Party officials in the Rocky Mountain region worry their congressional candidates’ chances may be hurt by unfavorable presidential hopefuls, such as Hillary Clinton.

By Noam N. Levey
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 30, 2007

BOZEMAN, MONT. — Election day was still more than a year off when Sen. Max Baucus recently stopped by the new Boys & Girls Club along a creek outside this fast-growing city in the shadow of southwestern Montana’s jagged Bridger Mountains.

But the silver-haired Democrat looked every bit a candidate in a nail-biter as he finger-painted with children at the log-cabin clubhouse and then raced 100 miles down the Missouri River to the state capital to talk up what he was doing for the state in Washington.

Baucus is the longest-serving senator in Montana history. As chairman of the finance committee, he writes the nation’s tax laws. He is one of the most popular politicians in the state. And his party, which controls the governor’s office, the Legislature and the state’s two Senate seats, is on a roll.

Yet, as he prepares to run for a fifth term next year, Baucus is entering treacherous territory. Despite recent gains by Democrats in the Rocky Mountain West, party officials across the region are increasingly anxious that their congressional candidates may get dragged under by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The New York senator and Democratic front-runner was by a wide margin the most unpopular of 13 potential presidential candidates in Montana, according to a June survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research for the Billings Gazette; 61% said they would not consider voting for her, compared with 49% who would not vote for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and 45% who would not vote for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. The most unpopular Republican candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, was rejected by 51%.

Recent polls in Colorado, Nevada and Arizona have found similar distaste for Clinton.

“She’s carrying huge negatives out here,” said Floyd Ciruli, an independent Colorado pollster who said Democratic congressional candidates would have to highlight their differences with the national party to be successful next year. “It’s that liberal East Coast image that is so hard to sell in the West.”

One key advisor to a prominent Democratic congressional candidate, who asked not be to identified discussing tensions within the party, went even further. “It’s a disaster for Western Democrats,” he said. “It keeps me up at night.”

The Clinton campaign said the alarm was unwarranted and expressed confidence that as voters in the West got to know Clinton, they would back her and the party’s congressional candidates. “We expect to head a very strong ticket in the West,” spokesman Mo Elleithee said.

Republicans, who have lost ground across the Mountain West for two election cycles, have challenges of their own. President Bush and the war in Iraq remain deeply unpopular. The GOP presidential nominee may also be an East Coast politician: former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

And although most states in the region will probably back the Republican presidential candidate, Democrats appear to have the momentum. The party has picked up seats in Congress in four of the last five elections. And it controls governors’ mansions in five of the eight states of the inland West; in 2000, it was zero.

“There is a steady march,” said Karl Struble, a veteran Democratic strategist who recently opened an office in Arizona to complement his Washington, D.C., headquarters. “My client base is moving west.”

Democratic strategists see opportunities in the shifting demographics of the region, where the Latino population is expanding and where major metropolitan areas, particularly in the Southwest, are booming. Both Latinos and city-dwellers lean toward Democrats.

But party leaders and strategists also attribute the recent gains to candidates who connect with Western voters and their values, in part by distinguishing themselves from the national Democratic Party.

Perhaps no one is more of a poster child for that success than Montana’s colorful governor, Brian Schweitzer. Three years ago, Schweitzer became the darling of Democratic politicos when he swaggered into office with a dog and a pair of cowboy boots.

Schweitzer, a cattle rancher and the grandson of homesteaders, is no Democrat in name only. He is a proponent of energy conservation and environmental regulation. He favors abortion rights. And while the Bush administration was pushing to expand surveillance powers with the Patriot Act, Schweitzer pardoned 78 Montanans, most of them German immigrants, who had been convicted of sedition during World War I.

He also champions gun rights and coal — a major Montana export — positions that reflect clear differences from the Democratic Party’s coastal wings.

“There are two kinds of people in Montana,” Schweitzer joked in a recent telephone interview. “Those who are for gun control, and those who run for public office.”

Across the border in Wyoming — where voters chose a Democratic governor in 2002 and reelected him by a landslide four years later — Democratic congressional candidate Gary Trauner offered another caution.

“Maybe in Wyoming, it’s easier to be partisan if you are a Republican because you have registration numbers on your side. You can’t be if you’re a Democrat,” said Trauner, a businessman who nearly knocked off Republican Rep. Barbara Cubin in one of the major surprises of the 2006 elections. “I think people, particularly in the West, want their leaders to be independent.”

Baucus, who helped President Bush pass sweeping tax cuts early in 2001 and is a stalwart opponent of gun-control legislation, routinely has one of the most conservative voting records among Democrats.

Highlighting that independence may be more difficult in a year when the presidential campaign will focus attention on a national party that is more liberal and more partisan.

“Westerners for a long time believed that Democratic presidential candidates followed some national Democratic scheme to tax and spend,” said Pat Williams, a former Democratic congressman from Montana who served 18 years in the House. “Democrats are still pushing uphill here.”

Clinton is pushing more than most.

In Arizona, where Democrats hope to pick up at least one congressional seat next year, 37% of the respondents in a recent Cronkite/Eight Poll said they would never vote for Clinton; 3% said they would never vote for Obama. Opposition to Clinton was strongest among Republicans, but a third of independents, who were crucial to many Democratic congressional victories in 2006, said they would never vote for the former first lady. Clinton’s unfavorable ratings also far outpaced other Democratic candidates in recent polls in Nevada and Colorado, two states where Democrats hope to make gains next year.

In the past, some Democratic congressional candidates in the Mountain West have kept their distance from their party’s presidential pick to underscore their independence. In 2004, Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar, a former prosecutor who won the state’s open Senate seat that year, almost never appeared in public with Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the party’s presidential nominee.This campaign season will probably be no different.

Pollster Ciruli and others familiar with Colorado politics expect Rep. Mark Udall, the leading Democratic contender for the state’s open Senate seat, to distance himself from Clinton, if she wins the nomination.

Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who heads the House Democratic campaign effort, said party officials would not push to link candidates with the presidential nominee. “We have to have candidates that connect with their constituents,” he said. “Where our candidates disagree with the nominee, whoever that may be, it will be important to distinguish themselves.”

Baucus dismisses the potential impact of a Clinton candidacy. “I’m not concerned about anybody,” he said after his Helena, Mont., news conference. “I don’t even know who the Democratic nominee is going to be.”

But Baucus, whose victory margins have been three times larger in nonpresidential election years, isn’t taking any chances.

He had raised more than $6 million for his campaign through July, which is as much as he spent in his 2002 race and more than all but six of the 31 senators expected to seek reelection next year, according to records collected by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

This summer he barnstormed the state, talking with Montanans at cookouts he calls “Baucus burger bonanzas.” In Bozeman, his visit to the Boys & Girls Club had all the hallmarks of a meticulously planned campaign stop.

Children, parents and club staff thanked Baucus for helping to build the complex. And reporters and cameramen trailed the entourage as the senator admired the computer room, art studio and gymnasium.

Baucus, who had just shepherded through the Senate legislation expanding health insurance for low-income children, sat down with Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt in front of a hand-picked audience that thanked the senator for his work and pleaded with Leavitt to tell President Bush not to veto the bill.

Afterward, Baucus carried the message outside, where he planted himself in front of a bank of television cameras and intoned: “Every American should have health insurance.”

He did not mention that a Democrat in the White House would help the cause.

noam.levey@latimes.com

David S. Broder
Washington Post
September 30, 2007

HANOVER, N.H. – On the flight from Washington to New Hampshire to cover Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, I was joined by a Hillary Clinton staffer headed for Hanover to prep her for the encounter with her seven rivals. “I expect fireworks,” he said, anticipating that the challengers would try to shake up the race at one of the last confrontations before the January voting.

It didn’t happen. There were several jabs – from Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel – but Barack Obama, who is her closest pursuer in the polls, had lost his voice to a bad cold and mostly stood mute.

And Clinton smothered every question with a blanket of conditional responses, so reluctant to take a clear stand that she frustrated NBC’s Tim Russert, the designated questioner at the two-hour MSNBC talkathon.

Her posture during the debate was the classic front-runner pose: Don’t make waves. The question is whether she can go through the next three months saying little or nothing, without jeopardizing her lead in the contest.

The highly regarded Granite State Poll released just before the debate showed Clinton had expanded that advantage, drawing 43 percent of the support, to 20 percent for Obama, 12 percent for Edwards and 6 percent for Richardson.

During the debate, she rarely came out of a defensive crouch, as if determined to protect her favored position. Answering the first question, she said her goal would be to withdraw all American troops from Iraq by 2013, but “it is very difficult to know what we are going to be inheriting” from the Bush administration, so she cannot make any pledge – as Richardson and others feel free to do. Troops might be needed for counterterrorism for many years.

Angering utter long shot Gravel and disagreeing with Biden and Chris Dodd, she voted earlier Wednesday for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s resolution designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

Edwards claimed that President Bush could use that as a pretext for war and said it showed Clinton had not learned the lesson of her “mistake” in authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But she calmly replied that the Revolutionary Guards had provided weapons to kill Americans in Iraq and promoted terrorism – so the designation was justified.

When Russert asked what her attitude would be toward an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, she refused to answer such a “hypothetical.”

He insisted it was a real possibility, but she would not play. Instead, she endorsed the Israeli attack on Syria – a safe stand.

Clinton joined the others in endorsing “sanctuary cities” for illegal immigrants, but couched it as a step toward law enforcement rather than protection for people here illegally. And when challenged on the failure of her 1993-94 health care initiative, she said she was “proud” to have waged that “lonely” fight, and rejected Russert’s claim that her stubbornness had blocked a bipartisan agreement back then.

Her greatest evasiveness occurred on the volatile issue of Social Security. Biden, the first to answer Russert’s question about steps to save the system from bankruptcy, said he would lift the cap on payroll taxes and raise additional millions from people making more than $97,000 a year.

But when it was Clinton’s turn, she argued that sound fiscal policies and economic growth could eliminate the problem – claiming that her husband’s experience proved that point. Russert knew better, and corrected her math, but she was adamant: “I’m not putting anything on the proverbial table” – meaning no painful tax increases or benefit cuts – until the budgetary and overall economic fixes are attempted. That is a position that would be hard to maintain in office, but it offers maximum protection for the campaign.

It went on like that through several more topics, until a final question about baseball fandom. Clinton identified herself as a Yankees fan, saying she knew it would not help her members of Red Sox nation in New Hampshire. But what if it is the Cubs vs. the Yankees, Russert asked. “I guess I would have to alternate,” she said, triangulating once again.

This dodginess got her through the two hours. Whether it can get her through the next three months is a different question. The same poll that gave her a 2-1 lead over Obama and almost a 4-1 lead over Edwards found that only 17 percent of New Hampshire voters have a firm choice of a candidate, and 55 percent said they are still deciding. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

Justin Martin
Baltimore Sun
September 30, 2007

During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi newspaper Azzaman could only be published in London. Fleeing the government’s muscular arm in the 1990s, the newspaper’s founder, former Saddam aide Saad al-Bazzaz, was forced to run his media operation out of Europe for nearly a decade.

But after Saddam’s expulsion in 2003, al-Bazzaz set up offices in Baghdad, and he has since been busy running what is considered Iraq’s most credible Arabic publication. With a daily circulation of more than 75,000, Azzaman is a modern journalistic success story and a publication that has added greater depth to the political debate in Iraq.

Among the relatively few positives to come out of Iraq in the last four years is the growing size and autonomy of its media. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq has caused chaos in so many of the country’s sectors, the removal of Saddam has brought a semblance of order and purpose to Iraqi journalism.

For nearly three decades during Saddam’s supremacy, Iraqi journalists existed only to applaud and glorify the dictator and his imps. Criticism of the government’s higher reaches and investigative reporting were often deadly undertakings. Supervision was fierce. Saddam’s son, Odai, was director of all Iraqi radio and TV stations, owned 11 of Iraq’s newspapers and was the head of the Iraqi journalists union.

With Saddam and his sons gone, journalists in Iraq are enjoying freedom and publication opportunities unimaginable under their previous rulers. Reporters Without Borders announced in 2003 that “a wind of freedom has gusted through the Iraqi media. Genuine diversity and openness are now possible.”

During Saddam’s rule, fewer than 40 Arabic news publications existed; today, they number in the hundreds. “Iraqi readers have been bombarded with new publications,” Arab journalist and scholar Noha Mellor wrote in her 2005 book, “The Making of Arab News.” And Iraqis are voracious news consumers, Mellor writes, welcoming the burgeoning number of available news outlets.

In 2002, the year before Saddam was removed, human rights advocate Freedom House rated Iraq as one of the worst nations in the world in its annual survey of media freedoms. Placing Iraq near the likes of North Korea and Rwanda in the rankings, Freedom House explained that criticism of Saddam and his powerful government appointees was simply not an option for Iraqi reporters. Since then, Iraq has been steadily improving its journalistic standing in the Middle East and around the world.

Now, the greatest impediment to free expression in Iraq is not government censorship but rampant lawlessness. Iraq is by far the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 23 reporters died in Iraq in 2005, 32 lost their lives in 2006 and, as of this writing, 19 have died this year. Scores of reporters have also been kidnapped, beaten and threatened by militants during this time.

Still, despite the sectarian brutality that often forces foreign and Iraqi reporters to write their dispatches from hotels and offices, media freedoms in Iraq will likely continue to grow. Journalists in Iraq will not abide a return to their country’s practice of crushing political criticism and open debate. Once people taste freedom, they rarely hunger for anything less.

For their part, too, Iraqi news consumers will not likely permit anything but the continued expansion of journalistic discourse in their country. One of the first things many Iraqis did after Saddam’s regime fell in 2003 was rush out and purchase satellite dishes to view news that wasn’t produced by Saddam’s family.

Iraqi journalists and their audiences are doing many of the right things to encourage a watchdog media and open debate. It is tempting to wonder how much more progress will be made if U.S. and Iraqi leaders ever get a handle on things over there. With stability in Iraq so fragile, it is heartening to know that a vocal press – that indispensable democratic pillar – is coming to life.

Every weekday, members of the Washington Post political team take your questions on politics. Here are highlights from today’s chat with Anne E. Kornblut.

Mount Prospect, Ill.: How do you reconcile the apparent wide gap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (according to recent polls) and the significant reaction (both in donors and total dollars) that puts Obama at the top tier, above Clinton? Is it possible that despite those polls, this grassroot movement for Obama is something the media is missing that will show its strength at the voting/caucus settings, and that is why Obama continues to avoid any strident criticisms of Clinton?
Anne E. Kornblut: It’s a great question,and one we spend a lot of time scratching our heads over here. Your theory is entirely possible; it is, after all, about three months until we see actual voting begin. And let’s not forget who was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination four years ago (hint: it was not John Kerry). The Clinton campaign, though, would say that Obama’s support donation-wise is a reflection of his support from elites who can afford to help him (and donors overall make up a small portion of the population), whereas Clinton has broad popular support… We will find out soon enough.

Salinas, Calif.: Hi Anne. Is John Edwards deciding to accept public funds for his campaign an example of trying to put the best face on an increasingly difficult position for a bottom-of-the-top-tier candidate, in contrast with the money generating juggernauts of Clinton and Obama? Is he banking on his long-term fieldwork in Iowa to counteract the limitations on spending that public financing will impose? I would expect his team to spin their position as taking the high road on campaign spending, considering their circumstances. Your thoughts?

Anne E. Kornblut: You are exactly right. By accepting public financing, Edwards is essentially conceding that his fundraising efforts haven’t been as successful as they had hoped. He is trying to put the happiest face on it — arguing, as you suggest, that he will be the one to reject the monied interest and stick to government-imposed limits, and calling on other Democratic candidates to do the same. But it’s a hard sell. And it may just be a reflection of the fact that there is only so much money out there, and only so many candidates who can vaccuum it up.

Silver Spring, Md.: Can you please explain why the leading Republican candidates didn’t show up for the debate last night in Baltimore? Would it really hurt these candidates that much in places like South Carolina to appear in front of a black audience? If this is the state of the Republican party I don’t see how right-thinking people of any race can continue to associate with the party. This is really repulsive behavior. People who act this way shouldn’t be president of a diverse country and can’t be expected to understand a world made up of many different cultures and viewpoints.

Anne E. Kornblut: I think the basic thinking was that there wasn’t a great deal of percentage in it for these guys. It’s the end of the fundraising quarter and they all had previously scheduled events (or so they said). This has been a particular bete noir for the former RNC chairman, Ken Mehlman (who did, by contrast, show up), who made the same case during his tenure that you have here. The current crop doesn’t seem to have bought in to that thinking, quite.

In the West Virgnia woods: Do you see any hint that Democrats know Hillary Clinton is pro-immigration, pro-NAFTA, pro-outsourcing? In other words she is very much a free-trader, and there is no sign anyone knows. She’s on a fast track to the presidency and people need to know where she stands on issue that are not on the media radar screen. Iraq is the only subject that interests the national media. Important as Iraq is, it is certainly not the only important issue. Do you think the media will broaden their interests to cover domestic issues?

Anne E. Kornblut: She has, actually, voiced differences with her husband over NAFTA (saying it would require revisions) and her opponents, Edwards in particular, have made sure to underscore where she has been on trade. One of his more recent lines is that the Clinton administration failed to bring us health care but brought us NAFTA instead. I would not be surprised at all to see this emerge as amore important issue in the weeks/months ahead. Great question.

South Bend, Ind.: I’ve watched a lot of the Democratic debates and I’ve come away really liking how Joe Biden isn’t willing to pander as much to the liberal base on Iraq withdrawal and actually adding something different to that discussion with his plan for a basically leaving Iraq in a loose confederation. What are the thoughts of foreign policy experts on the merits of this plan? Also, I know Biden doesn’t have a chance at the nomination, but what about vice president for one of the inexperienced candidates (Obama, Edwards, heck even Clinton) or Secretary of State?

Anne E. Kornblut: Sen. Biden has done a really interesting job of shaping the debate, hasn’t he? I am not a foreign policy expert, but put to a vote in the Senate this week, his plan for the confederation (not a partition, he was quick to note during the debate) won a majority. As you suggest, he is, as always, worth keeping an eye on and paying attention to.

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday September 29, 2007
Guardian

America, which has some 3,350 prisoners on death row, yesterday seemed to be moving towards an unofficial moratorium on executions after the supreme court granted a rare last-minute reprieve to a condemned man in Texas.

The supreme court stay for Carlton Turner Jr, who was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection for killing his adoptive parents, arrived hours after a death row inmate in Alabama was granted a 45-day reprieve by the state’s governor.

Opponents of the death penalty said the moves suggested there would be a lull in executions while the supreme court reviews lethal injection, the method for dispatching prisoners in all but one of the 38 states which impose the death penalty.

“I think this is a sign that maybe all executions are going to be put on hold aside from those who might volunteer, or who don’t raise the issue of the lethal injection method,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Centre.

In its order on Thursday the supreme court offered no explanation for Turner’s reprieve. However, his lawyers had based their appeal entirely on likening lethal injection to a “chemical straitjacket”.

The court is expected to hear arguments next January on whether lethal injection, a cocktail of three drugs, represents cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore unlawful. The challenge is on behalf of two condemned men in Kentucky, Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr, who argued in their 2004 suit that they would suffer excruciating pain in the moments before death, but would be unable to cry out because of the immobilising effects of one of the drugs in the injection.

The supreme court’s consideration of lethal injection also follows a number of botched executions.

Its decision, expected to arrive by June 2008, would have broad implications. Most of the 37 states using lethal injection use the same drugs as in Kentucky.

In recent months 11 states have suspended executions because of concerns about the cruelty of lethal injection.

However, a spokesman for Amnesty International said it was too early to say whether America was moving towards a “creeping moratorium” on executions. Texas, which operates the busiest execution chamber, appears resistant to a slowdown. The state executed a prisoner hours after the supreme court announced its review – before lawyers for the condemned man could prepare an appeal.

If all hope is lost, Gingrich could, at the very least, articulate the GOP party platform.
By   Jonathan Darman
Newsweek It’s hard to take Newt Gingrich seriously when he says he might run for president. In the nearly nine years since he resigned as Republican speaker of the House, Gingrich has floated the idea of a presidential candidacy numerous times, almost always when on TV to promote a new book. But he has never taken the plunge.

Gingrich wants to be a postmodern Goldwater, a man who uses technology to bring on the next great debate. He imagines a presidential campaign where instead of spending money on TV advertising, a candidate mails DVDs laying out his ideas to every voter in Iowa and New Hampshire with a simple request: “Do you think your country’s future, your children’s future and your grandchildren’s future is worth one hour of your time?” Could such an unorthodox strategy actually work if it was unleashed as late as this winter? It seems unlikely. Which is why Gingrich can’t be discounted: unlikely prospects have always served him well.

By Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball

Newsweek

Oct. 1, 2007 issue – Sam Gardiner plays war for a living. A former Air Force colonel who helped write contingency plans for the U.S. military, Gardiner has spent the 20 years since his retirement staging war-simulation exercises for military and policy wonks within and on the fringes of government (he keeps his client list confidential). Lately, more of his work has focused on Iran and its nuclear program. Gardiner starts by gathering various experts in a room to play the parts of government principals—the CIA director, the secretary of State, leaders of other countries—and presents them with a scenario: Iran, for example, has made a dramatic nuclear advance. Then he sits back and watches the cycle of action and reaction, occasionally lobbing new information at the participants.

In Gardiner’s war games, the conduct of Iran’s nemesis, Israel, is often the hardest to predict. Are Israeli intelligence officials exaggerating when they say Iran will have mastered the technology to make nuclear weapons by next year? Will Israel stage its own attack on Iran if Washington does not? Or is it posturing in order to goad America into military action? The simulations have led Gardiner to an ominous conclusion: though the United States is now emphasizing sanctions and diplomacy as the means of compelling Tehran to stop enriching uranium, an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could end up dragging Washington into a war. “Even if Israel goes it alone, we will be blamed,” says Gardiner. “Hence, we would see retaliation against U.S. interests.”

How far will Israel go to keep Iran from getting the bomb? The question gained new urgency this month when Israeli warplanes carried out a mysterious raid deep in Syria and then threw up a nearly impenetrable wall of silence around the operation. Last week opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu chipped away at that wall, saying Israel did in fact attack targets in Syrian territory. His top adviser, Mossad veteran Uzi Arad, told NEWSWEEK: “I do know what happened, and when it comes out it will stun everyone.”

Official silence has prompted a broad range of speculation as to what exactly took place. One former U.S. official, who like others quoted in this article declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters, says several months ago Israel presented the Bush administration with reconnaissance images and information from secret agents alleging North Korea had begun to supply nuclear-related material to Syria. Some U.S. intelligence reporting, including electronic signal intercepts, appeared to support the Israeli claims. But other U.S. officials remain skeptical about any nuclear link between Syria and North Korea. One European security source told NEWSWEEK the target might have been a North Korean military shipment to Iran that was transiting Syria. But a European intelligence official said it wasn’t certain Israel had struck anything at all.

While the Bush administration appears to have given tacit support to the Syria raid, Israel and the United States are not in lockstep on Iran. For Israel, the next three months may be decisive: either Tehran succumbs to sanctions and stops enriching uranium or it must be dealt with militarily. (Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes only.) “Two thousand seven is the year you determine whether diplomatic efforts will stop Iran,” says a well-placed Israeli source, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to speak for the government. “If by the end of the year that’s not working, 2008 becomes the year you take action.”

In Washington, on the other hand, the consensus against a strike is firmer than most people realize. The Pentagon worries that another war will break America’s already overstretched military, while the intelligence community believes Iran is not yet on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough. The latter assessment is expected to appear in a secret National Intelligence Estimate currently nearing completion, according to three intelligence officials who asked for anonymity when discussing nonpublic material. The report is expected to say Iran will not be able to build a nuclear bomb until at least 2010 and possibly 2015. One explanation for the lag: Iran is having trouble with its centrifuge-enrichment technology, according to U.S. and European officials.

Twice in the past year, the United States has won U.N. Security Council sanctions against Tehran. More measures might come up at Security Council discussions later this year, and recently French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned that European nations might impose their own sanctions. One U.S. official who preferred not to be identified discussing sensitive policy matters said he took part in a meeting several months ago where intelligence officials discussed a “public diplomacy” strategy to accompany sanctions. The idea was to periodically float the possibility of war in public comments in order to keep Iran off balance. In truth, the official said, no war preparations are underway.

