Thursday, February 05, 2004
Dave Pell on Howard Dean
I miss Howard Dean. The old Howard Dean. The one from before the media slapped his wrist (followed by his face, his body and his privates) for being too, well, too Howard Dean. Like the dominatrix in any such scene, the media is actually enjoying the role of Howard basher - and why not? When dealing with a pinata, better to be the guy swinging the stick than the guy holding the candy.
If we look to the Iowa Yell as a metaphor for all that went wrong, we might be tempted to blame Dean's current predicament on the wide perception of his anger problem. But anger was never Howard Dean's problem. Anger was his friend. His personality can be off-putting, he couldn't close on the votes when it counted, and the issue of electability reared its ugly head. But anger got Howard Dean this far. Lip-biting, counting to ten, and deep-breathing it away - far from resurrecting his chances - has only secured his downfall.
Dean's anger wasn't simply focused on W and Republicans. It was aimed at his fellow Democrats for being too silent, too weak and too lost in the post Clinton personality-driven era. And he was dead on. He tapped into the very real frustration Democrats felt towards their own party leaders. Too much anger? Too much yelling? If anything, the Iowa moment made the media look bad for the greatest overreaction to a cultural event in modern history (modern history here referring to the period between the cancellation of JLo's wedding and the baring of Janet Jackson's knocker). Take a look at the exit polls. This election is all about anger. Of course, Dean will not climb back into the race and the media will love his downfall. And that combination will make Howard Dean, above all, really pissed off.
Pakistan Confesses to Selling Nuclear Knowledge, Pardons Scientist
US chooses to ignore - "The Bush administration does not want to put further pressure for conducting a very open investigation because Musharraf and the Pakistani army is a key ally, and it does not want to lose its ally."
CIA never claimed Iraqi weapons were an imminent threat
CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged serious intelligence misjudgments leading up to the war with Iraq on Thursday but defended his agency's overall performance.
Also Bush doesn't learn from his mistakes - "Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," he said, in a line that drew long applause from an audience of military personnel and cadets.
Howard Dean on FoxNews - 'It's All Blather'
Howard Dean was listening through an earpiece to the on-air chatter of a bunch of half-informed pundits on Fox News Tuesday night as he waited his turn to be called on by host Greta Van Sustern.
"Jesus, now I know why I don't have cable," he said. "It's all blather. ... I don't mind being at the end, but I just can't stand listening to all this stuff."
The talk went on even though results were sketchy from the seven states voting, reports Thomas Fitzgerald of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"They just fill the air," Dean said, shaking his head. "It's verbal diarrhea."
el - He took my advice and has launched a truth campaign?
Gephardt to Endorse Kerry
Rep. Dick Gephardt, the former House minority leader whose presidential campaign collapsed in Iowa's caucuses, will endorse Democratic front-runner John Kerry, a Democratic official said.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Missouri lawmaker will give Kerry his backing in Warren, Mich., a blue-collar suburb of Detroit, on Friday. The endorsement is a huge boost for Kerry who has been aggressively pursuing the backing of labor unions who had thrown their support to Gephardt.
Conservatives Say Bush Is Skating On Thin Ice
My view is that Bush has calculated that fear of another 9-11 is sufficient in itself to get re-elected. I believe he is wrong.
Here’s a tiny bit of history that too many either don’t know or would prefer to ignore. Every president since World War II who committed US troops to massive military interventions overseas in undeclared wars was denied a second term. Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson declined to run again. George Herbert Walker Bush was defeated. I can recall how popular Bush41 was right after the Gulf War.
The undercurrent of discontent is palpable throughout the nation and it was this discontent that Gov. Howard Dean tapped into initially. It is this discontent that is now being stirred by other Democrat candidates. Something is terribly wrong in Washington, DC they say and they are right.
Right now, I am in the camp of those who fear the Islamic Jihad more than any domestic issue, but I am also in the camp of those who detest the President’s education, immigration, and economic policies. Many other Republicans are beginning to openly criticize these policies and, if there is a critical mass of them by November, many will stay home rather than vote.
el - Conservatives know two motivations - fear and pocketbook.
Fighting words from Dean in large Seattle rally
Struggling presidential candidate Howard Dean used a speech to a yelling, stomping, liberal Seattle crowd yesterday to paint fellow-Democrat John Kerry and President Bush as twin tools of special interests.
Dean railed against Kerry, the Massachusetts senator who has supplanted Dean as the front-runner in the Democratic race, and said news yesterday that Kerry took more lobbyist money than any other member of the Senate made him so mad he was sputtering.
"This is the challenge for the Democratic Party: Do we stand with the special interests and the Washington cozy crowd, or do we stand with ordinary Americans who we have claimed to represent?" Dean said to an overflow crowd at Seattle's Town Hall.
Dean was in Seattle to win support in the state's Feb. 7 Democratic caucuses.
"I think the American public has moved their attention," Dean said. "It's not as important an issue. People are losing their jobs. They are losing their health insurance. People are losing hope in the country. I think they are just throwing up their hands, saying, 'My God, what's happening here?' "
"It seems to me sometimes there's a little of George Bush in John Kerry," Dean said in the interview. "George Bush says the most blatant things that are just plain false.
" 'No Child Left Behind' leaves every child behind, which is something John Kerry voted for," Dean said of the president's education plan. "How many rationales has George Bush given us for the Iraq war? Well, how many rationales has John Kerry given us for the Iraq war, which he also supported?"
Dean received one of his biggest ovations after a heckler asked what he'd do to reduce the abortion rate. He suggested universal health care for children, sex education that isn't just abstinence-based, and finally, "We're going to tell all those white boys who run the Republican Party to stay out of our bedrooms."
Will Dean Quit If He Doesn't Win Wisconsin?
Probably, JODI WILGOREN thinks so and headlines the story he will Quit if he doesn't.
"We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2-and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race."
Note that doesn't say he will quit but says a non-win will put him out of the race.
More - "All I can say is, we intend to win" the state," he said, declining to elaborate on the middle-of-the-night e-mail.
The latest soundings suggested that would be difficult.
A poll taken for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Capital Times, published in Madison, put Kerry's support at 45 percent, compared to Dean at 12, Clark at 11 and Edwards at 6.
FLASH - New York Times changes headline - changes story. Asked by a Wisconsin television station on Wednesday whether he would drop out if he lost there, Dr. Dean said, "No, we've got to be in it for the long haul."
Unemployment up, productivity slowing
Not what the GOP wants to hear.
New claims for unemployment benefits rose last week by a seasonally adjusted 17,000 to 356,000. Odd how the AP story treats this all as good news.
Mac Really Is A Religion
A hoax story on gutting a top-of-the-line Mac and using the frame to build a cheap PC send thousands of Mac users into religious fury. The common theme - he deserved punishment and eternal damnation.
Examining DeanSpace
What happened to the Dean campaign. A long thoughtful article.
Support isn’t Votes
Fervor Isn’t Votes
Effort Isn’t Votes
Money Isn’t Votes
Voting is the victory of geography over affinity. Deaniacs in NYC could donate money and time, blogging like mad or tramping through the cold to talk to a handful of potential voters, but they couldn’t actually vote anywhere but NYC. Iowa was left up to the Iowans.
The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost – the voters didn’t like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he’d win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.
el - A seperate issue is why not enough voters liked him. His campaign lowered coordinating and fund raising costs but in the end it is how to get the mass of people who don't pay attention to politics to support your candidate.
