out of the text.
From everything Mellen had to say, and everything I read here in the reviews, I have to think she got it right. She certainly did her homework. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Am thinking it won't be an easy or quick read, but maybe an important one since now we have the advantage of looking at history from a far distance.
So that's my take.
Wrap...
Monday, November 14, 2005
Sunday, November 13, 2005
ALL Americans: Warning--These are everyone's Civil Rights.
Washington Post via Truthout.org:
Civil Rights Focus Shift Roils Staff At Justice
By Dan Eggen
The Washington Post
Sunday 13 November 2005
Veterans exit division as traditional cases decline.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees.
Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.
At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.
The division has also come under criticism from the courts and some Democrats for its decision in August to approve a Georgia program requiring voters to present government-issued identification cards at the polls. The program was halted by an appellate court panel and a district court judge, who likened it to a poll tax from the Jim Crow era.
"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized that with the change of administration, there would be some cutting back of some cases," said Richard Ugelow, who left the division in 2004 and now teaches law at American University. "But I don't think people anticipated that it would go this far, that enforcement would be cut back to the point that people felt like they were spinning their wheels."
The Justice Department and its supporters strongly dispute the complaints. Justice spokesman Eric Holland noted that the overall attrition rate during the Bush administration, about 13 percent, is not significantly higher than the 11 percent average during the last five years under President Bill Clinton.
Holland also said that the division filed a record number of criminal prosecutions in 2004. A quarter of those cases were related to human-trafficking crimes, which were made easier to prosecute under legislation passed at the end of the Clinton administration and which account for a growing proportion of the division's caseload.
In addition, Holland defended the department's decision to approve the Georgia voter law, saying that "career and political attorneys together concluded" that the measure would have no negative effect on minorities.
"This administration has continued the robust and vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws," Holland wrote in an e-mail statement, adding later: "These accomplishments could not have been achieved without teamwork between career attorneys and political appointees."
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the first Hispanic to hold the job, named civil rights enforcement as one of his priorities after taking office earlier this year and supports reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
Although relations between the career and political ranks have been strained throughout the Justice Department over the past five years, the level of conflict has been particularly high in civil rights, according to current and former staffers. The debate over civil rights flared in the Senate in recent weeks after the nomination of Wan J. Kim, who was confirmed on Nov. 4 as the assistant attorney general for the division and is the third person to hold that job during the Bush administration. Kim has been the civil rights deputy for the past two years.
There were no serious objections to Kim's nomination, but Democrats including Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) said they were concerned about serious problems with morale and enforcement within the division.
"Its enforcement of civil rights over the past five years has been negligent," Kennedy said in a statement. "Mr. Kim has promised to look closely at these issues and to increase the division's enforcement, and I believed he should be given a chance to turn the division around."
Critics point to several key statistics in arguing that Gonzales and the previous attorney general, John D. Ashcroft, have charted a dramatically different course for civil rights enforcement than previous administrations of both parties.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which includes a number of former Justice lawyers, noted in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the division has filed only a handful of cases in recent years dealing with employment discrimination or discrimination based on the statistical impact on women or minority groups.
The total number of criminal prosecutions is within the range of the Clinton administration, but a growing percentage of those cases involve prosecuting human smugglers, which have become a priority for the division only in recent years. Other types of civil rights prosecutions are down, from 83 in fiscal 2001 to 49 in 2005.
The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits - all of them this year - under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters.
The change in emphasis is perhaps most stark in the division's appellate section, which has historically played a prominent role intervening in key discrimination cases. The section filed only three friend-of-the-court briefs last year - compared with 22 in 1999 - and now spends nearly half its time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing civil rights litigation. Last year, six of 10 briefs filed by the section were related to immigration cases.
William R. Yeomans, a 24-year division veteran who took a buyout offer earlier this year, wrote in an essay in Legal Affairs magazine that "morale among career attorneys has plummeted, the division's productivity has suffered and the pace of civil rights enforcement has slowed."
In an interview, Yeomans said some of the problems stem from the way the "front office" at Justice has treated career employees, many of whom have been forced to move to other divisions or to handle cases unconnected to civil rights. As an example of the strained relations, Yeomans points to the recent retirement party held for a widely admired 37-year veteran: Not one political appointee showed up.
At the same time, Ashcroft implemented procedures throughout Justice that limited the input of career lawyers in employment decisions, resulting in the hiring of many young conservatives in civil rights and elsewhere in the department, former and current lawyers have said.
"The more slots you open, the more you can populate them with people you like," said Stephen B. Pershing, who left the division in May and is now senior counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation, a Washington law firm that handles civil rights cases. "It's pretty simple really."
To Roger Clegg, the situation is also perfectly understandable. A former civil rights deputy in the Reagan administration who is now general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Clegg said the civil rights area tends to attract activist liberal lawyers who are philosophically opposed to a more conservative approach.
"If the career people are not reflecting the policy priorities of the political appointees, then there's a problem," Clegg said. "Elections have consequences in a democracy."
Holland, the Justice spokesman, said critics are selectively citing statistics. For example, he said, the department is on the winning side of court rulings 90 percent of the time compared with 60 percent during the Clinton years. Federal courts are "less likely to reject our legal arguments than the ones filed in the previous administration," he said.
Ralph F. Boyd Jr., the civil rights chief from 2001 to 2003, agreed: "It's not a prosecutor's job to bring lots of cases; it's a prosecutor's job to bring the right cases. If it means fewer cases overall, then that's what you do."
Wrap...
Civil Rights Focus Shift Roils Staff At Justice
By Dan Eggen
The Washington Post
Sunday 13 November 2005
Veterans exit division as traditional cases decline.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees.
Nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.
At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.
The division has also come under criticism from the courts and some Democrats for its decision in August to approve a Georgia program requiring voters to present government-issued identification cards at the polls. The program was halted by an appellate court panel and a district court judge, who likened it to a poll tax from the Jim Crow era.
"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized that with the change of administration, there would be some cutting back of some cases," said Richard Ugelow, who left the division in 2004 and now teaches law at American University. "But I don't think people anticipated that it would go this far, that enforcement would be cut back to the point that people felt like they were spinning their wheels."
The Justice Department and its supporters strongly dispute the complaints. Justice spokesman Eric Holland noted that the overall attrition rate during the Bush administration, about 13 percent, is not significantly higher than the 11 percent average during the last five years under President Bill Clinton.
Holland also said that the division filed a record number of criminal prosecutions in 2004. A quarter of those cases were related to human-trafficking crimes, which were made easier to prosecute under legislation passed at the end of the Clinton administration and which account for a growing proportion of the division's caseload.
In addition, Holland defended the department's decision to approve the Georgia voter law, saying that "career and political attorneys together concluded" that the measure would have no negative effect on minorities.
"This administration has continued the robust and vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws," Holland wrote in an e-mail statement, adding later: "These accomplishments could not have been achieved without teamwork between career attorneys and political appointees."
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the first Hispanic to hold the job, named civil rights enforcement as one of his priorities after taking office earlier this year and supports reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
Although relations between the career and political ranks have been strained throughout the Justice Department over the past five years, the level of conflict has been particularly high in civil rights, according to current and former staffers. The debate over civil rights flared in the Senate in recent weeks after the nomination of Wan J. Kim, who was confirmed on Nov. 4 as the assistant attorney general for the division and is the third person to hold that job during the Bush administration. Kim has been the civil rights deputy for the past two years.
There were no serious objections to Kim's nomination, but Democrats including Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) said they were concerned about serious problems with morale and enforcement within the division.
"Its enforcement of civil rights over the past five years has been negligent," Kennedy said in a statement. "Mr. Kim has promised to look closely at these issues and to increase the division's enforcement, and I believed he should be given a chance to turn the division around."
Critics point to several key statistics in arguing that Gonzales and the previous attorney general, John D. Ashcroft, have charted a dramatically different course for civil rights enforcement than previous administrations of both parties.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which includes a number of former Justice lawyers, noted in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the division has filed only a handful of cases in recent years dealing with employment discrimination or discrimination based on the statistical impact on women or minority groups.
The total number of criminal prosecutions is within the range of the Clinton administration, but a growing percentage of those cases involve prosecuting human smugglers, which have become a priority for the division only in recent years. Other types of civil rights prosecutions are down, from 83 in fiscal 2001 to 49 in 2005.
The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits - all of them this year - under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters.
The change in emphasis is perhaps most stark in the division's appellate section, which has historically played a prominent role intervening in key discrimination cases. The section filed only three friend-of-the-court briefs last year - compared with 22 in 1999 - and now spends nearly half its time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing civil rights litigation. Last year, six of 10 briefs filed by the section were related to immigration cases.
William R. Yeomans, a 24-year division veteran who took a buyout offer earlier this year, wrote in an essay in Legal Affairs magazine that "morale among career attorneys has plummeted, the division's productivity has suffered and the pace of civil rights enforcement has slowed."
In an interview, Yeomans said some of the problems stem from the way the "front office" at Justice has treated career employees, many of whom have been forced to move to other divisions or to handle cases unconnected to civil rights. As an example of the strained relations, Yeomans points to the recent retirement party held for a widely admired 37-year veteran: Not one political appointee showed up.
At the same time, Ashcroft implemented procedures throughout Justice that limited the input of career lawyers in employment decisions, resulting in the hiring of many young conservatives in civil rights and elsewhere in the department, former and current lawyers have said.
"The more slots you open, the more you can populate them with people you like," said Stephen B. Pershing, who left the division in May and is now senior counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation, a Washington law firm that handles civil rights cases. "It's pretty simple really."
To Roger Clegg, the situation is also perfectly understandable. A former civil rights deputy in the Reagan administration who is now general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Clegg said the civil rights area tends to attract activist liberal lawyers who are philosophically opposed to a more conservative approach.
"If the career people are not reflecting the policy priorities of the political appointees, then there's a problem," Clegg said. "Elections have consequences in a democracy."
Holland, the Justice spokesman, said critics are selectively citing statistics. For example, he said, the department is on the winning side of court rulings 90 percent of the time compared with 60 percent during the Clinton years. Federal courts are "less likely to reject our legal arguments than the ones filed in the previous administration," he said.
Ralph F. Boyd Jr., the civil rights chief from 2001 to 2003, agreed: "It's not a prosecutor's job to bring lots of cases; it's a prosecutor's job to bring the right cases. If it means fewer cases overall, then that's what you do."
Wrap...
Working toward Theocracy at Air Force Academy...
via Truthout.org:
Group Trains Air Force Cadets to Proselytize
By Alan Cooperman
The Washington Post
Saturday 12 November 2005
A private missionary group has assigned a pair of full-time Christian ministers to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where they are training cadets to evangelize among their peers, according to a confidential letter to supporters.
The letter makes clear that the organized evangelization effort has continued this year despite an outcry over alleged proselytizing at the academy that has prompted a Pentagon investigation, congressional hearings, a civil lawsuit and new Air Force guidelines on religion.
"Praise God that we have been allowed access by the Academy into the cadet areas to minister among the cadets. We have recently been given an unused classroom to meet with cadets at any time during the day," the husband-and-wife team of Darren and Gina Lindblom said in the Oct. 11 letter to their donors.
Following allegations of religious intolerance at the academy, the Air Force issued interim guidelines in late August that caution senior officers against discussing their faith with subordinates. But the guidelines do not limit "voluntary, peer to peer discussions," and they do not say whether Air Force officials can provide office space or other assistance to professional missionaries who train cadets to evangelize among their peers.
The Lindbloms' letter was made public by Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein, a 1977 Air Force Academy alumnus who was a White House lawyer in the Reagan administration. He has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Air Force of violating the First Amendment's establishment clause by fostering evangelical Christianity over all faiths.
Weinstein, who has been joined in the suit by four recent graduates of the academy, said that some other religious groups are allowed onto the academy's campus, but only during certain hours and under close supervision by Air Force chaplains.
"The only group that gets 24/7 unrestricted access to cadets is this fundamentalist, born-again Christian group," Weinstein charged.
The Lindbloms are not chaplains hired by the military. They are private, full-time ministers assigned to the Air Force Academy by the Navigators, a Colorado-based group whose motto is: "To know Christ and to make Him known." It began in 1933 as a ministry to sailors and now has missionaries in 104 countries, according to its Web site.
Reached by telephone at their home in Colorado Springs, the Lindbloms declined to comment on their letter or their missionary work.
Lauren Libby, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Navigators, said the Lindbloms were assigned to the academy earlier this year, replacing a previous young couple. He said the Navigators have placed full-time staff members at the academy for more than a decade. "We're there as a spiritual resource to cadets," he said. "We've had a very good experience there."
Libby also said that the Navigators are following the Air Force guidelines, which have been criticized as infringing religious freedom by more than 70 members of Congress and several Christian lobbying groups, including Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. "Those are the guidelines, and we honor them," Libby said.
In their letter, the Lindbloms referred several times to the guidelines and to Weinstein's lawsuit, saying that "we are vitally aware we are in the front lines of a spiritual battle."
They included photos of the Navigator Cadet Ministry Team, a group of cadets who "have shown an interest in receiving training and development to have a personal ministry among their peers at the Academy," the letter said.
"Please pray for unprecedented wisdom for Gina and me as we coach these cadets to live among the lost, sharing the Gospel in the midst of this current climate. We must be so careful. Yet we do not wish to squelch the passion of men like Daniel," a cadet who has vowed to "impact the lives of 200 men with the Gospel" before he graduates, Darren Lindblom wrote.
In a postscript, they said, "We respectfully request that you not share this letter publicly. Due to the lawsuit recently filed, the contents of this letter are confidential."
A spokesman for the Air Force Academy said the Navigators are one of 19 outside religious groups - including Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic and Mormon organizations - that hold voluntary meetings on Mondays from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in a program known as SPIRE, for Special Program in Religious Education.
The groups are invited on campus at the request of cadets, and each is assigned a room, but only for that 90-minute period once a week, said the spokesman, John Van Winkle. "They can't just use the room whenever they want. That would be a violation of the memorandum of agreement they have to sign," he said.
Asked about the Lindbloms' assertion that they recently were given a classroom to "meet with cadets at any time during the day," Van Winkle said he would check. He called back to amend his statement, saying the academy's chaplains had set aside an extra room that any SPIRE group could use for counseling cadets at other times.
Weinstein said the academy was "furiously spinning." He said he had been told by people on campus, whom he declined to identify, that the room was Fairchild Hall 2D11, in the academy's main classroom building, and that only the Navigators have been using it. Van Winkle said he did not know the room number or which other groups had used it.
The Rev. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran chaplain who resigned in June over the religious climate at the academy, said the Navigators "used to have an informal agreement that they could meet cadets in the library." But because that location was "too visible," she said, they were told this year not to use it anymore.
Morton said the SPIRE program, which is limited to a few hours a week, should not be confused with the Lindbloms' efforts to be in continual contact with cadets throughout the week. "This Navigator thing is a whole different thing," she said.
Wrap...
Group Trains Air Force Cadets to Proselytize
By Alan Cooperman
The Washington Post
Saturday 12 November 2005
A private missionary group has assigned a pair of full-time Christian ministers to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where they are training cadets to evangelize among their peers, according to a confidential letter to supporters.
The letter makes clear that the organized evangelization effort has continued this year despite an outcry over alleged proselytizing at the academy that has prompted a Pentagon investigation, congressional hearings, a civil lawsuit and new Air Force guidelines on religion.