There are still voices pushing for firmer action against Tehran, most notably within Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. But the steady departure of administration neocons over the past two years has also helped tilt the balance away from war. One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney’s Middle East adviser. A spokeswoman at Cheney’s office confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Wurmser left his position last month to “spend more time with his family.” A few months before he quit, according to two knowledgeable sources, Wurmser told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz—and perhaps other sites—in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. The Iranian reaction would then give Washington a pretext to launch strikes against military and nuclear targets in Iran. (Wurmser’s remarks were first reported last week by Washington foreign-policy blogger Steven Clemons and corroborated by NEWSWEEK.) When NEWSWEEK attempted to reach Wurmser for comment, his wife, Meyrav, declined to put him on the phone and said the allegations were untrue. A spokeswoman at Cheney’s office said the vice president “supports the president’s policy on Iran.”

In Iran, preparations for war are underway. “Crisis committees” have been established in each government ministry to draw up contingency plans, according to an Iranian official who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely. The regime has ordered radio and TV stations to prepare enough prerecorded programming to last for months, in case the studios are sabotaged or employees are unable to get to work. The ministries of electricity and water are working on plans to maintain service under war conditions. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also sent envoys to reach out to European negotiators recently, in the hopes of heading off further sanctions or military action.

The question may not be whether America is ready to attack, but whether Israel is. The Jewish state has cause for worry. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows regularly to destroy the country; former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered a moderate, warned in 2001 that Tehran could do away with Israel with just one nuclear bomb. In Tel Aviv last week, former deputy Defense minister Ephraim Sneh concurred. Sneh, a dovish member of Israel’s Parliament and a retired brigadier general, took a NEWSWEEK reporter to the observation deck atop the 50-story Azrieli Center. “There is Haifa just over the horizon, Ben-Gurion airport over there, the Defense Ministry down below,” he said, to show how small the country is. “You can see in this space the majority of our intellectual, economic, political assets are concentrated. One nuclear bomb is enough to wipe out Israel.”

But can the Israelis destroy Iran’s nuclear program? Gardiner, the war-gamer, says they would not only need to hit a dozen nuclear sites and scores of antiaircraft batteries; to prevent a devastating retaliation, they would have to knock out possibly hundreds of long-range missiles that can carry chemical warheads. Just getting to distant Iran will be tricky for Israel’s squadrons of American-made F-15s and F-16s. Danny Yatom, who headed Mossad in the 1990s, says the planes would have to operate over Iran for days or weeks. Giora Eiland, Israel’s former national-security adviser, now with Tel Aviv’s Institute of National Security Studies, ticked off the drawbacks: “Effectiveness, doubtful. Danger of regional war. Hizbullah will immediately attack [from Lebanon], maybe even Syria.” Yet Israelis across the political spectrum, including Eiland and Yatom, believe the risk incurred by inaction is far greater. “The military option is not the worst option,” Yatom says. “The worst option is a nuclear Iran.”

The idea of a pre-emptive strike also has popular support. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered the raid on Syria earlier this month, his approval rating was in the teens. Since then, it has jumped to nearly 30 percent. And though Olmert may not believe Israeli warplanes can get to all the targets, he might be willing to gamble on even a limited success. “No one in their right mind thinks that there’s a clinical way to totally destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities,” says the well-placed Israeli source. “You strike at some and set the project back. You play for time and hope Ahmadinejad will eventually fall.”

Alternatively, Israel might count on Tehran to retaliate against American targets as well, drawing in the superpower. To avoid that outcome, Gardiner believes, Washington must prevent Israel from attacking in the first place. “The United States does not want to turn the possibility of a general war in the Middle East over to the decision making in Israel,” he says. Does not want to, certainly—but might not have a choice.

With Rod Nordland in Jerusalem, Christopher Dickey in New York and John Barry in Washington

Chuck Raasch
Gannet News SService
September 28, 2007

As fall arrives in this long march to the White House, six aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign emerge that make it more historic and consequential than any election since at least 1980.

If you are a normal American, the campaign so far probably has been like elevator music – always in the background but never quite grabbing your attention as you focus on more pressing things.

But some attributes of this campaign already have been framed and are worth pondering as you start paying closer attention:

•Unless dramatic change occurs, this will be the first election since 1972 to take place during an unpopular war, although the historic comparisons are more akin to 1968. That year, Hubert Humphrey lost the White House for the Democrats despite breaking late on the war from President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Unless Ron Paul wins the GOP nomination in less than five months, the Republican candidate will start out on the defensive on Iraq, and the question will be how far he breaks from President Bush on Iraq. The Democrats are in a bigger state of flux on Iraq. Their presidential candidates have bigger differences on what the future course ought to be.

•This is the first election where a woman, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is a leading contender for her party’s nomination and for the White House. But she is not just a gender trailblazer. As first lady, she was intricately involved in policy, providing executive-branch heft to her candidacy. But New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson trumps her on executive experience among Democrats. Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both Republicans, also have more executive experience than Clinton.

•Americans must for the first time factor into their decisions the possibility and advisability of sending a relatively popular ex-president, Bill Clinton, back to the White House, albeit as first spouse. A little-explored part of this scenario – the dynasty factor – should not be overlooked. In a country founded by rejecting dynastic royalty, the possibility that the presidency could be in the hands of a Bush or Clinton for as many as 28 straight years, if Clinton wins, could be a big debate point in 2008.

•The election happens in the midst of an acrimonious and unresolved debate about immigration, a debate that is proxy for a larger, melting pot discussion about what it means to be an American in the 21st century. Immigration is also part of a broader debate about security in a world where borders are breaking down on trade, communications, travel and other facets of life.

•The election also comes during a period of extraordinary animosity in political discourse. One source of animosity is based on the inability of either party to establish a distinct majority in Congress, leading to intensely close elections every two years. Right now, the most likely decisive-victory scenario has Democrats winning the White House and capitalizing on opportunities in congressional elections to approach veto-proof majorities. But remember, Republicans rose from the depths of a bad 1992 defeat to just two years later having their best nonpresidential election in two generations.

•Lastly, this will be the longest presidential general election in history, with the concurrent possibility that there actually may be more states in play on Feb. 5 than on Nov. 4 next year. More than 20 states now plan to hold primaries on the climactic “Tsunami Tuesday,” and the nominees of both parties could be in place by the end of that day. In recent general elections, the presidency has been fought over roughly 15 “swing states,” detouring around such population giants as California, Illinois, and New York. All three states plan to have primaries on Feb. 5 and will be big prizes.

This last scenario raises a big question. Will the 2008 presidential contest drag on so long that the public, finally fed up with the permanent campaign, demands a return to a saner election calendar that the two national political parties have been unwilling, or unable, to deliver?

Thomas Sowell
Hoover Institution
September 27, 2007

It is painful – and dangerous – how little we learn from history, even when it is recent history.

Just a year ago, “rape” charges spread lynch-mob hysteria on the campus of Duke University and in much of the liberal media, while professional race hustlers descended on the town of Durham, N.C., and mindless tribalism was stirred up by extremists in the local black community.

This year, we have all learned what a total fraud that case was, from beginning to end. Yet now we see a similar outburst of mindless tribalism and another attempt at mob rule, promoted by such veterans of last year’s hysteria as Jesse Jackson.

This time the scene is in Jena, La. The issue is the prosecution of a black high school student accused of stomping on an unconscious white student – and the lack of criminal prosecution of white students who hung a noose on a tree, who were disciplined by the school.

Liberals’ skills at moral equivalence have been so finely honed during the long years of the Cold War that they have turned this into a case of “unequal treatment,” based on race – as if putting a noose on a tree is equivalent to stomping somebody who is unconscious.

The black student was found guilty but the verdict was overturned on appeal – not on grounds that he was not guilty, but on grounds that the appellate court did not think he should have been tried as an adult.

The usual legal procedure would be to try the student again, this time not as an adult. However, the usual legal procedures are not good enough for those who have once again seized the opportunity to hype race – and to hell with questions of guilt or innocence or legal procedures.

The immediate demand of the mobs descending on Jena is that the young man found guilty of a serious crime of violence should be free on bail pending a second trial.

The legal question is whether letting someone accused of such a crime go free on bail is likely to mean that he will not be around long enough for a second trial. But no one is seriously debating that.

Racial hype has replaced all rational discussion. Moreover, the Jena episode has shown that two can play the racial hype game. Neo-Nazis have published the names and home addresses of all the young blacks involved in the school incident.

The slogan “No justice, no peace” has been used to justify settling legal issues in the streets, instead of in courts of law.

Neo-Nazis have now helped demonstrate what a dangerous slogan that is, since different people have opposite ideas of what “justice” is in a given situation.

Long after the imported demonstrators have left, and the national media have lost interest, the families of the black youngsters involved in the school altercation will have to live with the knowledge that their privacy and security have both been lost in a racially polarized community, with vengeful elements.

The last thing the South needs is a return to lynch-mob justice, whatever the color of whoever is promoting it.

Back in the 1950s, when the federal courts began striking down Jim Crow laws, one of the rising demands across the country was that the discriminators and segregationists obey “the law of the land.” But, somewhere along the way, the idea also arose and spread that not everybody was supposed to obey “the law of the land.”

Violations of law by people with approved victim status such as minorities, or self-righteous crusaders such as environmentalists, were to be met with minimal resistance – if any – and any punishment of them beyond a wrist-slap was “over-reacting.”

College campuses became bastions of the new and sanctified mob rule, provided that the mobs are from the list of groups approved as politically correct.

The politics of condoned law-breaking is part of the moral dry rot of our times. So is settling issues in the streets on the basis of race, instead of in courts on the basis of law.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
September 26, 2007

I would not be as bothered by Columbia University’s decision to host Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if Columbia and other universities had a consistent policy toward those they invite to speak and the rules applied equally to conservatives and liberals; to totalitarian dictators and to advocates for freedom and tolerance.

Any conservative who has ever tried, or actually succeeded, in speaking on the campus of predominately liberal academic institutions knows it can resemble to some extent the struggle experienced by African-Americans when they attempted to desegregate lunch counters in the South during the civil rights movement.

In the 1980s, I spoke at universities from Smith College in the East to the University of California at Davis in the West. At Smith, lesbians sat in the front row kissing each other while the rest of the crowd shouted so loud no one could hear me. (NPR’s Nina Totenberg witnessed the riotous behavior, prompting me to remark, “I hope you’re getting this on tape, Nina, because this is what liberals mean by tolerance.”)

Former U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo has been among the chroniclers of the demise of free speech on many college campuses. Writing in last winter’s issue of the publication City Journal, Leo noted that Columbia University officials prevented a large crowd from hearing Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist who is now an anti-jihadist. The reason given was security, which as Leo pointed out is a frequent excuse for restricting speech. Had Shoebat remained a PLO terrorist, Columbia might have allowed the students in, because anti-Jewish rhetoric of the kind Ahmadinejad delivers always seems welcome on too many campuses. Only Columbia students and 20 guests were allowed to hear Shoebat speak.

Why would Columbia expect Ahmadinejad to answer what they promised in advance would be “tough” questions? Have they not seen him interviewed by America’s best reporters? He doesn’t answer questions. He uses the interviews to lecture America and make his propaganda points. The exercise is useless, except to him because he scores points at home for standing up to “the Great Satan,” or whatever the preferred term du jour for the United States is at the moment.

Last October at Columbia, a mob of students stormed a stage, curtailing speeches by two members of the anti-illegal immigration group known as the Minutemen. The students shouted “They have no right to speak,” which was revealing, given the “academic freedom” argument that is used to defend liberal professors and their frequent anti-American rants when conservatives attempt to shut them up.

As John Leo wrote, “Campus opponents of (Rep.) Tom Tancredo, an illegal immigration foe, set off fire alarms at Georgetown to disrupt his planned speech, and their counterparts at Michigan State roughed up his student backers. Conservative activist David Horowitz, black conservative Star Parker, and Daniel Pipes, an outspoken critic of Islamism, frequently find themselves shouted down or disrupted on campus.” The number of instances involving censorship of conservatives on college campuses and denial of honorary degrees to people who don’t toe the liberal line could fill a book.

There is something else about Columbia’s decision to admit Ahmadinejad and that is the notion that by exposing a tyrant and religious fanatic to a liberal arts campus – a man who believes he has been “called” to usher in Armageddon – might make him less genocidal and students and the rest of us more understanding. We understand he and his legion of murdering thugs wish to kill us and are contributing to the death of Americans in Iraq. What part of mass murder do they not understand at Columbia, or don’t they have time to study history these days?

Ahmadinejad is probably using his visit to case our country, like a bank robber does before a big heist.

Before we allow more of our enemies into America and give them a freedom unknown in their own countries, we should at least demand reciprocity. Their president gets to speak in America? Our president gets to speak in Iran. Their president has access to our media? Our president should have access to their media. And while we’re at it, how about for every liberal who gets to speak on campus, the school must also invite a conservative.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
September 26, 2007

Please indulge me as I answer an e-mail I received last week in response to a recent column decrying unequal justice as represented by the controversy in Jena, La. A fellow named John wrote:

“Your columns usually merit reading. But this time, You sound like the typical Black guy crying ‘victim.’ Leonard, you list instances of Black injustice and I’m sure there are many. However have you forgot about O.J.? He got away with murder Leonard. He killed his white wife! … Or how about Sharpton and the Brawley case? … Or the Duke case. … I could go on and on. You want more respect for you and your race? Stop sounding like a nigger and start sounding and acting like a Black man. You’ll get respect and justice. Try being a Black man all the time, not just when it fits your agenda.”

John, thank you for writing. Here are a few words in response.

That column you disliked argued that Jena, where six black kids were initially charged with attempted murder after they gave a white kid a black eye and knocked him out, is part of a long pattern of the justice system being used to keep blacks in line. Indeed, black students at Jena High report that even before the fight, the D.A. warned them in an assembly that he could make their lives go away “with the stroke of a pen.”

The students say he was looking directly at them when he said it. The D.A. has denied this, but I find the denial less than credible given the unfathomable charges he sought to file against the black kids while a white kid who attacked a black one got off with a comparative slap on the wrist.

Anyway, you were one of a number of readers who wrote to remind me of Simpson. If the point of your reference to him, Tawana Brawley and the Duke lacrosse case was that the justice system has repeatedly and historically mistreated whites, too, on the basis of race, I’m sorry, but that’s absurd. Not that those cases were not travesties. They were. And if those travesties leave you outraged, well, I share that feeling.

But, here’s what I want you to do. Take that sense of outrage, that sense of betrayal, of having been cheated by a system you once thought you could trust, and multiply it. Multiply it by Valdosta and Waco and Birmingham and Fort Lauderdale and Money and Marion and Omaha and thousands of other cities and towns where black men and women were lynched, burned, bombed, shot, with impunity. Multiply it by the thousands of cops and courts that refused to arrest or punish even when they held photographs of the perpetrators taken in the act. Multiply it by a million lesser outrages. Multiply it by L.A. cops planting evidence. Multiply it by the black drug defendant who is 48 times more likely to go to jail than the white one who commits the same crime and has the same record. Multiply it by Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo. Multiply it by 388 years.

And then come talk to me about O.J. Simpson.

You may call all that “playing victim.” I call it providing context. Jena did not happen in a vacuum. It did not spring from nowhere. So this false equivalence, this pretense that the justice system as experienced by white people and black ones is in any way similar, is ignorant and obnoxious.

Much like your turning to a racial slur to describe how you think I “sound.” I found that word interesting coming near the end of an e-mail whose tone, while critical, had, until that point, been reasonable. I suppose you just couldn’t help yourself.

It says something about the intransigence, self-justification and retarded self-awareness of American racism that a man who uses the language you do would, in the same breath, offer advice to black folks seeking “respect and justice.” Appreciate the effort, John, but I’m afraid you can’t solve the problem.

See, you are the problem.

By Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 27, 2007; A01

HANOVER, N.H., Sept. 26 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself on the defensive here Wednesday night in a debate in which the Democratic presidential candidates clashed over withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, the financial future of Social Security and Iran’s nuclear threat.

The two-hour debate features clear differences but few fireworks. Clinton (N.Y.), the front-runner for the nomination, drew steady criticism, but her seven rivals couched their disagreements with respect rather than scorn or sharp words.

The debate came at a moment in the campaign when Clinton has solidified her position as the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, putting pressure on her opponents to slow her momentum. A new poll in New Hampshire released Tuesday showed Clinton expanding her lead in the Granite State, although the race in Iowa, which will start the nominating process in January, is far more competitive.

After turning in a series of winning performances in previous debates, Clinton appeared less dominant on Wednesday. Her potential vulnerabilities were highlighted either through questions from moderator Tim Russert of NBC News or from responses from her opponents.

Russert pressed her to explain why she would be a good president after failing to win support for health-care reform during her husband’s administration and after voting in 2002 to give President Bush authorization to launch a war that is now deeply unpopular.

Clinton defended her efforts to pass health-care reform, saying she had fought a sometimes-lonely battle against special interest forces. But she acknowledged that her new plan for universal care is one crafted from the lessons of that effort.

“There is so much that has happened that people can see with their own eyes now that I believe that we finally have a consensus to do what we should do,” she said. But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware questioned whether she could get the job done, saying Republicans will be more reluctant to compromise with Clinton than with other Democrats.

“I’m not suggesting it’s Hillary’s fault,” he said. “I think it’s a reality that it’s more difficult, because there’s a lot of very good things that come with all the great things that President Clinton did, but there’s also a lot of the old stuff that comes back. It’s kind of hard.”

Sensing some unease over what he had said, Biden quickly added, “When I say old stuff, I’m referring to policy — policy.”

Russert opened the debate by asking Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) — all of whom have supported a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, whether they would promise to have all the troops out by January 2013. All three declined to do so.

“We would get combat troops out of Iraq,” Obama said. “The only troops that would remain would be those that have to protect U.S. bases and U.S. civilians, as well as to engage in counterterrorism activities in Iraq.”

Clinton agreed. “I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians,” she said, “and making sure that we’re carrying out counterterrorism activities there.”

Edwards, who has been outspoken in his criticism of the Congress for failing to do more to stop the war, also declined to take the pledge. But he quickly turned the question into a criticism of Clinton, saying she would continue some combat operations long after most troops are out and he would not.

“To me, that’s a continuation of the war,” he said. “I do not think we should continue combat missions in Iraq.”

Clinton sought to clarify her position, saying those combat missions would be aimed at eradicating al-Qaeda in Iraq, but Edwards said, “I believe this war needs to come to an end.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said he would bring out all the troops within a year, saying “you cannot start the reconciliation of Iraq” before U.S. forces are out and pointedly disagreed with Clinton and Obama.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) said he would “get it done” in his first term, while Biden said he would bring them all home only if there were political reconciliation. If not, he said, American troops should be removed “because they’re just fodder.”

One of the sharpest exchanges came over a vote in the Senate on Wednesday on a resolution urging President Bush to designate the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. Clinton supported the measure, Biden and Dodd opposed it. Obama did not vote.

“I am ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it,” said former senator Mike Gravel of Alaska.

When Clinton defended the vote as something that could lead to sanctions against a group responsible for manufacturing weapons that are being used against U.S. forces in Iraq. But Edwards challenged her for that vote.

“I voted for this war in Iraq, and I was wrong to vote for this war,” he said. “And I accept responsibility for that. Senator Clinton also voted for this war. We learned a very different lesson from that. I have no intention of giving George Bush the authority to take the first step on a road to war with Iran.”

As the debate turned to domestic policy, the candidates debated how to make the Social Security system solvent. Clinton refused to point to specific remedies — such as raising above $97,500 the amount of income that is taxed for Social Security, or raising the age that seniors begin drawing benefits — and instead called for the federal government to return to the “fiscal responsibility” of her husband’s administration.

“I think it’s important that you cannot give away what you’re going to be negotiating over when it comes to Social Security until you make it clear that fiscal responsibility has got to be the premise of the negotiation,” Clinton said, saying that outlining where she would be willing to compromise would be akin to “negotiating with yourself.”

But Obama said he would put all solutions on the table and that raising the cap on payroll taxes would be his preferred solution. And other candidates concurred. Edwards, striking a note of outrage, said he would tax upper-income earners — people making above $200,000 a year — on all of their paychecks, while protecting workers who earn between $97,000 and $200,000 from additional payroll taxes. Biden warned voters that few politicians would be honest about the hard choices ahead. “You’re either going to cut benefits or you’re going to go ahead and raise taxes,” Biden said.

In perhaps the most awkward moment of the debate, Russert asked Clinton whether she would allow an exception to the ban on torture in order to gain knowledge from a terrorist such as Osama bin Laden. She said she would not. “As a matter of policy, it cannot be American policy, period,” she said.

Russert informed her that it was her husband — “William Jefferson Clinton,” he said gravely — who had offered up that very scenario a year earlier. Clinton stopped and paused. Then, she said: “Well, he’s not standing here right now.” Pressed by Russert on whether the couple has a difference on this issue, Clinton said with a wry smile, “Well, I’ll talk to him later.”

Wednesday night’s debate was held on the campus of Dartmouth College and was one of six candidate forums sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) also participated in the debate, which was aired on MSNBC.

    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist    Wednesday 19 September 2007

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.- Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits”

    It is a legitimately demented phenomenon, all the more so because it all started with a joke. Not even a funny joke, either, but a sad and threadbare thing I told only to myself, and no one else. When the clustered elements of our collective national burden erupted in masterfully synchronized bedlam, as they so often seem to, I had that joke to tell myself, and it may not have helped much, but it was there.

    Every time another cacophony of freshly minted lunacy was unleashed – lunacy regarding Iraq, the NSA domestic surveillance program, White House defiance of subpoenas, timorously flaccid performances by the Congressional majority, or merely when enduring the repeated “nukyalur”-ized butchery of public political rhetoric was required by my employers, all of which emphatically pegged the needle on my Pandemoni-O-Meter – I had that joke to tell myself.

    The joke is spherically terrible, i.e. bad in every possible direction in three dimensions and across 360 rounded degrees. It isn’t even a joke, really, which may be why it went so abruptly and bewilderingly sideways on me months ago. The joke, to be embarrassingly honest, is more like some half-bright mantra than anything else. As I came to discover, however, it managed to settle my mind when the needle was in the red. Perhaps the thing is best described as my self-generated Zen koan; though it did not actually stop my mind in proper koan fashion, it kept me from putting my head through the wall, and that made it valuable indeed.

    The joke: people say Bush and his people want to raze the core nature of the country itself by wrecking the Constitution, and they’re correct. People say Bush and his people are enriching their friends beyond dreams of avarice at our actual expense, by way of war-inflated oil prices; war-captured Iraqi oil infrastructure; the orgiastic plunder of Treasury money through calamitously unsound tax cuts for Bush’s pals; and through an Iraq war profiteering scam so unutterably corrupt that it bends the very light. That, and more besides, is what people say, and they’re correct.

    But all that, along with everything else the Bush crew has done, just isn’t enough for them. What Bush and his people really seek, at bottom, is to destroy the basic definition and literal existence of reality itself. They want to destroy reality, rebuild it according to their own blueprint, so the sum and substance of this new reality will accept as axiomatic the idea that lying, stealing and wholesale carnage are badges of integrity and moral clarity. In other words, our comprehensively understood reality today would be replaced by whatever madcap anti-reality currently exists within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

    I warned you.

    As bad as that chaotically crossbred joke/rant/mantra thing is, it wasn’t meant to be anything other than a harmless sliver of wordplay, something that settled my nerves and gave me a private little chuckle – that alone, and nothing more.

    Things are different now. It isn’t a joke anymore, at least not to me. The premise that the Bush administration has literally been trying to shatter elemental reality on planet Earth has steadily gained traction in my mind. It started as that sort-of joke, then it became an idea, and then it became an actual hypothesis, a working theory requiring research and evidence and argument so that, someday, I can prove it to be an unassailable bone-basic truth.

    And yes, the fact that I’m quite serious about this has me quietly yet legitimately concerned for my own mental health. What worries me the most, however, is a freshly minted suspicion that it is already over, that the deal already went down, but almost nobody actually noticed when it happened. I think these Bush folks may have successfully pulled it off right in front of our noses over the course of this past August. I think they may have actually broken reality, cobbling together a chaotic replacement, and I think I can back up that supposition all the way down the block and back again.

    Bear with me.

    The process began in earnest more than a year ago with a publicity campaign that deliberately made no sense whatsoever. Day after day, statements and declarations came from all manner of White House officials that were little more than bags of over-the-moon nonsense – all patently inaccurate to nine decimals, yet spoken shamelessly into cameras with bare faces hanging out.

    With this, the Bush folks laid the mental foundation of the new reality to come; that foundation had to transmute lies into facts while still stuck in the old reality, but they had an edge that may have proven decisive: trust. If the American people hear the White House repeatedly claim that water is not wet and Godzilla is real, many of those Americans will believe it after a fashion.