VP's Office May Be Facing Charges
From Kos - Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney's office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney's top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info--including defectors' claims about WMD and terror ties--to bolster the case that Saddam's government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.
So Hannah better get himself a good lawyer. Not only will he need to save his skin on the Plame Affair, but also when his role in falsifying the pre-war intelligence becomes clearer.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Kerry's Secret Faith Weapon - Catholic Men!
Signs of strong support for John Kerry among Catholic voters could mean big trouble ahead for George Bush.
Where his father lost the Catholic vote to Bill Clinton by 16 percentage points, Mr Bush won it against Al Gore by three points, according to exit polls on election day 2000. That gave him enough states for Florida to make a difference.
[In New Hampshire] one surprise was that many more men voted in the primary than had been the case four years ago, while the number of women hardly rose at all. One bigger surprise - a lot of them were Catholics.
Around one third of the New Hampshire population identifies itself as Catholic, and they identified strongly with Mr Kerry. He won nearly as many Catholic votes as the seven other candidates combined. The more people attended church, the more strongly they preferred him.
Men - particularly Catholic men - carried enough states for Mr Bush in 2000 to make the Florida decision decisive. Without their help, the Republicans would have lost at least Missouri, so even the Supreme Court's intervention would not have plucked the presidency out of Democratic hands.
Sex, Lies and Bush on Tape
The reality is that under Mr. Bush, surpluses have completely vanished. Granted, he had help from a bad economy. But spending has increased more rapidly than under any president since Lyndon Johnson, and Mr. Bush refuses to pay for it. I've seen that story before — in Argentina.
Now the I.M.F. has warned that the U.S. budget and trade deficits are a threat to the global economy.
A new study from the Brookings Institution, "Restoring Fiscal Sanity," estimates that by 2014 the average family's income will be $1,800 lower because of slower economic growth caused by these budget deficits. A family with a 30-year $250,000 mortgage will be paying $2,000 more per year in interest costs alone.
TV News Doesn't Cover Candidates Positions
Data, compiled for MediaChannel.org by international media monitoring firm Media Tenor showed that in January the three networks devoted less than 5 percent of their coverage of the Democratic campaigns to the candidates' positions on the five election issues that Americans say matter the most.
And the trend is towards less and less coverage according to Media Tenor. "For the past four weeks, all three networks have decreased their share of policy coverage on the candidates."
ABC Political Note Digested
Yesterday delegate counts:
Kerry: 128
Edwards: 61
Clark: 49
Dean: 7
Sharpton: 1
Number of states in which Gov. Howard Dean finished first or second yesterday: 0.
How much Edwards plays in Michigan is at this writing still TBD, but he will try to trip Kerry up in Virginia and/or Tennessee next Tuesday. But if Kerry wins the three intervening contests -- Michigan, Washington state, and Maine -- it will be tougher to stop him in those Southern/border states.
Edward's strengths are Kerry's weaknesses: South roots, likeability, and an absence of Washington insider-dom, and humble origins.
The question for Edwards now are:
A. Does he try to really compete in (expensive) Michigan, or skip straight through to next Tuesday's states, where he is going on TV today?
B. Can he raise a lot of money this week, to advertise extensively in Tennessee and Virginia, where he hasn't been able to afford TV so far?
C. How big an appetite is there among the unions, Democratic members of Congress, and others for an anti-Kerry choice, and how much can Edwards tap it?
D. Does he start to confront Kerry more directly on policy and biography than he has up to now (he has started down that road in the last few days)?
The Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein writes that there "are chinks" in Sen. Kerry's armor, Noting that in exit polls "he fared worse among voters who said their priority was a candidate who cared about people like them."
"Dean conceded Tuesday that he has no chance of winning Michigan, as polls show Kerry with an overwhelming lead."
Is Washington Saturday Dean's best shot at a win? Washington Democrats may be the most liberal the presidential candidates have faced yet and "it'll be a battle that has split the state's party establishment between Howard Dean and John Kerry."
Teacher's union, three million strong, to endorse Kerry.
The Washington Post's Schwartzman Notes that Clark's advisors believe the close call in Oklahoma, "along with second-place showings in North Dakota and New Mexico, would lay the groundwork for going on."
Sharpton campaign has no money. In fact, it is nearly half a million dollars in debt and the FEC has yet to approve its requests for matching funds.
Kucinich gets 5% in New Mexico, best showing yet.
Tonight's West Wing will feature an actual bipartisan Social Security reform plan drafted for the show by consultant and entitlement maven Gene Sperling.
More Political Note here.
Dean as Bee to Democratic Party
Why the Democratic nomination process has been such a beautiful thing.
The one who survives the process and collects the wisdom of his opponents into a single, smart platform might really be able to bring Karl Rove some pain. If indeed he does expire, Howard Dean, blessedly, will not have been the only Democratic candidate to sting before he died.
"Frustrated. Tired. Unhappy": Those are the three words New Hampshire's feisty Democratic chair, Kathy Sullivan, offers to describe her party in the wake of the recount that Al Gore should have won. She recalls the week things felt even worse: when Democratic senators refused to filibuster the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general. "The Democrats in Washington had a moment in which they could have taken a stand and said: 'No. We're not going to let this happen.' And they didn't do it."
Then came the disastrous 2002 off-year elections. "Such a bad year for us. People just felt down. Hollowed out.
"And here comes Howard Dean. And I think what Dean has done has in some respects given the party its swagger back."
And so, over a quarter of a club sandwich in a Nashua hotel coffee shop, she begins a peroration of her own. "And we said: No. We can beat this guy. Because he's wrong on Iraq. Because he's wrong on the environment. Because he's wrong on education. And Dean just starts getting people excited again. . . . And for that, no matter what happens to Howard Dean, his running for the president did a good thing for this party. It just got everybody energized again."
He might not get there. But if the Democrats make it to that Promised Land on Pennsylvania Avenue, Dean will have been the one who led us out of the desert in the first place.
Al Sharpton's Biggest Advisor - GOP Dirty Tricks Operative!
Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.
Stone played a pivotal role in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior campaigns. He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use his credit card to cover thousands in NAN costs—neither of which he could legally do for the campaign.
Recruited in 2000 by his friend James Baker, the former secretary of state, to spearhead the GOP street forces in Miami, Stone is apparently confident that he can use the Democrat-bashing preacher to damage the party's eventual nominee, just as Sharpton himself bragged he did in the New York mayoral campaign of 2001.
While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the Times that he "helped set the tone and direction" of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did it on the advice of a consultant who's worked in every GOP presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns.
Son of Clark Calls Politics Dirty Business, Faults Media
It's been a really disillusioning experience, you know."
The general's son blamed the news media for focusing too much on who is ahead and not on issues and said that if his father did not win in Oklahoma, he hoped he would drop out of the Democratic presidential race.
"His stance on the issues or his qualifications for the job haven't been talked about at all," Mr. Clark said of his father, who entered the Democratic race in September. "You've got to talk about what the man stands for and what he's done. Nobody does that."
Mr. Clark occasionally used obscenities to describe his views of how his father's campaign had been covered. "I think there was a lot of smearing and whispering going on by columnists and talking heads throughout," he said.