"Praise God that we have been allowed access by the Academy into the cadet areas to minister among the cadets. We have recently been given an unused classroom to meet with cadets at any time during the day," the husband-and-wife team of Darren and Gina Lindblom said in the Oct. 11 letter to their donors.
Following allegations of religious intolerance at the academy, the Air Force issued interim guidelines in late August that caution senior officers against discussing their faith with subordinates. But the guidelines do not limit "voluntary, peer to peer discussions," and they do not say whether Air Force officials can provide office space or other assistance to professional missionaries who train cadets to evangelize among their peers.
The Lindbloms' letter was made public by Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein, a 1977 Air Force Academy alumnus who was a White House lawyer in the Reagan administration. He has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Air Force of violating the First Amendment's establishment clause by fostering evangelical Christianity over all faiths.
Weinstein, who has been joined in the suit by four recent graduates of the academy, said that some other religious groups are allowed onto the academy's campus, but only during certain hours and under close supervision by Air Force chaplains.
"The only group that gets 24/7 unrestricted access to cadets is this fundamentalist, born-again Christian group," Weinstein charged.
The Lindbloms are not chaplains hired by the military. They are private, full-time ministers assigned to the Air Force Academy by the Navigators, a Colorado-based group whose motto is: "To know Christ and to make Him known." It began in 1933 as a ministry to sailors and now has missionaries in 104 countries, according to its Web site.
Reached by telephone at their home in Colorado Springs, the Lindbloms declined to comment on their letter or their missionary work.
Lauren Libby, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Navigators, said the Lindbloms were assigned to the academy earlier this year, replacing a previous young couple. He said the Navigators have placed full-time staff members at the academy for more than a decade. "We're there as a spiritual resource to cadets," he said. "We've had a very good experience there."
Libby also said that the Navigators are following the Air Force guidelines, which have been criticized as infringing religious freedom by more than 70 members of Congress and several Christian lobbying groups, including Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. "Those are the guidelines, and we honor them," Libby said.
In their letter, the Lindbloms referred several times to the guidelines and to Weinstein's lawsuit, saying that "we are vitally aware we are in the front lines of a spiritual battle."
They included photos of the Navigator Cadet Ministry Team, a group of cadets who "have shown an interest in receiving training and development to have a personal ministry among their peers at the Academy," the letter said.
"Please pray for unprecedented wisdom for Gina and me as we coach these cadets to live among the lost, sharing the Gospel in the midst of this current climate. We must be so careful. Yet we do not wish to squelch the passion of men like Daniel," a cadet who has vowed to "impact the lives of 200 men with the Gospel" before he graduates, Darren Lindblom wrote.
In a postscript, they said, "We respectfully request that you not share this letter publicly. Due to the lawsuit recently filed, the contents of this letter are confidential."
A spokesman for the Air Force Academy said the Navigators are one of 19 outside religious groups - including Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic and Mormon organizations - that hold voluntary meetings on Mondays from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in a program known as SPIRE, for Special Program in Religious Education.
The groups are invited on campus at the request of cadets, and each is assigned a room, but only for that 90-minute period once a week, said the spokesman, John Van Winkle. "They can't just use the room whenever they want. That would be a violation of the memorandum of agreement they have to sign," he said.
Asked about the Lindbloms' assertion that they recently were given a classroom to "meet with cadets at any time during the day," Van Winkle said he would check. He called back to amend his statement, saying the academy's chaplains had set aside an extra room that any SPIRE group could use for counseling cadets at other times.
Weinstein said the academy was "furiously spinning." He said he had been told by people on campus, whom he declined to identify, that the room was Fairchild Hall 2D11, in the academy's main classroom building, and that only the Navigators have been using it. Van Winkle said he did not know the room number or which other groups had used it.
The Rev. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran chaplain who resigned in June over the religious climate at the academy, said the Navigators "used to have an informal agreement that they could meet cadets in the library." But because that location was "too visible," she said, they were told this year not to use it anymore.
Morton said the SPIRE program, which is limited to a few hours a week, should not be confused with the Lindbloms' efforts to be in continual contact with cadets throughout the week. "This Navigator thing is a whole different thing," she said.
Wrap...
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Legal branch of "vast right-wing conspiracy"...
From the LA Times:
November 11, 2005
latimes.com
THE NATION
Engaged in a Very Civil War
The Federalist Society has reshaped the legal system without ever going to court.
By David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — It began in 1982 with a handful of law students at Yale and the University of Chicago who saw themselves as minorities. They were conservatives.As a counter to liberal orthodoxy, they formed a legal debating group they called the Federalist Society. And in a hint of things to come, their first faculty advisor at the Chicago chapter was professor Antonin Scalia, soon to be the most influential conservative on the Supreme Court.
This week, in a moment of triumph, the Federalist Society — now with 35,000 members and chapters at every major law school in the nation — is holding its annual meeting at the Mayflower Hotel, a few blocks from the White House. Not only are conservative judges no longer a minority, two of the society's favorites, new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., are poised to add their "strict constructionist" voices to the high court.
These days, the one-time college debating society is seen by both friends and critics as the legal branch of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." It brings together prominent conservative judges, Bush administration lawyers, Cabinet officers, law professors and roomfuls of young lawyers who hope to assume their places in the future.
They share a common concern: that courts and judges have taken on too much power in America's democracy and that this "judicial activism" should be replaced by what Roberts described as a modest and limited role for the judiciary.
In fact, in large measure, they have already reshaped the courts.
Conservative judges, many of them products of the Federalist Society network, have come to dominate the federal bench. On Thursday, President Bush hosted the group's leaders for an early morning meeting at the White House. As another sign of the society's close ties to the Bush White House, the speaker for Thursday's dinner was Bush's beleaguered political strategist Karl Rove.
Many liberal advocates admit they look with envy at what the Federalist Society has achieved.
"They have been unbelievably successful in a short time," said Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They have taken over the courts and the government. If you go to their meetings, you see the attorney general, senators, the solicitor general. I wish we had the same kind of presence."
Though the society has sometimes been portrayed as secretive, its debates are not only open but are usually balanced with liberal voices. Strossen, a New York Law School professor, regularly participates in Federalist Society meetings on campuses.
"Radicals in Robes," the recent book by University of Chicago Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, attacks what he sees as a new wave of conservative activism in the federal judiciary. Some conservative judges would like to strengthen property rights and use the courts to roll back federal laws on the environment, civil rights and workers' protections, Sunstein argues.
He was invited to this year's meeting to debate his book and its thesis. "I really like them," he said of the Federalist Society. "They talk about ideas in a serious way. And they are genuinely respectful of competing views."
In a bow to the society's success, several liberal professors founded the American Constitution Society four years ago as a counter to the Federalist Society. It has organized chapters at 138 law schools and holds an annual meeting that has drawn speakers such as Supreme Court Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
But Strossen concedes the liberal group has not yet achieved the same presence at law schools. "It still has a way to go," she said.
The Federalist Society has managed to influence the law without going to court. Unlike the ACLU, it does not file lawsuits and legal briefs. Nor does it takes stands on legislation in Congress. It does not even officially endorse and lobby for its own members, such as Alito, when they are nominated to the Supreme Court.
"When Harriet Miers was nominated, we had vocal members on both sides of that debate," Northwestern University law professor Steven G. Calabresi, one of the four original founders of the group, said of Bush's failed choice for the Supreme Court. He noted that former Judge Robert H. Bork, a hero to many conservatives, said the selection of Miers was a "disaster."
True to their roots, Federalist Society members seem most enthralled by debates over legal philosophy. This year's conference is focused on the theme of "originalism," the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted strictly based on its words and 18th century history, not on how concepts such as liberty and equality are seen today.
As the Federalists know — and few others would recall — then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III gave a speech in 1985 calling on the Supreme Court to adopt the "jurisprudence of original intention." He faulted the high court that year for decisions that prohibited silent prayer in public schools, restricted the death penalty and limited the questioning of suspects by police.
"Far too many of the court opinions were, on the whole, more policy choices than articulations of constitutional principle," he said.
Meese argued that the only true sources of a justice's authority are the plain words of the Constitution as they were originally understood.
A few months later, Justice William J. Brennan, the court's leading liberal voice, fired back in a speech, saying Meese's view represented "little more than arrogance cloaked as humility." He said justices could not truly discern precisely what the men of 1787 meant when they wrote clauses that, for example, prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments" or "unreasonable searches and seizures."
Brennan said the Supreme Court should not be held "captive to the anachronistic views of long-gone generations." Rather, it should interpret the Constitution as setting out a "vision of human dignity [that] continues to evolve," he said.
This week, the Federalist Society reprinted both speeches as part of its program and used them as a backdrop for debates on topics such as "originalism and unenumerated rights" and "originalism and precedent." Though they may be abstract, these topics describe the essence of the Senate's debate over Roberts' nomination and the upcoming debate over Alito. As conservatives, will they vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade because the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion was not based on the original intent of the Constitution, or will they uphold it because of its 32-year-old precedent?
Conservatives ruefully acknowledge that they have not won many converts to "originalism" on the Supreme Court. Two justices, Scalia and Clarence Thomas, describe themselves as originalists. They have rejected, for example, claims involving gay rights or challenges to the death penalty for mentally retarded defendants by saying such ideas would have violated the original understanding of the Constitution. By contrast, a majority of justices said the death penalty for retarded defendants was cruel and unusual punishment by today's standards.
Similarly, state laws that blatantly discriminate against gays, the majority said, violate "equal protection" as it is understood today.
Sunstein, who clerked for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, agreed that the conservative legal movement has won some battles, but not the war over how to interpret the Constitution."They have won the battle against 'liberal activism,' " he said. "But they have not won the debate over 'originalism.' The American public does not believe the Constitution should mean what it meant at the time it was ratified."
Wrap...
November 11, 2005
latimes.com
THE NATION
Engaged in a Very Civil War
The Federalist Society has reshaped the legal system without ever going to court.
By David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — It began in 1982 with a handful of law students at Yale and the University of Chicago who saw themselves as minorities. They were conservatives.As a counter to liberal orthodoxy, they formed a legal debating group they called the Federalist Society. And in a hint of things to come, their first faculty advisor at the Chicago chapter was professor Antonin Scalia, soon to be the most influential conservative on the Supreme Court.
This week, in a moment of triumph, the Federalist Society — now with 35,000 members and chapters at every major law school in the nation — is holding its annual meeting at the Mayflower Hotel, a few blocks from the White House. Not only are conservative judges no longer a minority, two of the society's favorites, new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., are poised to add their "strict constructionist" voices to the high court.
These days, the one-time college debating society is seen by both friends and critics as the legal branch of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." It brings together prominent conservative judges, Bush administration lawyers, Cabinet officers, law professors and roomfuls of young lawyers who hope to assume their places in the future.
They share a common concern: that courts and judges have taken on too much power in America's democracy and that this "judicial activism" should be replaced by what Roberts described as a modest and limited role for the judiciary.
In fact, in large measure, they have already reshaped the courts.
Conservative judges, many of them products of the Federalist Society network, have come to dominate the federal bench. On Thursday, President Bush hosted the group's leaders for an early morning meeting at the White House. As another sign of the society's close ties to the Bush White House, the speaker for Thursday's dinner was Bush's beleaguered political strategist Karl Rove.
Many liberal advocates admit they look with envy at what the Federalist Society has achieved.
"They have been unbelievably successful in a short time," said Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. "They have taken over the courts and the government. If you go to their meetings, you see the attorney general, senators, the solicitor general. I wish we had the same kind of presence."
Though the society has sometimes been portrayed as secretive, its debates are not only open but are usually balanced with liberal voices. Strossen, a New York Law School professor, regularly participates in Federalist Society meetings on campuses.
"Radicals in Robes," the recent book by University of Chicago Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, attacks what he sees as a new wave of conservative activism in the federal judiciary. Some conservative judges would like to strengthen property rights and use the courts to roll back federal laws on the environment, civil rights and workers' protections, Sunstein argues.
He was invited to this year's meeting to debate his book and its thesis. "I really like them," he said of the Federalist Society. "They talk about ideas in a serious way. And they are genuinely respectful of competing views."
In a bow to the society's success, several liberal professors founded the American Constitution Society four years ago as a counter to the Federalist Society. It has organized chapters at 138 law schools and holds an annual meeting that has drawn speakers such as Supreme Court Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
But Strossen concedes the liberal group has not yet achieved the same presence at law schools. "It still has a way to go," she said.
The Federalist Society has managed to influence the law without going to court. Unlike the ACLU, it does not file lawsuits and legal briefs. Nor does it takes stands on legislation in Congress. It does not even officially endorse and lobby for its own members, such as Alito, when they are nominated to the Supreme Court.
"When Harriet Miers was nominated, we had vocal members on both sides of that debate," Northwestern University law professor Steven G. Calabresi, one of the four original founders of the group, said of Bush's failed choice for the Supreme Court. He noted that former Judge Robert H. Bork, a hero to many conservatives, said the selection of Miers was a "disaster."
True to their roots, Federalist Society members seem most enthralled by debates over legal philosophy. This year's conference is focused on the theme of "originalism," the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted strictly based on its words and 18th century history, not on how concepts such as liberty and equality are seen today.
As the Federalists know — and few others would recall — then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III gave a speech in 1985 calling on the Supreme Court to adopt the "jurisprudence of original intention." He faulted the high court that year for decisions that prohibited silent prayer in public schools, restricted the death penalty and limited the questioning of suspects by police.
"Far too many of the court opinions were, on the whole, more policy choices than articulations of constitutional principle," he said.
Meese argued that the only true sources of a justice's authority are the plain words of the Constitution as they were originally understood.
A few months later, Justice William J. Brennan, the court's leading liberal voice, fired back in a speech, saying Meese's view represented "little more than arrogance cloaked as humility." He said justices could not truly discern precisely what the men of 1787 meant when they wrote clauses that, for example, prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments" or "unreasonable searches and seizures."
Brennan said the Supreme Court should not be held "captive to the anachronistic views of long-gone generations." Rather, it should interpret the Constitution as setting out a "vision of human dignity [that] continues to evolve," he said.
This week, the Federalist Society reprinted both speeches as part of its program and used them as a backdrop for debates on topics such as "originalism and unenumerated rights" and "originalism and precedent." Though they may be abstract, these topics describe the essence of the Senate's debate over Roberts' nomination and the upcoming debate over Alito. As conservatives, will they vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade because the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion was not based on the original intent of the Constitution, or will they uphold it because of its 32-year-old precedent?
Conservatives ruefully acknowledge that they have not won many converts to "originalism" on the Supreme Court. Two justices, Scalia and Clarence Thomas, describe themselves as originalists. They have rejected, for example, claims involving gay rights or challenges to the death penalty for mentally retarded defendants by saying such ideas would have violated the original understanding of the Constitution. By contrast, a majority of justices said the death penalty for retarded defendants was cruel and unusual punishment by today's standards.
Similarly, state laws that blatantly discriminate against gays, the majority said, violate "equal protection" as it is understood today.
Sunstein, who clerked for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, agreed that the conservative legal movement has won some battles, but not the war over how to interpret the Constitution."They have won the battle against 'liberal activism,' " he said. "But they have not won the debate over 'originalism.' The American public does not believe the Constitution should mean what it meant at the time it was ratified."