    The rumored totality of America’s cynical scorn for politics and leaders notwithstanding, this country has many citizens who still believe, even after what has happened, that if the president of the United States says it, then it must be true. This isn’t a conscious thing; it happens way back in the slushy part of the brain, where unpleasant facts or disquieting fears are submerged and drowned like rats in an applesauce vat. Bush and his crew counted on that, using TV news messaging to furrow the field in preparation for seeding time, and their trust in the trust of Americans was shown to be well-placed.

    When the serious push came, it came fast and furious. Dick Cheney declared that the Vice President’s office no longer existed within the Executive branch because he didn’t want to give any of his documents to the National Archives as is required by law, and actually went on to defend the legitimacy of his astonishing, arrogant, galactically mistaken declaration, and he got away with it.

    Bush’s lawyers put forth a claim of Executive Privilege that was the very living essence of overheated hubris run amok – a claim that for all intents and purposes declared Bush and his people to be fully and completely above the rule of law, and he got away with it. Subpoenas issued by Congress were either utterly ignored or smugly slapped aside, and the lawyers got away with it.

    Another piece of draconian surveillance legislation aimed at shattering our remaining rights arrived in Congress, so the Bush folks brazenly bullied the majority into passing it by threatening to blame them for the next terrorist attack to come, whereupon the majority instantly wilted like orchids in a snowbank, the bill passed with room to spare, and once again they got away with it.

    Cheney’s chief of staff was convicted for lying about lying about lying about outing a deep-cover CIA agent and sentenced to federal prison, initiating the single most observably crooked bag-job in modern political history: Libby took the bullet for his boss, got rewarded for his service with a presidential get-out-of-jail-free card, and they all got away with it.

    All of this was deployed in rapid succession, presenting the American people with a sudden feast of gibberish that has redefined incoherence across the board: the VP is not in the executive branch, and the executive branch is above the law, and the majority in Congress is actually the minority, and obstructing justice to protect Cheney from being prosecuted for annihilating a CIA operative isn’t anything to get in a snit about. If that is not prima facie evidence that a new reality has been imposed upon us, then I don’t know what is.

    After all that came August, and if I’m right, the process was brought to a successful conclusion. In a way, this was the greatest challenge for Bush and his people, because they all had to argue time and again that Iraq was doing fine, that the whole thing was about freedom, that there was no civil war, that the “surge” worked, that the American people truly supported the whole bloody carnivorous process, and be damned with poll numbers and pundits and contradictory facts. General Petraeus was rolled out on cue, he hummed his bars and faked it at the same time, and as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the White House won the argument and that’s that.

    Think about it. The weapons of mass destruction were not there, connections to 9/11 and Osama bin Laden were not there, the hearts and flowers were not there, thousands upon thousands have been killed, billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars have been translated into the bank accounts of administration allies, a civil war is raging beyond any semblance of control there, Iraq’s much-ballyhooed democracy is almost as chaotic as the streets outside Parliament, and the entire disaster has become a Quantico training ground for scores of bomb-makers looking to ply their trade in the wider world beyond.

    And they got away with it. If that is reality, I want no part of it.

    It must be clearly understood, however, that I do not discount the very real possibility that I have, finally and for all time, gone insane because of all this. My theory is not proven beyond doubt; my suspicions grow stronger by the hour, but I could simply be this barking madman no longer able to recognize reality even when it is staring me in the eye. I’m pretty sure of my footing, but the truth is that if I did go over the high side somewhere along the line, I’d be the last person to figure that out.

    Therefore, I’m going to wrap myself in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, if only to replace what once was my comforting little joke before the metamorphosis flipped everything upside down on me. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” said Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

    I make no claim to any sort of first-rate intelligence, but I’m going to try to hold these two thoughts in my mind for as long as possible. One thought says reality itself has been detonated with calculated premeditation by Bush and his people. The other thought remembers what it was like before anything like the first thought was even remotely conceived of. Each thought, I think, will nurture and protect the other once the three of us are all settled in, and I will continue to retain the ability to function.

    Meh. Reality is overrated anyway.

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 24, 2007; A01

As Rudolph W. Giuliani campaigns for president, he rarely misses a chance to warn about the threat from terrorists. “They hate you,” he told a woman at an Atlanta college. They “want to kill us,” he told guests at a Virginia luncheon.

The former New York City mayor exhorts America to fight back in what he calls the “terrorists’ war on us” and accuses Democrats of reverting to their “denial” in the 1990s, when, he said, President Bill Clinton erred by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, not a war.

Democrats, he said in July, have “the same bad judgment they had in the 1990s. They don’t see the threat. They don’t accept the threat.”

It is a powerful message coming from the man who won global acclaim for his calm and resolve after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is undercut by Giuliani’s record as mayor and by his public statements about terrorism since the 1990s, which document an evolution in thinking that began with a mind-set similar to the one he criticizes today.

In presenting himself as the candidate most knowledgeable about terrorism, Giuliani stakes the same claim he used to build a successful consulting firm after leaving City Hall: that he is not only a strong leader in a crisis, but someone who was deeply engaged with the Islamic extremist threat long before planes hit the World Trade Center.

But for most of Giuliani’s career as a Department of Justice official, prosecutor and New York’s chief executive, terrorism was a narrow aspect of his broader crime-fighting agenda, which was dominated by drug dealers, white-collar criminals and the Mafia. Giuliani expressed confidence that Islamic extremism could be contained through vigorous investigation by law enforcement agencies and prosecution in the court system — the same approach he now condemns.

His public warnings about the threat were infrequent. To the extent that he mentioned terrorism in his aborted run for the Senate in 2000, for example, it was to call for more spending on intelligence. Even in the weeks after Sept. 11, he framed the attacks in the language of crime, describing the hijackers as “insane murderers” and calling for restoration of the “rule of law.”

As mayor, Giuliani made decisions that seemed to discount the gravity of the terrorist threat, such as placing his emergency command center at the World Trade Center a few years after the 1993 bombing attack there, against the wishes of top advisers. By his own account, it was after Sept. 11 that he started reading up on al-Qaeda, devouring a book that his then-girlfriend Judith Nathan bought for him.

As terrorist incidents occurred sporadically in the 1990s, Giuliani sought to keep them in perspective. He urged against publicizing terror drills, to avoid needlessly scaring New Yorkers. He resisted branding as terrorism smaller-scale acts of Islamic violence in the city.

In late 1999, as authorities scrambled to unravel a worldwide “millennium plot” and a top former FBI official advised people not to attend the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square, Giuliani warned against overreacting. “I would urge people not to let the psychology of fear infect the way they act. Otherwise we have let the terrorists win without anybody striking a blow,” he said.

Among those who have watched with interest as Giuliani takes up the antiterrorism mantle is Peter Gross, a New Jersey lawyer. Gross’s son suffered brain damage when he was shot by a 69-year-old Palestinian man on top of the Empire State Building in 1997, an outburst that killed one and injured six.

Giuliani declined to label the shooting as terrorism, saying the gunman was just deranged, even though the shooter had a note declaring hatred for “Zionists” and their American allies and a wish to “strike at their own den in New York.”

Gross still marvels at Giuliani’s concern for his son, recalling how often the mayor visited the hospital, and watched as he took the same approach, on a much larger scale, after Sept. 11.

“I do think he rose to greatness after the World Trade Center, but it wasn’t because he was an expert on terrorism but because he was an affected and obviously level-headed leader when we didn’t need cheerleading, we needed honesty,” Gross said. “That’s the tone he set. But it wasn’t because he was some kind of expert on terrorism.”

One of Giuliani’s rivals for the Republican nomination, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), made a similar distinction, saying recently that while “the nation respects the mayor’s leadership after 9/11,” it is unclear that it “translates, necessarily, into foreign policy or national security expertise. I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any experience in it.”

Giuliani, through his campaign, declined to discuss his record on terrorism. But supporters say he gained unique insight into the issue when he witnessed people jumping from the twin towers and was almost trapped in a nearby building when the South Tower collapsed.

“You have to understand what the results of [terrorism] entail, and that’s very personal. If you have compassion for that, you can lead this effort, and if you don’t understand the personal consequences, you can’t,” said Lewis Schiliro, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the late 1990s.

Others say Giuliani’s experience with terrorism is not the point. What matters to voters, they say, is that he is a strong leader who has taken on scourges such as the Mafia and the New York murder rate, and so can be trusted to triumph over a new threat. “Giuliani does have a track record of being a no-nonsense S.O.B., a really tough guy,” said New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat. “Rudy is not someone you can picture waffling when it comes to terrorism.”

As Mayor, a Focus on Crime
Giuliani argues that his experience with terrorism long predates Sept. 11. His campaign notes that his work as a Justice Department official and as a U.S. attorney in New York included several encounters with the issue, such as serving on a 1976 task force, writing a 1982 letter to the State Department recommending counterterrorism legislation and prosecuting a member of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, FALN, for making false passports.

On the campaign trail, Giuliani particularly stresses the time he spent as U.S. attorney investigating Yasser Arafat for his role in the death of a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer, in the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. “I investigated Yasser Arafat before anybody knew who he really was,” Giuliani said in Las Vegas.

But prosecutors who led that case say Giuliani overstates his role. He assisted in the later, failed attempt to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization from its New York office, but the investigation of an Arafat link to the ship hijacking was handled by the Justice Department in Washington, say former Justice officials, including Stephen Trott, now a federal appeals judge.

Jay Fischer, a lawyer who represented the Klinghoffer family, said he never talked with Giuliani about the case. “When I heard [him] just in the last six months making a speech that he knew about terrorism because he had led the investigation, I recall turning around to my wife and saying, ‘That comes as news to me,’ ” Fischer said.

Giuliani’s focus throughout the 1990s was on reducing crime — New York had more than 2,000 murders a year when he took office as mayor. So fixated was he on crime during his 1993 campaign against David Dinkins that Giuliani said little on the trail about the explosion, that Feb. 26, of a 1,200-pound bomb in a rental van in a garage beneath the World Trade Center. That blast killed six and injured 1,000 in the first major attack by Islamic extremists on U.S. soil.

After winning that fall, he invoked the attack in his inaugural speech in passing, as a sign of the city’s resilience: “It was a day in which 50,000 New Yorkers took charge of themselves and each other.”

As he campaigns for president, Giuliani describes the 1993 attack as having been forefront in his mind throughout his mayoralty, saying it was others who failed to reckon with the blast.

“Islamic terrorists killed Americans. Slaughtered Americans. Bombed the World Trade Center. Bombed it,” he said in July. “You know what the reaction of the Clinton administration at the time was? It was a crime. It was another group of murders. . . . Well, it wasn’t just another group of murders.”

But the 1993 attack also receded on City Hall’s radar screen. During Giuliani’s search for a police commissioner, terrorism did not come up, according to four candidates and three members of the hiring panel interviewed by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, authors of the 2006 book “Grand Illusion.” Giuliani never asked his successor as U.S. attorney about the cases against the attackers or about other terrorism cases, said a source familiar with the office who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Securing the World Trade Center against another attack also got little attention from City Hall. The buildings’ owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, made some safety upgrades, but the city set aside a task force’s findings on building-code flaws revealed by the attack, as well as findings by fire chiefs. The city held several terrorism drills during Giuliani’s tenure, but they focused on biological or chemical attacks, not high-rise evacuations.

Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, said the threat of terrorism was taken seriously, with City Hall constantly reacting to police or FBI alerts. But the city’s planning tended to focus more on the subway system and sports facilities than on high rises, he said; City Hall — like everyone else — simply did not envision an airborne attack on the twin towers.

“There were numerous exercises, to the point where I knew all the exitways from Madison Square Garden,” Lhota said.

Giuliani often cites the 1993 attack as a motivation for his creation of an Office of Emergency Management, in 1996. But those present at the agency’s creation say it was intended to give the mayor oversight over more routine emergencies.

Jonathan Best interviewed for the job of leading the agency and said the subject of terrorism barely arose. “That wasn’t the focus of what they were looking at,” Best said. “They were interested in hurricanes. Hurricanes were big.”

In 1997, the city decided to place an emergency command center for the agency on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, across from the twin towers. Several top officials argued for a lower-profile site, such as an office complex across the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

But Giuliani was adamant about having a site within walking distance of City Hall, recalled Jerome Hauer, then the emergency management commissioner. Hauer left City Hall in 2000 and had a falling-out with Giuliani after Sept. 11 over Hauer’s endorsement of a Democrat to replace the mayor.

On Sept. 11, the $13 million center was quickly evacuated, and 7 World Trade Center collapsed later in the day.

Giuliani and his advisers have rejected criticism of the site selection, saying no one could have predicted the collapse of the towers. But Louis Anemone, a top-ranking police officer who has since retired, disagrees. The World Trade Center “was number one on our list of the most vulnerable and critical and symbolic locations in the city. The place had been attacked once before, and they had been threatening to bring those towers down again,” Anemone said. “For those of us who lived and breathed this stuff day in and day out, it boggled the imagination.”

‘Worst Crisis in Our History’
Throughout his tenure as mayor, Giuliani had to contend with more limited incidents of politically tinged violence, often involving Islamic extremism. But, not wanting to cause undue alarm, he described the attacks as isolated events and repeatedly expressed faith in the ability of law enforcement agencies to contain any threat.

When, in 1994, a Lebanese livery car driver shot at a van carrying Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one, Giuliani resisted declaring it terrorism and praised the police response. “The person who allegedly did this . . . is now going to be in a legal system that is really a very effective one,” he said. When later that year a man set off a firebomb in a subway, Giuliani pushed for reinstating the death penalty, calling it the “ultimate deterrent” against terrorism.

And after the 1997 shooting atop the Empire State Building, Giuliani said it was “irresponsible” to label it terrorism, a judgment that brought criticism from the Anti-Defamation League after the gunman’s anti-Israel note surfaced.

Giuliani’s desire to keep terrorism in perspective could be discerned even on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days following, when he sought to marginalize the attackers and the threat they represented. Asked on the day of the attacks whether they constituted an “act of war,” he said, “I don’t know that I want to use those words. . . . I’m totally confident that American democracy and the American rule of law will prevail.”

In an interview later that month, he noted that one of the inexplicable things about the attacks was that, unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, they lacked broader context: “This has no purpose,” he said. “They’re not going to gain freedom as a result of this. They’re not going to win a war as a result. They’re not going to stop us. America’s not going to stop as a result of this.”

But Giuliani’s rhetoric changed as time went on. Campaigning for President Bush in 2004, he described the attacks as part of an existential war for survival — “the worst crisis in our history” — that had been going on for years, but that Clinton and others had failed to recognize. It was, he said in his speech at the 2004 GOP convention in New York, “much like observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate the Soviet Union through the use of mutually assured destruction.”

On the trail this year, he has noted that the lack of awareness about terrorism was widely shared before Sept. 11. But this statement often precedes an attack on Democrats for lapsing into the “big mistake” of the 1990s. The Democratic candidates, he warned members of the National Rifle Association last week, would, if elected, cause a “slip back to the Clinton era of playing defense against Islamic terrorism. . . . That may be the single defining issue.”

Lhota, the former deputy mayor, said Giuliani’s shift from not dwelling on terrorism to his full-throated warnings today could be attributed to the difference between being a mayor and being a presidential candidate. “It’s really the role of the [mayor] to reassure the public that the situation is under control. It’s the role of national leader to tell Americans that we are vulnerable,” he said.

Hauer, the former emergency commissioner, said he does not know what to make of the rhetorical shift. In the 1990s, Giuliani “wanted to play the threat down,” he said. “Rudy felt like talking about [terrorism] was alarmist. He never talked about it except in reaction to something. Now he’s screaming that the sky is falling.”

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
September 24, 2007

This week, it is 50 years since the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army took nine children to school.

American soldiers sworn to defend American soil and American interests had to descend upon an American city with bayonets fixed to protect American children from a mob of American adults screaming blood and murder at their attempt to attend an American school. Because, you see, the adults had pale skin, and the children’s skin was dark.

From the vantage point of half a century, it seems an absurd drama. You shake your head at the fatuity of the adults in the old news footage, their mouths twisted, fists clenched, eyes alight, and you marvel that they were driven to such a fury, such a madness, by so innocuous an event. You wonder what in the world they could have been thinking.

But of course, that’s an easy one. They were thinking they were right.

We always expect evil to look different, obvious. We are always anticipating the pointed ears and the pitchfork, the black stovepipe hat and the Snidely Whiplash mustache. The truth, however, is that evil is rather banal. You might pass it five times a day and never recognize it for what it is.

The pale men and women who took to the streets of Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 would have been, in the overwhelming majority, Christian people. They paid their taxes. They helped the poor. They visited the sick. They held hands over hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance. They were decent folks, except they had this evil belief that people with dark skin were of a savage, yet simultaneously childlike, lower order and that if anyone sought to mix pale and dark, pale must resist by any means necessary.

If you had suggested to them that this was wrong, they would have looked at you askance, maybe even laughed, and wondered what was wrong with “you.” Because they knew they were right, knew it in their bones, knew it in their Bibles, knew it with certitude, knew it beyond all question.

Five decades later, there is a starkness, a black and white purity, to the issues argued those tense days in Little Rock streets: inclusion versus exclusion. It is enough to make one nostalgic. After all, after affirmative action, after busing, after O.J., after Cosby, after Imus, there is little starkness, much less purity, to the conflict between pale and dark. All is complexity, all is gray.

Or maybe that’s just the self-deluding conceit of a generation that is pleased to think of itself as enlightened beyond history, pleased to look back on past events and tsk-tsk the behavior of the poor, benighted souls who lived through them.

Yet in Jena, La., six American children with dark skin were charged with attempted murder after jumping a pale child whose injuries amounted to a black eye and a concussion.

In Tulia, Texas, 38 mostly dark-skinned people were convicted of drug dealing on the perjured testimony of a pale cop known to describe dark people with a racial slur.

In Paris, Texas, a dark-skinned girl who shoved a teacher’s aide was given seven years by a judge who had earlier given probation to a pale-skinned arsonist.

All this not in 1957, but now.

Yet, it has become common for some pale Americans to deny that these and other inequities have anything to do with skin tone. That’s an absurdity we left in the ’50s, they say. We are beyond that. There are no pale Americans and dark Americans. There are only Americans. They wish dark Americans would understand this and get over it already.

And it’s the darnedest thing. If you suggest that they are wrong, they will look at you askance, maybe even laugh, and wonder what is wrong with “you.” Because they know they’re right, know it in their bones, know it in their Bibles, know it with a certitude.

Know it beyond all question.

Ahmadinejad has no place anywhere near ground zero

New York Daily News
September 23, 2007

The following editorial appeared last week in the New York Daily News.

No. No. No. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot be allowed to defile ground zero, must be stopped from exploiting this hallowed landmark, this tragic product of a fanaticism cousin to the demons in Ahmadinejad’s soul.

When Ahmadinejad expressed an interest in visiting ground zero during his coming trip to New York for the U.N. General Assembly, he was promptly given the only correct answer: Drop dead. Now there are reports that he intends to appear at least in the vicinity of ground zero on Monday morning regardless. To him we say: Go to hell.

Ahmadinejad is an enemy of the United States in particular and of civilization in general. He is spilling American blood. His government is supplying weapons to forces that are killing our troops in Iraq. His presence on American soil is a damnable insult, one we suffer because New York is a global city with a slice of international territory on the East Side.

The Iranian can claim to have no affinity for al-Qaida – they being Sunni and he being Shiite – but he harbors his own dream of imposing radical Islam on the world, and he has been monstrously frank in his attitudes toward Israel. Dear to Ahmadinejad’s heart is the idea of wiping the Israelis off the map, literally.

As for Sept. 11, he has questioned whether, in fact, the attack was part of an American-hatched conspiracy. In a letter to President Bush in 2006, he asked: “Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess.”

And there is no doubt Ahmadinejad has set his sights on ground zero as an act of provocation. He felt no need to go there when he came to New York in 2006. In fact, he dismissed the idea in an interview with Time magazine.

“Did you visit the site of the World Trade Center?” Ahmadinejad was asked.

“It was not necessary,” he replied. “It was widely covered in the media.”

Now, it’s different. Now, he wants to propagandize. At the United Nations he will lie through his teeth in denying that Iran has nuclear weapons ambitions, and he will speak on the platform of a world body that’s too craven to give him the boot.

New Yorkers are made of sterner stuff and decent stuff. Our city must deny Ahmadinejad aid and comfort – including restricting him to certain roads and sidewalks. All of Manhattan south of Canal Street must be forbidden to him by the NYPD.

Related Story 

Ahmadinejad lands in New York

Iran president aims to reassure America

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to board his plane Sunday in Tehran. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Karen Matthews
Associated Press
September 24, 2007

NEW YORK – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in New York to protests Sunday and said in a television interview that Iran was neither building a nuclear bomb nor headed to war with the United States.

The president will appear at a series of events, including the U.N. General Assembly and a forum at Columbia University, where about 40 elected officials and civic leaders decried his visit.

Ahmadinejad’s public-relations push appears aimed at presenting his views directly to American people amid rising strains and talk of war between the two nations.

Tensions are high between Washington and Tehran over U.S. accusations that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, as well as helping Shiite militias in Iraq that target U.S. troops – claims that Iran denies.

“Well, you have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb. We don’t need that. What need do we have for a bomb?” Ahmadinejad said in a “60 Minutes” interview taped Thursday in Iran. “In political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use. If it was useful, it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union.”

He also said, “It’s wrong to think that Iran and the U.S. are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war? There is no war in the offing.”

Before leaving Iran, Ahmadinejad said the American people have been denied “correct information,” and his visit will give them a chance to hear a different voice, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Washington has said it is addressing the Iran situation diplomatically, but all options are open.

The commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East said he did not believe tensions will lead to war.

“This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me, which is not helpful and not useful,” Adm. William Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, which made a partial transcript available Sunday.

Ahmadinejad’s scheduled address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday will be his third time attending the New York meeting in three years.

But his request to lay a wreath at ground zero was denied by city officials and condemned by politicians who said a visit to the site of the 2001 terror attacks would violate sacred ground.

Police cited construction and security concerns in denying Ahmadinejad’s request. Ahmadinejad told “60 Minutes” he would not press the issue but didn’t believe the visit would offend Americans.

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007

By William Kristol

What a way to begin the fall! Perennial college-football power University of Michigan was ranked No. 5 in the preseason polls. It paid little Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C., about $400,000 to have its football team visit Ann Arbor to serve as a season-opening tune-up for the Wolverines. In a stunning upset, Appalachian State won 34-32– kicking a field goal with 26 sec. left, then blocking a Michigan field-goal attempt on the game’s last play.

Lesson: the improbable sometimes happens. And what’s true in sports is true in politics. There hasn’t been a major upset in a presidential-nomination race since Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. We’re due. And the 2008 presidential campaign is an especially good candidate to provide a surprise. Why?

1. It’s an open-seat election. For the first time since 1952, there will be no incumbent President or Vice President on the ballot. As we know from state and local elections, nonincumbent races are more volatile and less predictable than those with incumbents, which tend to be reasonably predictable referendums on the party in power. But in 2008 there won’t be an incumbent, and there won’t even be someone who resembles an incumbent: none of the leading Republicans have worked in or been particularly close to the Bush Administration. Indeed, the three leading Republicans and two leading Democrats have never run for national office before. Much more depends in such circumstances on unpredictable factors like candidates’ errors, campaign dynamics and external events than in a traditional incumbent contest.

2. It’s a wartime election. Wars are volatile. Eight months ago, we were losing in Iraq. Now it’s not so clear. Where will Iraq stand four months from now, at the time of the Iowa caucuses–or 14 months from now, in November 2008? As wars are unpredictable, so are the politics of war. The fact that we were a nation at war helped the Republicans in 2002 and 2004. It hurt them badly in 2006. What about 2008? George W. Bush recently compared Iraq to Vietnam. Well … is this 1968, when the party in power got punished, or 1972, when a dovish challenger got clobbered?

3. The primary schedule will be newly front-loaded and compressed. Will that make Iowa and New Hampshire more or less important? No one is certain. I suspect that the slingshot effect out of Iowa and New Hampshire could be greater than ever. In fact, in recent years Iowa has become an increasingly good predictor of the nominee: Bob Dole and Bush won Iowa in 1996 and 2000, respectively, and went on to win the GOP nomination; Al Gore and John Kerry won Iowa in 2000 and 2004 and prevailed on the Democratic side. But in a multicandidate field in Iowa, which it looks as if we’ll have for both parties, a few thousand votes–a few hundred votes–could well mean the difference between first place and second and third or, for that matter, third and fifth. And such a small difference could be utterly decisive for who survives and who gets knocked out, who has momentum and who falters.