Mr. Clark said he did not believe the poor coverage had been limited to his father, however. "I think a lot of people have gotten bad coverage," he said. "I think Howard Dean's gotten unfair coverage. John Kerry's gotten unfair coverage. John Edwards has gotten unfair coverage. I mean, no one has been covered as to what they actually stand for and what they've done."
el - Can't argue with that.
Digby has his Big Winner
Kerry for knowing how to campaign for TV - good sound bites.
He also has a history of the Clinton's first run for the White House and his terrible and many low vote totals. Digby appears to think it is better to have a rushed primary season to avoid that again. I fail to see it.
Clinton won the White House twice - why would you think Jerry Brown or Paul Tsongas or Tom Harkin could even win in 92?
Dem primary voters choose Clinton even after sex scandals popped out because they saw he could win the White House.
That appears to be what primary voters are doing this year, casting their votes for perceived electability, or at least who looks good on TV which may be the same thing.
Winners and Losers
Big Winner - Kerry, would have been bigger if he had won them all.
Winner - Edwards, big win in South Carolina, competitive in others. the more he can show up on TV the better he does.
Neutral - Clark, Oklahoma showed him at his best. Probably not good enough for him to get any kick out of his showing. He appears to have had favorable press and TV coverage there which has a good deal to do with his win, along with the effort he put there. He really needed more than a pretty close three-way race for first.
Small Loser - Dean, getting votes in single digits in several states hurts. Only picking up some Southwest delegates hurts. Meeting low expectations is the best you can say. Still number two in delegate count. Not the best campaigner even if you feel his position on the issues is best.
Loser - Sharpton, probably had his highest total of the campaign in SC and it was clearly not enough. He has picked up one delegate today, Delaware, and could pick up a few more in some upcoming states..
Big Loser - Kucinich, who? Earlier I thought there were a few states that might elect him a delegate or two under the 15% rule in urban districts. That scenario is fading for the left candidate.
Bigest Loser - Lieberman, just 11 percent of the vote in Delaware, his best state, and he is out.
All-time biggest loser not in the real competition - LaRouche, less than one person in a thousand likes an egotistical, paranoid felon. There is hope for American democracy.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Clark Throwing down the gauntlet
The Norman (Ok.) Transcript - Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark stormed into Norman Saturday evening, blasted President Bush for “bad leadership,” outlined his own domestic agenda, and called on Oklahomans to lead him into the White House.
The hundreds who crammed inside the University of Oklahoma’s Rupel J. Jones Theater responded with thunderous approval.
“We’ve got a president who will go half way around the world for a photo opportunity,” Clark said in reference to Bush’s appearances at overseas military outposts, “but won’t go across Washington to attend the funeral of a serviceman who died in Iraq.
“None of that is patriotic, it’s just bad leadership,” he added. “Mr. President, shame on you for bad leadership.”
el - all Democrats but Lieberman sound like Dean now. Notice the anti-Kerry reader comments - Kerry aided and abetted the Bush Administration by voting for both the Iraqi war and the Patriot Act - that is WHEN he decided to vote. He was absent from voting 72 percent of the time and, most recently, was not there to help stop the Omnibus Bill which took away workers' rights to overtime pay. What kind of a leader is that?
Bush lost 22% of GOP Vote in NH!
According to updated figures from the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, which only today posted a final figure on the total number of ballots cast, only 78 percent of New Hampshire voters who took Republican ballots marked them for Bush. (In one New Hampshire town, Milton, Bush received only 48 percent of the vote, while in a number of others he was held below 60 percent of the vote.)
The figures on the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office website (http:// www.state.nh.us/sos/electionsnew.htm) show than 69,379 New Hampshire voters cast regular and absentee ballots in the Republican primary. Just 53,962 voted for Bush (78 percent). More than one in five Republican primary voters, 22--percent--chose not to vote for Bush.
Where did the renegade Republican votes go? While roughly ten percent of Republican primary voters statewide backed little-known Republicans whose names appeared on the ballot or simply did not vote, a remarkable 8,288 (12 percent) wrote in the names of leading Democratic presidential contenders.
el - First the first time since 9/11 Bush clearly looks likes a one-termer.
Dean Adapting to New Status as an Underdog
In Seattle on Saturday, more than 2,000 people turned up to hear Dean speak at a town hall meeting,creating a line that wrapped around the block.
The same day, about 1,000 people gathered on the worn grass field of a park in Tucson to cheer him on.
"I scream, you scream, we all scream for Howard Dean," read one large sign, an embrace of Dean's now-infamous speech after the Iowa caucuses.
Many say they're standing by him, no matter how far he has fallen.
"He's still the most common-sense, straightforward candidate," said Jennifer St. Clair, a marketing copywriter, after attending a town hall meeting in St. Louis on Friday.
"I really like him and Edwards and Kerry. I think they're all very similar in their positions," St. Clair added. "But you've got to credit Howard Dean for energizing the base — the apathetic people who just lost interest and felt hopeless."
And the candidate is picking up a few new supporters along the way. After hearing him speak in Roseville, Mich., on Sunday, Bonnie and David Milam said they were inclined to vote for Dean over Sen. John Edwards, their other favorite.
"I know all the momentum has kind of evaporated for him, but I thought he spoke really well and confronted the issues," said David Milam, a Presbyterian minister.
DeLong on the Terrible Washington Post Budget Story
Isn't it worth stating--somewhere in the first ten paragraphs--that the Bush budget number for 2009 omits about $160 billion in costs that the administration is on record as favoring?
Isn't the fact that the Bush budget limits itself to five years--to 2009--rather than the ten years of Clinton budgets, and limits itself to five years for a reason, worth a mention somewhere in the first ten paragraphs?
Isn't the fact that extending the Bush tax cuts would blow an annual $250 billion hole in the budget in the 2009-2012 presidential term worth mentioning in the first ten paragraphs--not in paragraph 26?
Shouldn't the article say somewhere in its first ten paragraphs that $400 billion in 2009 and $700 billion by 2014 are better forecasts of the deficit that would be produced by the policies the Bush administration advocates?
And isn't it worth turning to--as the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray does--page 183 of the Analytical Perspectives volume to pick out the quote that "Long-run budget projections show clearly that the [federal] budget is on an unsustainable path"?
Analysts: Bush's plan does little to reduce deficit
Excellent Knight-Ridder - The deficit-reduction path that Bush outlined in his 402-page budget contains questionable assumptions and large omissions that independent analysts say could greatly increase rather than shrink the out-of-control federal deficit, which is already frightening world markets, provoking cost-conscious Republicans into rebellion and feeding Democrats political ammunition in an election year.
Orcinus Agrees - Ricin attack likely domestic terrorist
The CNN version at least notes that the latter incident involved a "typewritten letter [that] was addressed to the Department of Transportation and demanded that changes in truckers' sleep/work schedules not be implemented." Not exactly a concern for Al Qaeda.
More GOP Calls to Investigate Breast Flashes, Not WMDs
This from the New Whiskey Bar: By God, we may not know what happened to Saddam's disappearing WMDs, or whether the White House outed a covert CIA operative to score a few cheap political points, but we're gonna get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about "Titgate," and right quick. In fact the FCC is already on the case.