Wrap...
Friday, November 11, 2005
About time Clinton stood up for himself!!
From AOL news, originated by Associated Press
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (Nov. 11) -
Former president Bill Clinton called Congress' impeachment of him an "egregious" abuse of the Constitution and challenged those who say history will judge him poorly because of his White House tryst with Monica Lewinsky.
Speaking at an academic conference examining his presidency here Thursday, Clinton challenged historian Douglas Brinkley's comments in a newspaper interview that Clinton would be deemed a great president were it not for his impeachment.
"I completely disagree with that," Clinton said in his speech at Hofstra University. "You can agree with that statement, but only if you think impeachment was justified. Otherwise, it was an egregious abuse of the Constitution and law and history of our country."
Clinton was acquitted by the Senate of perjury and obstruction of justice at his 1999 impeachment trial, which he argued was not about what he called his "misconduct."
"Now if you want to hold it against me that I did something wrong, that's a fair deal," he said. "If you do that, then you have a whole lot of other questions, which is how many other presidents do you have to downgrade and what are you going to do with all those Republican congressmen, you know, that had problems?"
Clinton touted what he called the achievements of his eight-year presidency, from Middle East peace initiatives to turning around the U.S. economy.
His remarks were cheered loudly by the audience.
Clinton said his administration's failures included its slowness to act to halt the genocide in Rwanda and the decision to allow federal agents to raid a cult leader's compound in Waco, Texas. Nearly 80 cult followers died in a fire during the 1993 confrontation.
"We should have waited them out," he said.
The presidential conference is the 11th to be held at Hofstra; the first in 1982 examined the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
11/11/05 05:02 EST
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
Wrap...
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (Nov. 11) -
Former president Bill Clinton called Congress' impeachment of him an "egregious" abuse of the Constitution and challenged those who say history will judge him poorly because of his White House tryst with Monica Lewinsky.
Speaking at an academic conference examining his presidency here Thursday, Clinton challenged historian Douglas Brinkley's comments in a newspaper interview that Clinton would be deemed a great president were it not for his impeachment.
"I completely disagree with that," Clinton said in his speech at Hofstra University. "You can agree with that statement, but only if you think impeachment was justified. Otherwise, it was an egregious abuse of the Constitution and law and history of our country."
Clinton was acquitted by the Senate of perjury and obstruction of justice at his 1999 impeachment trial, which he argued was not about what he called his "misconduct."
"Now if you want to hold it against me that I did something wrong, that's a fair deal," he said. "If you do that, then you have a whole lot of other questions, which is how many other presidents do you have to downgrade and what are you going to do with all those Republican congressmen, you know, that had problems?"
Clinton touted what he called the achievements of his eight-year presidency, from Middle East peace initiatives to turning around the U.S. economy.
His remarks were cheered loudly by the audience.
Clinton said his administration's failures included its slowness to act to halt the genocide in Rwanda and the decision to allow federal agents to raid a cult leader's compound in Waco, Texas. Nearly 80 cult followers died in a fire during the 1993 confrontation.
"We should have waited them out," he said.
The presidential conference is the 11th to be held at Hofstra; the first in 1982 examined the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
11/11/05 05:02 EST
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
Wrap...
Author has a hell of a time with CIA...
From Publishers Lunch just this morning comes this tale:
JAWBREAKER Set for End of Year Release
In late October (after a second Federal Court filing earlier in the month), former CIA field commander Gary Bernsten and publisher Crown finalized clearances from the CIA's Publications Review Board to issue JAWBREAKER on December 27, two months after originally scheduled.
Crown executive editor Rick Horgan says, "We are going to publish the book with the redactions preserved," with blacked-out text throughout the book where CIA approval was not granted, to make transparent to readers "all of the violence done to the manuscript." (In the interest of readibility, places where multiple pages were redacted by the CIA will be indicated in notes from the author rather than a run of completely black pages.) Printed blackouts will "stop at 20 lines." Horgan notes that Crown has also included blacked out text in two books by Robert Baer, though to a much lesser extent than in this manuscript.
Bernsten has argued, and Horgan confirms, that "some of the redactions involved deleting material that was already part of the public record." So the author and publisher decided to publish the approvable manuscript rather than continue to submit to the CIA's "shrewd delaying process."
An author's note will chronicle the battle for approval from the Agency, and Horgan says the book will include "notations that allude to what the CIA removed." A cover burst will proclaim it as "The book the CIA doesn't want you to read." The house is moving quickly to show the manuscript to prospective foreign licensees and an arrangement with a network news magazine show "could be imminent."
Note: Work for the CIA and you'd best believe they WILL read what you write. TJ Waters, author of CLASS 11, available this coming March, went through that CIA vetting process too.
Note: Robert Ferrigno has one well-working imagination, lemme tell you. He writes:
Here's a link to my next book, PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN (Scribners, Feb 2006), a thriller set 35 years in the future, after a civil war has left the US split into an Islamic republic and the Bible Belt. Fun ensues.
(...and I don't doubt it a bit!)
http://www.prayersfortheassassin.com/
Meanwhile, send a bit of sympathy to Sean Chercover, author of BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD... which will come out in 2007...and who is facing a fast coming winter. He is, he says, "Getting the snow tires put on the car this afternoon. Ugh." To which I say, "Ouch!! Been there, done that..."
Link to his website, www.seanchercover.com , and you'll see he knows whereof he speaks, since he's been...and perhaps still is...a private detective.
Final note: First, I do wonder just what a CIA Field Commander like Gary Bernsten does. Must be somewhat different from a CIA Station Chief. Interesting.... I have to say that I resent the devil out of that CIA Publishing Board getting to read all the good stuff first!
Wrap...
JAWBREAKER Set for End of Year Release
In late October (after a second Federal Court filing earlier in the month), former CIA field commander Gary Bernsten and publisher Crown finalized clearances from the CIA's Publications Review Board to issue JAWBREAKER on December 27, two months after originally scheduled.
Crown executive editor Rick Horgan says, "We are going to publish the book with the redactions preserved," with blacked-out text throughout the book where CIA approval was not granted, to make transparent to readers "all of the violence done to the manuscript." (In the interest of readibility, places where multiple pages were redacted by the CIA will be indicated in notes from the author rather than a run of completely black pages.) Printed blackouts will "stop at 20 lines." Horgan notes that Crown has also included blacked out text in two books by Robert Baer, though to a much lesser extent than in this manuscript.
Bernsten has argued, and Horgan confirms, that "some of the redactions involved deleting material that was already part of the public record." So the author and publisher decided to publish the approvable manuscript rather than continue to submit to the CIA's "shrewd delaying process."
An author's note will chronicle the battle for approval from the Agency, and Horgan says the book will include "notations that allude to what the CIA removed." A cover burst will proclaim it as "The book the CIA doesn't want you to read." The house is moving quickly to show the manuscript to prospective foreign licensees and an arrangement with a network news magazine show "could be imminent."
Note: Work for the CIA and you'd best believe they WILL read what you write. TJ Waters, author of CLASS 11, available this coming March, went through that CIA vetting process too.
Note: Robert Ferrigno has one well-working imagination, lemme tell you. He writes:
Here's a link to my next book, PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN (Scribners, Feb 2006), a thriller set 35 years in the future, after a civil war has left the US split into an Islamic republic and the Bible Belt. Fun ensues.
(...and I don't doubt it a bit!)
http://www.prayersfortheassassin.com/
Meanwhile, send a bit of sympathy to Sean Chercover, author of BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD... which will come out in 2007...and who is facing a fast coming winter. He is, he says, "Getting the snow tires put on the car this afternoon. Ugh." To which I say, "Ouch!! Been there, done that..."
Link to his website, www.seanchercover.com , and you'll see he knows whereof he speaks, since he's been...and perhaps still is...a private detective.
Final note: First, I do wonder just what a CIA Field Commander like Gary Bernsten does. Must be somewhat different from a CIA Station Chief. Interesting.... I have to say that I resent the devil out of that CIA Publishing Board getting to read all the good stuff first!
Wrap...
Thursday, November 10, 2005
OUTRAGEOUS!!!
From http://talkleft.com/new_archives/013056.html :
Thursday :: November 10, 2005
Senate Passes Amendment to End Habeas for Detainees
Unbelievable. The Senate today passed Lindsay Graham's amendment, 49 to 42 barring detainees at Guantanamo and others declared by the Executive Branch to be enemy combatants from seeking judicial review of the legality of their detentions.
Democrats indicated they may try to kill or change the provision before the Senate votes on the overall bill next week. Five Democrats sided with 44 Republicans in voting for the provision.
Who are the five Democrats who voted with Republicans?
Conrad, N.D.; Landrieu, La.; Lieberman, Conn.; Nelson, Neb.; Wyden, Ore.
As I said below, this is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
**********Original Post: Nov. 9, 9:52 am
Breaking: Senator Lindsay Graham is introducing an Amendment to the defense appropriations bill pending in the Senate (S. 1042) that would strip those designated by the Administration as enemy combatants of the ability to seek habeas review in federal courts. This is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
According to Graham's talking points for the bill (which I received by e-mail) his amendment would prohibit detainees from using the court to challenge:
The legality of their detentions
The propriety of returning detainees to their home countries
Adequacy of medical care at Guantanamo
Quality of the food
Speed of mail delivery
Allotment of exercise time and other conditions of confinement
You can read the text of his amendment here. (pdf) (scroll down, the first page is blank.)
This would effectively end all litigation brought on behalf of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, as well as any future litigation on behalf of those imprisoned at the CIA secret detention camps.
This bill is intended to have retroactive application.
Please call your senators as soon as possible and urge them to vote against the Graham amendment.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is urging bloggers to get the message out that Graham's amendment needs a swift defeat. Please, do your part.Posted Thursday :: November 10, 2005 Detainees
Wrap...
Thursday :: November 10, 2005
Senate Passes Amendment to End Habeas for Detainees
Unbelievable. The Senate today passed Lindsay Graham's amendment, 49 to 42 barring detainees at Guantanamo and others declared by the Executive Branch to be enemy combatants from seeking judicial review of the legality of their detentions.
Democrats indicated they may try to kill or change the provision before the Senate votes on the overall bill next week. Five Democrats sided with 44 Republicans in voting for the provision.
Who are the five Democrats who voted with Republicans?
Conrad, N.D.; Landrieu, La.; Lieberman, Conn.; Nelson, Neb.; Wyden, Ore.
As I said below, this is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
**********Original Post: Nov. 9, 9:52 am
Breaking: Senator Lindsay Graham is introducing an Amendment to the defense appropriations bill pending in the Senate (S. 1042) that would strip those designated by the Administration as enemy combatants of the ability to seek habeas review in federal courts. This is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
According to Graham's talking points for the bill (which I received by e-mail) his amendment would prohibit detainees from using the court to challenge:
The legality of their detentions
The propriety of returning detainees to their home countries
Adequacy of medical care at Guantanamo
Quality of the food
Speed of mail delivery
Allotment of exercise time and other conditions of confinement
You can read the text of his amendment here. (pdf) (scroll down, the first page is blank.)
This would effectively end all litigation brought on behalf of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, as well as any future litigation on behalf of those imprisoned at the CIA secret detention camps.
This bill is intended to have retroactive application.
Please call your senators as soon as possible and urge them to vote against the Graham amendment.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is urging bloggers to get the message out that Graham's amendment needs a swift defeat. Please, do your part.Posted Thursday :: November 10, 2005 Detainees
Wrap...
Bush's "management" admin...Gawd!
An excerpt from Molly Ivin's column:
Our chief executive is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his Cabinet is studded with former CEOs. This was supposed to be the "management administration" -- government was to be run like a big business, meetings would start on time, not like those slack Clinton years.
These folks are giving management a bad name.
Back in Iraq, the $30 billion appropriated for the reconstruction of Iraq is running out.
According to a New York Times article on the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, "Officials in charge cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no clear source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to operate the projects that have been finished. ... (The report describes) an array of projects that went awry, sometimes astonishingly, like electrical substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the country's electrical grid."
After two-and-a-half years and $30 billion, electricity in Baghdad is on intermittently, just as it was two-and-a-half years and $30 billion ago. So you figure, "Of course nothing's getting done -- there's an insurgency, the country's sliding into chaos."
Let's look to Afghanistan, where peace reigns. How goes the rebuilding there? Oops. According to The New York Times, a New Jersey company got the contract to build 96 health clinics and schools by September 2004. To date, nine clinics and two schools have been completed and passed inspection. The company told the Times it is hard to get good help in Afghanistan -- they have to use Afghani construction companies. After four years of reconstruction in Afghanistan, the United States has spent $1.3 billion, and according to American and Afghani sources, nobody's sure where the money is and how it's been spent -- and the net result is between unimpressive and pitiful.
The agency in charge, the U.S. Agency for International Development, says things are moving right along and defends its programs.
One of the funnier legacies of the Nixon administration was an accounting award named after Maurice Stans, a secretary of commerce and chairman of the finance committee for Nixon's re-election, who kept suitcases of cash in his office and pled guilty to five misdemeanors relating to mishandling money. In that fine tradition, the Bushies should establish a management award named the Heckuva Job Brownie Prize. It would go to the person who makes the best suggestion for improving government management -- like, "Roll up your sleeves, it makes you look like you're working."
Wrap...
Our chief executive is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his Cabinet is studded with former CEOs. This was supposed to be the "management administration" -- government was to be run like a big business, meetings would start on time, not like those slack Clinton years.
These folks are giving management a bad name.
Back in Iraq, the $30 billion appropriated for the reconstruction of Iraq is running out.
According to a New York Times article on the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, "Officials in charge cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no clear source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to operate the projects that have been finished. ... (The report describes) an array of projects that went awry, sometimes astonishingly, like electrical substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the country's electrical grid."
After two-and-a-half years and $30 billion, electricity in Baghdad is on intermittently, just as it was two-and-a-half years and $30 billion ago. So you figure, "Of course nothing's getting done -- there's an insurgency, the country's sliding into chaos."
Let's look to Afghanistan, where peace reigns. How goes the rebuilding there? Oops. According to The New York Times, a New Jersey company got the contract to build 96 health clinics and schools by September 2004. To date, nine clinics and two schools have been completed and passed inspection. The company told the Times it is hard to get good help in Afghanistan -- they have to use Afghani construction companies. After four years of reconstruction in Afghanistan, the United States has spent $1.3 billion, and according to American and Afghani sources, nobody's sure where the money is and how it's been spent -- and the net result is between unimpressive and pitiful.
The agency in charge, the U.S. Agency for International Development, says things are moving right along and defends its programs.
One of the funnier legacies of the Nixon administration was an accounting award named after Maurice Stans, a secretary of commerce and chairman of the finance committee for Nixon's re-election, who kept suitcases of cash in his office and pled guilty to five misdemeanors relating to mishandling money. In that fine tradition, the Bushies should establish a management award named the Heckuva Job Brownie Prize. It would go to the person who makes the best suggestion for improving government management -- like, "Roll up your sleeves, it makes you look like you're working."
Wrap...
New books worth waiting for...