4. The Democratic front runners are a woman and an African American–the first members of either group to have a good chance to win the presidency. Do the polls accurately reflect hidden support for–or hostility toward–such trailblazer candidates? And the woman in question happens to have as her husband a former President of the U.S. Will the prospect of having Bill Clinton back in the White House help or hurt Hillary Clinton when voters cast their ballots?

5. The leading Republican contenders are a Mormon from Massachusetts, a pro-choice New Yorker and a late-starting TV actor. Some Protestant churches teach that Mormonism is a cult. No pro-choice candidate has been able to compete seriously for the GOP nomination since 1980. No one has gone straight from the studio to the presidency (Ronald Reagan had long ago given up his acting career and had served two terms as Governor of California). This is a very unusual bunch of Republican front runners.

And what about a real Appalachian State–style upset? New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is in double digits in current polling in Iowa, within hailing distance of the three Democratic front runners. What if the leading candidates whack away at one another in TV ads and the personable Richardson sneaks into first or second? On the Republican side, John McCain is having something of a rally. If the situation in Iraq continues to improve and the other Republicans slip and slide, couldn’t the old warrior pull off an upset? And what happens to a front runner once he or she stumbles? The week after its defeat by Appalachian State, Michigan was still favored by a touchdown over Oregon. Michigan lost 39-7.

Every presidential election, it’s been said, breaks one political rule. This one may break them all.

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007

By Richard Brookhiser

The line of politicians who have had a change of heart about the war in Iraq keeps getting longer. Republican Senator John Warner, who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force there, now wants the troops to start coming home. Democratic Congressman Brian Baird, who opposed the war, wants to give the surge a chance: “Progress is being made and there is real reason for hope.” But politicians are often anxious about changing their minds. They know opponents are waiting to hammer them as opportunists or just plain confused, as Mitt Romney, dogged by accusations of flip-flopping over abortion, and John Kerry, who ineptly said he had voted for a supplemental funding bill before voting against it, can attest. Yet our nation’s leaders often change their minds. If they didn’t, we might still be slave-owning British subjects. When and why they do so can be instructive.

Wanting to be seen as responsible and practical, many politicians often claim to be reacting to new information. In 1966, during his first race to become Governor of California, Ronald Reagan pledged not to raise income taxes, declaring that his feet were “in concrete” on the issue. State income taxes were collected by withholding, and Reagan believed taxes should be obvious and painful. But once in office, he found that there was no other revenue stream that could balance the state budget, and so he submitted an economic plan that called for higher withholding taxes. “The sound you hear,” he said at a press conference, “is the sound of concrete cracking.”

Reagan wasn’t the first pol to reverse himself when a new office brought with it a new worldview. When James Madison was a Congressman, he argued for a stronger Federal Government and took a lead role in creating one as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. But in 1798, as a leader of the fight against the war measures of President John Adams, he became an advocate of states’ rights, urging his native Virginia and its fellow states to resist “dangerous” exercises of federal power. In 1815, when Madison was President, he had to fend off a threat by New Englanders to wield the power of their states against his war measures, which they found “dangerous.” Madison had a supple mind–supple enough to reconcile his shifting position, which he attributed to changing circumstances. “The state of things at the time,” he explained, was “always a key to the arguments employed.” The most important circumstance, however, seems to have been where he sat.

Sometimes the desire for a job makes a politician see the light. For the first two decades of his career, Lyndon Johnson was a New Deal liberal, with white Southern views on race (he called Harry Truman’s early efforts on civil rights “a farce and a sham”). This combination made him a popular Texas Congressman and Senator, but he also wanted to be President. After a stumbling run as Texas’ favorite son in 1956, he realized that his ambitions required him to change his profile on civil rights. The next year, after epic wheeling and dealing as Senate majority leader, he produced the first successful civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It was weak enough to be supported by fellow Southerners, who constituted his political base, yet it offered Northern liberals the prospect of future progress. This balancing act did not win him the Democratic nomination in 1960, but it allowed John F. Kennedy to make Johnson his running mate.

At their best, politicians change their minds because their principles tell them to. John Quincy Adams, son of Founding Father John Adams, became a national figure in his own right by working with Southerners. President George Washington, a Virginian, gave him his first job. President James Monroe, another Virginian, made him Secretary of State. And Speaker of the House Henry Clay, a Kentuckian, helped him win the presidency when the election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives. For most of his career, Adams believed the South would handle slavery on its own, wiping the great blot from national life. By his 60s, however, he had heard too many Southerners praising slavery as a good thing. When elected to Congress after losing the White House in 1828, Adams spent the remainder of his life flaying slavery, supporting the mutineers on the slave ship Amistad and the right of citizens to deluge Congress with antislavery petitions.

No decision, of course, is ever the result of one pure motive. Johnson, his biographer Robert Caro argues, always had reservoirs of genuine compassion that his ambition finally allowed him to tap. John Quincy Adams became a principled scourge only after his ambition to be elected President had been gratified (and his ambition to be re-elected denied). Concrete cracks for many reasons. The sound you hear is politics–and human nature–at work.

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007

By Joe Klein

California Senator Barbara Boxer almost asked a good question at the Petraeus-Crocker festivities on Capitol Hill this week. She was reminiscing, as most of her colleagues did, about time spent on the ground in Iraq with General David Petraeus, but it was not a recent visit. It was back in 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training the new Iraqi army. An aide pulled out a blown-up photograph of the Senator and the general. “You were so upbeat, General,” Boxer said. “You said, ‘You’re about to see some terrific troops.’” There were 100,000 of them “ready to go … You were as optimistic as anyone I’ve seen on the planet … and I believed you!” The stage was set for Boxer to point out that the Petraeus effort to train the Iraqi army had failed and to ask, “So why should we believe your optimism now?” But she wandered off into an antiwar diatribe and never got around to asking it.

The unasked question was so profound that Petraeus, a proud man, chose to answer it anyway. “I believe that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified,” he said. The good work was undone, though, in 2006, when Shi’ite militias “hijacked” whole units of the Iraqi military. But, he insisted, we are back on the right track now. Petraeus may well be right–or maybe not. The nature of military leadership is congenital optimism; officers are trained to complete the mission, to refuse to countenance the possibility of failure. That focus is essential when you go to war, but it lacks perspective. That’s why civilian leaders–the Commander in Chief–are there to set the mission, to change or abort it when necessary. The trouble is, George W. Bush’s credibility on Iraq is nonexistent. And so he has placed David Petraeus, an excellent soldier, in a position way above his pay grade. He has made Petraeus not just the arbiter of Iraq strategy but also, by default, the man who sets U.S. policy for the entire so-called war on terrorism.

The cleverness of Bush’s strategy was apparent when Senator Russ Feingold asked Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker a very important question: Which should have the higher priority in the war against al-Qaeda, Iraq or the rebuilt al-Qaeda leadership and terrorist camps, festering on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Feingold had forced Crocker, the elusive former ambassador to Pakistan, into a corner and then, inexplicably, let him off the hook and turned to Petraeus, who rightly claimed a lack of knowledge or authority to answer that question. The nonanswer stood as the Bush Administration’s response to an essential strategic issue.

It seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime. Even when Petraeus gave sketchy, disingenuous answers expressing hope about the three-way Shi’ite gang war in the oil-rich port city of Basranot even the most knowledgeable Senators had the facts to dispute him. The general was armed with the modern military’s deadliest weapon, the PowerPoint-presentation-serried ranks of bar charts marching toward victory, which provided camouflage for the gaping holes and contradictions in the Petraeus-Crocker story. Crocker, for example, seemed particularly insistent on roping Iran into the scenario. “The Iranian President has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq,” the ambassador testified. But Crocker also testified that the Iraqi Shi’ites were Arabs who had fought fiercely against the Iranians in the eight-year war and were very unlikely to cede control to their Persian neighbor without a fight. Petraeus described al-Qaeda in Iraq both as the greatest threat to stability and as the greatest loser in the struggle, its brand of Islamic extremism decisively rejected by the Sunni tribes.

No doubt Crocker and Petraeus believe they were merely stating the complexities of a difficult situation. But in a war, there is a need for executive decision making when it comes to priorities and contradictions: With al-Qaeda in Iraq on the run and, as Petraeus insisted, no need for American forces to resolve the Shi’ite chaos in the south, what was the rationale for keeping so many troops in Iraq? Why wasn’t there a clearly defined strategic path for dealing with the country’s political collapse? Those issues–the strategic ones–were beyond the reach of Petraeus and Crocker. And the Senators were left with bland assurances that the two patriots would continue to do their considerable best to work really, really hard on the situation.

That’s not nearly enough, of course. There was an important follow-up that Boxer didn’t ask either: Without a strong, credible central government, for whom exactly is the re-retrained Iraqi army fighting? How can any Iraqi be loyal to a government that doesn’t exist? And, finally, now that the Sunnis have decisively rejected the extremists, why should any American trooper sacrifice even a pinkie in this sectarian catastrophe?

The Hsu scandal sheds light on how-and why- pols bail each other out when the going gets tough.
By   Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball And Evan Thomas
With Roya Wolverson, Sarah Elkins And Sally Lynch
Newsweek It was Clinton-campaign standard operating procedure: when on the defensive, deflect and attack. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton surrogates invited onto TV talk shows were issued “talking points” in anticipation of awkward questions about the mysterious Norman Hsu. A top “HillRaiser”—someone who brings in more than $100,000 for the campaign—Hsu was wanted on an arrest warrant for a 1991 fraud conviction in California. (After failing to show up for a court appearance earlier this month, he was later arrested by the FBI after falling ill and writing an apparent suicide note.) If asked how Hsu’s criminal record could have slipped through the cracks in the campaign’s vetting process for donors, the Clinton supporters were instructed to say they hadn’t participated in the vetting. If pressed, they were told to take a none-too-subtle swipe at Clinton’s chief rival. “Long before Hillary’s presidential campaign took money from Mr. Hsu, Mr. Obama’s senate campaign had as well as a bunch of others,” read the memo, given to NEWSWEEK by a Clinton supporter who didn’t want to be identified revealing internal campaign communications.

Hsu also shows up on the donor rolls of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton’s charity organization, to the tune of $30,000. (Clinton gave the money back.) The foundation that funds the Clinton Global Initiative also paid to build the Clinton library, but so far the foundation has refused to name the donors to the library. (A spokesman for the former president declined to say whether Hsu was on the list.) There is at least one candidate who sees some political advantage in raising the issue. Barack Obama has put forth an ethics proposal requiring the public disclosure of donors to federally supported presidential libraries. It appears that Obama is learning how to get in his own digs.

Israel sends Iran a signal with a stealth raid into Syria.
By   Dan Ephron And Mark Hosenball
With Jeffrey Bartholet In Washington
Newsweek Few things motivate Arab spokesmen more than the chance to condemn Israel. Yet they were subdued when Israeli warplanes flew deep into Syrian airspace earlier this month. The Arab League called the incursion “unacceptable,” but most Mideast governments kept quiet. Their lack of support for Damascus has much to do with Syria’s close relationship to Iran, whose rising power they fear. But some Israeli officials and analysts are reading it optimistically, perhaps dangerously so. “You can learn something from it as to how the Arab world might react to an Israeli or American attack against strategic targets in Iran,” says Yossi Alpher, a former Israeli intelligence official.

U.S. intelligence agencies, by contrast, believe Iran is still two to eight years away from mastering the technology to build a bomb. Some officials warn that attacking Iran would mire U.S. forces in another messy war and might prove ineffective, since the Iranian facilities are believed to be scattered across the country and buried deep underground. Still, from Israel’s perspective, there might never be a more supportive White House. “It makes sense that if Israel has to do it alone, it would want to do it on Bush’s watch and not wait to see what the political attitude of the next administration will be,” says Alpher. That Arab states, and the world, will look away next time might be too much to assume.

David Broder
Washington Post
September 21, 2007

In the years since I first met him in 1974, I have learned that it’s wise to take Newt Gingrich seriously. He has many character flaws, and his language is often exaggerated and imprudent. But if there is any politician of the current generation who has earned the label “visionary,” it is probably the Georgia Republican and former speaker of the House.

For that reason alone, it is regrettable that Gingrich has virtually decided to pass on the 2008 presidential race. He told me and other reporters last week, “The odds are very high that I won’t run.” He probably would not be the winner, but his presence in the field would raise the bar for everyone else, improve the content of the debates and change the dynamic of the race.

The simple fact that he is prepared to say plainly that, if they have a prayer of electing George Bush’s successor, Republicans must offer “a clean break” from Bush’s policies sets Gingrich apart. No one in the Republican field except the semi-eccentric Ron Paul has taken that position – and the debate has been weaker because of that silence.

Gingrich shies away from running for good reason. His personal history and the scars he bears from leading the 1994 revolution that brought Republicans to power in Congress for a dozen years would make it hard for him to mobilize the money and support needed in an already crowded field.

Moreover, he is right in saying that when “10 guys are lined up like penguins,” for TV debates in which answers must be compressed to 60-second sound bites, the “big ideas” he wants to promote would likely be lost.

So he is opting for American Solutions for Winning the Future, a policy and advocacy group equipped for the Internet age that will launch at the end of this month from the west front of the Capitol, where Gingrich staged his “Contract With America” signing at the start of the 1994 campaign.

This new effort, which is nominally nonpartisan, aims at developing fresh solutions to the public policy problems that challenge the nation, from health care to immigration to inner-city education.

Gingrich is brimming with ideas on all these subjects, but is realistic enough to suggest that it may take five years for public opinion – and other politicians – to be ready to embrace some of them.

That five-year estimate is significant. It would run to the end of the next presidential term. Gingrich has a low opinion of the ingenuity and independence shown so far by the GOP field, and he predicts that the battle for the nomination will be a long one. Even the Feb. 5 massing of primaries in big states is unlikely to produce a clear winner, he says, and the result may be “chaos” or a brokered nominating convention.

By contrast, he says, Hillary Rodham Clinton faces few obstacles in winning the Democratic nomination. And he leaves reporters with the feeling that he thinks that a Hillary Clinton presidency would provide fertile ground, just as Bill Clinton’s did, for a Republican revival.

Gingrich told National Journal’s Linda Douglass that in 2012, “I’d be the same age … (that) Reagan was when he was elected in 1980.” At the news breakfast where I saw him, he was as pumped-up about his new venture as he had been when we first had coffee 33 years ago. Then he was a college professor, engaged in a losing House campaign, but blessed or cursed with grandiose ideas about how the Republicans might – after more than 30 years – become the majority in the Congress.

It took him 20 years after that to achieve his goal, so I have no reason to doubt that he’d spend another five years trying to put his now beleaguered party back on its feet. He works and travels at a frenetic pace, drawing fresh ideas from visits last week to a Michigan hospital, a Microsoft plant and a health care complex in Spokane.

If big ideas and big ambitions can bring Republicans back to life, Gingrich is ready to supply them. And I have learned not to underestimate him.

Plan likely Democrats’ last chance to change Iraq policy this year

Terri Gurrola greets her 3-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, at the airport in Atlanta last week. She had just returned from a seven-month tour in Iraq. Some military personnel have spent more than half of the past five years deployed in war zones.Associated Press (Associated Press )

Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
September 20, 2007

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan proposal to lengthen the home leaves of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, derailing a measure that war opponents viewed as one of the best chances to force President Bush to accelerate a redeployment of forces.

The proposal, sponsored by Sens. James Webb, D-Va., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., failed on a 56-44 vote, with 60 votes needed for passage. A last-minute campaign by the Defense Department and the White House to kill the measure won over Sen. John Warner, R-Va., an influential voice on defense policy who had voted with Webb and Hagel in July.

Warner’s defection deflated any momentum that had been building and effectively ensured the legislation’s demise. Just six Republicans supported the proposal, one fewer than the previous count.

The vote offered the most vivid evidence yet that the Bush administration still controls Iraq war policy, despite months of congressional debate, the war’s persistent unpopularity and a summer-long effort by activists to pressure Republicans. Unless other options with broad appeal emerge soon – a prospect both parties now say is unlikely – Bush’s plan to keep most troops in Iraq through next summer will remain intact.

“Our Republican colleagues are more interested in protecting our president than our troops,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said moments before the vote, when defeat appeared certain.

“This is Bush’s war. Don’t make it also the Republican senators’ war.”

Of all the Iraq measures now pending before the Senate, as part of an annual defense policy debate, Democrats had viewed the Webb proposal as one of the few that could gain broad enough support to become law. The measure would have required that troops be granted home leaves at least as long as their most recent combat deployments before being sent back to war. Its focus on troops and their families, rather than on military strategy, had attracted more GOP backing than Democratic bills that had set withdrawal timetables or had targeted war funding.

After the measure’s defeat, senators predicted that other Iraq amendments in the queue, including several with bipartisan sponsorship, would meet a similar fate.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any meaningful change of votes or switching until we get into next year,” Hagel said.

A former Navy secretary and decorated Marine combat veteran, Webb quietly courted Republicans, tweaking the bill’s language and adding clauses to allay their concerns. Exemptions were added for service members who volunteer to return to battle early. Testimony last week from Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that 130,000 troops will remain in place through next summer, seemed to bolster Webb’s case.

Military families have bemoaned the stress of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Some military personnel have spent more than half of the past five years deployed in war zones.

“As this debate is going on, I think it’s very important that we just put a safety net under our troops, to tell them, to reassure them that however long they’re being deployed, they should be able to have that much time, at least, at home, in order to refurbish, retrain, have time with their families, and mentally get prepared to go,” Webb said.

Reading between the lines, Republicans detected another aim. By limiting the pool of people who would be eligible for deployment, they believed that Democrats were attempting to force the troop reductions that they had failed to bring about legislatively.

The White House’s big breakthrough came Wednesday morning, when Warner announced he had reconsidered.

Supporters of the Webb plan were visibly deflated. None of the anticipated GOP converts ended up switching their votes.

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; A01

Republican lawmakers yesterday blocked the Senate from taking up the D.C. vote bill, a potentially fatal setback for the District’s most promising effort in years to get a full member of Congress.

The vote was on a motion to simply consider the bill. Fifty-seven senators voted in favor, three short of the 60 needed to proceed. Without enough support to vault the Senate’s procedural hurdles, the bill is expected to stall this year and possibly next year.

The Senate action was a crushing disappointment to many activists in the decades-long campaign for voting representation in Congress. The bill, which passed the House in April, has gone further than any other D.C. vote measure in almost 30 years.

Glum-faced supporters vowed to fight on.

“We have not given up,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the District’s nonvoting congressional delegate. “The session is not over. We have come too far to stop now.”

The bill was a compromise aimed at appealing to both parties. It would expand the House by two seats: one for the overwhelmingly Democratic District and the other for the next state in line to add a seat. That state currently is Utah, which is heavily Republican. Utah would also gain an electoral vote.

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and the White House have strongly criticized the legislation. They maintain that, because the District is not a state, the bill violates the constitutional mandate that House members be chosen by the “People of the several States.”

“I opposed this bill because it is clearly and unambiguously unconstitutional,” McConnell said in a statement. “If the residents of the District are to get a member for themselves, they have a remedy: amend the Constitution.”

In addition to voicing legal concerns, opponents were wary of the bill’s potential political repercussions. Some Republicans feared that the measure could eventually lead to the addition of two full D.C. senators, who probably would be Democrats.

Yesterday’s vote marked the first time the full Senate had considered the D.C. voting rights issue since 1978, when it passed a constitutional amendment that would have given the city voting representatives in the House and Senate. The amendment died seven years later after getting approval from only 16 of the 38 states required for ratification.

Proponents have portrayed the bill as a civil rights measure, saying that depriving a majority African American city of a vote echoes discriminatory practices outlawed decades ago. They also have said it is hypocritical for the United States to fight for voting rights in Iraq while denying them in its own capital.

“It’s time to end the injustice, the national embarrassment that citizens of this great capital city don’t have voting representation in Congress,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a brief floor session before the vote. Opponents did not make speeches.

Voting rights supporters said they planned to regroup and said they hoped that Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) would bring up the bill again. But they acknowledged that is highly unlikely this year and might not happen in the 2007-08 session.

“We would really have to convince him we had 60 votes,” Lieberman said. “He’s not going to go through this exercise again to lose it.”

Proponents blamed their loss on aggressive last-minute lobbying by the Republican leadership. They said three Republican senators who had indicated support for moving the bill forward changed their minds: Gordon Smith (Ore.), John McCain (Ariz.) and Thad Cochran (Miss.).

But two Democrats also did not vote for the bill to proceed. They were Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), who was absent and whose support had been considered doubtful, and Max Baucus (Mont.).

Baucus said in a written statement that he opposed the bill because Montana has only one House vote. “If we were to expand the House, Montana’s voice would become less influential,” he said.

His spokesman denied reports that Baucus had promised to side with his party if he turned out to be the deciding vote.

Baucus, standing in the well of the Senate, was the last to vote, raising his arm and jabbing a finger downward.

“Fifty-seven?” exclaimed Norton as she realized the motion would fall short. She and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) were on the Senate floor for the vote. So was the man who came up with the idea of pairing a D.C. seat with one for Utah: Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.).

“It’s crummy,” Davis said. But, he added, “a lot of time, legislation takes years to get through.”

Eight Republicans voted to allow the bill to proceed. In addition to Utah’s two senators, they included three previously uncommitted lawmakers: Arlen Specter (Pa.), Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine). The measure already had support from three moderate Republicans: Susan Collins (Maine), George V. Voinovich (Ohio) and Norm Coleman (Minn.).

In the Senate, 60 votes are needed if there is not unanimous consent to proceed with a bill.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a co-sponsor of the bill, called on its critics to at least allow a full floor debate on its constitutionality. He and other supporters say the Constitution gives Congress sufficient power over the District to create a House seat for it.

“When has the U.S. Senate been afraid to debate a constitutional issue as important as this one?” he said in a brief floor speech.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) was the only member of the local congressional delegation to vote against moving forward with the bill. Warner said he was drafting a constitutional amendment to provide D.C. residents with representation in Congress.

“My view is that only a constitutional amendment . . . will resolve this issue and thereby avoid interminable litigation flowing from an act of Congress,” he said before the vote.

Candidates Are Urged to Attend Forums Sponsored by Minorities
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; A01

Key Republican leaders are encouraging the party’s presidential candidates to rethink their decision to skip presidential debates focusing on issues important to minorities, fearing a backlash that could further erode the party’s standing with black and Latino voters.

The leading contenders for the Republican nomination have indicated they will not attend the “All American Presidential Forum” organized by black talk show host Tavis Smiley, scheduled for Sept. 27 at Morgan State University in Baltimore and airing on PBS. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) all cited scheduling conflicts in forgoing the debate. The top Democratic contenders attended a similar event in June at Howard University.

“We sound like we don’t want immigration; we sound like we don’t want black people to vote for us,” said former congressman Jack Kemp (N.Y.), who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. “What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? If we’re going to be competitive with people of color, we’ve got to ask them for their vote.”

Making matters worse, some Republicans believe, is that the decision to bypass the Morgan State forum comes after all top GOP candidates save McCain declined invitations this month to a debate on Univision, the most-watched Hispanic television network in the United States. The event was eventually postponed.

“For Republicans to consistently refuse to engage in front of an African American or Latino audience is an enormous error,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who has not yet ruled out a White House run himself. “I hope they will reverse their decision and change their schedules. I see no excuse — this thing has been planned for months, these candidates have known about it for months. It’s just fundamentally wrong. Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That’s baloney.”

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman urged candidates to “reconsider this opportunity to lay out their vision and other opportunities in the future.”

“Every one of these candidates I’ve talked to is sincerely committed to offering real choices to African American and Hispanic voters, and in my opinion have records that will appeal to many of these voters,” he added.

Mehlman, a longtime aide to President Bush, aggressively courted the minority vote as RNC chairman in 2005-06. He recruited black candidates to run for office as Republicans and condemned electoral tactics that showed hints of race-baiting.

Mehlman’s successor at the RNC was Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.), a backer of legislation that would allow illegal immigrants now in the country to stay and eventually become citizens.

Except for McCain, the top GOP candidates have distanced themselves from that proposal, which Kemp worries will become another strike against the GOP with Hispanics. Bush received 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, but the Republican base remains inflamed about illegal immigration, leading the candidates to focus on border-control proposals.

In passing on invitations to the Morgan State forum, the Republicans cited hectic schedules, noting in particular that September is a critical month for fundraising after a traditional summer slowdown. With fundraising closely scrutinized as a measure of their strength, all are eager to report a showing that reflects enthusiasm for their candidacies.