Bush Budget DOA - Polls Show People Want Bush Gone
Bush's "Dead On Arrival" Budget
New Poll Shows Trouble For Bush
DNC To Make Issue Of Bush's Disappearance From Guard Duty
Most worrisome to Republicans is Kerry's war hero image while, in the words of one prominent Bush supporter, "our guy was drinking beer in Alabama." - Bob Novak
Early tests show deadly ricin in Senate mailroom
This is the hillbilly WMD. Castor beans are plentiful down south and a high school student could weaponize ricin. Stuffing in an envelope is not a good delivery system even if you have achieved a very fine particle size. You need a particle the size of a pinhead to get inside the lungs, it can also be mixed in food or injected. This information is available in numerous places, wha.., who's that at my door?
Army Logistics Much Worse Than First Acknowledged
The first official Army history of the Iraq war reveals that American forces were plagued by a "morass" of supply shortages, radios that could not reach far-flung troops, disappointing psychological operations and virtually no reliable intelligence on how Saddam Hussein would defend Baghdad.
Logistics problems, which senior Army officials played down at the time, were much worse than have previously been reported.
In most cases, soldiers improvised solutions to keep the offensive rolling. But the study found that the Third Infantry Division, the Army's lead combat force, was within two weeks of being halted by a lack of spare parts, and Army logisticians had no effective distribution system.
el - The Army always studies war to draw lessons for the next one. So do foreign armies who learned several weaknesses of ours.
Response to my Representatives as Zombies post from Weekly World News
i find it interresting that the only responses i have recieved to my letters/e-mails to our illustrious representatives in washington, is from representatives from OUTSIDE my state. the responses from IN my state have been one from sen. kay baily hutchison (rep.), and multiple snail mail responses from rep. chris bell (dem.). so far as i can tell, chris bell is the only one in the state of texas who is even bothering to pretend he cares about the common peole in this state. last night, instead of watching the super bowl ass-straviganza (or should that be "boob-straviganza", poor janet), i watched the movie "independance day". you know, the one with will smith & harry connic jr. where the aliens blow up the white house and capitol hill? and i kept wondering, "where are those damn aliens when you NEED them!?!"
el - Yes, where are those damn aliens when you need them? Here is the original link - Seven Congressmen Are Zombies! My post is in here.
Companies Limit Health Coverage of Many Retirees
Scores of companies in the last two years, including the telecommunications equipment giants Lucent Technologies and Alcatel and a big electric utility, TXU, have ended medical benefits for some or all of their retirees and instead offered to let them buy coverage through a group plan. This coverage is often more expensive than many retirees can afford.
Experts expect that the trend, driven by the fast-rising cost of health care, will continue, despite the billions of dollars that the government will distribute to companies that maintain retiree health coverage when the new Medicare drug benefit begins in two years. In contrast to pension financing, companies are not obligated to set aside funds to pay for retirees' health benefits, and the health plans can usually be changed or terminated at the company's choosing, with no appeal available to the retirees.
The costs can be a shock. According to surveys by benefits consultants, companies that offer health benefits to retirees typically have subsidized about 60 percent of the premium. Losing that support all at once can mean hundreds of dollars a month in unexpected costs.
Another Bogus Budget
Even as the Republican leadership strong-armed the Medicare drug bill through Congress, the administration was sitting on estimates showing that the plan would cost at least $134 billion more than it let on. But let's not make too much of the incident. After all, it's not as if our leaders make a habit of faking their budget projections. Oh, wait.
The budget released yesterday, which projects a $521 billion deficit for fiscal 2004, is no more credible than its predecessors. When the administration promises much lower deficits in future years, remember this: two years ago it projected a fiscal 2004 deficit of only $14 billion.
The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950. About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts. The rest reflects the end of the stock market bubble, the still-depressed economy and — probably — growing tax sheltering and evasion.
In particular, what's going on with the tax on corporate profits? That source of revenue is down, as a percent of G.D.P., to 1930's levels. No, that's not a misprint. And receipts are not growing nearly as fast as one would expect, given an economic recovery that has bypassed workers but given big gains to their employers. An administration that actually tried to make corporations pay their taxes might be able to find $100 billion or more each year.
Today's Budget Proposal
Charts, Projections and Plenty of Politics
"Today's budget proposal makes it clear what President Bush's priorities are: tax cuts for the rich and tough luck for everyone else," said Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said: "The new Bush budget is more of the same: record deficits, tax cuts for the wealthy and special interests and cuts in areas that matter to families — such as health care and education."
Democrats attacked the president's proposal to hold the line on spending in a number of areas. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, called the document "the most antifamily, antiworker, anti-health-care, anti-education budget in modern times." Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the budget "is built on a house of cards."
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has railed against pork-barrel spending, simply laughed when asked his view of the budget. "I think it makes for very entertaining reading," he said.
"This is not a serious plan for getting the country out of trouble," senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota said. "This president is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the United States."
Monday, February 02, 2004
A scandal greater than Watergate
If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as it long insisted, we must draw one of two conclusions.
Either President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed, and deceived Congress and the American people. Or, they were grossly misinformed by their intelligence experts and must be judged fools of the first order.
If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed national security experts were really misinformed about Iraq's weapons and capabilities, then they started a war by mistake - and presided over the two biggest national security fiascos since Pearl Harbor: the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
It turns out President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly branded a "liar," was in fact telling the truth all along when he said all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush and British PM Tony Blair who weren't telling the truth.
So, take your pick.
The Iraq war either was the Mother of All Lies, or the Mother of All Fiascos.
Dean's Endorsement of IRV
"If I could do anything I wanted and have campaign finance reform, here's what I would do. I would have small donations allowed, $100 or less. I would have public financing of everybody's campaign. And I would limit people's spending, so nobody could go outside the public financing system. And I would have instant run-off voting, so, when you had more candidates than just two, the person with a majority of votes would win. Now, that's what I would like to do. I believe in campaign finance reform. But I don't believe in campaign finance reform that gives a significant advantage to the Republican Party. And that's what we have now" ("NewsNight," CNN, 11/12).
Kerry's Army
It's important not to oversimplify the veteran vote--as Kerry's defiant friend Cleland, defeated in 2002 after attacks on his patriotism, can testify. And all the veteran support will mean nothing if Kerry retreats into the caution and ambivalence of his vote on Iraq. Kerry's candidacy offers the possibility of a national leader who's a Vietnam veteran bearing all the ambiguities of his generation. Could Vietnam veterans and their families tip a presidential race? Contemplate this: The most frequently visited monument in Washington is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Can we grow out of deficits this big?
An 11-pound federal budget arrived with a thud on Washington desks Monday morning, underscoring an increasingly tough fiscal environment.
"Our fiscal gap is too great to grow our way out of this problem. Tough choices are going to be required," says David Walker, the Comptroller General and head of Congress's nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO).
At a Monitor breakfast he outlined stark choices: Reform entitlement programs like Social Security. Cut the base of discretionary spending which Congress controls. Change tax policies. "We are going to have to look at all three," he said.
Some $420.7 billion in military spending does not include ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be funded in a request expected to come after November's election.
Gene Sperling, economic adviser to President Clinton, says the White House has engaged in "reverse generational responsibility" by running up debts at a time when the nation should be setting aside money to help pay for baby boomers' retirement.
Return of the populist campaign
Does this message resonate with Americans, especially those who have yet to choose sides in the presidential race? A recent Time/CNN poll has 57 percent of the public (and 63 percent of independents) agreeing that Mr. Bush "pays too much attention to big business."
"A lot of Democrats see this as a new Gilded Age, with a widening gap between wage earners and the elites," says Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin. "Clearly, this sort of heightened populist rhetoric responds to [the perception that] the Bush administration is a throwback to the days before the New Deal."