From Publishers Lunch Weekly:
Okay... Just took a look at www.seanchercover.com , Sean Chercover's website, and learned his thriller, BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD, will be in bookstores in 2007. Long wait, but worth it. Fascinating site! Keep in mind too, that TJ Waters' book, CLASS 11, wherein he tells the story of the CIA's first class of new agents after 9/11 is a book I'm still waiting to get when March, 2006 arrives. And do scroll down and take a look at the book in FOREIGN...which will be given to each member of the new Iraqi government!!! Now that's very, very interesting, I think. Also there's a new book below on...guess who?...Donald Rumsfeld! On with the list:
FICTION/DEBUT:
J. M. Ledgard's GIRAFFE, the story of the creation of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world - told in part from the point-of-view of a haemoynamicist (who studies blood flow) and a factory girl - from their capture in Africa to their senseless massacre far away, behind the Iron Curtain, to Scott Moyers, at Penguin Press, in a very nice deal, by Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken Associates (US).clare@gillonaitken.co.uk
GENERAL/OTHER:
HOW TO BE LOST and SLEEP TOWARD HEAVEN author Amanda Eyre Ward's, FORGIVE ME, the intertwined stories of an American journalist who accompanies a couple to South Africa, where their son's murderers are appearing before Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; a war photographer mourning the loss of his great love; and a boy in Cape Cod who dreams of stardom, to Anika Streitfeld (her editor at MacAdam/Cage) at Random House, in a two-book deal, by Michelle Tessler of Tessler Literary Agency (NA).UK and foreign rights: michelle@tessleragency.com.NA to RachelBernstein:bernstein@randomhouse.com
Turkish Parliament member and journalist O.Z. Livaneli's BLISS, the story of a young girl who is raped by her uncle, and the custom of "honor killings" of disgraced women in Turkey, to Diane Reverand at St. Martin's, by Robert Bernstein and Peter Bernstein of ASAP Media. diane.reverand@stmartins.com
WOMENS/ROMANCE:
Isabel Sharpe's SHAKE IT UP, about a "black widow" who moves to middle America after being acquitted in a nationally televised murder trial, called "in the vein of Jacqueline Susann eats Norman Rockwell for breakfast," to Lucia Macro at Harper, in a very nice deal, for two books, by Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary (world English).mailto:.hb@cornerstoneliterary.com
BIOGRAPHY:
Washington Post writer and long-time Pentagon correspondent Bradley Graham's THE WARRIOR: Donald Rumsfeld's Long March, the story of what shaped Rumsfeld's pugnacious character and drive for change, from his wrestling days in high school through his stints as a Chicago congressman, senior insider in the Nixon and Ford administrations and corporate CEO, to Peter Osnos and David Patterson at Public Affairs, for publication in fall 2009, by Esther Newberg at ICM (world).
Experience Hendrix's Janie Hendrix and John McDermott's JIMI HENDRIX: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY, presenting flat and removable memorabilia and rare photographs from the family's collection, and a CD of never-commercially-released music and interviews, to Malaika Adero at Atria, for publication in fall 2006, at auction, by packagers Andy Mayer and Ellie Hutton at becker&mayer! (world English).
BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE:
Federal Express insider Roger Frock's THE STORY OF FEDEX, presenting the making of the company as only a high-ranking insider can (he's been involved with founder Fred Smith since day one), including many previously unpublished or unknown stories about the countless heartbreaking, and sometimes entertaining ordeals the company countered in its rise to the top, to Steven Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler (world).mailto:.jsiva@bkpub.com
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Bestselling history writer Alex Kershaw's behind-the-scenes account of the ill-fated Desert One operation to rescue American hostages in Iran, for publication in spring 2008, and the story of the crew of the WWII submarine, USS Sculpin, most of whose crew was captured and tortured, but a few of whom chose to go down with the ship, sinking the sub and burying their secrets with it, for publication in spring 2009, again to Robert Pigeon at Da Capo, for two books, by Derek Johns at AP Watt (world).
Former presidential aide to every president since Lyndon Johnson Barry Landau's three-part series of illustrated books describing his largest private collection of White House and presidential memorabilia, to Phil Friedman at Collins, by Lord Colin Campbell, on behalf of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.
Last Train to Paradise and Meet You in Hell author Les Standiford's WHITE HOUSE BURNING, an account of the assault, destruction, and reclaiming of the nation's capital during the War of 1812, focusing on the roles played by President James Madison and Dolly Madison, and on the transformation of a city and the president's home into symbols of vital importance, to Rachel Klayman at Crown, by Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell Management.
MEMOIR:
Lou Ferrante's humorous memoir, from a mobster who became a scholar and writer during his 13 years in prison, to Claire Wachtel at Morrow, by Lisa Queen at Queen Literary Agency (NA).mailto:.lqueen@queenliterary.com
SCIENCE:
Stanford Professor Jo Boaler's WELCOME TO MATH-LAND: A New World of Possibilities drawing from her research and exploring how learning math in the U.S. is different from math in the rest of the world, identifying the problems with math today, including gender, teaching, testing, grouping, and curriculm, and offering practical tips and key strategies for math success, to Kathryn Court at Viking Penguin, in a pre-empt, by Jill Marsal at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
SPORTS:
Tom Bertrand and The Cosmic Laws of Golf author Printer Bowler's THE SECRET OF HOGAN'S SWING, in which the secret of golf legend Ben Hogan's swing will be revealed and offering a detailed and illustrated golf system incorporating all the elements of Hogan's swing while also telling the fable-like story of Hogan and student/golf pro John Schlee (Bertrand's instructor), to Stephen Power at Wiley, in a nice deal, by Bob Diforio at the D4EO Literary Agency (world). d4eo@optonline.net
TRUE CRIME:
NYT bestselling author Gregg Olsen's first hardcover true crime book UNFORGIVEN SINS: Two ministers, five lovers, and one dead wife, the story of a pastor from Washington State who murdered his wife while carrying on several affairs with members of his fundamentalist congregation, to Charlie Spicer at St. Martin's, by Susan Raihofer of the David Black Literary Agency (NA).
FOREIGN:
Iraqi rights to James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee's COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: Straight Thinking About Wealth and Prosperity, to the Baghdad Center for Economic Research, with free copies to be provided to all members of the new Iraqi government, by Scott Hoffman at PMA Literary and Film Management.mailto:Management.scott@pmalitfilm.com
FILM:
Film rights to COAST TO COAST, based on the diaries of Effie Hotchkiss, the first woman to cross the country on a motorcycle, in 1915, optioned to Eric Harryman at Vital Entertainment, in a nice deal, by Sandra Choron at March Tenth, with Hotchkiss's great grandson Craig Dove adapting the diaries for the book.mailto:book.schoron@aol.com
Wrap...
Okay... Just took a look at www.seanchercover.com , Sean Chercover's website, and learned his thriller, BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD, will be in bookstores in 2007. Long wait, but worth it. Fascinating site! Keep in mind too, that TJ Waters' book, CLASS 11, wherein he tells the story of the CIA's first class of new agents after 9/11 is a book I'm still waiting to get when March, 2006 arrives. And do scroll down and take a look at the book in FOREIGN...which will be given to each member of the new Iraqi government!!! Now that's very, very interesting, I think. Also there's a new book below on...guess who?...Donald Rumsfeld! On with the list:
FICTION/DEBUT:
J. M. Ledgard's GIRAFFE, the story of the creation of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world - told in part from the point-of-view of a haemoynamicist (who studies blood flow) and a factory girl - from their capture in Africa to their senseless massacre far away, behind the Iron Curtain, to Scott Moyers, at Penguin Press, in a very nice deal, by Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken Associates (US).clare@gillonaitken.co.uk
GENERAL/OTHER:
HOW TO BE LOST and SLEEP TOWARD HEAVEN author Amanda Eyre Ward's, FORGIVE ME, the intertwined stories of an American journalist who accompanies a couple to South Africa, where their son's murderers are appearing before Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; a war photographer mourning the loss of his great love; and a boy in Cape Cod who dreams of stardom, to Anika Streitfeld (her editor at MacAdam/Cage) at Random House, in a two-book deal, by Michelle Tessler of Tessler Literary Agency (NA).UK and foreign rights: michelle@tessleragency.com.NA to RachelBernstein:bernstein@randomhouse.com
Turkish Parliament member and journalist O.Z. Livaneli's BLISS, the story of a young girl who is raped by her uncle, and the custom of "honor killings" of disgraced women in Turkey, to Diane Reverand at St. Martin's, by Robert Bernstein and Peter Bernstein of ASAP Media. diane.reverand@stmartins.com
WOMENS/ROMANCE:
Isabel Sharpe's SHAKE IT UP, about a "black widow" who moves to middle America after being acquitted in a nationally televised murder trial, called "in the vein of Jacqueline Susann eats Norman Rockwell for breakfast," to Lucia Macro at Harper, in a very nice deal, for two books, by Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary (world English).mailto:.hb@cornerstoneliterary.com
BIOGRAPHY:
Washington Post writer and long-time Pentagon correspondent Bradley Graham's THE WARRIOR: Donald Rumsfeld's Long March, the story of what shaped Rumsfeld's pugnacious character and drive for change, from his wrestling days in high school through his stints as a Chicago congressman, senior insider in the Nixon and Ford administrations and corporate CEO, to Peter Osnos and David Patterson at Public Affairs, for publication in fall 2009, by Esther Newberg at ICM (world).
Experience Hendrix's Janie Hendrix and John McDermott's JIMI HENDRIX: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY, presenting flat and removable memorabilia and rare photographs from the family's collection, and a CD of never-commercially-released music and interviews, to Malaika Adero at Atria, for publication in fall 2006, at auction, by packagers Andy Mayer and Ellie Hutton at becker&mayer! (world English).
BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE:
Federal Express insider Roger Frock's THE STORY OF FEDEX, presenting the making of the company as only a high-ranking insider can (he's been involved with founder Fred Smith since day one), including many previously unpublished or unknown stories about the countless heartbreaking, and sometimes entertaining ordeals the company countered in its rise to the top, to Steven Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler (world).mailto:.jsiva@bkpub.com
HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:
Bestselling history writer Alex Kershaw's behind-the-scenes account of the ill-fated Desert One operation to rescue American hostages in Iran, for publication in spring 2008, and the story of the crew of the WWII submarine, USS Sculpin, most of whose crew was captured and tortured, but a few of whom chose to go down with the ship, sinking the sub and burying their secrets with it, for publication in spring 2009, again to Robert Pigeon at Da Capo, for two books, by Derek Johns at AP Watt (world).
Former presidential aide to every president since Lyndon Johnson Barry Landau's three-part series of illustrated books describing his largest private collection of White House and presidential memorabilia, to Phil Friedman at Collins, by Lord Colin Campbell, on behalf of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.
Last Train to Paradise and Meet You in Hell author Les Standiford's WHITE HOUSE BURNING, an account of the assault, destruction, and reclaiming of the nation's capital during the War of 1812, focusing on the roles played by President James Madison and Dolly Madison, and on the transformation of a city and the president's home into symbols of vital importance, to Rachel Klayman at Crown, by Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell Management.
MEMOIR:
Lou Ferrante's humorous memoir, from a mobster who became a scholar and writer during his 13 years in prison, to Claire Wachtel at Morrow, by Lisa Queen at Queen Literary Agency (NA).mailto:.lqueen@queenliterary.com
SCIENCE:
Stanford Professor Jo Boaler's WELCOME TO MATH-LAND: A New World of Possibilities drawing from her research and exploring how learning math in the U.S. is different from math in the rest of the world, identifying the problems with math today, including gender, teaching, testing, grouping, and curriculm, and offering practical tips and key strategies for math success, to Kathryn Court at Viking Penguin, in a pre-empt, by Jill Marsal at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
SPORTS:
Tom Bertrand and The Cosmic Laws of Golf author Printer Bowler's THE SECRET OF HOGAN'S SWING, in which the secret of golf legend Ben Hogan's swing will be revealed and offering a detailed and illustrated golf system incorporating all the elements of Hogan's swing while also telling the fable-like story of Hogan and student/golf pro John Schlee (Bertrand's instructor), to Stephen Power at Wiley, in a nice deal, by Bob Diforio at the D4EO Literary Agency (world). d4eo@optonline.net
TRUE CRIME:
NYT bestselling author Gregg Olsen's first hardcover true crime book UNFORGIVEN SINS: Two ministers, five lovers, and one dead wife, the story of a pastor from Washington State who murdered his wife while carrying on several affairs with members of his fundamentalist congregation, to Charlie Spicer at St. Martin's, by Susan Raihofer of the David Black Literary Agency (NA).
FOREIGN:
Iraqi rights to James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee's COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: Straight Thinking About Wealth and Prosperity, to the Baghdad Center for Economic Research, with free copies to be provided to all members of the new Iraqi government, by Scott Hoffman at PMA Literary and Film Management.mailto:Management.scott@pmalitfilm.com
FILM:
Film rights to COAST TO COAST, based on the diaries of Effie Hotchkiss, the first woman to cross the country on a motorcycle, in 1915, optioned to Eric Harryman at Vital Entertainment, in a nice deal, by Sandra Choron at March Tenth, with Hotchkiss's great grandson Craig Dove adapting the diaries for the book.mailto:book.schoron@aol.com
Wrap...
Sickie: Pat Robertson on Dover, PA...
Televangelist Robertson warns town of God's wrathThu Nov 10, 2005 4:17 PM ET
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the influential conservative Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition, has a long record of similar apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements.
Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, one of President George W. Bush's most vocal international critics.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."
"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
The 700 Club claims a daily audience of around one million. It is also broadcast around the world translated into more than 70 languages.
In voting on Tuesday, all eight Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members up for re-election lost their seats after trying to introduce "intelligent design" to high school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Adherents of intelligent design argue that certain forms in nature are too complex to have evolved through natural selection and must have been created by a "designer." Opponents say it is the latest attempt by conservatives to introduce religion into the school science curriculum.
The Dover case sparked a trial in federal court that gained nationwide attention after the school board was sued by parents backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The board ordered schools to read students a short statement in biology classes informing them that the theory of evolution is not established fact and that gaps exist in it.
The statement mentioned intelligent design as an alternate theory and recommended students read a book that explained the theory further. A decision in the case is expected before the end of the year.
In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Florida that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity.
Wrap...
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the influential conservative Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition, has a long record of similar apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements.
Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, one of President George W. Bush's most vocal international critics.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."
"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
The 700 Club claims a daily audience of around one million. It is also broadcast around the world translated into more than 70 languages.
In voting on Tuesday, all eight Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members up for re-election lost their seats after trying to introduce "intelligent design" to high school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Adherents of intelligent design argue that certain forms in nature are too complex to have evolved through natural selection and must have been created by a "designer." Opponents say it is the latest attempt by conservatives to introduce religion into the school science curriculum.
The Dover case sparked a trial in federal court that gained nationwide attention after the school board was sued by parents backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The board ordered schools to read students a short statement in biology classes informing them that the theory of evolution is not established fact and that gaps exist in it.
The statement mentioned intelligent design as an alternate theory and recommended students read a book that explained the theory further. A decision in the case is expected before the end of the year.
In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Florida that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity.
Wrap...
Lockheed: Making military $$$$$ hand over fist...
From: http://brandywinepeace.com/New%20Interrogators.htm
Pratap Chatterjee is Managing Editor/Project Director of CorpWatch.
Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap Chatterjee
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El
Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were
going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic
tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up,
they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of
the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the
world's biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Before deployment to Iraq, they assemble in Building 503 on Pleasanton
Road to mingle with the soldiers and government civilian workers at the
welcome briefing that takes place every Sunday. There they get a
government-issued duffel bag, filled with basic items for working in the
war in the Middle East: cargo pants, tactical shirts, Kevlar helmets and
Land Warrior chemical masks. After a week of orientation and medical
processing, they fly to Tampa, Florida, and onto their final work
destinations -- Iraq's infamous prisons including Abu Ghraib, Camp
Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport, and Camp Whitehorse,
near Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes" (97E is the official
classification number for the interrogator course taught at military
colleges including Fort Huachuca, Arizona), these contractors will work
side-by-side with military interrogators conducting question-and-answer
sessions using 17 officially sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love of
comrades" to "fear up harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of
thousands of men thrown into United States-run military jails on
suspicion of links to terrorism.
The rules that govern all interrogators, both contract and military, are
currently open to broad interpretation. Today there is much legal
wrangling about where to draw the line between harsh treatment and
torture. An amendment to the latest military spending bill introduced by
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, explicitly bars the use of
torture on anyone in Unites States custody. His amendment was recently
approved by a 90 to 9 votes in the United States Senate and is currently
being negotiated in "conference" by both Houses of Congress this week
before going to President Bush. McCain is fighting off Vice President
Dick Cheney's suggestion that Central Intelligence Agency
counter-terrorism agents working overseas be exempted from the torture
ban.
Sytex
Jobs for this new breed of interrogators typically begin with a phone
call or e-mail to retired Lieutenant Colonel Marc Michaelis, in the
quaint old flour milling town of Ellicott City, on the banks of the
Patapsco River in Maryland, about an hour's drive from Washington DC.
Michaelis, who is the main point of contact for new interrogators, came
to Lockheed in February after it acquired his former employer Sytex in a
$462 million takeover. Sytex was founded 1988 by Sydney Martin, a
management graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
dabbles in collecting old Danish and Irish coins. In its first year, the
Pennsylvania-based company earned $1,500. By 2004, according to
Congressional Quarterly, Sytex was providing "personnel and technology
solutions to government customers including the Pentagon's Northern
Command, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, and the Department
of Homeland Security." Its revenues had reached $425 million.
The bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in hiring contract
interrogators that began just weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Center in New York. Armed with new Pentagon contracts,
Michaelis advertised job openings for 120 new "intelligence analysts"
ranging from Arab linguists to counterintelligence and information
warfare specialists. The private contractors would work at Fort Belvoir,
Virginia, and at the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa,
Florida.
At the same time, Lockheed Martin, then a completely different company,
was also interested in entering this lucrative new business of
intelligence contracting. It bought up Affiliated Computer Services
(ACS), a small company with a General Services Administration (GSA)
technology contract issued in Kansas City, Missouri. In November 2002,
Lockheed used GSA to employ private interrogators at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. The contract was then transferred to a Department of Interior
office in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
The issue of private contractors in interrogation did not come to light
until mid-2004, when a military investigation revealed that several
interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees of CACI.
The contract to the Virginia-based company was also issued by the
Department of Interior's Sierra Vista, Arizona office, located a stone's
throw from the headquarters of the Army's main interrogation school.
(CACI did not actually bid on the original contract, but like Lockheed in
Guantanamo, it had bought another company--Premier Technology Group-which
did. The Fairfax, Virginia-based firm provided interrogators to the
Pentagon in August 2003 under a GSA contract for information technology
services.)
Scandal at Abu Ghraib
One of the CACI interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, was accused of
involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal that broke in May
2004. It was soon revealed that Stefanowicz, who was trained as a
satellite image analyst, had received no formal training in military
interrogation, which involves instruction in the Geneva Conventions on
human rights.
A subsequent report in July 2004 by Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek,
on behalf of the Army Inspector General, found that a third of the
interrogators supplied in Iraq by CACI had not been trained in military
interrogation methods and policies. The same report mentioned that of the
four contract interrogators employed by Sytex in Bagram, Afghanistan,
only two had received military interrogation training, and the other two,
who were former police officers, had not.
It also emerged that no one knew what laws applied to private contractors
who engaged in torture in Iraq or whether they were in fact accountable
to any legal authority or disciplinary procedures. When the media began
to question the role of the private contractors and the legality of their
presence under unrelated information technology contracts from
non-military agencies, the Pentagon swiftly issued sole-source ("no bid")
military contracts to CACI and Lockheed.
That CACI contract expired at the end of September this year. But before
the company opted not to renew its contract, the company was already
working with Sytex as a sub-contractor to supply new personnel to
interrogate prisoners.
No new contractor in either Iraq or Afghanistan has been made officially
announced to date, but Major Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesperson for
United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa,
Florida, told CorpWatch: "The Army is the executive agent for contracting
all interrogator type services for the Department of Defense. They work
their contracts (writ large) from an office which operates out of Fort
Belvoir, Virginia."
Web Recruiting
Sytex, and thus Lockheed after the takeover, appears to have subsequently
emerged as one of the biggest recruiters of private interrogators. In
June alone, Sytex advertised for 11 new interrogators for Iraq, and in
July the company sought 23 interrogators for Afghanistan. It has also
been seeking experienced report writers and program managers who have
worked in military interrogations in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation
Enduring Freedom, former Yugoslavia, or the Persian Gulf War.
Ads on several websites frequented by current and former military
personnel offered a $70,000 to $90,000 salary, a $2,000 sign-up bonus,
$1,000 for a mid-tour break, and a $2,000 bonus for completing the normal
six month deployment. Those returning for a second tour get double
bonuses at the beginning and end of their stints. In return, the
employees are expected to work as necessary-- up to 14 hours a day, 7
days a week. (The companies, however, get to bill the military up to $200
an hour for this work, according to Cherif Bassiouni, the former United
Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in
Afghanistan.)
"Sytex is one of our best customers," says Bill Golden, a former military
intelligence analyst with 20 years Army experience, who now runs
IntelligenceCareers.com, one of the biggest intelligence employment
websites in the business. "They are the main company hiring 97E workers
today."
Golden attributes the current boom in private contract interrogators to
poor military planning over the last decade. "The military worked as hard
as it could to create a brain drain by moving qualified intelligence
people into other jobs, who then quit. As a result by September 11, 2001,
there was no one left who had a clue. Now they are rushing to catch up
and create 9,000 new specialists, but it takes at least five years to
become really experienced. What we have now is a nursery full of babies
in the army."
Yet even by 2003, just 237 new interrogators were graduated from the
intelligence school at Fort Huachuca. Today, a Virginia-based company,
Anteon, has contracted with the base to provide private instructors to
increase the number of qualified interrogators completing intelligence
courses to 1,000 a year in 2006. (See related article)
The scope of contracts for companies like Anteon and Sytex are difficult
to determine because they have never been made public. Asked about the
details of the interrogation contracts, Lockheed declined to comment.
Joseph Wagovich, a spokesman for the company's information technology
division that includes Sytex, initially told CorpWatch that the company
had only a minor role in the interrogation business and that the company
had wrapped up its interrogation contract on Guantanamo. But he confirmed
that Lockheed was still supplying other kinds of "intelligence analysts"
on the Cuban base.
Sytex itself also likes to keep a low profile. "Most of the law
enforcement organizations, as well as the other surreptitious
organizations we may be supporting, would just as soon not see their
names in print," Ralph Palmieri Junior, the company's Chief Operating
Officer told Congressional Quarterly in 2004.
Running the United States?
Even without all the specifics, it is clear that Lockheed is supplying
the U.S. war in Iraq with a vast range of both personnel and materiel. In
addition providing interrogators, it is currently seeking retired Army
majors or lieutenant colonels to develop short- and long-range planning
at the biggest U.S. base in Iraq: Camp Anaconda, in Balad, northern Iraq.
Also being courted for work in Iraq are "red switch" experts to run the
military's secure communications systems.
On the materiel side, Lockheed's Keyhole and Lacrosse satellites beam
images from the war back to the military; its U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird
spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 jet fighters, and F-117 stealth attack fighters
were used to "shock and awe" the Iraqis at the start of the US invasion;
and ground troops employed its Hellfire air-to-ground missiles and the
Javelin portable missiles in the invasion of Fallujah last year.
The company's reach and influence go far beyond the military. A New York
Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the sentence: "Lockheed
Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a
breathtakingly big part of it."
"Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military
contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now
stretches from the Pentagon to the Post Office. It sorts your mail and
totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United
States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make
all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft"
writes Tim Weiner.
The national security reporter for the New York Times explains how
Lockheed gets its business: "Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered
for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of
transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and
director of the national spy satellite agency."
"Giving one company this much power in matters of war and peace is as
dangerous as it is undemocratic," says Bill Hartung, senior fellow at the
World Policy Institute in New York. "Lockheed Martin is now positioned to
profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to
intervention, and from occupation to interrogation.
Failed Experiment?
Apart from the monoply on war-related contracts to one single
corporation, the increased outsourcing of interrogation to private
contractors raises questions of accountability and of enforcement of
regulations designed for the military.
Human rights groups are openly critical of this new trend. "The Army's
use of contract interrogators has to date been a failed experiment,"
Deborah Pearlstein told CorpWatch. "Based on the Pentagon's own
investigations and other reports that are already public, it seems clear
that contractors are less well trained, less well controlled, and harder
to hold accountable for things that go wrong than are regular troops."
Pearlstein, who is the director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at
Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee on Human Rights), warned
that "unless and until contract interrogators can be brought at the very
least up to the standards of training and discipline expected of our
uniformed soldiers, the United States may well be better off without
their services."
Former interrogators have a more nuanced opinion. "The problem is not the
use of civilian contractors," one former Army interrogator with over ten
years of field experience, wrote in an e-mail to CorpWatch. "What is
necessary is an active means of supervision and oversight on ALL of our
assets in the field...not just the civilian ones. If you take a look at
many of the investigations of the military intelligence activities, you
will find just as many uniformed individuals breaking the law as
contractors. I am more interested in providing proper guidance, training,
supervision and oversight to ALL of our intelligence people."
But Susan Burke, a lawyer for Iraqi prisoners who say they were tortured
at Abu Ghraib, challenges the legality of using private contractors for
interrogation. "Interrogation has always been considered an inherently
governmental function for obvious reasons. It is irresponsible and
dangerous to use contractors in such settings given that there is a long
history of repeated human rights abuses by contractors." The Philadephia
attorney charges that the use of private contractors is illegal. "The
United States Congress has passed laws (the Federal Acquisition
Regulations) that prevent the executive branch from delegating
"inherently governmental functions" to private parties."
BOX: Spy Cameras Meet Lie Detectors
Peter Rosenfeld designs technology that allow computers to interpret what
a cameras "sees." Now, robotics expert for Advanced Technology Labs, a
division of Lockheed Martin in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is turning this
expertise to the imprecise science of interrogation.
His latest assignment is a three year project with Professor Dimitris
Metaxas of Rutgers University to use cameras and a special computer
program to track subjects' eyes, lips, shoulders, and hands movements to
determine if they are lying.
Metaxas and Rosenfeld's work is paid for by a $3.5 million grant made in
August by the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the U.S.
immigration and border security system among a myriad other tasks.
Lockheed Martin's Rosenfeld is supplying three-dimensional sensor
technology for the project, while Rutgers is supplying student
volunteers.
The government has used polygraphs for more than 50 years to track blood
pressure and heart rate, but most experts believe that these "lie
detectors" are inaccurate at least 50 percent of the time and that a
trained liar can easily fool the machine.
The next steps in lie detection draw heavily from the work of
psychologists including Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of
California medical school in San Francisco, who has spent more than 40
years tracking the facial and body signals that people make when they
answer questions. Early studies indicated, for example, that people
looked to their left when recalling the past but to the right when making
up a story about prior events.
Today Ekman and Metaxas are getting millions of dollars from the multiple
military agencies to study the fleeting facial expressions and casual
gestures that many observers do not notice, but that the scientists hope
can help them develop more sophisticated lie detectors.
"Micro-expressions and micro-gestures are a lot harder to mask and they
do not vary among cultures and races," Metaxas told the Daily Targus, the
Rutgers campus newspaper. "This gives interrogators tools to do their job
confidently."
Wrap...
Pratap Chatterjee is Managing Editor/Project Director of CorpWatch.
Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap Chatterjee
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El
Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were
going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic
tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up,
they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of
the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the
world's biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Before deployment to Iraq, they assemble in Building 503 on Pleasanton
Road to mingle with the soldiers and government civilian workers at the
welcome briefing that takes place every Sunday. There they get a
government-issued duffel bag, filled with basic items for working in the
war in the Middle East: cargo pants, tactical shirts, Kevlar helmets and
Land Warrior chemical masks. After a week of orientation and medical
processing, they fly to Tampa, Florida, and onto their final work
destinations -- Iraq's infamous prisons including Abu Ghraib, Camp
Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport, and Camp Whitehorse,
near Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes" (97E is the official
classification number for the interrogator course taught at military
colleges including Fort Huachuca, Arizona), these contractors will work
side-by-side with military interrogators conducting question-and-answer
sessions using 17 officially sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love of
comrades" to "fear up harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of
thousands of men thrown into United States-run military jails on
suspicion of links to terrorism.
The rules that govern all interrogators, both contract and military, are
currently open to broad interpretation. Today there is much legal
wrangling about where to draw the line between harsh treatment and
torture. An amendment to the latest military spending bill introduced by
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, explicitly bars the use of
torture on anyone in Unites States custody. His amendment was recently
approved by a 90 to 9 votes in the United States Senate and is currently
being negotiated in "conference" by both Houses of Congress this week
before going to President Bush. McCain is fighting off Vice President
Dick Cheney's suggestion that Central Intelligence Agency
counter-terrorism agents working overseas be exempted from the torture
ban.
Sytex
Jobs for this new breed of interrogators typically begin with a phone
call or e-mail to retired Lieutenant Colonel Marc Michaelis, in the
quaint old flour milling town of Ellicott City, on the banks of the
Patapsco River in Maryland, about an hour's drive from Washington DC.
Michaelis, who is the main point of contact for new interrogators, came
to Lockheed in February after it acquired his former employer Sytex in a
$462 million takeover. Sytex was founded 1988 by Sydney Martin, a
management graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
dabbles in collecting old Danish and Irish coins. In its first year, the
Pennsylvania-based company earned $1,500. By 2004, according to
Congressional Quarterly, Sytex was providing "personnel and technology
solutions to government customers including the Pentagon's Northern
Command, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, and the Department
of Homeland Security." Its revenues had reached $425 million.
The bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in hiring contract
interrogators that began just weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Center in New York. Armed with new Pentagon contracts,
Michaelis advertised job openings for 120 new "intelligence analysts"
ranging from Arab linguists to counterintelligence and information
warfare specialists. The private contractors would work at Fort Belvoir,
Virginia, and at the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa,
Florida.
At the same time, Lockheed Martin, then a completely different company,
was also interested in entering this lucrative new business of
intelligence contracting. It bought up Affiliated Computer Services
(ACS), a small company with a General Services Administration (GSA)
technology contract issued in Kansas City, Missouri. In November 2002,
Lockheed used GSA to employ private interrogators at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. The contract was then transferred to a Department of Interior
office in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
The issue of private contractors in interrogation did not come to light
until mid-2004, when a military investigation revealed that several
interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees of CACI.