Democrats have been invited to so many debates and forums that the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) was moved last month to send out a memo saying he would begin declining invitations to them. Republicans have confronted a somewhat more manageable schedule. Interest groups important to the party have held fewer forums, and the leading candidates have still felt they could skip some.

Several Republicans have so far declined to participate in a forum sponsored by the Web site YouTube that would be broadcast on CNN. Earlier this week, the top contenders skipped a “values voters” forum organized by conservative activists in Florida.

“We consider every debate invitation equally as they relate to the schedule,” said Kevin Madden, a Romney spokesman. “Unfortunately, our schedule considerations for the month of September were such that we had to decline several debate invitations and candidate forums from different groups around the country, including Wharton Business School and CNN.”

But while the GOP campaigns have generally offered no public rationale other than timing for missing the forums, an adviser to one suggested they had little to gain from attending an event such as Smiley’s.

“What’s the win?” said the adviser, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Why would [the candidates] go into a crowd where they’re probably going to be booed?”

Giuliani, Romney and McCain also declined to appear at events sponsored by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the National Urban League, which Smiley said suggests a pattern of ignoring minority voters. He said debate organizers will set up lecterns showing the names of the absent candidates.

“When you reject every black invitation and every brown invitation you receive, is that a scheduling issue or is it a pattern?” he asked. “I don’t believe anybody should be elected president of the United States if they think along the way they can ignore people of color. That’s just not the America we live in.”

By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — The Sept. 6 attack by Israeli warplanes inside Syria struck what Israeli intelligence believes was a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, according to current and former American and Israeli officials.

Details about the Israeli assessment emerged as China abruptly canceled planned diplomatic talks in Beijing that were to set a schedule to disband nuclear facilities in North Korea. The Bush administration has declined to comment on the Israeli raid, but American officials were expected to confront the North Koreans about their suspected nuclear support for Syria during those talks.

The American and Israeli officials said the Israeli government notified the Bush administration about the planned attack just before the raid. It is not clear whether administration officials expressed support for the action or counseled against it.

The raid has aroused intense speculation in Washington and Jerusalem, but details remain extraordinarily murky. Officials said access to new intelligence about suspected North Korean support to Syria has been confined to a very small group of officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

The details of the Israeli intelligence remain highly classified, and the accounts about Israel’s thinking were provided by current and former officials who are generally sympathetic to Israel’s point of view. It is not clear whether American intelligence agencies agree with the Israeli assessment about the facility targeted in the raid, and some officials expressed doubt that Syria has either the money or the scientific talent to initiate a serious nuclear program.

But current and former American and Israeli officials who have received briefings from Israeli sources said Monday that the raid was an attempt by Israel to destroy a site that Israel believed to be associated with a rudimentary Syrian nuclear program.

The allegations come at a particularly delicate time, with the United States and several Asian countries testing whether North Korea is serious about dismantling its nuclear production facilities and providing a full accounting of all its nuclear facilities, fuel and weapons.

Israel is also wary of complicating continuing peace talks involving other countries in the Middle East about the future of a Palestinian state. In particular, the Bush administration has not decided yet whether Syria will be invited to a Middle East peace conference that is to be held in Washington in November. A tense Israel-Syria standoff would further complicate that decision, Israeli and American officials said.

The Sept. 6 strike was carried out several days after a ship with North Korean cargo tracked by Israeli intelligence docked in a Syrian port, according to the current and former officials. The cargo was transferred to the site that Israel later attacked, the officials said. It is unclear exactly what the shipment contained. A former top American official said the Israelis had monitored the site for some time before the ship arrived. The ship’s arrival in Syria before the raid was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post.

It is also unclear why China decided at the 11th hour to postpone the planned talks, but Beijing’s decision seemed to put off a possible confrontation between the United States and North Korea that could have scuttled the diplomatic talks with North Korea.

Christopher R. Hill, the top American negotiator for the talks, had already packed his bags and was preparing to depart for Beijing when he was notified of China’s decision to delay the negotiations, American officials said.

North Korea has a long relationship with Syria, mostly involving the sale of weapons, particularly technology for relatively primitive missiles. But it has never been caught exporting nuclear-related material to either Syria or Iran, another of its customers for missile technology.

On Sunday on Fox News, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates declined to confirm either whether Israel had attacked targets in Syria or whether North Korea was providing nuclear-related assistance to that Arab country. But he warned, “If such an activity were taking place, it would be a matter of great concern because the president has put down a very strong marker with the North Koreans about further proliferation efforts, and obviously any effort by the Syrians to pursue weapons of mass destruction would be a concern.”

A senior North Korean diplomat dismissed the accusations, the South Korean news agency Yonhap said Sunday. “They often say things that are groundless,” Kim Myong-gil, North Korea’s deputy United Nations mission chief, told Yonhap.

Whether North Korean actions could ultimately cause a breakdown in disarmament talks may well depend on what, if anything, the United States concludes about the nature of any illicit relationship between Syria and the North.

The most benign of the theories is that the cargo had no use in a nuclear program. Another theory is that any equipment shipped from North Korea to Syria was designed to help Syria mine uranium and transform it into enriched uranium. That could mean that Syria is involved in only the early stages of any nuclear activity, and it could argue that the mining operation is for something other than weapons.

But any shipment of nuclear fuel to Syria by North Korea would be much more significant, though that is considered less likely and very risky for North Korea at this time.

“It would almost defy credibility that the North Koreans would be willing to risk so much to engage in a nuclear weapons-related proliferation,” said Evans Revere, the president of the Korea Society in New York and a former senior American diplomat in Seoul.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

September 18, 2007

While American soldiers fight to establish a secular democracy abroad, many Americans want to create a Christian nation at home.

Consider the findings of “State of the First Amendment 2007,” a national survey released this week by the First Amendment Center. Significant numbers of Americans express support for government sponsorship of the majority religion, especially in public schools:

•58 percent want teacher-led prayers in schools.

•43 percent endorse school holiday programs that are entirely Christian and devotional.

•50 percent would allow public school teachers to teach the Bible as a “factual text” in history classes.

Despite the fact that all of the above are unconstitutional under current law, many people see nothing wrong – and much right – with school officials privileging or even endorsing the Christian faith.

Transpose the location (or substitute another religion) and the result would surely be very different. Would Americans support the creation of an Iraqi state where the majority Shiites imposed their prayers, religious celebrations and scriptures on all Iraqi schoolchildren? Not likely.

On the contrary, we send young Americans to fight for an Iraq where people of all faiths will be protected from state-imposed religion. Why? Because we understand that (however quixotic the quest) only a secular democracy in Iraq with no established faith will guarantee religious freedom – and end sectarian strife.

Closer to home, however, many Americans seem to think our framers had another idea. According to the First Amendment poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) agree that our nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation. Even more striking, 55 percent believe that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. (For complete survey results, visit www.firstamendmentcenter.org/ sofa_reports/index.aspx)

Now, it’s true that many (but not all) of our founders were Christians. And it’s true that the Protestant majority dominated the nation’s institutions for much of our early history. But the U.S. Constitution nowhere mentions God or Christianity, an omission that was widely criticized in 1787.

In fact, the only mention of religion in the body of the Constitution (before the addition of the religious-liberty clauses of the First Amendment) is the “no religious test” for public office provision of Article VI. By ensuring that people of all faiths or none could hold office, the founders made clear their intention to found a secular republic committed to full religious freedom.

Of course, people define “Christian nation” in various ways – ranging from a nation that reflects Christian virtues to a nation where the government promotes the Christian faith. But under any definition, the Constitution in no way establishes or creates a Christian nation.

Some might argue that teacher-led prayers or Nativity pageants in public schools are a far cry from the dangers of a Shiite (or Sunni) theocracy in Iraq. Perhaps. But the lesson of history is that when a majority uses the government to promote the majority religion, conflict and oppression inevitably follow.

That brings me to the most disturbing finding of the First Amendment Center poll: 28 percent of Americans believe that “freedom to worship as one chooses” was never meant to apply to religious groups that the majority of the people consider “extreme or on the fringe.”

At various times in our history, that would have meant no religious freedom for Baptists, Roman Catholics or Mormons. Today it would deny liberty to any number of small or unpopular religious groups.

Fortunately, our founders understood that the great danger of majority rule is majority denial of fundamental human rights. That’s why they wisely put some rights – religious liberty first among them – beyond the reach of majority vote.

The United States is not now and never has been a Christian nation in any official or legal sense of the term. It is precisely because we live in a secular democracy with First Amendment protections that Christians – and people of all faiths – have more freedom to practice their religion here than anywhere else on Earth.

Michael Barone
September 18, 2007

“Never in the history of the United States had lawyers had such extraordinary influence over war policy as they did after 9/11.” Those are the words of Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard law professor who was one of those lawyers, as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004. They appear in his book “The Terror Presidency,” hailed as a criticism of the Bush administration’s legal policies, which in part it is.

Believing that some of his predecessor’s opinions, particularly two on interrogation techniques, were “deeply flawed,” he reversed them. He argues that the administration would have ended up with more latitude in fighting terrorism if it had worked with Congress to get legislation, even if those laws would not have been as expansive as the administration wanted. It’s a serious argument, and he also presents fairly, I think, the opposing view that such restrictions would make it harder to protect the American people.

But anyone who goes beyond the first newspaper stories and reads the book will find another message. For one thing, Goldsmith also supports many much-criticized policies – the detention of unlawful combatants in Afghanistan and their confinement in Guantanamo, trials by military commissions, the terrorist surveillance program. And he rejects the charge that the administration has disregarded the rule of law. Quite the contrary. “The opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001, this war has been lawyered to death.” There has been a “daily clash inside the Bush administration between fear of another attack, which drives officials into doing whatever they can to prevent it, and the countervailing fear of violating the law, which checks their urge toward prevention.”

It was not always so, he points out. In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt ordered military commissions to try the eight Nazi saboteurs who had landed on our shores; the Supreme Court unanimously approved, and six were executed six weeks after they were apprehended, to the applause of the media of the day. But FDR “acted in a permissive legal culture that is barely recognizable to us today.”

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress passed laws that criminalized military and civilian officers who broke the rules on electronic surveillance and detainee treatment: “the criminalization of warfare.” Its ban on political assassination deterred the Clinton administration from gunning down Osama bin Laden. The CIA has become so wary of possible criminal charges that it urges agents to buy insurance. Developments in international law, especially the doctrine of universal decision, also threaten U.S. government officials with possible prosecution abroad. All of this creates a risk-averseness that leaves us more vulnerable to terrorists.

The CIA today employs more than 100 lawyers, the Pentagon 10,000. “Every weapon used by the U.S. military, and most of the targets they are used against, are vetted and cleared by lawyers in advance,” Goldsmith notes. In this respect, the national security community resembles the larger society. As Philip Howard of Common Good points out, we are stripping jungle gyms from playgrounds and paying for unneeded medical tests for fear of lawsuits.

The audiotapes released last week of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s interrogation remind us that we are faced with evil enemies and that getting information from them can save lives. Goldsmith, who withdrew his predecessor’s interrogation opinions, nevertheless understands this and makes a strong case that our national security apparatus is overlawyered.

Most Americans seem to agree; an Investor’s Business Daily poll shows that more than 60 percent of Americans – and majorities of Democrats as well as Republicans – favor wiretapping terrorist suspects without warrants, increased surveillance, retaining the Patriot Act and holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo. Unfortunately, the 30 percent or so who disagree are disproportionately represented in the legal profession and in the media.

The 1970s laws that have helped produce the overlawyering of this war were prompted by the misdeeds of one or two presidents. But they will hamper the efforts of our current president as well as his successors in responding to a threat that is likely to continue for many years to come.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — Two Senate Democrats warned Monday that the Judiciary Committee would delay confirmation of President Bush’s choice for attorney general unless the White House turned over documents that the panel was seeking for several investigations.

Mr. Bush announced the selection of Michael B. Mukasey, a retired federal judge from New York who has presided over several high-profile terrorism trials, during a morning Rose Garden ceremony. He urged the Senate to confirm Mr. Mukasey promptly as the nation’s 81st attorney general, succeeding Alberto R. Gonzales, who resigned last month under withering attacks from Democrats on Capitol Hill.

“Judge Mukasey is clear-eyed about the threat our nation faces,” Mr. Bush said, with the 66-year-old former jurist by his side. “As a judge and a private lawyer, he’s written on matters of constitutional law and national security. He knows what it takes to fight this war effectively.”

If confirmed, Mr. Mukasey would take over a department that has been burdened by the weight of Congressional inquiries into the dismissals of federal prosecutors and the administration’s domestic wiretapping program. Democrats have expressed deep concerns about that program, and one of the first tasks of any new attorney general would be to go to Capitol Hill to negotiate legislation reauthorizing it.

The selection of Mr. Mukasey — a Washington outsider who met Mr. Bush for the first time during an hour-long interview at the White House on Sept. 1 — seemed to signal that the administration is looking to move past the partisanship that characterized Mr. Gonzales’s tenure.

But two Democrats who will have a powerful say over whether Mr. Mukasey gets confirmed — Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Charles E. Schumer of New York — vowed on Monday to use the nomination to extract information from a reluctant White House.

“All I want is the material we need to ask some questions about the former attorney general’s conduct, on torture and warrantless wiretapping, so we can legitimately ask, ‘Here’s what was done in the past, what will you do?”’ Mr. Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, said.

In brief remarks after Mr. Bush spoke, Mr. Mukasey said he was honored to be asked to lead a department where he had worked as a prosecutor 35 years ago. While Justice officials face vastly different challenges now, he said, “the principles that guide the department remain the same: to pursue justice by enforcing the law with unswerving fidelity to the Constitution.”

The White House wants Mr. Mukasey confirmed by Oct. 8, when the Senate leaves for its next recess. But Mr. Leahy said there would be no quick confirmation without the documents. He said he had told the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, that “cooperation with the White House would be central” to scheduling hearings.

Senator Schumer, for his part, seemed on Monday to take on the role of mediator between Mr. Leahy and the White House. On Sunday, Mr. Schumer — who first floated Mr. Mukasey’s name with the White House as a potential Supreme Court nominee four years ago — praised Mr. Mukasey as a potential “consensus nominee.” On Monday, he said he had told Mr. Fielding that the White House would have to resolve Mr. Leahy’s concerns, but also said he was optimistic the dispute could be resolved.

“Chairman Leahy’s concern is genuine,” Mr. Schumer said. “He strongly defends the prerogatives of the committee. I stressed that to both Fielding and Mukasey. It would be much better for everyone concerned if they could reach an agreement.”

The White House is trying to cast the Mukasey confirmation as urgent, and in private top aides to Mr. Bush said they were expecting that Democrats would not want a messy confirmation fight. Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, said the request for documents and the confirmation are “separate issues that should not be linked.”

Some Democrats reacted with caution to the Mukasey nomination on Monday. Several, like Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, said Mr. Mukasey would have to prove that he is independent of Mr. Bush and that he can repair the damage done to the department by Mr. Gonzales, whom many Democrats regarded as a crony of the president.

Others, like Senator Joseph I. Biden Jr. of Delaware, sounded surprised by what they regarded as an unusual White House overture. Mr. Biden said he was “pleased that President Bush put aside his old habits and picked an outside professional to nominate as attorney general, rather than a member of his own circle.”

With just 16 months left in his administration, Mr. Bush can ill afford a nasty confirmation fight, and the White House had been extremely concerned about finding a consensus nominee — so much so that it found itself trying to fend off criticism not only from the left, but also the right.

Conservatives in Washington had set their sights on Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general. But Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said last week that Democrats found Mr. Olson too partisan and would block his nomination.

White House officials would not say how seriously Mr. Bush had considered Mr. Olson — or even confirm that he had been under consideration. But they did say the president had interviewed several candidates, and that he offered Mr. Mukasey the job on Friday. William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, said that top aides to Mr. Bush had already been sounding out conservatives about Mr. Mukasey by the time he was offered the job.

“The White House was very interested in Mukasey 10 days ago; they were already probing to get more information about him and how conservatives would react,” Mr. Kristol said. “So I don’t buy the argument that they backed off in the face of Reid’s criticism.”

Still, the White House had to sell the nomination to conservatives, and over the weekend, top aides to Mr. Bush made a furious attempt to do so, inviting at least six leading conservative thinkers to the White House for meetings with Mr. Mukasey. Participants said a range of issues were discussed, from Mr. Mukasey’s views on national security matters to his Republican pedigree.

Expected nomination eases Senate battle

Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen
Washington Post
September 17, 2007

WASHINGTON – President Bush has selected retired federal judge Michael Mukasey as his new attorney general, sources said Sunday, moving to install a law-and-order conservative at the Justice Department while hoping to avoid a confirmation fight with Senate Democrats.

The nomination of Mukasey, considered an authority on national security issues, could come as early as this morning, the sources said. The White House was already seeking over the weekend to tamp down concern in the conservative legal world about Mukasey’s positions, assuring allies that he shares Bush’s views on executive power and the need for strong action against terrorists.

In picking Mukasey, Bush would sidestep the uproar that would have erupted in the Senate had he chosen one of the early front-runners, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson. Some conservatives made clear their puzzlement that Bush was passing over one of their favorites for someone who has been praised by Senate liberals and their allies.

But the White House apparently decided that Mukasey is conservative enough, and that it is important to restore confidence in the Justice Department as quickly as possible, with a choice that could garner bipartisan support. The department has been in turmoil under Alberto Gonzales, the Bush confidant whose firing of nine U.S. attorneys and the ensuing controversy led to his resignation last month.

Senate Democrats and their allies signaled that they were likely to accept Mukasey without a big fight and said they saw the pick as a conciliatory gesture. .

“While he is certainly conservative, Judge Mukasey seems to be the kind of nominee who would put rule of law first and show independence from the White House, our most important criteria,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a frequent critic of the Gonzales Justice Department, said in a statement. “For sure, we’d want to ascertain his approach on such important and sensitive issues as wiretapping and the appointment of U.S. attorneys, but he’s a lot better than some of the other names mentioned and he has the potential to become a consensus nominee.”

Meanwhile, some conservatives close to the White House seemed prepared to accept the president’s judgment about Mukasey, who also has close ties to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor.

“He has all the objective qualifications to be an excellent attorney general,” said Edward Whelan, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “He’s not well known, so there would be some question marks in the minds of a lot of folks if he’s nominated. But my strong sense is that the more people learn about him, the more impressed they will be.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino declined to comment Sunday.

Mukasey would be the latest in a string of key Bush appointments that come from outside Texas or the president’s inner circle and seem less ideological than some of his previous appointments.

In 1987, he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan as a U.S. District Court judge in the Southern District of New York. He spent the next 19 years in Manhattan’s federal court, including the last six years as the chief judge. He retired in 2006 to return to the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.

As a federal judge, Mukasey was best known for his expertise on national security issues, in part because he presided over the trials of “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mukasey lived under heavy federal security for years because of his connection with that case. He also handled the early case against Jose Padilla, who was declared an “enemy combatant” by Bush in 2002. Mukasey ruled that the government had the power to make the declaration but found that Padilla should have access to his lawyers.

As a prominent judge in one of the country’s busiest courts, Mukasey was involved in other high-profile cases, including battles between insurance companies and a World Trade Center developer after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He dismissed in 2004 lawsuits against an Italian insurance company for policies held by Holocaust victims.

Baruch Weiss, a partner at the law firm of Arent Fox and a former federal prosecutor in New York who appeared before Mukasey, described him as a very smart, businesslike judge who kept things moving quickly in his courtroom and who has a reputation for integrity. Weiss said Mukasey’s appeal to the White House most likely was his independent stature; he is not, as he put it, “someone who would simply be doing the president’s bidding.”

“He is thoughtful, independent, very much a person of integrity – he’s nobody’s plaything,” said Paul Engelmayer, a Democrat and former supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. “If there is an analogy here, it’s to (former FBI Director) Louis Freeh – who obviously bedeviled Clinton. He will not be a tool of the Bushies.”

Some of Mukasey’s public pronouncements have pleased conservatives. During one 2004 speech, excerpts of which were published by the Wall Street Journal, Mukasey strongly defended the controversial USA Patriot Act antiterrorism law and said its “Orwellian name … may very well be the worst thing about the statute.”

He also scoffed at complaints from librarians and others that the statute gave the government too much power to spy on ordinary Americans, arguing that the allegations were not supported by evidence.

Mukasey, who was Manhattan’s chief federal judge at the time, also defended a wave of terrorism-related immigration arrests by the FBI after the Sept. 11 attacks. “We should keep in mind that any investigation conducted by fallible human beings in the aftermath of an attack is bound to be either over-inclusive or under-inclusive,” Mukasey said. “There are consequences both ways. The consequences of over-inclusiveness include condemnations. The consequences of under-inclusiveness include condolences.”

The view from Democrats and their allies Sunday seemed to be that Mukasey was about the best they could hope for from Bush. Ralph Neas, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, predicted Mukasey’s confirmation, assuming he is willing to answer “legitimate questions” from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“He seems like a bona fide conservative Republican, not a right-wing ideologue,” Neas said. “He seems like someone who would attract strong bipartisan support and who could help restore public confidence in the Department of Justice.”

Related Story:  Mukasey no stranger to terror-related cases

Devlin Barrett
Associated Press
September 17, 2007

WASHINGTON – Retired judge Michael Mukasey is intimately familiar with the nation’s legal battles over terrorism. He played a central role in such cases for over a decade – much of that time getting around-the-clock protection from armed guards.

Mukasey, 66, once worked as a reporter, but gave it up to pursue a career in law. He was nominated to the federal bench in 1987 by President Reagan and eventually became the chief judge of the high-profile Manhattan courthouse.

As such, he played a key role in the nation’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks, which brought down the World Trade Center towers just blocks from Mukasey’s courthouse.

In the days after the attacks, Mukasey and other New York judges worked behind closed doors, seeing some of the first material witnesses detained by federal authorities.

Civil liberties advocates contended the material witness cases amounted to an unconstitutional roundup, and an inspector general’s report later found that many of the witnesses were subjected to physical and verbal abuse while held in a Brooklyn jail.

Mukasey also had a hand in one of the most hard-fought post-Sept. 11 terror cases: that of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2002 on a supposed mission to detonate a “dirty bomb.”

The judge appointed a lawyer to represent Padilla, but before a hearing on whether there was sufficient cause to detain Padilla, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant. That started a legal odyssey that ended with Padilla in a different federal court. He was convicted last month of murder conspiracy, and faces sentencing later this year.

Mukasey wrote an opinion piece recently in which he argued the Padilla case shows the current legal system is not well-equipped to aid a largely military effort to fight terrorists. He urged Congress to consider passing new laws to improve what he said was a mismatched legal system.

In all, Mukasey handled terrorist cases for more than a decade.

In the 1996 sentencing of co-conspirators in a plot to blow up several New York City landmarks, Mukasey accused Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman of trying to spread death “in a scale unseen in this country since the Civil War.” He then sentenced the blind sheik to life in prison.

There was a time when Bush administration officials held a dimmer view of Mukasey’s handling of that case, partly because it took 1-1/2 years to reach trial, a massive undertaking with more than 150 witnesses and 1,500 exhibits. The case ended with 11 convictions.

After the 2001 attacks, the government transferred the most important terror defendant, Zacarias Moussaoui, from New York to Virginia, where they hoped the Virginia court’s “rocket docket” would swiftly deliver the case to jurors more inclined to choose the death penalty.

Mukasey, then the chief judge in New York, had a caustic rejoinder to suggestions his courthouse was too slow.

“It’s easy to have a rocket docket when you have horse-and-buggy cases,” Mukasey said.

He has boosters among some of Bush’s toughest Democratic critics. Sen. Charles Schumer, of New York, had previously recommended Mukasey for the Supreme Court.

Betsy Z. Russell
Staff writer
September 17, 2007

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota has filed a brief backing Idaho Sen. Larry Craig in his Minnesota court case, in which Craig is seeking to withdraw his guilty plea in an airport restroom sex solicitation sting.

“The actions of police in this restroom, the sting operations, are things that have been conducted against gay men forever,” said Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the Minnesota ACLU. “The object of the exercise, fundamentally, was never really to stop solicitation of sex but rather to ‘out’ gay males.”

Craig has strenuously denied that he is gay, and said a police officer misconstrued his foot-tapping and hand gestures in the airport restroom. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge in the June incident, but after the news came to light, began working to withdraw his plea. Craig faces a court hearing in Minnesota on Sept. 26.