In the South, which has become more and more Republican in recent decades, populist-sounding Democrats are counting on voters like Charley Raley, who's soured on the GOP. "They've been vacating all our jobs, and now we ain't got no place to go," says Mr. Raley, whose job at a plant in Winnsboro, S.C., was transferred overseas. "These rich people don't care. We need somebody who stands up for the rest of us." In 2003 alone, South Carolina lost more than 22,000 jobs - more than any other state.
As many Americans now rate the economy as their top priority as they do protecting the US against terrorism, according to the Pew Research Center.
Pew also finds other domestic issues are increasingly important to the public: Balancing the federal budget is now a top priority for 51 percent, up from 40 percent last year. Providing healthcare to the uninsured is up to 54 percent from 45 percent.
Meanwhile, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states have had to cut programs for the current fiscal year. Seventeen states - several headed by Republican governors (including Jeb Bush in Florida) - have found it necessary to raise taxes to provide essential services and fill unemployment claims.
Southern GOP strongholds weakening
A window into discontent in Dixie
In South Carolina - while the top third of wage earners here make nearly $20,000 more today than 20 years ago, the bottom third has lost ground - a disparity compounded by three years of job losses and a recovery that still feels jobless to many.
"There is a whole group of people in the country who feel that the recovery is under way, but the bottom half - the working class, the working poor, and the lower middle class - do not feel that at all," says Cal Jillson, a government professor at Southern Methodist University.
North Korean Gas Chambers and Medical Experiments
The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.
US Mad Cow Was Not A Downer, Has Been Eaten
Contrary to reports from the federal Department of Agriculture, he asserts that the cow he killed was not too sick to walk. And it was caught not by routine surveillance, he says, but by "a fluke": he killed it outdoors because he feared it would trample other cows lying prostrate in its trailer, and the plant's testing program called for sampling cows killed outside only.
"Mad cows aren't downers," he said. "They're up and they're crazy." The Agriculture Department disputes his account. Dr. Kenneth Petersen, a food safety official, faxed copies of the Dec. 9 inspector's report saying the cow was "sternal," or down on its chest.
Mr. Louthan said he believed the government changed the report on Dec. 23, during the panic at Vern's when a positive test was found. The "smoking gun," he said, is that it is the only one on the page marked "unable to get temp" while other cows' temperatures were recorded. It is easy, he said, to get a rectal temperature from a downed cow but hard from a jumpy one.
The department has not changed last year's plans to test 40,000 cows nationwide this year, out of 30 million slaughtered. Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, which represents slaughterhouses, called that "plenty sufficient from a statistical standpoint."
Mr. Louthan said the agent who ordered him to be quiet suggested that he was akin to "an urban terrorist" for spreading alarm about beef.
"I'm not," Mr. Louthan said. "I just want to enjoy my cheeseburger like anybody else. I don't want to think: Is this the magic burger that's going to kill me?"
Nude Wrestling? Good Practice for Politics
President Bush and Senator John Kerry are not only graduates of Yale but also fellow members of the university's most elitist secret society, Skull and Bones.
Missteps Pulled a Surging Dean Back to Earth
"You could argue that it was a mistake for us to spend in the summer, in the fall, and in nine states rather than just one or two, but our position is that we had to spend the money to generate the momentum, to get the endorsements that we got," said a senior campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We believed that if we won Iowa and New Hampshire, we would be the nominee by Feb. 3. Look what's happening to John Kerry. The strategy wasn't wrong; it just didn't work for us."
"I was there when we first started. I have a different perspective on where we were and how far we've come. He's had an impact on this country. We're not giving up."
Seven Congressmen Are Zombies!
Weekly World News - At least seven U.S. congressmen are boot-licking zombies controlled by Haiti's supersecret AIH intelligence agency, but here's the clincher:
Nobody can figure out who they are because the living dead -- with their shuffling gait, wrinkled skin and glassy stares -- are indistinguishable from all the senior-citizen politicians on Capitol Hill.
So says the FBI in a frightening internal report that suggests the House of Representatives "could become a nest of zombies within the next 10 years . . . and the American public would be none the wiser."
"By definition, zombies have limited mental faculties, no emotion, no free will, and they are only able to function at the behest of voodoo priests who control their every move.
Kerry Beating Bush in Three Polls
IWON-AP - The Massachusetts senator was leading Bush 54-46 in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll and 51-43 in a national poll by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Both polls were taken over the weekend. A Newsweek poll released over the weekend showed Kerry at 48 percent and Bush at 46 percent.
Al Gore was right - the Pentagon and scientists say so
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as 'likely'. But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.
The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.
The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become 'very much' saltier in the tropics and subtropics and 'very much' fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years. This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.
Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.
The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as 'the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light'. Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute - Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth's climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries.
In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.
Our current speculations about future climate and its impacts have focused on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has forecast gradual global warming of 1.4 to 5.8 Celsius over the next century.
It is prudent to superimpose on this forecast the potential for abrupt climate change induced by thermohaline shutdown. Such a change could cool down selective areas of the globe by 3 to 5 Celsius, while simultaneously causing drought in many parts of the world. These climate changes would occur quickly, even as other regions continue to warm slowly. It is critical to consider the economic and political ramifications of this geographically selective climate change. Specifically, the region most affected by a shutdown 'the countries bordering the North Atlantic' is also one of the world's most developed.
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.
In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.
Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.
Recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda" a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild.
Global Chilling
The ice-core records demonstrate that the North Atlantic can freshen to a point where the deep-water pump fails, warm water stops coming north, and the northern ocean suddenly freezes, as it did in the last Ice Age. No one can say if that is what will happen next. But since the 1950's, the best documented deep-water pump, between Iceland and Scotland, has slowed 20 percent.
Thom Hartmann - The Ice Age Cometh
Most scientists involved in research on this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100,000 years.
And when might that threshold be reached? Nobody knows, the action of the Great Conveyor Belt in defining ice ages was discovered only in the last decade. Preliminary computer models and scientists willing to speculate suggest the switch could flip as early as next year, or it may be generations from now. It may be wobbling right now, producing the extremes of weather we've seen in the past few years.
Predictably the paid corporate mouthpiece Tech Central Station is pooh-pahing the scientists.
From the opposite side Tom Paine has a much better analysis of this - Climate Change Alert.
First Paul O'Neill, now Andrew Marshall. Marshall has just blown the lid off another Bush administration can of worms - namely, its unwillingness to acknowledge and address the massive threat posed by global climate change.
Marshall is the founding director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, a quiet but powerful think tank within the Pentagon. In 2001, Marshall was tapped by George W. Bush to lead the Pentagon's military review that largely defined the scope of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's 'transformation' agenda. Marshall, whose ONA has served every president since Nixon, introduced the term "revolution in military affairs."
In an article published Jan. 26 in Fortune magazine, Marshall released the findings of an unclassified report written by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security."
The ONA-commissioned report, using the well-established scenario-planning techniques developed at Shell's planning unit, generated a plausible future scenario in which the thermohaline conveyor collapses in 2010. What follows that oceanic shut-down sounds apocalyptic and yet the authors contend, is quite plausible.