The contract to the Virginia-based company was also issued by the
Department of Interior's Sierra Vista, Arizona office, located a stone's
throw from the headquarters of the Army's main interrogation school.
(CACI did not actually bid on the original contract, but like Lockheed in
Guantanamo, it had bought another company--Premier Technology Group-which
did. The Fairfax, Virginia-based firm provided interrogators to the
Pentagon in August 2003 under a GSA contract for information technology
services.)
Scandal at Abu Ghraib
One of the CACI interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, was accused of
involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal that broke in May
2004. It was soon revealed that Stefanowicz, who was trained as a
satellite image analyst, had received no formal training in military
interrogation, which involves instruction in the Geneva Conventions on
human rights.
A subsequent report in July 2004 by Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek,
on behalf of the Army Inspector General, found that a third of the
interrogators supplied in Iraq by CACI had not been trained in military
interrogation methods and policies. The same report mentioned that of the
four contract interrogators employed by Sytex in Bagram, Afghanistan,
only two had received military interrogation training, and the other two,
who were former police officers, had not.
It also emerged that no one knew what laws applied to private contractors
who engaged in torture in Iraq or whether they were in fact accountable
to any legal authority or disciplinary procedures. When the media began
to question the role of the private contractors and the legality of their
presence under unrelated information technology contracts from
non-military agencies, the Pentagon swiftly issued sole-source ("no bid")
military contracts to CACI and Lockheed.
That CACI contract expired at the end of September this year. But before
the company opted not to renew its contract, the company was already
working with Sytex as a sub-contractor to supply new personnel to
interrogate prisoners.
No new contractor in either Iraq or Afghanistan has been made officially
announced to date, but Major Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesperson for
United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa,
Florida, told CorpWatch: "The Army is the executive agent for contracting
all interrogator type services for the Department of Defense. They work
their contracts (writ large) from an office which operates out of Fort
Belvoir, Virginia."
Web Recruiting
Sytex, and thus Lockheed after the takeover, appears to have subsequently
emerged as one of the biggest recruiters of private interrogators. In
June alone, Sytex advertised for 11 new interrogators for Iraq, and in
July the company sought 23 interrogators for Afghanistan. It has also
been seeking experienced report writers and program managers who have
worked in military interrogations in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation
Enduring Freedom, former Yugoslavia, or the Persian Gulf War.
Ads on several websites frequented by current and former military
personnel offered a $70,000 to $90,000 salary, a $2,000 sign-up bonus,
$1,000 for a mid-tour break, and a $2,000 bonus for completing the normal
six month deployment. Those returning for a second tour get double
bonuses at the beginning and end of their stints. In return, the
employees are expected to work as necessary-- up to 14 hours a day, 7
days a week. (The companies, however, get to bill the military up to $200
an hour for this work, according to Cherif Bassiouni, the former United
Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in
Afghanistan.)
"Sytex is one of our best customers," says Bill Golden, a former military
intelligence analyst with 20 years Army experience, who now runs
IntelligenceCareers.com, one of the biggest intelligence employment
websites in the business. "They are the main company hiring 97E workers
today."
Golden attributes the current boom in private contract interrogators to
poor military planning over the last decade. "The military worked as hard
as it could to create a brain drain by moving qualified intelligence
people into other jobs, who then quit. As a result by September 11, 2001,
there was no one left who had a clue. Now they are rushing to catch up
and create 9,000 new specialists, but it takes at least five years to
become really experienced. What we have now is a nursery full of babies
in the army."
Yet even by 2003, just 237 new interrogators were graduated from the
intelligence school at Fort Huachuca. Today, a Virginia-based company,
Anteon, has contracted with the base to provide private instructors to
increase the number of qualified interrogators completing intelligence
courses to 1,000 a year in 2006. (See related article)
The scope of contracts for companies like Anteon and Sytex are difficult
to determine because they have never been made public. Asked about the
details of the interrogation contracts, Lockheed declined to comment.
Joseph Wagovich, a spokesman for the company's information technology
division that includes Sytex, initially told CorpWatch that the company
had only a minor role in the interrogation business and that the company
had wrapped up its interrogation contract on Guantanamo. But he confirmed
that Lockheed was still supplying other kinds of "intelligence analysts"
on the Cuban base.
Sytex itself also likes to keep a low profile. "Most of the law
enforcement organizations, as well as the other surreptitious
organizations we may be supporting, would just as soon not see their
names in print," Ralph Palmieri Junior, the company's Chief Operating
Officer told Congressional Quarterly in 2004.
Running the United States?
Even without all the specifics, it is clear that Lockheed is supplying
the U.S. war in Iraq with a vast range of both personnel and materiel. In
addition providing interrogators, it is currently seeking retired Army
majors or lieutenant colonels to develop short- and long-range planning
at the biggest U.S. base in Iraq: Camp Anaconda, in Balad, northern Iraq.
Also being courted for work in Iraq are "red switch" experts to run the
military's secure communications systems.
On the materiel side, Lockheed's Keyhole and Lacrosse satellites beam
images from the war back to the military; its U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird
spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 jet fighters, and F-117 stealth attack fighters
were used to "shock and awe" the Iraqis at the start of the US invasion;
and ground troops employed its Hellfire air-to-ground missiles and the
Javelin portable missiles in the invasion of Fallujah last year.
The company's reach and influence go far beyond the military. A New York
Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the sentence: "Lockheed
Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a
breathtakingly big part of it."
"Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military
contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now
stretches from the Pentagon to the Post Office. It sorts your mail and
totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United
States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make
all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft"
writes Tim Weiner.
The national security reporter for the New York Times explains how
Lockheed gets its business: "Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered
for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of
transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and
director of the national spy satellite agency."
"Giving one company this much power in matters of war and peace is as
dangerous as it is undemocratic," says Bill Hartung, senior fellow at the
World Policy Institute in New York. "Lockheed Martin is now positioned to
profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to
intervention, and from occupation to interrogation.
Failed Experiment?
Apart from the monoply on war-related contracts to one single
corporation, the increased outsourcing of interrogation to private
contractors raises questions of accountability and of enforcement of
regulations designed for the military.
Human rights groups are openly critical of this new trend. "The Army's
use of contract interrogators has to date been a failed experiment,"
Deborah Pearlstein told CorpWatch. "Based on the Pentagon's own
investigations and other reports that are already public, it seems clear
that contractors are less well trained, less well controlled, and harder
to hold accountable for things that go wrong than are regular troops."
Pearlstein, who is the director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at
Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee on Human Rights), warned
that "unless and until contract interrogators can be brought at the very
least up to the standards of training and discipline expected of our
uniformed soldiers, the United States may well be better off without
their services."
Former interrogators have a more nuanced opinion. "The problem is not the
use of civilian contractors," one former Army interrogator with over ten
years of field experience, wrote in an e-mail to CorpWatch. "What is
necessary is an active means of supervision and oversight on ALL of our
assets in the field...not just the civilian ones. If you take a look at
many of the investigations of the military intelligence activities, you
will find just as many uniformed individuals breaking the law as
contractors. I am more interested in providing proper guidance, training,
supervision and oversight to ALL of our intelligence people."
But Susan Burke, a lawyer for Iraqi prisoners who say they were tortured
at Abu Ghraib, challenges the legality of using private contractors for
interrogation. "Interrogation has always been considered an inherently
governmental function for obvious reasons. It is irresponsible and
dangerous to use contractors in such settings given that there is a long
history of repeated human rights abuses by contractors." The Philadephia
attorney charges that the use of private contractors is illegal. "The
United States Congress has passed laws (the Federal Acquisition
Regulations) that prevent the executive branch from delegating
"inherently governmental functions" to private parties."
BOX: Spy Cameras Meet Lie Detectors
Peter Rosenfeld designs technology that allow computers to interpret what
a cameras "sees." Now, robotics expert for Advanced Technology Labs, a
division of Lockheed Martin in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is turning this
expertise to the imprecise science of interrogation.
His latest assignment is a three year project with Professor Dimitris
Metaxas of Rutgers University to use cameras and a special computer
program to track subjects' eyes, lips, shoulders, and hands movements to
determine if they are lying.
Metaxas and Rosenfeld's work is paid for by a $3.5 million grant made in
August by the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the U.S.
immigration and border security system among a myriad other tasks.
Lockheed Martin's Rosenfeld is supplying three-dimensional sensor
technology for the project, while Rutgers is supplying student
volunteers.
The government has used polygraphs for more than 50 years to track blood
pressure and heart rate, but most experts believe that these "lie
detectors" are inaccurate at least 50 percent of the time and that a
trained liar can easily fool the machine.
The next steps in lie detection draw heavily from the work of
psychologists including Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of
California medical school in San Francisco, who has spent more than 40
years tracking the facial and body signals that people make when they
answer questions. Early studies indicated, for example, that people
looked to their left when recalling the past but to the right when making
up a story about prior events.
Today Ekman and Metaxas are getting millions of dollars from the multiple
military agencies to study the fleeting facial expressions and casual
gestures that many observers do not notice, but that the scientists hope
can help them develop more sophisticated lie detectors.
"Micro-expressions and micro-gestures are a lot harder to mask and they
do not vary among cultures and races," Metaxas told the Daily Targus, the
Rutgers campus newspaper. "This gives interrogators tools to do their job
confidently."
Wrap...
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Abramoff asked for $9 mil bribe, but did he get it?
NY Times via Raw Story:
Abramoff asked $9 million from Gabon for meeting with Bush
RAW STORY
Thursday's New York Times will feature a front page story on Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist linked to former House GOP leader DeLay, RAW STORY has learned.
Excerpts from the forthcoming story:
#
The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a small West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.
The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that the lobbyist had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon.
White House and State Department officials described Bush's meeting with Bongo as routine.
Gabon is regularly accused by the United States of human rights abuses.
The officials said they knew of no involvement by Abramoff in the arrangements. Officials at Gabon's embassy in Washington did not respond to written questions.
"This went through normal staffing channels," Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, told the Times. He said the meeting was "part of the president's outreach to the continent of Africa."
#
The rest of the article can be read at the (registration required) Times Website.
Wrap...
Abramoff asked $9 million from Gabon for meeting with Bush
RAW STORY
Thursday's New York Times will feature a front page story on Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist linked to former House GOP leader DeLay, RAW STORY has learned.
Excerpts from the forthcoming story:
#
The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a small West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.
The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that the lobbyist had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon.
White House and State Department officials described Bush's meeting with Bongo as routine.
Gabon is regularly accused by the United States of human rights abuses.
The officials said they knew of no involvement by Abramoff in the arrangements. Officials at Gabon's embassy in Washington did not respond to written questions.
"This went through normal staffing channels," Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, told the Times. He said the meeting was "part of the president's outreach to the continent of Africa."
#
The rest of the article can be read at the (registration required) Times Website.
Wrap...
Congressional Republicans Bait & Switch...
From American Progress Action Report:
Reconciling Tax Cuts On the Backs of the Poor
House conservatives are currently debating a budget bill that cuts federal programs by $54 billion over five years, and would drastically affect services for mostly poorer Americans.
"The cuts would impose new costs on Medicaid beneficiaries, cut assistance for child support enforcement, trim student loan spending, cut back agriculture supports, and curb eligibility for food stamps."
The Senate has already passed a $35 billion budget bill that cuts many of the same programs.
The New York Times writes that the House's budget package is "so over-the-top in its inequities and giveaways that embarrassed moderates are actually rebelling, withholding support unless some of the more outrageous measures - like despoiling the Alaska wildlife refuge with oil drilling - are killed."
President Bush says the budget cuts are necessitated by a need to "reduce our deficit," but in fact the cuts will go elsewhere: conservatives are now rolling out a new tax cut package for the wealthy that will be sure to eliminate any savings resulting from budget reconciliation.
CUTS TO MEDICAID/MEDICARE:
The House bill plans to cut $12 billion in Medicaid access and benefits for the poor. "
The Medicaid provisions would allow state governments to impose co-payments even on the poorest beneficiaries for emergency room visits for non-emergency health problems and for drug prescriptions not on a list of preferred treatments."
To avoid such painful cuts to Medicaid, the Senate bill saved money by removing a provision that gives $5.4 billion to drug companies to encourage them to offer prescription drug coverage under the new Medicare benefit plan. The White House has threatened to veto a bill that includes this so-called "stabilization fund."
The New York Times calls the fund "a windfall gimmick" that should be cut to spare Medicaid.
CUTS TO FOOD STAMPS:
The House bill is expected to make substantial cuts to the food stamp program at a time when hurricane survivors in South Florida are lining up to receive the much-needed benefits. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the House bill "would cut food stamp benefits by about $45 a month for 225,000 people and that 40,000 children would lose their eligibility for free meals at school. About 70,000 legal aliens would no longer qualify for food stamps."
House Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-MO) has claimed that these cuts would have a "very small overall impact."
CUTS TO CHILD CARE ENFORCEMENT:
Buried in the House bill are cuts that could strip funding from state child care enforcement budgets. Arizona groups are warning that the bill, "if passed, it could mean a $59 million cut for the state's child-support enforcement over the next five years and a $10 million to $12 million reduction for the state's Child Protective Services."
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) also criticized the "proposed reduction in federal reimbursement to states for child support enforcement from 66 percent to 50 percent."
The funding cuts would reduce the ability of states to collect payments from deadbeat parents, among other provisions.
TAKING WITH ONE HAND AND GIVING WITH THE OTHER:
After passing $35 billion in budget cuts for the nominal purpose of reducing the deficit, conservatives are now separately unveiling "$70 billion in tax cuts."
In the face of $35 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and child care enforcement, conservatives are seeking to "extend several of Mr. Bush's biggest tax cuts, including those on stock dividends and capital gains" -- over half of the benefits from those cuts benefit people earning over $1million per year.
"The administration and Congressional leaders arranged to separate votes on the two halves of the budget to obscure the full picture" of the impact on the deficit.
ALASKA REFUGE DRILLING IN A BUDGET BILL?
The budget reconciliation bill is reserved for only those legislative items that impact spending and revenue targets. But because the bill is immune from the filibuster, it has become a favored means of passing sought-after, non-revenue-related items that otherwise would not obtain the necessary support for passage as a stand-alone bill. One such item is the plan for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
As The Oregonian writes, "This issue did not belong in the budget bill -- it was tucked there only because drilling advocates knew they could never open the Arctic in a stand-alone bill that could be filibustered." That's why "two dozen House Republicans signed an Aug. 4 letter outlining their opposition to using the budget reconciliation process to open" the Arctic refuge to drilling.
Despite the claim that higher gas prices necessitates the drilling of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, the U.S. Department of Energy's own Energy Information Administration estimates the drilling will save about a penny for every gallon of gas twenty years from now.
A better way to save at the pump might be to examine, as senators are doing today, the record profits oil companies have made by constraining refining capacity which has resulted in higher prices.
Wrap...
Reconciling Tax Cuts On the Backs of the Poor
House conservatives are currently debating a budget bill that cuts federal programs by $54 billion over five years, and would drastically affect services for mostly poorer Americans.
"The cuts would impose new costs on Medicaid beneficiaries, cut assistance for child support enforcement, trim student loan spending, cut back agriculture supports, and curb eligibility for food stamps."
The Senate has already passed a $35 billion budget bill that cuts many of the same programs.