Craig’s lead attorney in the case, Billy Martin, said, “We welcome the ACLU’s filing today and their involvement in this case.”

He noted, “We have argued to the court that the facts which Sen. Craig admits happened on that day do not constitute a crime. The ACLU’s legal position is that Sen. Craig’s arrest may have violated his constitutional rights. Furthermore, the ACLU’s position is the sting conducted by the airport police may also violate the protection the United States Constitution provides all of us.”

Martin said, “We are hopeful the court will agree with the legal arguments and the facts that we have presented and allow Sen. Craig to withdraw the guilty plea on Sept. 26.”

Samuelson, whose group filed its “friend of the court” brief this morning in 4th District Court in Minneapolis, said, “Frankly, I could care less what the senator’s sexual proclivities are. But from a First Amendment point of view, the ACLU hates to see this stuff happen. … Our client is not Sen. Craig, but rather freedom of speech.”

Judge Charles Porter in Minneapolis likely will rule soon on whether to allow the ACLU arguments to be considered in the case, court spokesman Jamie Smith said.

The legal brief argues that the law under which Craig pleaded guilty unconstitutionally makes speech and private sexual solicitation into crimes. “Sex is a constitutionally protected liberty interest,” the brief states. “An invitation to have private sex is constitutionally protected and may not be made a crime. This is so even where the proposition occurs in a public place, whether in a bar or in a restroom.”

It notes that one 1970 Minnesota Supreme Court case held that two men engaged in sexual activity in a department store restroom with the stall door closed had a reasonable expectation of privacy. “They were, the court held, therefore acting in a private, not a public place,” the brief states.

It also says that posting a sign that the restroom was patrolled would have been a better deterrent to public sex than a sting operation.

Said Samuelson, “The entire sting is constitutionally suspect.”

The ACLU of Minnesota filed a motion along with its brief, asking the court to consider its arguments in the case. In the motion, the group said it has more than 10,000 members in Minnesota who “share a commitment to the defense of the rights that are guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Among the most fundamental of these rights are the right to due process and the right to free expression.”

The motion said, “The outcome of this case will have a broader impact on the constitutional rights of other individuals facing prosecution” under Minnesota laws.

Iraq war protesters participate in a “die-in” event Saturday on Capitol Hill in Washington. Associated Press (Associated Press) Related stories Iraq conflict

Michelle Boorstein, V. Dion Haynes and Allison Klein
Washington Post
September 16, 2007

WASHINGTON – A march by thousands of protesters demanding an end to the Iraq war turned chaotic Saturday afternoon near the Capitol, where hundreds sprawled on the ground in a symbolic “die-in.” Police arrested 189 people, including 10 who organizers said were veterans of the war.

Capitol Police used chemical spray against a small number of the protesters and pushed back others who tried to jump a barrier in a self-described effort to be arrested. The “die-in,” on a walkway in front of the Capitol, was generally peaceful, but scores of arrests came when protesters tried to climb over metal fences and a low stone wall.

Iraq veteran Geoff Millard, 26, of Columbia Heights, Md., wore fatigues and clutched an American flag as he lay on the ground before he was arrested. “It’s time for the peace movement to take the next step past protest and to resistance,” said Millard, president of the D.C. chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

It was an unruly end to a day that started in brilliant sunshine with two separate, largely upbeat rallies. One began about noon at Lafayette Square, across from the White House, and was organized by the anti-war ANSWER Coalition. The other, a few hours earlier on the Mall, was organized by Gathering of Eagles, a group of Vietnam veterans, and the D.C. chapter of the conservative group Free Republic. Their message: The Iraq war can be and is being won, and the troops need unqualified support.

“We just want a chance to show America we don’t agree with the vocal minority,” said Deborah King-Lile, 55, of St. Augustine, Fla.

The march opposing the war was led by about 50 veterans who served in Iraq, according to Iraq Veterans Against the War. Many wore fatigues as the crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, where several blocks were lined with war supporters. At times, back-and-forth shouting grew confrontational and obscene.

March organizers said Iraq war veterans were more involved and visible at Saturday’s protest than in any other similar demonstration since the conflict began. Activists said they are planning “a week of action” meant to push the anti-war movement to a more confrontational stage.

Organizers of the anti-war event said tens of thousands turned out. A law enforcement official, who declined to be indentified because authorities no longer provide crowd counts, estimated the gathering at closer to 10,000; the march permit obtained in advance by ANSWER had projected that number.

Early in the day, Lafayette Square took on a festive atmosphere, with some war protesters wearing wigs and costumes and others drumming and playing music even as passionate speeches were given. Vietnam veterans chatted with Iraq war veterans young enough to be their children.

Among the speakers were several Iraq war veterans, Green Party leader Ralph Nader and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who talked about the Iraqis exiled to refugee camps, left hungry and facing cholera and other diseases. “You can’t believe a word the administration says,” Clark said.

But supporters of the Bush administration, well represented in the Gathering of Eagles and Free Republic counter-demonstrations, could not have disagreed more.

“I’ve seen how leftist politicians hate the military. It’s disgusting. We’re fighting a war not in Iraq but with them,” said Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a retired Air Force pilot.

War supporters staked out three blocks on Pennyslvania Avenue to await the war protesters. A large police presence and metal barricades separated the groups, but not their words.

“Commies out of D.C.!” came the chants from one corner of 10th Street NW. Across the street, two middle-aged men shouted obscenities into the face of a young man in full camouflage and a bandana that concealed all but his eyes. The young man remained silent amid the screaming, holding a sign over his head that read “Support the troops, end the war.”

David S. Broder
Washington Post
September 16, 2007

Now that the president has endorsed the Petraeus-Crocker plan for Iraq, it is worthwhile noting one exchange from their Senate hearings.

Some senators, such as Barbara Boxer of California, were so self-absorbed they could not manage to ask a single question in their allotted time, even when they had Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker ready to provide answers.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is not like that. An Air Force Reserve officer, Graham is an incisive questioner whose unexpected and provocative inquiries often produce revealing answers, whether the subject is Iraq, immigration or a Supreme Court nomination.

A Republican with a notable record of independence, Graham has been an outspoken advocate of the “surge” strategy – claiming real success on the ground and urging its continuation.

But Graham’s first question to Petraeus called on the general to “put on the table as honestly as we can what lies ahead for the American people and the U.S. military if we continue to stay in Iraq. … It’s highly likely that a year from now we’re going to have at least 100,000 troops in Iraq?”

“That is probably the case,” Petraeus said. “Yes, sir.”

Graham’s follow-up was even more surprising. “How many people are we losing a month, on average, since the surge began, in terms of killed in action?”

“Killed in action is probably in the neighborhood of 60 to 90.”

Graham then noted that “we’re spending $9 billion a month to stay in Iraq. … So you’re saying to the Congress that you know that at least 60 soldiers, airmen and Marines are likely to be killed every month from now to July, that we’re going to spend $9 billion a month of American taxpayer dollars, and when it’s all said and done, we’ll still have 100,000 people there. You believe it’s worth it in terms of our national security interests to pay that price?”

Petraeus said, “Sir, I wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t have made the recommendations that I have made, if I did not believe that.”

After a few more questions, Graham turned to Crocker and confronted him with a surprising question: “What’s the difference between a dysfunctional government and a failed state?”

Crocker replied: “In a parliamentary democratic system such as Iraq has, there is a mechanism for the removal of governments that people get tired of. Parliament can simply vote no confidence.”

That sounded to me – and to Graham – like a hint that the United States would welcome a change from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki if new and more flexible leadership were to appear in Baghdad.

Graham wanted to underline that message. “Would you agree with me,” he asked Crocker, “that Iraq is a dysfunctional government at this moment in time?”

“Certainly, it is a challenged government,” Crocker replied.

“You’ve called it dysfunctional,” Graham said. “The point I’m trying to make is, to anybody who’s watched this, this government is in a dysfunctional state. The point I’m trying to make, there’s a difference between still trying and not trying.”

When I talked with Graham on Thursday, he said he had asked those questions because “I am sick and tired of people posing choices between the two extremes; I want reality-based policy. Harry Reid (the Senate Democratic leader) is as bad as Donald Rumsfeld was in rejecting reality. He said in April that the war is lost, and he refuses to accept anything else.”

But Graham said he thought Crocker was “making a pretty major statement that the clock is running out on the Maliki government – and we can have an effect on it by what we do here.”

“There are alternatives,” he said – Shiite political leaders who are willing, for example, to tour the Baghdad jails with Graham and be photographed with Sunnis who are protesting the imprisonment of so many of their co-religionists. “The good news,” Graham said, “is that Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites are ready to play politics. Judges feel more secure because of the surge, and that is important, because all of them have experienced rough justice.

“What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues – oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections – in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state.”

Despite the president’s words, that sounds realistic.

“Senator Clinton has the experience, good judgment and the battle-tested character to face the challenges ahead,” Clark told The Associated Press.

Clark, who joined the Democratic field four years ago largely due to an active online draft movement, planned to discuss his endorsement on a conference call with bloggers later Saturday.

A decorated career Army officer who graduated first in his class at West Point, Clark served as NATO’s supreme allied commander and led the Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo war under President Bill Clinton.

Clark received numerous military commendations throughout his 34-year career and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Clark’s brief foray into presidential politics was not as successful.

He was a latecomer to the 2004 field. His military credentials and forceful criticism of President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq war propelled him to the top of polls for a time. But he stumbled on his first full day as a candidate, saying he “probably” would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion. Questions about that statement dogged him for the rest of the campaign.

Clark left the race in February after finishing a weak third in New Hampshire and winning just one primary – Oklahoma’s – after that. He endorsed the eventual Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Clark has remained active in politics, running a political action committee, WESpac, and campaigning for Democratic candidates around the country.

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Mr. Bush, he writes, was never willing to contain spending or veto bills that drove the country into deeper and deeper deficits, as Congress abandoned rules that required that the cost of tax cuts be offset by savings elsewhere. “The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” writes Mr. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican.”

“They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose” in the 2006 election, when they lost control of the House and Senate.

As officials leave the Bush administration, there is no shortage of criticism of this White House: Disenchanted hawks are writing that Mr. Bush has abandoned the certainties of the first term and taken too soft a line on North Korea and Iran; from the other side of the spectrum, former officials are telling tales about how the administration bent rules on torture or domestic spying.

But Mr. Greenspan, now 81, is in a different class, by dint of his fame, his economic authority and his service across party lines. His critiques are likely to have more resonance among Mr. Bush’s base.

His book was provided to The New York Times by his publisher, Penguin Press, under an agreement that nothing would be reported until its publication date, on Monday. But The Wall Street Journal, saying it had purchased a copy from a retailer, published excerpts on its Web site on Friday night, freeing other news organizations to do the same.

Much of the book concerns Mr. Greenspan’s reflections on markets, globalization and the media’s fascination with the thickness of his briefcase on the way to meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates.

He praises President Bush for letting the Fed stay independent of political pressure, saying he was scrupulous in not trying to interfere with monetary policy — which he contrasts sharply with the pressure exerted by his father, George H. W. Bush, in the early 1990s. For years, the first President Bush has blamed Mr. Greenspan for contributing to his defeat in 1992 by failing to prevent a recession by cutting interest rates.

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

It was a presidency marred by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he writes, but he fondly describes his alliance with two of Mr. Clinton’s Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, in battling financial crises in Latin America and then Asia.

By contrast, Mr. Greenspan paints a picture of Mr. Bush as a man driven more by ideology and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000, incurious about the effects of his economic policy, and an administration incapable of executing policy.

The White House is clearly not eager to get into a public argument with Mr. Greenspan, whom President Bush reappointed to a fifth term in May 2004. But they pushed back at Mr. Greenspan’s central themes.

“The Republican leadership in the House and Senate kept to our top number,” Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said. Veto threats worked, he said, to keep spending within caps set by the White House. “We’re not going to apologize for standing up the Department of Homeland Security and fighting terror.”

Mr. Greenspan described his own emotional journey in dealing with Mr. Bush, from an initial elation about the return of his old friends from the Ford White House — including Mr. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense — to astonishment and then disappointment at how much they had changed.

“I indulged in a bit of fantasy, envisioning this as the government that might have existed had Gerald Ford garnered the extra 1 percent of the vote he’d needed to edge past Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Greenspan writes in his memoir. “I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets.”

Instead, Mr. Greenspan continued, “I was soon to see my old friends veer off in unexpected directions.” He expected Mr. Bush to veto spending bills, he writes, but was told that the president believed he could control J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the Republican speaker of the House, better by signing them.

“My friend,” he writes of Mr. O’Neill, “soon found himself to be the odd man out; much to my disappointment, economic policymaking in the Bush administration remained firmly in the hands of the White House staff.”

He was clearly referring to the political team led by Karl Rove at the White House. Mr. Rove was a neighbor of Mr. Greenspan in a leafy enclave near the Potomac River, but the two men almost never had a conversation.

In responding to Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Fratto of the White House disputed the accusation that Mr. O’Neill’s economic arguments were ignored. “Just because you don’t carry the day doesn’t mean your views weren’t considered,” Mr. Fratto said.

Though Mr. Greenspan does not admit he made a mistake, he shows remorse about how Republicans jumped on his endorsement of the 2001 tax cuts to push through unconditional cuts without any safeguards against surprises. He recounts how Mr. Rubin and Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, begged him to hold off on an endorsement because of how it would be perceived.

“It turned out that Conrad and Rubin were right,” he acknowledges glumly. He says Republican leaders in Congress made a grievous error in spending whatever it took to ensure a permanent Republican majority.

Mr. Greenspan has critics as well, and they are likely to weigh in as soon as the book is published. Though he publicly disagreed with Mr. Bush’s supply-side approach to tax cuts, urging Congress to offset the cost with savings elsewhere, he refrained from public criticism that could have shifted the debate. His willingness to criticize now, 18 months after leaving office, may open him to the accusation of failing to speak out when it could have affected policy.

Today, Mr. Greenspan is indignant and chagrined about his role in the Bush tax cuts. “I’d have given the same testimony if Al Gore had been president,” he writes, complaining that his words had been distorted by supporters and opponents of the cuts.

Mr. Greenspan, of course, had been the ultimate Washington insider for years, and knew full well that politicians cited his words selectively to suit their agendas. He was also legendary for ducking delicate issues by, as he once said, “mumbling with great incoherence.”

Mr. Greenspan’s memoir describes at some length the monetary policies that many economists say fostered the extraordinary economic boom of the 1990s. In what is widely regarded as a brilliant insight, Mr. Greenspan became convinced the United States could grow faster than generally thought because productivity was climbing much faster than the official statistics implied.

Mr. Greenspan writes briefly about what may become a more troubling legacy, the housing bubble, and now the bust, that was fueled by low interest rates and risky mortgages in the last six years.

Some economists argue that Mr. Greenspan deserves considerable blame, because the Fed slashed interest rates to rock-bottom lows and kept them there for three years after the stock market collapse and the recession in 2001.

The Fed was “a prime culprit in creating the crisis,” wrote Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine, in a just-published commentary. But other economists, including critics of Mr. Greenspan, say the housing bubble resulted from much broader forces, including a dramatic drop of interest rates around the world and an explosion of mortgages that required no money down, no income verification and deceptively low initial teaser rates.

Mr. Greenspan generically defends the Fed’s action, writing: “I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk. Protection of property rights, so critical to a market economy, requires a critical mass of owners to sustain political support.”

The book appears in stores on Monday, the day before the Fed is expected to lower interest rates in an effort to prevent the collapsing housing market from taking the rest of the economy down with it.

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Now that President Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus have charted their course for the Iraq war, Democrats in the Senate say one of their proposals aimed at shifting the president’s strategy is finally close to winning enough Republican support for a real chance at being approved. It would require that troops spend as much time at home as on their most recent tours overseas before being redeployed.

The proposal, by Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, has strong support from top Democrats, who say that the practical effect would be to add time between deployments and force General Petraeus to withdraw troops on a substantially swifter timeline than the one he laid out before Congress this week, and that it would protect troops from serving protracted and debilitating deployments.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware and a candidate for president, called the proposal the “easiest way” for his Republican colleagues to change the war strategy on the same day that the Bush administration released a mixed report on the Iraqi government’s progress toward various goals.

The Pentagon sought on Friday to challenge the Democrats’ approach, with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates saying at a Pentagon news conference that it would only create further hardships for the military, including the prospect of even lengthier tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates called the proposal “well-intentioned,” but said it might require extending tours of units already in Iraq, calling up additional National Guard and Reserve troops, and making other adjustments that “would further stress the force and reduce its combat effectiveness.”

“The complexity of managing the flow of units, individuals and capabilities to two active combat theaters is enormous and does not lend itself to simplistic, or to simple, legislative prescriptions,” Mr. Gates said at a briefing with Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The cumulative effect of these kinds of things, we think, would, frankly, increase the risk to our men and women in uniform over there.”

Mr. Gates also said Friday that he hoped that it would be possible to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq to about 100,000 by the end of 2008, a target that officials have for months described as a White House goal, but one that would go well beyond the cuts announced this week by Mr. Bush. Mr. Gates repeated that goal in what appeared to be an effort to quiet critics who said the president’s speech on Thursday night left open the possibility that there would be more troops in Iraq next summer than before the start of the “surge” in January.

The president’s plan would reduce the number of combat brigades to 15 from 20 by mid-July 2008, and Mr. Gates said he hoped to reduce that number to 10 by the end of next year. But he also said that the additional reductions hinged on continued improvement in conditions in Iraq and that they had not been formally adopted as a goal. He said further assessments by General Petraeus would determine if the goal could be met.

The precise impact of Mr. Webb’s proposal is likely to be hotly debated next week as the Senate resumes its consideration of a major defense policy bill that Democrats will use to push a number of initiatives aimed at shifting the war strategy.

But none of those may have a better shot at winning the 60 votes needed to cut off debate than Mr. Webb’s plan, a back door approach that underscores the Democrats’ continuing struggle to have any real influence on the conduct of the war.

When it was last up for a vote in July, the proposal failed by 56 to 41, falling just four votes short. With the return of Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, who had been recuperating from a brain hemorrhage, the Democrats need just three Republicans to join the six who supported the amendment in July.

And several Republicans who voted against the proposal last time said they were now reconsidering, including Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who is running for re-election next year.

The Webb measure holds deep appeal for military service members and their families, and allows Democrats to present themselves as supporters of the troops, but not the war. Mr. Webb has a son in the Marine Corps in Iraq whose tour was extended because of the troop increase.

There were signs on Friday that Mr. Bush’s address might have succeeded in shifting some sentiment. The Washington Post’s editorial page, which has clung to a middle ground on the war, described Mr. Bush’s strategy as “the least bad plan” and one that would be “less risky than the alternatives.” Nielsen Media Research reported Friday night that the president’s speech drew a combined 28.8 million viewers across nine broadcast networks and cable channels.

The Pentagon’s opposition to the Webb measure could make it harder for Republican senators who voted against the plan in July to change their position. But Mr. Webb, in a telephone interview on Friday, said he believed that prospects had improved. “I had people like Senator Murkowski come to me even before the Petraeus testimony and say that she regretted that she had voted the other way,” he said, referring to Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who has repeated Democratic entreaties.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that because the Webb proposal would apply to individual soldiers, not just units, the Pentagon would be forced to examine the deployment history of every soldier to ensure that each had been home long enough. That could force units with some soldiers who met the time limit and others who did not to be broken up, harming combat effectiveness, he added.

Current Pentagon policy calls for active-duty Army units to get a year at home for every 15 months deployed. Individual soldiers, because they might have been transferred from other units, could be sent back on a faster timetable. Even without the Webb amendment, Army officials have said they would have difficulty meeting current policy.

Froma Harrop
Providence Journal
September 15, 2007

Democrats need their “Sister Souljah moment” with the outer left, and they need it now. The MoveOn.org ad – “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” – was simply unacceptable. Not only was it dumb, but it created a distraction for Democrats trying to challenge Bush policy in Iraq.

“Sister Souljah moment” entered the political language in 1992, when presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked black militant Sister Souljah over an outrageous remark. And he did it before a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition. Clinton took heat from Jesse Jackson and others, but he established his independence from radical elements within the Democratic Party.

MoveOn should be a positive force for Democrats. It raises lots of money and rallies disaffected liberals. But it has a history of dated tactics that – while gratifying to some on the fringes – alienates the moderate voters that Democrats need to win. Its messages too often make the left look juvenile.

In 2004, MoveOn ran a contest for anti-Bush ads and posted on its Web site a submission that likened the president to Adolf Hitler. MoveOn leaders recognized the mistake and urged colleagues to discourage commentary that Republicans could use to make them look like extremists.

But now, MoveOn has made a nasty personal attack on David Petraeus, and the general is not nearly the unpopular figure that Bush is.

“Simply put, the MoveOn people are a gift to the GOP,” Republican consultant Dan Hazelwood told Washington Post political blogger Chris Cillizza right after the ad came out. He is right.

Democrats showed great respect for Petraeus, even as they asked hard questions. But they had that silly ad hanging around their necks.

You can’t get more “antiwar” than Illinois Rep. Janice Schakowsky. But even she had to take time out to respond to reporters’ questions about the MoveOn ad, calling it “not an accurate statement.”

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden was on television calling Petraeus’ claims of progress “dead, flat wrong.” But he, too, had to interrupt his message to distance himself from the MoveOn statement. A Democratic candidate for president, Biden characterized the ad as “hard-edged” and Petraeus as misguided but “honorable.”

The American people already agree that the war was a dreadful mistake and badly run. The new Associated Press-Ipsos poll has 59 percent of respondents saying that history will judge the Iraq war as a failure, and only 34 percent as a success. This doesn’t mean that the public is in any mood for street theater directed against an admired general.

What is MoveOn.org up to here? Is this all about getting attention? If so, it’s succeeded.

Political activists on all sides have ravenous egos to feed, and the netroots of the left are no exception. They demand constant tributes from Democratic candidates – note the fawning performances at the last YearlyKos convention.

In reality, the hard left is not where the action is for the Democratic Party. It is in the purplish regions where moderates and independents decide outcomes. The party’s big victories in 2006 were in places like Missouri, Montana, Colorado and Virginia.

Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin had a near-Sister Souljah moment in March, when he argued that defeating the bill for funding the troops wouldn’t end the war but would deny the soldiers body armor and good military hospitals. “It’s time these idiot liberals understand that,” the Democrat said.

To make it a full-Sister Souljah moment, politicians have to say these things to their friends’ faces. Like Jackson in 1992, the targets of their censure will object, but they’ll get over it. Speaking real-world truths to their brethren on the left could spare Democrats much pain later on.

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
September 15, 2007

Of course Gen. David Petraeus predicts success in the Iraq war. What wonders couldn’t generals achieve with more troops and more time? The battle is always going well until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public.

There’s no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam, if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers. Instead, the politicians and public, led by that bleeding heart President Richard Nixon, lost the will to win. Thus, the dominos fell to communism, and Red China and Red Vietnam now rule the world by dint of military force. Have you been to Wal-Mart lately? The triumph of communism is total.

Once again, we have a general repeatedly promising to save Western civilization by turning the corner in yet another intractable and unnecessary foreign war. Back on Sept. 26, 2004, in the weeks before the midterm congressional elections, Petraeus took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post to make sure the voters didn’t vote wrong. Despite appearances, he claimed the war in Iraq was going very well: “I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up,” Petraeus wrote. “The institutions that oversee them are being re-established from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. … There has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security, something they are keen to do.”

So keen, it makes one’s heart swell. So keen that three years later, after the expenditure of $450 billion more in taxpayer funds, and more U.S. troops in proportion to the Iraqi population than, at the height of the Vietnam War, we had in Vietnam, the good general now insists it would be disastrous to even think about bringing any American troops home before next summer.

That’s at least $150 billion more and many more Iraqi and U.S. lives wasted. But wait – Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, also testified before Congress this week with Petraeus, and he has more good news about what he still celebrates as the “liberation of Iraq.” Remember that Bush administration promise that the oil-rich Iraqis would pick up the check for the cost of their liberation? Well, Crocker is bullish on that front: The Iraqi economy is on schedule to grow by 6 percent, according to his testimony. Perhaps he is referring to the additional money dumped into Iraq’s economy by American taxpayers chipping in for the surge.

He certainly wasn’t basing his estimate on any improvement in Iraqi oil production or any other economic component. As the International Monetary Fund reported last month in its annual review of Iraq’s economy, “Economic growth has been slower than expected at the time of the last (review) mainly because the expected expansion of oil production has failed to materialize.” In case you haven’t noticed, oil is the Iraqi economy, yet a recent GAO report stated an additional $57 billion in U.S. tax dollars will be needed to bring oil and electricity production to the level where it can satisfy Iraq’s domestic demand by the year 2015.