By 2020, average rainfall in Europe drops 30 percent; "megadroughts" affect Southern China and Northern Europe; massive boatlifts of people from the Caribbean attempt to enter the United States and Mexico; China is unable to feed its population due to the combination of droughts and violent monsoons and flooding; Eastern European countries invade a weakened Russia to seek minerals and energy; nuclear India, Pakistan, and China go to war over water, land, and refugees. In all 400 million people could be forced to migrate from uninhabitable regions. In the United States, the East Coast population areas experience severe shortages of freshwater; flooding creates an inland sea in California's Central Valley and disrupts freshwater supplies for Southern California; and energy disruptions are commonplace due to storms, ice and conflict. The authors make the point clear: this is not a prediction, this is a plausible scenario given what we know now.
For a man of Marshall's long legacy of discretion to directly challenge the current administration's line on global warming at the beginning of a presidential election year speaks volumes. That he chose to do so by releasing a report by respected business consultants in Fortune seems to say he wants the business world, Bush's most important constituency, to understand clearly that the status quo is untenable.
This extraordinary act by a senior Defense Department official implies high-level recognition that the Bush administration's resistance to the near global consensus on climate change - a consensus that includes the vast majority of the scientific community, many corporations including General Motors, Alcoa, IBM, Dupont, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, and all the remaining governments of the OECD - is a threat to national security itself. Indeed, last month in the journal Science, the United Kingdom's Chief Scientific Advisor declared that "climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today - more serious even than the threat of terrorism."
According to The New York Times, the Bush administration acted to distort and omit EPA findings on global warming. The group notes that the administration has dismissed the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change set up by the first President Bush and the findings of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that Bush himself requested. They document how administration has tried to mislead the public by substituting the absolute indicator of total emissions with emissions per unit of GDP, which can go down while total U.S. emissions continue to rise, and then asking emitters (unsuccessfully) to voluntarily commit to reducing emission intensity. And they highlight how the administration has stalled the debate by calling for a research agenda which The New York Times described as a "redundant examination of issues that had largely been settled, bereft of vision, executable goals and timetables - in short, little more than a cover-up for inaction."
Terrorism is still a real threat and Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and HIV/AIDS must be stabilized and resolved. The larger threat of abrupt climate change, however, means we must comprehensively transform our emissions-ridden economy.
Google News by Date - Global Warming. Right now, 1820 news articles.
How to Hack an Election
When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election.
They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location.
Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 10 seconds."
Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hackers and Others
Computers that Maryland voters will use in the March primary contain "vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious individuals," according to programmers who tested the equipment.
A team assembled by Columbia-based RABA conducted an exercise Jan. 19 to simulate an attack on Maryland's touch-screens, built by North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc.
Members found that individual machines could be disabled by jamming a voter card into a terminal or lifting it up and pulling out wires. The team guessed passwords on the cards that were needed to access the machines, and found the passwords were contained in the source code of the computers.
The team also said the computer server that tabulates election results did not have security updates from Microsoft Corp. Team members were able to break into the server remotely via dial-up modem.
Wertheimer said he was surprised that each of Maryland's machines has two identical locks, which could be opened by any one of the 32,000 keys. The report also stated it was easy to pick the locks.
How John Kerry Can Win
Joe Conason - I first began to think that he could rouse the Democratic Party from its terrible torpor during the summer of 2002, when he called out Trent Lott and Tom DeLay as chicken hawks and threatened to filibuster against oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. He should emphasize his historical willingness to stand alone and fight for what he believes.
The Democrats have to take their campaign into "red states" wherever possible, or else the Republicans will put them on the defensive in the "blue states."
Press criticism of populist rhetoric deserves to be ignored. Owing to its own centrist and conservative biases, the media habitually discourages politicians from articulating the populist themes that have recently energized all of the Democratic contenders. When Michael Dukakis ran as a technocrat in 1988, his numbers kept falling until, too late, he reached for populist speeches against the plutocratic Bush regime. When Al Gore delivered his combative convention speech in 2000, the press gallery almost unanimously disparaged its "old-fashioned" populism. Gore's numbers soared, proving that the mainstream wisdom is always wrong, but he made the mistake of listening to them anyway and squandered his lead. Voters want a competent leader who they believe is on their side. Nearly every poll ever taken about George W. Bush shows they know he isn't that leader.
Brevity is both merciful and wise. That advice is particularly pertinent for a stiff speaker like Kerry.
Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings - The Bush Timeline
Center for American Progress - lays out in simple form a chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak.
The Media and Howard Dean
What if we lived in a parallel universe where Howard Dean was actually treated fairly by the media?
Dean has made mistakes, to be sure. But those mistakes have been amplified by a 24-hour-a-day news cycle, by late-night comics, by an Anybody-But-Dean army of cable television and talk-radio talking heads, and by Washington-centric newspaper columnists who never understood or particularly approved of Dean's decision to show up uninvited at the top of Democratic polls in late 2003. It wasn't just cable commentators and comics that gave Dean a hard time, however. According to the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs, Dean was the favorite target of the evening news programs on the nation's broadcast networks. The center's study of 187 CBS, NBC and ABC evening news reports found that only 49 percent of all on-air evaluations of Dean in 2003 were positive. The other Democratic contenders collectively received 78 percent favorable coverage during the same period.
When it came time for the Sentinel to make an endorsement, the editors looked over their own coverage and came to a conclusion: Dean was not the screaming hothead portrayed on cable TV. Rather, they saw a sensible and appealing candidate, and they backed him, writing that, "Dean offers voters a wide range of well-thought-out policy initiatives, foreign and domestic, based on a dramatic--and one might say conservative--theme: I want my country back. That cry, coupled with Dean's direct, energetic style, appeals to a lot of Democrats and independents, and has attracted a large number of people to his campaign who had previously been alienated from politics of any kind. Dean is particularly effective in his open refusal to entice voters with wild promises of expensive new government programs...
"We come to this decision not without some difficulty, given the appeal of the (retired General) Clark and (US Senator John) Edwards candidacies. But we believe on balance that Dean is best-equipped to restore respect for this country abroad while protecting the interests of Americans at home. And we believe Dean, unlike the current occupant of the White House, understands that the two efforts must be linked. All nations reserve the right to act boldly in their own interests, but no nation--even our own exceptional nation--can thrive as a go-it-alone force on virtually every matter of international substance: energy, the environment, trade, war and peace. Dean has reasonable and we believe workable ideas for addressing Americans' needs regarding health care, the federal deficit, homeland security, jobs, civil rights and the economy. And he would reverse the current administration's shameless weakening of environmental laws."
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Dem's Head Answers Call And Raises Bush AWOL Issue
Oh My Freaking Goodness! exclaims Balkinization
The Chairman of the Democratic Party is actually attacking President Bush on his military record, the New York Times reports. Instead of cowering in the corner when the media said that the charge of desertion was false, Terry McAuliffe is raising the more plausible question whether the President was AWOL while in Alabama. Nevertheless, it is particularly strange to me that McAuliffe chose to break this story on Super Bowl Sunday, which is not a good time to cover a political event.
The Times reports that Terry McAuliffe's statement "came two days after a scathing attack on President Bush's war record, delivered by Senator Max Cleland of Georgia on behalf of Mr. Kerry." Cleland said "Mr. Kerry was "a real deal" and President Bush was "a raw deal." He added, "We need somebody who felt the sting of battle — not someone who didn't even complete his tour stateside in the Guard.""