The New York Times writes that the House's budget package is "so over-the-top in its inequities and giveaways that embarrassed moderates are actually rebelling, withholding support unless some of the more outrageous measures - like despoiling the Alaska wildlife refuge with oil drilling - are killed."
President Bush says the budget cuts are necessitated by a need to "reduce our deficit," but in fact the cuts will go elsewhere: conservatives are now rolling out a new tax cut package for the wealthy that will be sure to eliminate any savings resulting from budget reconciliation.
CUTS TO MEDICAID/MEDICARE:
The House bill plans to cut $12 billion in Medicaid access and benefits for the poor. "
The Medicaid provisions would allow state governments to impose co-payments even on the poorest beneficiaries for emergency room visits for non-emergency health problems and for drug prescriptions not on a list of preferred treatments."
To avoid such painful cuts to Medicaid, the Senate bill saved money by removing a provision that gives $5.4 billion to drug companies to encourage them to offer prescription drug coverage under the new Medicare benefit plan. The White House has threatened to veto a bill that includes this so-called "stabilization fund."
The New York Times calls the fund "a windfall gimmick" that should be cut to spare Medicaid.
CUTS TO FOOD STAMPS:
The House bill is expected to make substantial cuts to the food stamp program at a time when hurricane survivors in South Florida are lining up to receive the much-needed benefits. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the House bill "would cut food stamp benefits by about $45 a month for 225,000 people and that 40,000 children would lose their eligibility for free meals at school. About 70,000 legal aliens would no longer qualify for food stamps."
House Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-MO) has claimed that these cuts would have a "very small overall impact."
CUTS TO CHILD CARE ENFORCEMENT:
Buried in the House bill are cuts that could strip funding from state child care enforcement budgets. Arizona groups are warning that the bill, "if passed, it could mean a $59 million cut for the state's child-support enforcement over the next five years and a $10 million to $12 million reduction for the state's Child Protective Services."
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) also criticized the "proposed reduction in federal reimbursement to states for child support enforcement from 66 percent to 50 percent."
The funding cuts would reduce the ability of states to collect payments from deadbeat parents, among other provisions.
TAKING WITH ONE HAND AND GIVING WITH THE OTHER:
After passing $35 billion in budget cuts for the nominal purpose of reducing the deficit, conservatives are now separately unveiling "$70 billion in tax cuts."
In the face of $35 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and child care enforcement, conservatives are seeking to "extend several of Mr. Bush's biggest tax cuts, including those on stock dividends and capital gains" -- over half of the benefits from those cuts benefit people earning over $1million per year.
"The administration and Congressional leaders arranged to separate votes on the two halves of the budget to obscure the full picture" of the impact on the deficit.
ALASKA REFUGE DRILLING IN A BUDGET BILL?
The budget reconciliation bill is reserved for only those legislative items that impact spending and revenue targets. But because the bill is immune from the filibuster, it has become a favored means of passing sought-after, non-revenue-related items that otherwise would not obtain the necessary support for passage as a stand-alone bill. One such item is the plan for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
As The Oregonian writes, "This issue did not belong in the budget bill -- it was tucked there only because drilling advocates knew they could never open the Arctic in a stand-alone bill that could be filibustered." That's why "two dozen House Republicans signed an Aug. 4 letter outlining their opposition to using the budget reconciliation process to open" the Arctic refuge to drilling.
Despite the claim that higher gas prices necessitates the drilling of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, the U.S. Department of Energy's own Energy Information Administration estimates the drilling will save about a penny for every gallon of gas twenty years from now.
A better way to save at the pump might be to examine, as senators are doing today, the record profits oil companies have made by constraining refining capacity which has resulted in higher prices.
Wrap...
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
It ain't just milk, it's meat too!!!
I look at it this way... out on the farms, the animals we eat are being fed hormones to fatten them up. Bigger animals, when sold for meat, earn more money for the farmers. So okay. Does anybody think those fattening hormones are removed from the meat when the animals are butchered? I don't think so. With the logical results, it seems to me, that when humans eat those steaks, hamburgers, roast chickens and pork chops, they're being fattened up right along with the animals by the hormones within those meats. And they wonder why so many people are obese. Sheesh!!!
And here, from CBS, is Andy Rooney:
What Have They Done To Milk?
Nov. 6, 2005
(CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.
The milk we get from cows has always had a special standing among the foods we eat. Mothers are always saying to kids, "Drink your milk."
So what in the world have they done to this simple and basic food? I'll bet a calf wouldn't drink most of the stuff called milk now sold in cartons. You can’t tell some of it from Diet Coke.
The companies that sell milk are upset because people are drinking less milk then they used to and they don't know why. Has it ever occurred to them that people aren't drinking it because milk isn't as good as it used to be?
Rooney picked up some cartons at the milk section of a grocery store: Lowfat Milk, Fat Free Milk, 2 Percent Reduced Fat Milk, Skim Milk.
Before milk was homogenized – that's mixing the cream in with the milk - cream came to the top of your milk bottle. If they took the cream off the top, they skimmed it off. What this ought to be called is not "Skim Milk" but "Skimmed Milk." Saturated fats are bad for our arteries. We all know that, but do you know how much fat milk has in it as it comes from a cow? About 3.2 percent. So 2 percent is no big reduction.
I like half and half on my shredded wheat but when I say "half and half," I mean half milk and half cream. I bought some half and half the other day and I didn't like the taste so I looked at the label to see what it was half of and what the other half was.
Listen to these ingredients: "Nonfat milk, milk, corn syrup solids, artificial color, sugar, dipotassium phosphate, sodium citrate mono, and diglycerides, carrageenan, natural and artificial flavors, vitamin A palmitate".
This is half and half? It's not half anything I want and it has nothing to do with something as good as milk.
Three and a half percent is what they call Whole Milk. Why don't they just call it milk? Some of this other stuff tastes more like whole water.
They all like to use the words "farm" or "dairy" on their cartons. One came from Farmland Dairies in Wallington, N.J. We went to Wallington looking for a dairy farm. The address was 520 Main Avenue. At the “farm,” there was no cow in sight.
My suggestion, if they want to sell more milk, is that they go back to selling what comes out of a cow.By Andy Rooney © MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Wrap...
And here, from CBS, is Andy Rooney:
What Have They Done To Milk?
Nov. 6, 2005
(CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.
The milk we get from cows has always had a special standing among the foods we eat. Mothers are always saying to kids, "Drink your milk."
So what in the world have they done to this simple and basic food? I'll bet a calf wouldn't drink most of the stuff called milk now sold in cartons. You can’t tell some of it from Diet Coke.
The companies that sell milk are upset because people are drinking less milk then they used to and they don't know why. Has it ever occurred to them that people aren't drinking it because milk isn't as good as it used to be?
Rooney picked up some cartons at the milk section of a grocery store: Lowfat Milk, Fat Free Milk, 2 Percent Reduced Fat Milk, Skim Milk.
Before milk was homogenized – that's mixing the cream in with the milk - cream came to the top of your milk bottle. If they took the cream off the top, they skimmed it off. What this ought to be called is not "Skim Milk" but "Skimmed Milk." Saturated fats are bad for our arteries. We all know that, but do you know how much fat milk has in it as it comes from a cow? About 3.2 percent. So 2 percent is no big reduction.
I like half and half on my shredded wheat but when I say "half and half," I mean half milk and half cream. I bought some half and half the other day and I didn't like the taste so I looked at the label to see what it was half of and what the other half was.
Listen to these ingredients: "Nonfat milk, milk, corn syrup solids, artificial color, sugar, dipotassium phosphate, sodium citrate mono, and diglycerides, carrageenan, natural and artificial flavors, vitamin A palmitate".
This is half and half? It's not half anything I want and it has nothing to do with something as good as milk.
Three and a half percent is what they call Whole Milk. Why don't they just call it milk? Some of this other stuff tastes more like whole water.
They all like to use the words "farm" or "dairy" on their cartons. One came from Farmland Dairies in Wallington, N.J. We went to Wallington looking for a dairy farm. The address was 520 Main Avenue. At the “farm,” there was no cow in sight.
My suggestion, if they want to sell more milk, is that they go back to selling what comes out of a cow.By Andy Rooney © MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Wrap...
Great economy? BushCo lies...
From the Christian Science Monitor:
from the November 07, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p01s02-usec.html
Workers face paycheck pinchAfter inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.
By Mark Trumbull Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
For all its strength, the current economic expansion is not boosting the American worker's paycheck.
Wages have been rising nominally: Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday. That's not fast enough to counter inflation.
By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.
It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.
While energy costs are the most obvious culprit, other forces may be playing a role, from globalization and illegal immigration to the weakening of labor unions. Politicians, too, could share in the blame.
Experts differ on just how wide and deep the problem runs. But the disturbing implications are clear enough. America's proud heritage as a land where the standard of living rises like late-summer corn seems, to many, to be at risk.
Even the fact that budgets have grown tighter for many debt-laden families is a volatile issue for the nation politically and financially. And economists say that while the pay pinch affects a wide swath of occupations, the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.
"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. "There's no way you can consider this one overall labor market."
Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school. In some cases, "weak" is an understatement.
The automotive industry, and the nation, got a shock a few weeks ago when Delphi Corp., a major auto-parts supplier, demanded that union workers take a gargantuan pay cut so the company can survive.
The airline industry, too, faces a period of intensive restructuring that is difficult for workers of all skill levels.
Pilots at Northwest Airlines last week approved a 24 percent temporary pay cut, to give the beleaguered airline breathing room while a new labor contract is negotiated.
In the grocery industry, the spread of Wal-Mart has had a similar pay-squeezing effect on some unionized supermarkets.
Nor is the challenge confined to the United States. Wage growth has been slowing in Europe and is tepid in Japan, as those regions work through a difficult restructuring of their economic base.
What these industrialized nations share is growing competition for lower wages, from factories in places like Portugal, Poland, and China.
US manufacturers have done remarkably well at responding to global competition by finding ways to make workers more productive.
Traditionally, rising productivity allows employers to raise wages without raising prices. Thus it holds the key to rising living standards in society.
But lately, wage growth has lagged behind fast-rising US productivity.
Several reasons, beyond the downward pressure of global competition, may be involved:
• The cost of benefits. Some employers have stopped offering health insurance, but those that do are spending more, and thus boosting overall compensation even though hourly wages aren't rising.
• Price-sensitive consumers. As energy costs rose, many companies didn't feel able to pass those costs along to customers. So they have to pay their oil bills by cutting costs elsewhere. Pay hikes get smaller.
• Government policies. Some researchers say a failure to crack down on illegal immigration - whether at the border or in the workplace - has depressed wages for the less skilled.
• Weak bargaining power. The decline of union membership in the private workforce has had a significant dampening effect on wages, some economists say.
"The auto and airline industry - these were some of the best jobs you could get," without a college degree, says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Those unionized jobs were "a boost to wages for less-educated workers generally, because to some extent other industries had to compete for those workers."
Other economists counter that a more flexible, less unionized labor market has helped the US trounce its European peers in job creation. Americans spend less time unemployed, but their incomes have arguably suffered as a result.
The result of all these forces is an environment in which wages tend to rise at a glacial pace. And when inflation picks up, that means they don't rise at all in real terms.
Inflation has now reached a 5 percent pace. The upshot is that hourly earnings are effectively 2.3 percent below last year's level.
"The inflation bar is very high right now," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. So even the 2.7 percent hourly earnings growth, from a year earlier, "doesn't get you over."
Assessing just how far wages are falling behind inflation can be tricky. The federal government gathers data in several regular surveys, from the Census Bureau to the several sets of data produced by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The results can vary. The numbers above, for example, come from a widely cited wage report, a BLS survey of nonfarm employers called "current employment statistics."
In this survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.
Most other reports show larger gains, in part because they track a wider sample of workers or of income. And clearly, Americans have found the means to consume higher levels of goods and services during that period.
"It's not as bad as it gets painted," says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the Hudson Institute. By broader measures of household finances, she notes, "income is rising in real terms."
Still, on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003.
What's the recipe for keeping wages on an upward path? Some economists point to conservative models, such as keeping taxes and regulation low to spur job creation. Others take a more left-leaning tack, calling for stronger labor unions and a boost to the minimum wage.
Experts on both sides often stress education as paving the way for individuals to boost their earnings in higher-level work.
They also focus on two areas - healthcare and energy - where inflation is eating away at spending power. "You either need wages to pick up or inflation to slow down," says Mr. Bernstein. "There may be a bit of both in coming months."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
www.csmonitor.com Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
Wrap...
from the November 07, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p01s02-usec.html
Workers face paycheck pinchAfter inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.
By Mark Trumbull Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
For all its strength, the current economic expansion is not boosting the American worker's paycheck.
Wages have been rising nominally: Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday. That's not fast enough to counter inflation.
By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.
It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.
While energy costs are the most obvious culprit, other forces may be playing a role, from globalization and illegal immigration to the weakening of labor unions. Politicians, too, could share in the blame.
Experts differ on just how wide and deep the problem runs. But the disturbing implications are clear enough. America's proud heritage as a land where the standard of living rises like late-summer corn seems, to many, to be at risk.
Even the fact that budgets have grown tighter for many debt-laden families is a volatile issue for the nation politically and financially. And economists say that while the pay pinch affects a wide swath of occupations, the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.
"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. "There's no way you can consider this one overall labor market."
Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school. In some cases, "weak" is an understatement.
The automotive industry, and the nation, got a shock a few weeks ago when Delphi Corp., a major auto-parts supplier, demanded that union workers take a gargantuan pay cut so the company can survive.
The airline industry, too, faces a period of intensive restructuring that is difficult for workers of all skill levels.
Pilots at Northwest Airlines last week approved a 24 percent temporary pay cut, to give the beleaguered airline breathing room while a new labor contract is negotiated.
In the grocery industry, the spread of Wal-Mart has had a similar pay-squeezing effect on some unionized supermarkets.
Nor is the challenge confined to the United States. Wage growth has been slowing in Europe and is tepid in Japan, as those regions work through a difficult restructuring of their economic base.
What these industrialized nations share is growing competition for lower wages, from factories in places like Portugal, Poland, and China.
US manufacturers have done remarkably well at responding to global competition by finding ways to make workers more productive.
Traditionally, rising productivity allows employers to raise wages without raising prices. Thus it holds the key to rising living standards in society.
But lately, wage growth has lagged behind fast-rising US productivity.
Several reasons, beyond the downward pressure of global competition, may be involved:
• The cost of benefits. Some employers have stopped offering health insurance, but those that do are spending more, and thus boosting overall compensation even though hourly wages aren't rising.
• Price-sensitive consumers. As energy costs rose, many companies didn't feel able to pass those costs along to customers. So they have to pay their oil bills by cutting costs elsewhere. Pay hikes get smaller.
• Government policies. Some researchers say a failure to crack down on illegal immigration - whether at the border or in the workplace - has depressed wages for the less skilled.
• Weak bargaining power. The decline of union membership in the private workforce has had a significant dampening effect on wages, some economists say.
"The auto and airline industry - these were some of the best jobs you could get," without a college degree, says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Those unionized jobs were "a boost to wages for less-educated workers generally, because to some extent other industries had to compete for those workers."
Other economists counter that a more flexible, less unionized labor market has helped the US trounce its European peers in job creation. Americans spend less time unemployed, but their incomes have arguably suffered as a result.