Crocker actually had the nerve to compare the bloody religious fratricide in Iraq, which our inane invasion unleashed, to the American battle over state’s rights, once again reducing the complexities of world history to an easily understood but totally irrelevant example from the American experience. In that case, a better analogy might have been made to the American Indian wars, given that the only thing the United States has been able to do effectively in Iraq is unleash superior firepower. At the current rate, Iraq will be liberated when there are no Iraqis.

Perhaps that is why this week’s ABC-BBC poll shows that 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the surge and that 60 percent believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified. And 93 percent of Sunnis, whom the general and ambassador claim are joining our side, want to see us dead. As for optimism, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, as opposed to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the surge – which almost 70 percent of Iraqis believe has “hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development.”

So, ambassadors and generals lie. Get used to it.

By Michael Kinsley

Mitt Romney wants the J.F.K. deal with voters: If you don’t hold my religion against me, I won’t impose my religion on you. But that deal made little sense in 1960 and makes no sense today. Kennedy said, “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.” But the Roman Catholic Church holds that abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being. Catholic liberal politicians since Mario Cuomo have said they personally accept the doctrine of their church but nevertheless believe in a woman’s right to choose. This is silly. There is no right to choose murder. Either these politicians are lying to their church, or they are lying to us.

These days presidential candidates are required to wear their religion on their sleeve. God is a personal adviser and inspiration to all of them. They all pray relentlessly. Or so they say. If that’s not true, I want to know it. And if it is true, I want to know more about it. I want to know what God is telling them–just as I would want to know what Karl Rove was telling them if they claimed him for an adviser. If religion is central to their lives and moral systems, then it cannot be the candidates’ “own private affair.” To evaluate them, we need to know in some detail the doctrines of their faith and the extent to which they accept these doctrines. “Worry about whether I’m going to reform health care, not whether I’m going to hell” is not sufficient.

What exactly should we worry about? Most important, we need to know what forms of conduct a candidate’s religion forbids or requires and how the candidate interprets that injunction. Is it a universal moral imperative or just a personal lifestyle choice? Every religion has its list of no-nos. Mormonism’s is very long and includes alcohol, coffee, tea and such forms of sexual behavior as “passionate kissing” outside wedlock. If Romney’s church doctrines require efforts to impose these restrictions on others, Romney has a Cuomo problem: he cannot be a good Mormon and a good President. He needs to show at the least that he has thought about this.

Some church doctrines give offense even though they don’t constrain an outsider’s behavior in any way. They can imply a more general worldview, and voters have a right to know if a presidential candidate shares that perspective. Until recently, just about all religions had a built-in patriarchal worldview–God the Father, male priests and so on–that many today find offensive. To what extent has the candidate’s church moved with the times, and what has the candidate done to push his or her church in the right direction? I say the right direction, but many voters, of course, believe that this kind of modernization is the wrong direction. They also are entitled to know where the candidate stands and to vote on that basis.

In the online magazine Slate a while back, editor Jacob Weisberg called Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, an “obvious con man” and wrote, “Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don’t want him running the country.” Thus a third argument that religion can’t be a private affair for a presidential candidate: what a person deeply believes says something about his or her character, which voters may wish to take into account. Deeply religious people may find a candidate’s ability to make that “leap of faith” admirable or even essential. Or they may find it offensive if it conflicts with their own faith. (Some devout Christians object to Mormonism’s belief that the Bible is a mistranslation.) A skeptic may not want someone so credulous in the nation’s top job.

Proceed with caution here, of course. Every religion is full of doctrines and beliefs that may seem nutty to outsiders. Jesus could be seen as a snake-oil salesman if you don’t buy the snake oil. Weisberg says Mormonism is different because it is so “recent,” involving miraculous events in the 19th century in upstate New York. Well, I dunno. The patina of age may explain why Jesus’ walking on water is easier to believe than Smith’s golden plates and magic glasses. But it doesn’t go far in justifying the distinction. For me, any candidate who believes in the literal truth of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon or the novels of Jane Austen is probably too credulous to be President.

Above all, we need to see some struggle. Precisely because all religious doctrines are hard to believe, believers and nonbelievers alike have an interest in how a candidate who claims to be deeply religious deals with religion’s improbabilities. It will be amusing if Romney is done in by a fear of his religious values because, as near as we can tell, he has no values of any sort that he wouldn’t happily abandon if they became a burden. But in politics, you are who you pretend to be.

Can a gag man turn senator? That’s what Al Franken is trying to do in Minnesota-and it’s tricky work.
By   Andrew Romano
Newsweek Al Franken isn’t used to holding his tongue. Knowing that, one might expect the froggy, horn-rimmed comedian to punctuate a recent lunch at his offices in St. Paul, Minn., with the sort of anti-right barbs that launched him on “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, propelled his books to the top of the best-seller lists and resurfaced on gleeful GOP fliers after he announced in February that he was running for U.S. Senate from Minnesota. (REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS ARE SHAMELESS D––KS, read one.) Except that Franken actually wants to be a senator. Which means that when he’s asked about gay rights, he says, “I am pro—” and then, watching his words, “—I am for legalizing gay marriage.” When asked what he dislikes about campaigning, he admits, “as far as reading the news, I’m unhappy with falling be—of not being ahead of the curve.” And when asked about his favorite recent “SNL” sketch—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi emphasizing Democratic priorities like health care, Iraq and, ahem, “rough sex”—he cuts himself off as the phrase “leather S&M outfit” leaves his lips. “I’m off message,” he says. In showbiz, maybe not. On Capitol Hill? Um, just a little.

By the time Franken arrives at his booth, he’s starting to sweat. This, aides say, is where Franken thrives; over the course of six days, he’ll spend 50 hours wooing fairgoers. “The more people who meet me, it puts a lie to the ‘He’s from Hollywood!’ shtik,” says Franken. After waiting his turn, Jeff Hill, 55, places a hand on the candidate’s shoulder. “You’ve spent your life as a comedian,” says Hill. “Now that you’re running for office, how will you keep from crossing the line?” Franken looks him in the eye. “I’ll tell you what a satirist does,” he says. “A satirist sees the hypocrisies and absurdities in the world and cuts through the baloney to get to the truth. I think that’s good training for the U.S. Senate. Don’t you?” Hill nods. It doesn’t matter that Franken has already used the line twice today, or that he will use it twice more. That’s what a politician does.

Party leaders hope less drastic goals will build support

Associated Press Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., speaks at a news conference Wednesday. (Associated Press) Bush, Cheney to make their case » President Bush is scheduled to deliver a speech from the White House at 6:01 p.m. PDT tonight on the situation in Iraq. The speech follows two days of testimony to Congress this week by Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. » Bush is planning to follow tonight’s speech with another Friday at the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va. » Vice President Dick Cheney is also scheduled to speak Friday before a military audience, at the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of the U.S. Central Command.

Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post
September 13, 2007

WASHINGTON – Democratic leaders in Congress have decided to shift course and pursue modest bipartisan measures to alter U.S. military strategy in Iraq, hoping to use incremental changes instead of aggressive legislation to break the grip Republicans have held over the direction of war policy.

Standing against them will be President Bush, who intends to use a prime-time address tonight to try to ease concerns that his Iraq strategy will lead to an open-ended military commitment.

Both efforts share a single target: a handful of Republican moderates in the Senate whose votes the Democrats need to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. Should enough Republican moderates sign on to a compromise measure, Democrats could finally pass legislation aimed at changing direction of the war in Iraq.

“We’re reaching out to the Republicans to allow them to fulfill their word,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Wednesday. “A number of them are quoted significantly saying that come September that there would have to be a change of the course in the war in Iraq.”

After two days of congressional testimony from Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, the battle lines in the House and Senate over the war have begun to shift, with moderate members of both parties building new momentum behind initiatives that would force the White House to make modest changes to the military mission in Iraq but not require a substantial drawdown of troops by a set date. Democratic leaders, who have blessed the new approach, now believe that passing compromise legislation is the first step toward more ambitious measures aimed at ending the war.

After months of false starts and dead ends, Democratic leaders are taking a pragmatic turn.

“We want to get something to the president’s desk,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The Senate next week will resume consideration of its annual defense policy bill, which Reid had abruptly pulled from the floor in July after he failed to add an amendment that would have imposed timetables for the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq. This time, however, Democratic leaders will focus their efforts on four to six amendments that they believe could get the 60 votes needed for passage.

•One of the first will be a revised version of legislation that would ensure that troops returning from Iraq be granted a home leave at least as long as their last deployment before returning to the battlefield.

The amendment garnered 56 votes in July, and with Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., back on the job after suffering a brain hemorrhage, the measure should be within three votes of victory.

•Another amendment in bipartisan talks is a revised withdrawal measure that would likely include timelines to start troop drawdowns but would leave a final pullout date as a goal rather than a deadline.

•And an amendment by Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, to mandate a change of mission in Iraq is gaining currency with Democratic leaders, according to leadership aides. The amendment would order missions to shift immediately from combat to counterterrorism, border security and the training of Iraqi security forces. It would not mandate troop withdrawals, but Collins said such withdrawals would be inevitable, since the remaining missions could be accomplished with between 50,000 and 60,000 troops.

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
September 13, 2007

The emerging narrative from Iraq is threefold, leading us to a further conclusion about the future of American politics. Hint: Watch Gen. David Petraeus.

Any narrative – the agreed-upon storyline – is a mixture of truth, fiction and poetry. In politics, narratives make sense of the past, guiding us into the future.

The first piece of the narrative is familiar from all our wars, won or lost: Our warriors did what we asked them to – and more. The Iraq war, as an overall crusade for democracy, might prove to be a disappointment, but Americans take pride in their military’s performance on the battlefield.

So politicians and pundits vie with each other to praise most highly our armed forces, seeking to match the poignancy at the tragic-heroic end of the 1954 Korean War movie “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” when the wise old admiral asks admiringly, “Where do we get such men?” Across the generations, nothing changes; Dana Perino, the new White House press secretary, came back from Iraq, declaring, “I am humbled by our troops.”

The second element of the narrative is that the Iraqis have let us down. Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman echoed Perino when he wrote of the Americans he met in Iraq: “We don’t deserve such good people.” But then Friedman said of the Iraqis, “If they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids,” they don’t deserve the help of Americans.

The same message was embraced in the wake of another painful war, Vietnam. In 1978, just three years after the fall of Saigon, “The Deer Hunter” offered a retrospective cinematic blessing to American GIs. We fought hard, the movie argued, but the Vietnamese were irredeemably awful, having nothing better to do than wager on sick games of Russian roulette. The movie was a hit, winning five Academy Awards, including best picture.

The third narrative component holds that Iraq is not a viable country. This was clear to me back in June 2003, when I traveled to Iraq and noted the Anglo-Saddam absurdity of the country’s “unity.” In recent years, other artificial countries – Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union – have broken up, to the benefit of their once-trapped populations.

So why not partition Iraq, too? As I wrote in a column more than four years ago, “ethnic and religious self-determination” for Iraqis is a better option than clinging “to borders drawn by long-dead colonialists.”

Indeed, a slow-motion division has been happening all along. The emblematic success of the Petraeus “surge” is the arming of local sheiks in Anbar province. But these empowered Sunni warlords are loyal to their own kind in their own place, not to the Shiite-controlled “national” government in Baghdad. Translation: Three Iraqs are coming – Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish.

Even neoconservatives are accepting the reality that Iraq will not be “whole and free.” Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, Charles Krauthammer described the sectarian splitting: “This radically decentralized rule is partition in embryo.”

Thus the narrative: The troops are great, the Iraqis are terrible, and Iraq wasn’t much of a country, anyway. So if the war didn’t work out – well, it’s not our fault. Critics will attack each element of this narrative, but politicians will embrace it. Why? Because that’s where the votes are, in agreeing to a storyline that gives Americans something honorable to hang on to.

And speaking of politics and votes, watch Petraeus, whom the White House obviously regards as its most credible advocate for the war, more so than George W. Bush.

Monday, Petraeus praised the troops and distanced himself from the Iraqis – just what Americans want to hear.

And the Los Angeles Times recently compared Petraeus to Ulysses S. Grant, the Northern hero of the Civil War. Grant was hated by many Americans, and yet in 1868, the Republican was elected to the presidency.

Kathleen Parker
Orlando Sentinal
September 13, 2007

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans were treated to two starkly contrasting images that speak centuries of difference between the U.S. and its enemies.

In Frame One, we see Gen. David Petraeus testifying before Congress on the status of the war in Iraq. In Frame Two is Osama bin Laden in a new video – resplendent in white robes, his beard recently rinsed dark to conceal the gray – promising that Islam will subjugate the West.

One an image of courage, integrity and honor; the other a caricature of manhood.

Then there is a third frame. It is a full-page ad in Monday’s New York Times placed by MoveOn.org attacking Petraeus’ integrity: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” reads the caption. And then, “Cooking the Books for the White House.”

The fog of war, it seems, has seeped into the left wing of the blogosphere.

One may disagree with the war – and even find informed fault with Petraeus’ report – but impugning the character of the war’s commanding officer while American forces are still fighting is what’s known as betrayal. If Petraeus were ordering the mass murder of civilians, this would be a different matter. But last time we checked, American forces were fighting to prevent innocent people from getting killed.

Thus, the ad reveals more about the character of those who placed it than it does of Petraeus. It also reveals a dangerous lack of judgment. Put it this way: If Petraeus is viewed as the bad guy, will they know evil when they see it? (Hint: It has a beard and lives in a cave.)

Because bin Laden and Petraeus hit the same news cycle – and no, I’m not suggesting that Iraq had anything to do with Sept. 11 – it is convenient and instructive to compare the two men. Visually, they are opposites. One is bearded and operates in shadow. The other, clean-shaven and open-faced, operates in full daylight, exposed and open to scrutiny.

They are night and day, darkness and light.

“Virtually impotent” were the well-chosen words homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend used to describe bin Laden, saying he’s a man on the run, living in a cave.

Impotence is a strong word for a woman to use around men, but it is apt here in multiple ways. Impotence gets to the heart of a deeper matter: bin Laden’s sense that he has been minimized by external forces. Freedom is his boogeyman. His need to control others is symptomatic of deep-rooted insecurities.

It is appropriate, meanwhile, that he is a cave-dweller. The cave – both Plato’s allegorical house of illusion and primitive man’s earliest shelter – is a proper home for a delusional man trapped in the distant past. Bin Laden and his cohorts are the embodiment of the primitive, infantile male, acting out their frustrations through cowardly barbarism.

It may take a certain kind of courage to fly an airplane into a building, but it takes no courage to murder defenseless people whose crime was getting to work on time. Yet, on the tape released Tuesday, bin Laden praises one of the hijackers of Flight 11, saying that the dead man “recognized the truth.”

“It is true that this young man was little in years, but the faith in his heart was big,” says bin Laden.

Giving the devil his due, bin Laden is crafty. He flatters young men, promising virgins in the afterlife, then persuades them to strap on bombs or fly planes into buildings. The young men die, and bin Laden gets a new outfit. Quite a trick.

In another contrast, bin Laden wants to subjugate the world, while Petraeus leads men and women who want to release the world from subjugation. One fights for the submission of others; the other fights for their liberation.

You don’t have to be an American exceptionalist to recognize that there is a difference. One is good; the other is not.

In fairness, MoveOn’s ad was aimed at the Iraq war and wasn’t intended, either by omission or commission, to be a commentary on bin Laden. But the distorted judgment that prompted an attack on Petraeus as America relives the horrors of Sept. 11 hints at a sinister alignment with darker forces.

Bin Laden must be very pleased. He could not have done better himself.

Our response to terrorism is too hesitant to ensure our survival

Michael Goodwin
New York Daily News
September 13, 2007

If you’re looking for a true sign of how far we’ve come since 9/11, skip the new video from Osama bin Laden and focus on the police bust of terror plotters in Germany last week. The basic facts of the case – the nature of the plot, who was behind it and the fact that the good guys won – tells you what you need to know about how we’re doing.

My scorecard sees some good signs, but not nearly enough for us to win. And remember, there can be no ties in this war.

If that seems too pessimistic, consider that the issue is no longer Osama bin Laden. It is bin Ladenism, a dagger of nihilistic violence aimed at the heart of civilization. The monster himself remains an important symbol – perhaps more important to us than to them – but the evil movement he spawned has taken on a life of its own. Even without him, World War III would continue.

The soldiers in his movement don’t require direct leadership or even contact with al-Qaida’s inner circle. As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said of the “arc of extremism” that unites Muslim terrorists: “It doesn’t always need structures and command centers or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.”

This time the cancer popped up in Germany, where two of the three initial arrests in the plan to attack transit systems and a U.S. military base involved German natives who converted to Islam. One was named Fritz to his family and Abdullah to his fellow plotters. Similar homegrown cells are increasingly responsible for attacks and plots. Some, like in Madrid and London, were successful; others have been thwarted.

Our military in Afghanistan and Iraq is fighting heroically, and with increasing, though shaky, success. Our intelligence and law enforcement, best illustrated by the NYPD, have gotten smarter in thinking globally and locally, yet still don’t always communicate. Their counterparts in most of Europe and parts of Asia, slow to understand the threat, are now more fully engaged, as the German arrests and recent ones in Denmark and Great Britain prove.

Yet it’s all still too slow and too hesitant. From President Bush on down, we lack a sense of urgency. The enemy is changing faster than we are. We endlessly debate and contest something so fundamental as the Patriot Act. The liberal media call warrantless wiretapping “domestic spying,” giving an important tool a bad name. Iraq has been mismanaged from the start. Mistakes, stupidity, political opportunism and legitimate divisions are crippling us. The enemy acts; we react. Sooner or later, we will be too late. And if that is when they use a weapon of mass destruction, our losses will be unfathomable.

That fact is a given in law enforcement, but it has not yet seeped into our culture. We do port security on the cheap, counting on luck to save our civilization. We dwell more on the cost of protection than on the cost of a calamity.

A recent segment of the PBS series “Nova” wondered why we have not improved construction and evacuation plans in most high-rise towers. It took five hours to evacuate the World Trade Center after the 1993 truck bomb that killed six, but the buildings collapsed within two hours of the 2001 attacks. Do the math.

Iraq is the main proxy for this larger war, and the divisions it has unleashed have taken center stage in Washington this week. As you watch the serious testimony and the political grandstanding, remember two things: We must win to survive. And each of us is responsible for helping.

See related Cal Thomas article

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
September 10, 2007

Sept. 11 falls on a Tuesday this year. It will be the first time since that other Sept. 11, six years ago.

Do you remember? Can you recall how difficult it was to even conceive of going forward from that moment? The events of that day had so thoroughly lacerated us that it seemed as if, in some small corner of our collective soul, the clock had stopped. In that corner, it would forever be 8:46 EDT on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Do you remember? If so, then the world as it stands six years later must come as something of a shock.

Six years ago, we saw people rushing to the World Trade Center site to search for survivors and recover bodies. Heroes, we said. Six years later, largely removed from public attention, many of those same heroes are sick and even dying, poisoned by the soot and dirt they breathed.

Six years ago, appalled and infuriated, the world rallied to our side. Candles and cards were left at our embassies. The French newspaper Le Monde declared “We Are All Americans Now.” The Masai, a tribe in rural Kenya, sent us 14 cows, a gift regarded by their culture as sacred. Six years later, our president is trailed by angry demonstrators wherever he travels, and it is headline news when he is actually cheered in Albania.

Six years ago, we vowed revenge on Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi who masterminded the attacks. We would bring him in, said the president, “dead or alive.” Six years later, bin Laden is still free, and the president has said he is not particularly concerned about that.

Do you remember?

The terrorist attacks of six years ago this week are sometimes compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 66 years ago this December 7. That is, of course, a reference to the shock, disbelief and anger Americans of both eras felt.

But there is a telling difference between 12/7 and 9/11. From the 1941 attack, there was forged a sense of national mission and purpose. Those feelings of shock, disbelief and anger became the building blocks of a consensus that we would do whatever, spend whatever, sacrifice whatever, until victory was won. After the attacks of 2001, by contrast, we talked national mission and purpose, but it soon became apparent that it was only talk.

Those feelings of shock, disbelief and anger became instead the building blocks of a political machine that duped the nation into a war of choice that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, eroded American civil liberties under the guise of protecting American lives and branded as traitors those who said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

Worst of all, it squandered the moment, threw away a historic chance to build a national – and international – consensus that could have marginalized the architects of terror, maybe even reshaped the world, more effectively than all the bombs and bullets used to date in Iraq.

This anniversary, then, laments not simply the loss of life, but of opportunity. And perhaps the worst thing is that one senses most Americans are like their president: We don’t think about bin Laden that much these days. He is not front-of-mind anymore.

So it is worth pausing here to remember that just six years ago, we were attacked.

Six years ago, people leaped from flaming skyscrapers.

Six years ago, flaming skyscrapers fell.

Six years ago, dust-caked people wandered the streets of New York City.

Six years ago, an airplane tore a hole in the Pentagon.

Six years ago, a hijacked plane crashed.

Six years ago, searing, airless shock was followed by resolve. Clear, cold, iron-fisted resolve.

Six years later, the shock is gone and it seems like the resolve is, too.

Do we remember? You couldn’t prove it by me.

See related Leonard Pitts Jr. article

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
September 10, 2007

Throughout our young history, Americans have been admonished to “Remember the Alamo,” “Remember the Maine” and “Remember Pearl Harbor.” These remembrances – and others – were for the purpose of motivating the public to fight on until an enemy was vanquished. When victory was assured, the memory faded into history.

Now, as we approach the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11, there are suggestions that we should begin to forget the worst terrorist incident in America’s history. Recently, a front-page story in the New York Times suggested it is becoming too much of a burden to remember the attack, that nothing new can be said about it and that, perhaps, Sept. 11 “fatigue” may be setting in.

Charlene Correia, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass., is quoted as saying, “I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life? We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

Yes, Sept. 11 forces us to be serious, not only about those who died and why they died at the hands of religious fanatics, but also so that we won’t forget that it could very well happen again and many of today’s living might end up as yesterday’s dead. That is the purpose of remembering Sept. 11, not to engage in perpetual mourning. The war goes on and to be reminded of Sept. 11 serves as the ultimate protection against forgetfulness. Terrorists have not forgotten Sept. 11. Tape of the Twin Towers is used on jihadist Web sites for the purpose of recruiting new “martyrs.”

What’s the matter with some people? Does remembering not only Sept. 11 but the stakes in this world war interfere too much with our pursuit of money, things and pleasure? Serious times require serious thought and serious action. In our frivolous times, full of trivialities and irrelevancies, to be serious is to abandon self-indulgence for survival, entertainment for the stiffened spine.

“Few Americans give much thought anymore on Dec. 7 that Pearl Harbor was attacked,” says the Times writer, who goes on to mention Nov. 22, 1963 (the date of JFK’s assassination), the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, and the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. The difference between those tragic events and Sept. 11 is that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is dead, as is Timothy McVeigh, and the Vietnam War ended long ago. While all of the Sept. 11 hijackers died, their ideological and religious colleagues are plotting new attacks in a war that is far from over.

“Why didn’t we see Sept. 11 coming?” was a question frequently asked in the aftermath of that terrorist attack. And the answer should be, because we forgot the attacks preceding that one, or brushed them off as inconsequential aberrations so we could get back to watching the stock market go up and obsess about Bill Clinton’s pants coming down. By not remembering those earlier attacks, the reasons behind them and the intentions of the terrorists and those who trained and incited them, we put ourselves in further jeopardy.

Sept. 11 should not be remembered for maudlin, ghoulish and certainly not for nostalgic reasons. Unlike those other mostly forgotten or no longer observed dates, this one is key to defending ourselves from a future attack and further disasters. Not to remember Sept. 11 is to forget what brought it about. That can lead to a lowering of our guard and a false sense of security, the conditions that existed immediately prior to that awful day six years ago.

Indiana University history professor John Bodnar is asked in the Times story what might happen on Sept. 11 100 years from now. He replies, “It’s conceivable that it could be virtually forgotten.”

It might be forgotten – or relegated to a “Jeopardy” answer – but only if we win the war against Islamofascism. If we don’t, Sept. 11 will stand as a day of infamy with consequences to humanity far worse than Dec. 7, 1941.

David Broder
Washington Post
September 9, 2007

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Two hours before Fred Thompson formally entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination, his old friend John McCain turned in the kind of performance that once would have kept Thompson from running.