Seems I missed a flash during my Superbowl boycott
Story at whatevs (dot org) Janet picture here. Looks planned to me, especially as she was wearing a metallic glue-on star on her nipple. Jackson close-up from Vividblurry.
Bush won't give to the 9/11 Commission it's own notes.
The White House, already embroiled in a public fight over the deadline for an independent commission's investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is refusing to give the panel notes on presidential briefing papers taken by some of its own members, officials said this week.
Read that slowly. Some members of the commission were only allowed to take notes of some documents and now Bush won't release those notes, their own, to the members.
Friedman on Bush's Faith-Based Policies
Budgets of Mass Destruction
It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history.
Personally, I don't believe the Bush team will pay a long-term political price for its faith-based intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Too many Americans, including me, believe in their guts that removing Saddam was the right thing to do, even if the W.M.D. intel was wrong.
The Bush team's real vulnerability is its B.M.D. — Budgets of Mass Destruction, which have recklessly imperiled the nation's future, with crazy tax-cutting and out-of-control spending.
Suicide Bombers Kill 56 Kurds
Two suicide bombers strapped with explosives have blown themselves up in the offices of two Kurdish parties aligned with U.S. occupation forces in Iraq, killing at least 56 people and wounding 200.
The offices of Iraq's two main Kurdish political groups in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil were crowded with senior officials celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha when the bombers struck on Sunday, killing many top leaders of the two groups.
Electability
Natasha at Pacific Views has: I'd like to know what right the Democratic party leadership has to lecture people about electability. After losing congress in 1994, the presidency in 2000, and the senate in 2002, I think they have some nerve to tell anyone that they know best.
Looking back at that Newsweek poll, none of the major candidates is more than five points away from Bush, whose re-elect numbers are very soft. At this point, virtually anyone could beat Bush if they play their cards right.
And when anyone says "record", I'd say "Max Cleland." A decorated Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the service of his country, voted for the Iraq war, the PATRIOT act, and Homeland Security. He was ousted by a Republican ad campaign that put his picture next to Bin Laden's and claimed that he was soft on terror. An ad campaign not dissimilar to the one run against Dean in two states by a group staffed by 'former' Kerry and Gephardt people. (I've never bought the denial of attachment, less so after seeing the above advertisement in NH.)
And it's in this context that it's clear why Kerry is beating Dean, and why his campaign is probably reducing its chances of winning in the general. He's selling fear of Bush, propped up with pilfered bits of Dean's platform. And no one sells fear better than conservatives, they are (to lift a phrase) the real deal when it comes to petrifying the electorate. When we buy into it, it cedes the entire debate. Democrats all around the country have lost to Republicans when they got into the fear business, which they like to call centrism.
Too many people seem to forget that before Dean showed up with his complete lack of reverence and fear for Bush, it would have been hard to find a Democrat who believed anyone could oust him. The DLC approved campaigns are dragging all of us right back to where Bush is the 800 lb. gorilla that can't be touched except by the very lucky and curiously meritorious. Thanks guys. Thanks a bunch.
When the Democratic party finally gets the Dean campaign's donor list, they'll find that they already had my name. And they'll find that I haven't given them a cent.
She refers to this good Al Giordano post.
Bush Spends More Than Dean For His Primaries
President Bush was the first to file his report. It shows the Republican raised a record $132.7 million last year and spent $33.6 million. el - Now where did all that money go with no TV ads or campaigns? As was commented on Pandagon - How much will each lie cost?
US Officials Knew Last May Iraq Possessed No WMD
Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The new revelation came as White House sources indicated that President George Bush was considering establishing an investigation into the intelligence, despite rejecting an inquiry the previous day.
The disclosure that US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded so quickly that no major weapons or facilities would be found is certain to produce serious new embarrassment on both sides of the Atlantic.
Stampede Kills 244 at Hajj Pilgrimage
The stampede occurred during the stoning of the devil, an emotional and notoriously perilous hajj ritual. Pilgrims frantically throw rocks, shout insults or hurl their shoes at three stone pillars - acts that are supposed to demonstrate their deep disdain for Satan.
Safety measures were in place at the site - one where fatal stampedes have been frequent - but "caution isn't stronger than fate," said Saudi Hajj Minister Iyad Madani. "All precautions were taken to prevent such an incident, but this is God's will."
The chaos came after a sleepless night of prayer at the climax of the hajj, when pilgrims from around the world listened to Saudi Arabia's top cleric at the Namira Mosque.
On Sunday morning, they prayed at dawn then gathered pebbles to throw at the pillars. Each participant throws seven times, chanting "bismillah" ("in the name of God") and "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great").
Calling America "the greatest Satan," Egyptian pilgrim Youssef Omar threw pebbles at one pillar on which someone had scrawled "USA."
Dean Speaks Out Again
"It turns out we've got more than one Republican in the Democratic race. I've already said I thought Wes Clark was a Republican and now apparently John Kerry has the same financing habits."
el - I think Kerry is too much a politician - is Dean too little?
Observing Nedra
Nedra Pickler - Dean's Sunday schedule had him in Wisconsin and Michigan. In Milwaukee, he met privately with black leaders, then spoke at the Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ. President Bush visited the same church in July.
Dean touted his record on health care and his position on affirmative action, but avoided a critique of his rivals in favor of a more agreeable tone at the church.
"I am blessed, I am grateful and I thank you,'' he said. "Praise the Lord.''
Dean Attacking Kerry
AP - "He misrepresented himself, grossly misrepresented himself, as a candidate who would take on special interests in Washington," Dean told reporters aboard a flight from Milwaukee to Detroit. "That is factually untrue. He is part of the problem and not part of the solution. We cannot go on in this country having United States senators and public officials gather their money from people who they then perform favors for."
"I'm not going to do anything that's going to harm the Democratic Party. If we get blown out again and again and again ... if somebody else gets more delegates and they clinch it, of course, I'm not going to go all the way to the convention just to prove a point," Dean said.
Howard Dean said Sunday that he regretted burning through most of the $41 million his campaign raised last year on losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"We took a gamble and it didn't pay off," Dean, the one-time front-runner for his party's nomination, told NBC's "Meet the Press."
During his one-hour appearance on the show, Dean continued his criticism of Sen. Kerry as a Washington insider with deep ties to special interests, charging that the Massachusetts lawmaker has raised more money from lobbyists over the past 15 years than any other senator.
"That is exactly what's wrong with American politics and that's why 50 percent of the people in this country don't vote," Dean said.
Reuters - Dean Urges Kerry to Apologize for 'Hypocrisy'
Democratic White House hopeful Howard Dean on Sunday called on his front-running rival John Kerry to apologize to the American people for hypocrisy by pretending to be free of special interest money.
Dean, whose high-flying presidential bid crashed in Iowa and New Hampshire last month when he finished far behind Kerry, has tried to reinvigorate his campaign by confronting the senator head on over his ties to big money and lobbyists.
"This is a war of principles, not a war of words," Dean told reporters on his campaign plane.
Dean cited a nonpartisan study showing Kerry had taken more money from special interests than any other U.S. senator in the past 15 years.
"I call on Sen. Kerry to apologize to the American people for misleading them during the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and for saying that he was going to stand up to the special interests," Dean said.
The former Vermont governor also raised a Newsweek report on Sunday that Kerry met and corresponded with Johnny Chung, a key figure in the 1996 fund-raising scandals, in the summer of 1996 before Chung threw a September fund-raiser for Kerry. Kerry had previously claimed his first meeting with Chung was at the fund-raiser.