The result of all these forces is an environment in which wages tend to rise at a glacial pace. And when inflation picks up, that means they don't rise at all in real terms.
Inflation has now reached a 5 percent pace. The upshot is that hourly earnings are effectively 2.3 percent below last year's level.
"The inflation bar is very high right now," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. So even the 2.7 percent hourly earnings growth, from a year earlier, "doesn't get you over."
Assessing just how far wages are falling behind inflation can be tricky. The federal government gathers data in several regular surveys, from the Census Bureau to the several sets of data produced by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The results can vary. The numbers above, for example, come from a widely cited wage report, a BLS survey of nonfarm employers called "current employment statistics."
In this survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.
Most other reports show larger gains, in part because they track a wider sample of workers or of income. And clearly, Americans have found the means to consume higher levels of goods and services during that period.
"It's not as bad as it gets painted," says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the Hudson Institute. By broader measures of household finances, she notes, "income is rising in real terms."
Still, on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003.
What's the recipe for keeping wages on an upward path? Some economists point to conservative models, such as keeping taxes and regulation low to spur job creation. Others take a more left-leaning tack, calling for stronger labor unions and a boost to the minimum wage.
Experts on both sides often stress education as paving the way for individuals to boost their earnings in higher-level work.
They also focus on two areas - healthcare and energy - where inflation is eating away at spending power. "You either need wages to pick up or inflation to slow down," says Mr. Bernstein. "There may be a bit of both in coming months."
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
www.csmonitor.com Copyright © 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
Wrap...
Monday, November 07, 2005
NRA's Exec, Wayne Lapierre is....
Note: I found this a most interesting post on the Blonde Sense blog.
From http://blondesense.blogspot.com :
I don't care where
a person's compass may point them. But, it does bother me when someone is a hypocrite in the political arena.The executive officer of the National Rifle Association, Wayne Lapierre, is currently endorsing Jerry Kilgore for governor of Virginia in media ads saying Kilgore stands for the same family values that Wayne had as a child growing up in Roanoke.
Well, while Wayne Lapierre was in high school in Roanoke (Patrick Henry High School class of '67) he was my brother's lover. Their affair lasted past graduation and on during the anti Vietnam war protest marches they attended in 1969.
Not only is Wayne Lapierre gay (not that there's anything wrong with that) but he marched in protest to the Vietnam war.
Now he's touting his high ground morality and family values. That I have a problem with.
Archie Gordon
Roanoke, VA
write to me at blondesense(@)optonline.net for the contact information
Wrap...
From http://blondesense.blogspot.com :
I don't care where
a person's compass may point them. But, it does bother me when someone is a hypocrite in the political arena.The executive officer of the National Rifle Association, Wayne Lapierre, is currently endorsing Jerry Kilgore for governor of Virginia in media ads saying Kilgore stands for the same family values that Wayne had as a child growing up in Roanoke.
Well, while Wayne Lapierre was in high school in Roanoke (Patrick Henry High School class of '67) he was my brother's lover. Their affair lasted past graduation and on during the anti Vietnam war protest marches they attended in 1969.
Not only is Wayne Lapierre gay (not that there's anything wrong with that) but he marched in protest to the Vietnam war.
Now he's touting his high ground morality and family values. That I have a problem with.
Archie Gordon
Roanoke, VA
write to me at blondesense(@)optonline.net for the contact information
Wrap...
Bring along the Constitution...
From the International Herald Tribune:
The world needs a prefab constitution
By Cheryl Benard
International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2005
WASHINGTON Governments and relief agencies working feverishly in areas stricken by recent natural disasters aren't trying to win architectural awards with innovative new designs for permanent housing. They are trying to provide emergency shelter for the homeless. In the same way, officials trying to rebuild nations ripped apart by war can't be expected to come up with groundbreaking new constitutions that will last for the ages. With the bullets still flying, nation-builders must create governmental structures as quickly as possible to run their countries.
Just as providers of housing can rely on standard-design tents, trailers and prefabricated shelters, nation-builders need a new tool at their disposal - the prefabricated constitution.
The idea may sound silly at first - but on closer examination it makes a lot of sense. Every representative government needs a legislature, a court system and an executive branch running governmental agencies that keep a country operating. A neutral, generic post-war constitution developed by international agencies could take a country recovering from conflict through its first volatile years. Discussion of more fundamental issues of national principle could then be postponed until a bit of normality has been restored.
This is not what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. In these warn-torn nations, the United States and national governments have pushed to get constitutions in place quickly, treating them as tools for stabilization. But as we saw in Afghanistan and can see now in Iraq, post-conflict countries are in serious disarray not just physically but socially and ideologically. Getting all factions to agree on the text of a new constitution requires heavy external engagement. The process is marked not only by the debate and grave consideration due to such a solemn task, but also and less inspiringly by arm-twisting, threats and behind-the-scenes horse-trading.
With the clock ticking loudly on timelines for approving new constitutions, the quickest way out of ideological deadlocks is through deliberate ambiguity. Constitutions become riddled with vague, differentially interpretable formulations. They then become agreements to commence disagreeing over important basic issues as soon as the ink is dry.
A prefabricated emergency constitution could be commissioned by the United Nations and created by a group of recognized experts in international law, constitutional law and governmental administration. This document would be put in place for a limited period of time, perhaps five years. This would give societies time to recover from the immediate turmoil of conflict, put their daily affairs in order, regain a measure of stability and civility, and begin to sort out their values and priorities.
After five years, demobilization and disarmament would have made greater strides, giving a greater role to civil society. More settled, the country could consider what modifications it wished to make to the basic constitution, tailoring it to its culture and specific needs. And in the concluding referendum, people ideally would not literally have to risk their lives just to go to the polling station - a frame of mind that surely is not optimally suited to calm deliberation.
The argument of culture is sure to be raised against this suggestion. But a comparison of constitutions reveals that they are not all that different from one another. Modern constitutions in particular are far more alike than they are different, with many of the essentials - like a bill of rights guaranteeing individual liberties, acknowledgment of the most important international conventions and treaties, and acceptance of the principles of human rights - standard issue and de facto beyond debate.
Nor is this without historical precedent. After World War II, Japan received a constitution drafted entirely by Americans. On the instructions of General Douglas MacArthur, a committee led by two U.S. Army officers with law degrees wrote up the text. They referred to the old Meiji Constitution, but did not shy away from bold innovations. Women, for example, were granted not just the vote, but an equal rights amendment. The 1947 Constitution proved so popular in Japan that it remains unchanged today, even though it could have been amended by the Japanese.
Would countries today accept the imposition of a generic document? Again, we need to recall our natural disaster analogy. A country that needs a new constitution is a country in a state of total collapse. We're not talking about a small war or a minor conflict; we're talking 7 or 8 on the political Richter scale. These are countries that cannot govern, support or administer themselves. Instead, they are reliant on external funding and outside management - usually by the United Nations, an assortment of nongovernmental aid groups and donors, or by a foreign power like the United States.
For some years, the sovereignty of a newly established state that results from these efforts is a polite fiction and not much more. Just as a new police force must be trained and a new army must be raised, so too must governance develop through a process that optimistically cannot take less than five to 10 years. In this situation, it would be quite useful for a prefab constitution to be part of the reconstruction package for nations recovering from war - saving significant energy and resources for the more pressing tasks of helping a new national governmental structure survive.
(Cheryl Benard is a senior political scientist at RAND Corp.)
Wrap...
The world needs a prefab constitution
By Cheryl Benard
International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2005
WASHINGTON Governments and relief agencies working feverishly in areas stricken by recent natural disasters aren't trying to win architectural awards with innovative new designs for permanent housing. They are trying to provide emergency shelter for the homeless. In the same way, officials trying to rebuild nations ripped apart by war can't be expected to come up with groundbreaking new constitutions that will last for the ages. With the bullets still flying, nation-builders must create governmental structures as quickly as possible to run their countries.
Just as providers of housing can rely on standard-design tents, trailers and prefabricated shelters, nation-builders need a new tool at their disposal - the prefabricated constitution.
The idea may sound silly at first - but on closer examination it makes a lot of sense. Every representative government needs a legislature, a court system and an executive branch running governmental agencies that keep a country operating. A neutral, generic post-war constitution developed by international agencies could take a country recovering from conflict through its first volatile years. Discussion of more fundamental issues of national principle could then be postponed until a bit of normality has been restored.
This is not what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. In these warn-torn nations, the United States and national governments have pushed to get constitutions in place quickly, treating them as tools for stabilization. But as we saw in Afghanistan and can see now in Iraq, post-conflict countries are in serious disarray not just physically but socially and ideologically. Getting all factions to agree on the text of a new constitution requires heavy external engagement. The process is marked not only by the debate and grave consideration due to such a solemn task, but also and less inspiringly by arm-twisting, threats and behind-the-scenes horse-trading.
With the clock ticking loudly on timelines for approving new constitutions, the quickest way out of ideological deadlocks is through deliberate ambiguity. Constitutions become riddled with vague, differentially interpretable formulations. They then become agreements to commence disagreeing over important basic issues as soon as the ink is dry.
A prefabricated emergency constitution could be commissioned by the United Nations and created by a group of recognized experts in international law, constitutional law and governmental administration. This document would be put in place for a limited period of time, perhaps five years. This would give societies time to recover from the immediate turmoil of conflict, put their daily affairs in order, regain a measure of stability and civility, and begin to sort out their values and priorities.
After five years, demobilization and disarmament would have made greater strides, giving a greater role to civil society. More settled, the country could consider what modifications it wished to make to the basic constitution, tailoring it to its culture and specific needs. And in the concluding referendum, people ideally would not literally have to risk their lives just to go to the polling station - a frame of mind that surely is not optimally suited to calm deliberation.
The argument of culture is sure to be raised against this suggestion. But a comparison of constitutions reveals that they are not all that different from one another. Modern constitutions in particular are far more alike than they are different, with many of the essentials - like a bill of rights guaranteeing individual liberties, acknowledgment of the most important international conventions and treaties, and acceptance of the principles of human rights - standard issue and de facto beyond debate.
Nor is this without historical precedent. After World War II, Japan received a constitution drafted entirely by Americans. On the instructions of General Douglas MacArthur, a committee led by two U.S. Army officers with law degrees wrote up the text. They referred to the old Meiji Constitution, but did not shy away from bold innovations. Women, for example, were granted not just the vote, but an equal rights amendment. The 1947 Constitution proved so popular in Japan that it remains unchanged today, even though it could have been amended by the Japanese.
Would countries today accept the imposition of a generic document? Again, we need to recall our natural disaster analogy. A country that needs a new constitution is a country in a state of total collapse. We're not talking about a small war or a minor conflict; we're talking 7 or 8 on the political Richter scale. These are countries that cannot govern, support or administer themselves. Instead, they are reliant on external funding and outside management - usually by the United Nations, an assortment of nongovernmental aid groups and donors, or by a foreign power like the United States.
For some years, the sovereignty of a newly established state that results from these efforts is a polite fiction and not much more. Just as a new police force must be trained and a new army must be raised, so too must governance develop through a process that optimistically cannot take less than five to 10 years. In this situation, it would be quite useful for a prefab constitution to be part of the reconstruction package for nations recovering from war - saving significant energy and resources for the more pressing tasks of helping a new national governmental structure survive.
(Cheryl Benard is a senior political scientist at RAND Corp.)
Wrap...
Just try it...
From Editor & Publisher:
Eudora Welty once wrote, about vacations:
"In caveman times, vacations were short and simple because only men could take them and "no man is going to drag a woman 40 miles."
Wrap...
Eudora Welty once wrote, about vacations:
"In caveman times, vacations were short and simple because only men could take them and "no man is going to drag a woman 40 miles."
Wrap...
Bush can't run the country...
NY Times Editorial
Nov 8 2005
November 8, 2005
Editorial
President Bush's Walkabout
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.
In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.
It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.
The White House is in an uproar over the future of Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and spinning off rumors that some top cabinet members may be asked to walk the plank. Mr. Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.
Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver - in great part through his own powers of leadership - a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.
The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.
Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.
Wrap...
Nov 8 2005
November 8, 2005
Editorial
President Bush's Walkabout
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.
In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.
It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.
The White House is in an uproar over the future of Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and spinning off rumors that some top cabinet members may be asked to walk the plank. Mr. Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.
Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver - in great part through his own powers of leadership - a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.
The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.
Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.
Wrap...
Tomorrow's election results...
From Political Wire.com :
There will be no exit polls of the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia or the special elections in California and Ohio. As Hotline On Call notes, the campaigns "will rely on small surveys of selected precincts to determine turnout, but there will be no large-scale campaign-sponsored exit polls."
For real time election results:
In Virginia, polls close at 7 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In Ohio, polls close at 7:30 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In New Jersey, polls close at 8 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In California, polls close at 11 p.m. ET and results will be here.
Wrap...
There will be no exit polls of the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia or the special elections in California and Ohio. As Hotline On Call notes, the campaigns "will rely on small surveys of selected precincts to determine turnout, but there will be no large-scale campaign-sponsored exit polls."
For real time election results:
In Virginia, polls close at 7 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In Ohio, polls close at 7:30 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In New Jersey, polls close at 8 p.m. ET and results will be here.
In California, polls close at 11 p.m. ET and results will be here.
Wrap...
There were these 2 lawyers, see....
...and when I read the first page of this book, busted up laughing and bought it. Here it is:
CELL MATES
The man in the holding cell loosened his tie, tossed his rumpled suit coat into a corner, and stretched out on the hard plastic bench. The woman in the facing cell slipped out of her glen plaid jacket, folded it carfully across an arm, and began pacing.
"Relax, Vickie. We're gonna be here awhile," the man said.
"Victoria," the woman corrected. Her angry footsteps echoed off the bare concrete floor.
"Wild guess. You've never been held in contempt before."
"You treat it like a badge of honor."
"A lawyer who's afraid of jail is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood," Steve Soloman said.
"From what I hear, you spend more time behind bars than you clients," Victoria Lord said.
"Hey, thanks. Great tag line for my radio spots. 'You do the crime, Steve does the time."
"You're the most unethical lawyer I know."
"You're new at this. Give it time."
"Sleazy son-of-a-bitch," she muttered, turning away.
*****************************
And so begins "Soloman vs Lord"... a hilarious thriller by Paul Levine. Guess you know what I'll be doing this evening....
Wrap...
CELL MATES
The man in the holding cell loosened his tie, tossed his rumpled suit coat into a corner, and stretched out on the hard plastic bench. The woman in the facing cell slipped out of her glen plaid jacket, folded it carfully across an arm, and began pacing.
"Relax, Vickie. We're gonna be here awhile," the man said.
"Victoria," the woman corrected. Her angry footsteps echoed off the bare concrete floor.
"Wild guess. You've never been held in contempt before."
"You treat it like a badge of honor."
"A lawyer who's afraid of jail is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood," Steve Soloman said.
"From what I hear, you spend more time behind bars than you clients," Victoria Lord said.
"Hey, thanks. Great tag line for my radio spots. 'You do the crime, Steve does the time."
"You're the most unethical lawyer I know."
"You're new at this. Give it time."
"Sleazy son-of-a-bitch," she muttered, turning away.
*****************************
And so begins "Soloman vs Lord"... a hilarious thriller by Paul Levine. Guess you know what I'll be doing this evening....
Wrap...
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