"If he had never been out there saying I don't take money from special interests ... I wouldn't be doing this right now," Dean said. "I'm just incensed by his hypocrisy."
Dean said the senator was being disingenuous.
"I think he's playing within the system," Dean said. "I think he's guilty of saying one thing and doing another. And when you're pretending to be free of influence ...I mean, there are numerous, documented instances when contributions came in and favorable action was taken."
A Flawed Argument In the Case for War
No one believed that Iraq was able to attack the United States with drones carrying chemical and biological agents. How did the administration, including Powell, get so fooled? Look who was frog marching the director of the CIA up to Capital Hill.
"The information was so startling that CIA Director George J. Tenet, accompanied by Vice President Cheney, marched up to Capitol Hill to brief the four top Senate and House leaders the day after Labor Day 2002. The administration was gearing up to present its case against Iraq at the United Nations, and lawmakers were eager for any evidence that would prove Saddam Hussein was a grave threat.
"In the briefing, Tenet and Cheney presented what one participant described as a "smoking gun": New intelligence showed Iraq had developed unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) that could deliver chemical or biological agents. In addition, Iraq had sought software that would allow it to produce sophisticated mapping of eastern U.S. cities. President Bush hinted at the evidence in a speech on Oct. 7, 2002."
"The story of the UAVs -- just one part of the vast array of claims made by the Bush administration about Iraq's alleged weapons programs -- is emblematic of how U.S. intelligence on Iraq was often wrong, even when officials made efforts to cull the strongest material from a torrent of information."
el - Still not the straight story, a whitewash of an article.
ABC's Opinion of Sunday Talk TV
ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos
Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe made very clear to George Stephanopoulos that his party is prepared to make George W. Bush's personal and professional military record an issue in the upcoming general election, especially if John Kerry is the nominee. Here's what The Macker said on This Week:
"I don't know if John Kerry will be the nominee. I have to be neutral towards all of them. But if he is the nominee, let me tell you this, George, I look forward to that debate, when John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, is standing next to George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard. George Bush never served in our military in our country. He didn't show up when he should have showed up. And there's John Kerry, on the stage with a chest full of medals that he earned by saving lives of American soldiers. So is — John Kerry says, Bring it on. I don't know if he'll be the nominee, but I welcome whoever the nominee's debate is with George Bush."
Chairman McAuliffe also perhaps slightly backed off his earlier statements that to move your candidacy forward you will have had to win at least one contest by February 4. Today McAuliffe said he is aware of Howard Dean's decision not to advertise in any of Tuesday's seven states and that he will be playing in contests later in February. McAuliffe said that is a decision for Howard Dean who has to assess his own candidacy in his own way.
NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert
A surly (el - Surly, WTF?) Howard Dean appeared on "Meet the Press" today. Dean went after Kerry for the contributions that he has received from special interests and was put on the spot by NBC's Tim Russert for special interest ties of his own.
Dean said that he thinks the race isn't going to be decided until March 2 or March 9 but said he would get out of the race sooner if he gets "blown out again" and someone secures enough delegates. When Russert questioned Dean about the past lobbying activities of Roy Neel and Bob Rogan, Dean said: "The question is: are they ethical people? And both of my people are ethical people." He didn't really directly respond to Tim on this.
Dean happily accepted an old Kerry invitation to debate that Dean had dismissed when he was the frontrunner. Dean laughed and expressed his doubts as to whether Kerry would now accept. Russert vowed to ask him.
Dean said the best explanation was a New York Time analysis that said that he lost because the American people never got to know him. Dean suggested that his background as a doctor makes it difficult for him to let people get to know him — because he's always listening to the patient.
We thought Governor Dean should have been more insistent with Tim in demanding he show the Diane Sawyer version of The Scream.
CBS' Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer
On Face the Nation, Senator John Edwards stated from Columbia, S.C., that if he were offered the number two spot on the Democratic ticket, "I would say no."
Asked by host Bob Schieffer what he would do if it turned out he didn't have the delegates to win the Democratic presidential nomination and were offered the vice presidential slot, Edwards said he would refuse because he's running for president, and "to bring the change I think needs to be brought to this country, I need to be the president of the United States. That's what this is about for me."
Last Wednesday we heard Edwards start down this somewhat Sherman-esque road and today he was even a bit more concise if not stronger. We still think there is a bit of wiggle room here, but it appears to us that he has made a conscious decision that he is either 1.) completely uninterested in being VP or 2.) of the belief that he must appear completely uninterested in being VP.
Asked about the need for a Democratic Southern strategy (no, not THAT Southern strategy) and Senator John Kerry's statement that it's possible for a Democrat to win without Southern states, Edwards said it is mathematically possible, but it's never happened.
Edwards said it's a close race coming in South Carolina on Tuesday: "Clearly there's a showdown going on in South Carolina." As to whether he can win anywhere else on Feb. 3, Edwards said, "I can win delegates everywhere."
The campaign has good support and good ground operations all over, and they can be competitive, Edwards said, stopping far short of saying he could win in any other state.
CNN's Inside Politics Sunday
Former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi looking as if he had (el - I had to correct their typo here) just been to the spa (or at least gotten a good night's sleep recently) told CNN's Judy Woodruff that he thinks he made the right decision to step aside because he believes "you can't have two captains of the ship."
When pressed about the seeming inconsistency of hiring telecom lobbyist Roy Neel while railing against Washington insiders, Trippi tried to turn the focus of the conversation back to special interest contributions taken by President Bush and Senator John Kerry.
CNN's John Mercurio reported that Dean's media consultants, Trippi, McMahon and Squire, made $5.2 million this past quarter.
Campaigns Release Spending for 2003
AP - Election Spending: Dean raised nearly twice as much as any other Democrat last year: a party record $41 million. He spent all but about $8.5 million of it.
Dean dedicated more than $8.5 million to consultants, staff salaries and related expenses. Ads were another major cost, taking up at least $7 million, and the campaign spent at least $4.5 million on direct mail. (el - Where did the other $12 million go?)
Sources close to the campaign said last week that Dean had about $5 million in cash left after bills were paid. He is withholding staff salaries, isn't airing ads in the seven states with delegate contests on Tuesday, and plans to reduce or shuffle staff as he decides which states to focus on.
His fund-raisers see reason for optimism, in part because the Internet donors key to his fortunes last year have continued giving. Dean raised roughly $1.5 million online last week, and at least $2.2 million from all fund-raising sources since his Iowa loss, his campaign said.
- John Kerry, the front-runner, spent about $23.6 million last year. His campaign raised about $23.5 million in 2003, including about $3 million in a personal loan from Kerry.
- Joe Lieberman raised about $14 million last year. The Connecticut senator had about $612,000 left at the end of December, but also had $253,000 in bills. He received $3.6 million in public financing last month.
- Gen. Wesley Clark also collected about $14 million last year. He spent $10.4 million and had about $3 million on hand after bills Dec. 31. He picked up an additional $3.7 million in presidential public financing in January.
- Al Sharpton raised $396,366 last year and spent $389,677. He had $7,535 on hand and $348,450 in bills on Dec. 31, and loaned his campaign at least $10,000. Sharpton, a civil rights activist, has applied for public financing and hopes to get his first check soon.
Bush has collected at least $140 million so far, including $132.7 million last year and more than $7.3 million in January.
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