As eight GOP hopefuls debated Wednesday night at the University of New Hampshire, McCain enjoyed the best 90 minutes since his campaign started spiraling downhill last spring. He received accolades from his rivals and from the audience – raising at least faint hopes of his revival in the state where he defeated George W. Bush in 2000.

When I interviewed Thompson last month about his planned candidacy, he was frank to say that if McCain had not stumbled so badly in the first half of 2007, there would have been no opening – and no cause – for Thompson to run. “I expected to support John, just as I did in 2000,” Thompson said.

Thompson said he was mystified how McCain, with all his advantages, lost control of his campaign organization and budget, how he ran through millions of dollars, shed his staff and found himself in early summer dead-broke and scrambling for help.

But even as Thompson was making the decision to run, McCain was regearing for an uphill fight.

Three steps have been crucial. His outspoken support for the “surge” strategy in Iraq had to find a degree of endorsement from real-world events. The edge had to come off the issue of illegal immigration, which had caused him deep political wounds. And he had to re-establish his personal contact with voters in New Hampshire and remind them why they had once been for him.

He still faces formidable obstacles. Mitt Romney has taken the lead here and has an impressive organization. Rudy Giuliani is competing well for moderate Republicans. And independents, who gave McCain his victory in 2000, are likely to flock to the Democratic primary this time.

Still – as the Durham debate demonstrated – McCain has begun to achieve all three goals.

On Iraq, an assertive McCain chided Romney for hedging his bets by saying that the surge “apparently” is meeting its military objectives. “It is working,” McCain told the former Massachusetts governor. “Not ‘apparently’; it’s working.”

McCain expects validation of that view from Gen. David Petraeus this week, and is eager to be Petraeus’ advocate when the Senate takes up the issue – while at the same time reminding people that he was one of the first critics of the previous strategy under Don Rumsfeld.

On immigration, where McCain was particularly vulnerable as co-sponsor with Ted Kennedy of the failed comprehensive legislation endorsed by Bush, he has bowed to reality. Blaming the failure of that bill on the public’s loss of confidence in government, McCain now says that the first step must be securing the border – and having that success certified by the border state governors.

But as important as these changes have been, the key for McCain has been returning to the town-meeting formats that worked so well for him here before – lengthy and uninhibited question-and-answer sessions that allow him to display his command of substance, his candor and his sense of humor. That ease and intimacy have carried over to his debate performances.

After making his points about Iraq and immigration, he smiled contentedly as Romney and Giuliani struggled to answer tough questions about their personal histories – questions that raised doubts about their credibility.

And then he received an unsolicited testimonial from rival Mike Huckabee, as the former Arkansas governor complimented McCain for setting “honor” as the criterion for American policy in the war. “If there’s anybody on this stage that understands the word ‘honor,’ I’ve got to say Sen. McCain understands that word,” Huckabee said of the former Vietnam POW.

Unsurprisingly, a Fox News focus group in Manchester named McCain as the debate winner, and Dante Scala, a UNH political scientist, told a politically oriented Web site, “If New Hampshire Republicans were tuning in, they’re probably thinking to themselves, ‘That’s the John McCain I remember.’ ”

To top it off, the Concord Monitor on Thursday editorialized that McCain is “good at the kind of campaigning that wins elections here. That’s no accident. As much as any candidate in recent memory, McCain respects – and embraces – the New Hampshire primary,” with its emphasis on person-to-person communication.

Fred Thompson, take note.

Barbara Shelly

Kansas City Star
September 8, 2007

Harry S. Truman, an exceptionally hard worker all his life, is busy even in eternal rest.

His latest assignment: role model to President Bush.

Understandably sobered by low ratings and a relentless drumbeat of bad news, Bush and his supporters are drawing inspiration from the remarkable and ongoing redemption of the man from Independence, Mo.

Truman’s presidency, notable for its highs and lows, ended in a deep valley, which is where Bush finds himself today. But 54 years after leaving office, Truman is acclaimed by scholars and the public as one of the nation’s wisest and most courageous leaders.

We should all wish the current president a similar climb. It would bode well for world order, and the safety and well-being of our children.

But historians are conspicuously resistant to con jobs. If Bush achieves redemption, it will be on the basis of realism, not spin.

It was a bad sign when Bush declared last week, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo., that America’s withdrawal from combat in Vietnam led to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

Almost no one was fooled. Military experts and historians noted quickly that the destabilization of Cambodia was caused by the Vietnamese conflict itself, not its conclusion. And though the world remembers Americans being airlifted off of a Saigon rooftop, the United States didn’t cut and run from Vietnam, as the president suggested. The pullout took place over a period of years.

Bush’s distortion of history spells trouble for his place in it. A leader who won’t look at the past with realism seems unlikely to be remembered for acting wisely in the present.

If the 43rd president wants to follow in the footsteps of the 33rd, Bush should model Truman’s disdain for spin and look to his ability to listen to the right people and see the world with clear vision.

When Truman left office in 1953, U.S. troops were dying in Korea and labor troubles had enraged the public. Polls showed less than a third of Americans approved of Truman’s job performance.

The president who had overseen the end of World War II, the dawn of the Atomic Age, the recognition of the state of Israel and the start of the Cold War spent the 1950s in political exile.

By the time of Truman’s death, late in 1972, his image was improving. Obituaries praised him for his ability to show courage when required and restraint when necessary.

Margaret Truman published a book about her father, titled simply “Harry S. Truman,” in 1973. Samuel Gallu’s play, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” was made into a film in 1975.

A public hung over from Vietnam and the Watergate scandals found an antidote in the plain-spoken Truman.

“The country had been through two presidents who seemed to discard the truth at least part of the time,” said Ray Geselbracht, a longtime archivist at the Harry S. Truman Library. “And here was this crusty, ingenuous, sincere, folksy character.”

The president’s personal papers, which started becoming available in the 1980s, reinforced the notion of Truman as a genuine article.

“He sort of symbolizes the country’s sense of what it is and what it can be,” Geselbracht said.

But a turnaround as dramatic as Truman’s isn’t accomplished on style alone. His accomplishments are legion, and include the Marshall Plan to save war-damaged Europe, desegregation of the U.S. military, and founding of the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

History has validated his decision to send troops to Korea as part of a United Nations action, as well as his refusal to follow the counsel of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and drop nuclear bombs on China.

“I came into this job 19 years ago not knowing anything about President Truman. I was prepared to be skeptical,” said Geselbracht, who is special assistant to the Truman Library director.

“I haven’t found much to be skeptical about. I find it remarkable that he achieved all the things that he did.”

We should hope that, 50 years hence, a historian speaks so kindly of President Bush. But a legacy is built on deeds, and time is growing short.

James P. Pinkerton

Newsday
September 8, 2007

Should we in the media be virtuous? That is, should we consciously set out to do good – and to be good? The American people, especially the young, say “yes.” And yet most in the media say “no” – for various reasons that are worth exploring.

Needless to say, most journalists, like most people, wish to think of themselves as virtuous. But still, it is not the normal language of journalism to speak of virtue as a goal.

For news reporters, the stated goal instead is to be “objective” – to get the story right. That’s a laudable goal, of course, but as Abraham Lincoln once explained, there’s a difference between objectivity and neutrality.

One can be objectively accurate in one’s report, but still not neutral in one’s stance. As Lincoln put it, if your loved one is being eaten by a bear, you can see the situation clearly – and seek to save your loved one. In such a case, the virtue of impartiality risks becoming the vice of indifference.

Last month, many people thought that CNN went overboard on “neutrality” with its three-part special, “God’s Warriors.” Reporter Christiane Amanpour neatly divided her reporting into thirds, among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Yet, one watchdog group, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, called her reportage “one of the most grossly distorted programs” ever aired on TV. At a minimum, one can say that by rigidly assigning “equal time” to zealotry in all three faiths, she was imposing an artificial and misleading “fairness.”

On the other hand, a growing branch of the media is punditry. And commentators generally make no pretense of being fair; their goal is to show “attitude,” so as to generate “buzz” and glean “eyeballs.”

But one problem with such relentless self-promotion is that it attracts people to whom modesty and decency are strangers. A case in point is MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, who on Aug. 28 bragged about a gay-bashing incident from his youth. Carlson will no doubt be doing penance before gay groups for years to come, but his chuckling recollections of his own thuggery provide a wide window into his true self. Yet, he’s “good television,” and so he still has a job.

Of course, nobody in the media – including this writer, who also contributes to the Fox News Channel – is without fault.

But maybe, in pursuit of scoops and ratings, we have gone too far. That’s what the American people seem to think, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

The center found that most Americans believe the media don’t care about the people they report on. Indeed, they think that news organizations are too critical of America overall – although it’s important to note that by a 2-1 ratio those same respondents think that George W. Bush is receiving fair coverage, which suggests that people see a distinction between the treatment of an individual politician and the treatment of our country.

Interestingly, the center found that those Americans who get their news from the Internet – who are typically younger and better educated – are more critical of the media than their elders. A full 68 percent of “Net-heads” say that the media disrespect ordinary folk, compared with 53 percent of the general public. The other findings reveal a streak of idealism about the media as they could be – and harsh judgmentalism about them as they are.

People understand how powerful the media are these days, even as they fragment into more and more pieces. People want reporters and pundits – and bloggers and everyone else – to use that power for good. Yes, there are debates about the definition of the good, but perhaps not as much room for disagreement as the “neutral” press has suggested in recent decades.

In the fight between good and evil, Americans are saying, loudly, neutrality is not an answer.

Bad News Puts Political Glare OntoEconomy

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — For the first time in four years, economic concerns are rivaling the war in Iraq as a top issue on the political agenda.

Sensing new political momentum, Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are stepping up their criticism of President Bush’s handling of the economy and offering their own proposals.

And now that the malaise in housing and credit markets appears to be infecting the wider economy, the Federal Reserve could feel more pressure from Democrats and Republicans alike than it has since Alan Greenspan, then the Fed chairman, incurred the wrath of President George H. W. Bush for not cutting rates faster in the early 1990s.

The Fed is all but certain to reduce interest rates at its next policy meeting on Sept. 18, but the big debate among economists is how much further and faster it cuts rates after that.

The Bush administration, on the defensive, rushed out with a message of calm reassurance, as a phalanx of top officials insisted that the economy remained poised for growth despite a government report that seemed to show that the broader economy is suffering from the mortgage meltdown.

“We’re still confident that we’re going to see high growth for next year,” said Edward P. Lazear, chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

And Carlos M. Gutierrez, secretary of commerce, warned that the prospect of tax increases would merely increase economic uncertainty.

On Friday, a top House Democrat announced his intention to push for a sweeping revision of President Bush’s tax cuts that would favor middle-income families at the expense of the rich.

“It will be the mother of all tax reforms,” vowed Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Other Democrats are criticizing President Bush’s economic policies and pushing for more help for low-income people who face foreclosures after buying their houses with subprime mortgages, an expansion of government-financed health care and more money for education.

But perhaps the most important participant in the drama — the Federal Reserve — remained silent on Friday and will probably continue to say nothing until its next policy meeting in 11 days.

Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has signaled his readiness to reduce a key interest rate, the overnight rate for loans between banks, if the turmoil in the mortgage markets threatens to derail economic growth.

But Fed officials still have lingering worries about the risk of rising inflation, and they do not want the central bank to be seen as rescuing investors and lenders from bad bets on mortgage-backed securities.

Typically, the Fed raises interest rates to ward off inflation when the economy is growing fast and in danger of overheating, and lowers rates when the economy is slackening.

Fed officials and politicians alike know that decisions about monetary policy right now are likely to affect the broader economy about the time of the presidential elections in November 2008, because changes in interest rates usually take effect after a lag of 12 to 18 months.

But the political repercussions could be greater than in many years. For the last decade, the Fed has given politicians little to criticize: it has either spurred faster growth with low interest rates or raised rates modestly amid fast growth and low unemployment.

Now the central bank is in a less comfortable position. Even as Wall Street analysts ratchet up their worries about a recession, Fed officials are far from convinced that a true downturn is likely. At the same time, many officials still have lingering worries about higher inflation.

Republican and Democratic presidential candidates all jumped on the weak job numbers to make political points.

“It does not surprise me that there’s been some adjustment there,” said Fred D. Thompson, who officially declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination this week, while campaigning in Iowa. “Unemployment is at a level that used to be considered full employment in this country. Nothing is sustainable forever. Things ebb and flow.”

Democratic candidates used the first monthly decline in employment in four years to attack Mr. Bush. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Mr. Bush’s economic policies demonstrated his “failure to lead.”

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said the jobs data proved the administration’s strategy was “not working for working Americans.”

John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, said Mr. Bush’s support for globalization had “accelerated the winnings of the winners.”

But for Mr. Bernanke, who has to make the most immediate decisions, the new employment numbers are unlikely to have settled the issue. Fed officials were almost certainly taken aback by the drop in jobs last month. Wall Street forecasters had predicted an increase of about 100,000 jobs, though many had trimmed back their forecasts in recent days.

Instead, the Labor Department estimated that the nation actually lost 4,000 jobs in August, and it reduced its estimate of the jobs created in June and July. The average monthly pace of job creation dropped to only 32,000 jobs in the most recent two months from 139,000 jobs in the second quarter of this year.

Fed officials had been awaiting the August jobs report, viewing it as the last major statistical indicator they would get before their policy meeting on Sept. 18.

But the report probably did not convince all policy makers that a recession is likely. Much of the recent decline in job creation came in construction and the downturn in housing, which had already been expected. And some of the decline stemmed from a decline in government jobs, which are not tied to the economic cycle.

“He needs to mollify the markets and Congress,” Bernard Baumohl, managing director of the Economic Outlook Group, said of Mr. Bernanke.

“But it’s important to remember that Bernanke has said, over and over again, that the best way to ensure economic growth is to anchor inflation expectations. He knows we still have a low unemployment rate, that industrial capacity is still tight. If he’s going to reduce interest rates substantially, he’ll be increasing inflation expectations.”

Susan Saulny contributed reporting from Sioux City, Iowa, and Karen James from New York.

Petraeus Open to Pullout of 1 Brigade
Top General in Iraq Said to Favor Caution
By Robin Wright and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 7, 2007; A01

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus has indicated a willingness to consider a drawdown of one brigade of between 3,500 and 4,500 U.S. troops from Iraq early next year, with more to follow over the next months based on conditions on the ground, according to a senior U.S. official.

The pullouts would be contingent on the ability of U.S. and Iraqi forces to sustain what the administration heralds as recent gains in security and to make further gains in stabilizing Iraq. President Bush signaled the possibility of drawdowns after visiting Anbar province earlier this week. After meeting with Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, Bush said he was told that “if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

Administration officials say the president will make the final decision about the overall strategy in Iraq, but they suggested that Bush is unlikely to depart significantly from recommendations made by top military officials. But on the eve of Petraeus’s testimony before Congress early next week, there is still a diversity of opinion among top U.S. military officials on the eventual size and length of U.S. deployments. Petraeus’s recommendations could fall on the conservative side of preferences among U.S. military planners, with the Joint Chiefs and Adm. William J. Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, concerned about the drain on U.S. forces and the heavy focus on Iraq, U.S. officials say.

The testimony of Petraeus and Crocker next week will follow a succession of recent analyses of the war that have painted a bleak picture of the Iraqi government’s efforts to stand alone. The U.S. intelligence community has called the government dysfunctional and riven with sectarianism. The Government Accountability Office this week found little progress toward 18 measurable benchmarks that the president himself laid out in January. And, yesterday, retired Gen. James Jones, a former Marine Corps commandant, told lawmakers that significant numbers of U.S. troops could and should be pulled out of Iraq to spur Iraq’s security forces to assume more control of their country.

Those reports have helped stoke a brewing rebellion among moderate lawmakers from both parties, who see an opportunity to drive their leaders toward compromise. Democratic leaders have signaled they are open to a more bipartisan approach to Iraq that would force the Bush administration to begin publicly planning for troop withdrawals but would stop short of requiring a firm timeline.

“Clearly, we don’t have the numbers to override the president’s vetoes, as has been clearly demonstrated,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), “nor do we expect to for a long time.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has said that he could drop his demand for a firm troop withdrawal next spring to win GOP votes. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this week that she will allow a vote on bipartisan troop legislation that, without requiring a redeployment, would force the administration to begin publicly planning for a withdrawal.

Even with the extension of deployments and the mobilization of reserves for multiple deployments, the troop buildup announced by Bush in January is already tentatively scheduled to draw down by significant numbers in March and April. Many U.S. officials expect the U.S. presence in Iraq to shrink to about 130,000 troops by next August; in effect, Petraeus is signaling it could be done a little faster, though not as fast as some in the Pentagon might want.

“The debate now is, do we want to be at 12 brigades in August or 15?” one administration official said recently.

The new effort at compromise by the Democratic leadership could alienate liberals. “You may end up with a revolt from my wing of the party if we do something that doesn’t pass the smell test and, quite frankly, infuriates our constituents,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a firm opponent of the war.

But the bipartisan approach put Republican leaders on the defensive yesterday. They urged lawmakers to withhold judgment until next week, when they hear from Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Crocker.

“Republicans have said all year that we will listen to those who have witnessed our successes and setbacks firsthand, and as next week’s testimony approaches, we will await any recommendations, next steps or adjustments that may be needed in our strategy,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

With Republican leaders on the defensive and Democratic leaders unsure of the legislative path forward, moderates sense that their moment has arrived.

“The House Democratic leadership, in using the Iraq issue in the fall election, imposed on themselves a set of impossible tasks, by going way beyond what they could reasonably achieve under the Constitution, by creating the illusion that they could pull out quickly,” said Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.). “I think this creates an opportunity to step back from their confrontational stance and for Republicans to really reassess where this mission goes from here.”

Several groups of centrists — led by Reps. Nick Lampson (D-Tex.), Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), John Tanner (D-Tenn.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.), Michael N. Castle (R-Del.) and English — have begun quiet discussions about banding together to force the leaders of both parties out of their trenches.

“In both parties, there is a push that comes out of a pure desire for resolution,” Kaptur said. “The question is how you get there. It’s going to require a bipartisan effort.”

Just before the August recess, more than a dozen lawmakers met to forge a new, centrist push. A major meeting is planned in the next two weeks to bring disparate, ad hoc groups together into a cohesive caucus that would be large enough to force showdowns, even if it meant using parliamentary tactics to embarrass the party leaders into concessions.

“If you had a group of people who were centrists and who were agreeing on issues strongly enough, something like that might practically happen,” Lampson said, “but I don’t think that’s the goal.”

If the group could hold firm, Pelosi would face a choice of governing with a centrist coalition from both parties or dealing with a full-scale revolt. But the liberal wing is not about to give in. Recent signals from Reid and other leaders that they might drop their demands for withdrawal timelines led some Democrats to begin firing back yesterday.

“Rather than picking up votes, by removing the deadline to get our troops out of Iraq, you have lost this Democrat’s vote,” said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.), a presidential candidate. “It is clear that half measures are not going to stop this president or end this war.”

The issue that prompted the push was a bill, sponsored by Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Tanner and English, that would give the Bush administration 60 days to apprise Congress of Pentagon planning for troop redeployments in Iraq. The bill was yanked from consideration in the House last month after a standoff between moderate Democrats and antiwar activists who opposed it. “They allowed a few people in the progressive caucus to have veto power over everything, and that can’t be sustained,” Abercrombie said.

In a letter to Pelosi and Hoyer, 10 Democrats and three Republicans this week demanded consideration of the Abercrombie-Tanner-English bill, saying: “Congress needs to make clear to the American people that we can and will work across the partisan divide on issues of such profound importance.”

Pelosi said this week that the House will now bring the bill to a vote, but that it will be considered with another Iraq measure. That measure is likely to be designed to placate an antiwar wing that believes the Abercrombie measure will give Republicans a chance to tell their constituents that they are standing up to the president but will actually change nothing.

Many Democrats remain convinced that they should force Republicans to their side, not compromise on an issue as fundamental as ending the U.S. involvement in Iraq. “I have no problem with talking to moderates about alternatives, just as long as we’re not just giving them cover and getting an agreement for the sake of agreement,” McGovern said. “I’m out of patience.”

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

Gay ’stings’ are the real crime

Ellen Goodman
Boston Globe
September 7, 2007

Well, that didn’t take long. A mere five days from the Roll Call revelations to the presumed resignation. Thirty-three years of public service down the toilet, and that is the last bathroom joke I’ll make.

When Larry Craig got caught in a sex sting in a Minneapolis airport restroom, Republican stalwarts broke the speed record turning him from the distinguished senator into the disgusting senator. Gay rights groups did not rise to the defense of their public enemy. The only politician expressing actual empathy for Craig was Jim McGreevey, the “outed” former governor of New Jersey who is now – you cannot make this stuff up – in divinity school.

By Tuesday, even Idahoans thought it was all over. The most popular news on the Idaho Statesman Web site was about a woman rock climber who got her long hair caught in the ropes while she rappelling.

Now what’s happening? It looks like Craig’s “intention to resign” left a loophole as wide as his stance. If he can fight off the charges to which he pleaded guilty, his spokesman and his lawyer now say, he may not resign.

I have no desire to throw myself between Craig and the madding crowd.

He was never my kind of senator. I don’t want to send my grandson into a public restroom used for assignations. Nor do I enjoy watching another humiliated wife standing by her husband.

But I have to agree with Sen. Arlen Specter in separating the law from the lewd, the criminal from the yucky. What law did this sad sack of a 62-year-old senator with his ludicrous explanations actually break?

Craig was charged with violating privacy under what is essentially a Peeping Tom law. The charge was dropped because it would never have held up. He then pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. But what exactly was the disorder or the conduct? Soliciting sex in a public place? In fact, all he actually did was tap his foot and put his hand under a stall. As Dale Carpenter at the University of Minnesota Law School notes, there was no specific sexual allegation, no indecent exposure, no money, no abuse, and the other man – the policeman – tapped back: “Can’t you send ambiguous signals in Minnesota without it being a crime?” asks Carpenter.

The stinger, lest you forget, was a 29-year-old police officer with a master’s degree. He must have been trained in gay codes before being assigned to sit in bathrooms waiting for a flirtatious shoe. Isn’t there a murder to be solved in Minneapolis?

Sex stings to catch gays have been around for more than a century.

Sodomy itself was illegal in Minnesota until 2001. It was a “crime against nature” in Idaho, punishable by five years to life in prison. Then in 2003, the Supreme Court finally overturned all the laws against sodomy.

Today, the same people who couldn’t legally have sex can get legally married in Massachusetts, and form civil unions or partnerships in six other states. In the midst of the Craig debacle, an Iowa court briefly allowed gay marriage. But last fall, Idaho joined the vast majority of states in voting to ban it.

What a time of duality. Leading Democratic candidates for president flocked to a gay forum and pledged allegiance to civil unions – but not marriage. Many Republican pols split between private acceptance and public hostility, welcoming Mary Cheney’s baby and rousing the religious right.

Even Craig’s son, while supporting his father’s denial, added, “Gay or straight, that part doesn’t matter.”

Yet the stings go on. Craig was only one of 40 arrested since May in Minneapolis. There were 45 arrested in the Atlanta airport this year. How many elsewhere? There must be saner ways to keep a restroom from becoming a meeting ground, better than using a dubious law that shames men into pleading guilty for the same reason Craig did: humiliation and the fear of exposure. “I don’t call media,” said the policeman. But exposure often follows. So too, the loss of a license or a lifetime of registering as a sex offender.

Craig is trapped in the time warp of same-sex relationships that now run from anonymity to marriage, from the closet to the altar. How much does it – “gay or straight” – matter to the man who grew up on a cattle ranch, studied in a one-room school, became student body president at the University of Idaho, and then a senator?

Whether he resigns or not, I hope Craig does fight the charge against him. “I am not gay,” he insists. Indeed he’s fought gay rights at every turn. How perfect if his last public service is taking the anti-gay venom out of the sting?

Patriot Act reined in

Judge bans FBI use of warrantless letters to get records of telephone calls, e-mails

Dan Eggen
Washington Post
September 7, 2007

WASHINGTON – A federal judge struck down controversial portions of the USA Patriot Act in a ruling that declared them unconstitutional Thursday, ordering the FBI to stop its wide use of a warrantless tactic for obtaining e-mail and telephone data from private companies for counterterrorism investigations.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York said the FBI’s use of secret “national security letters” to demand such data violates the First Amendment and constitutional provisions on the separation of powers, because the FBI can impose indefinite gag orders on the companies and the courts have little opportunity to review the letters.

The secrecy provisions are “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values,” Marrero wrote. His opinion amounted to a rebuke of both the administration and Congress, which had revised the act in 2005 to take into account an earlier ruling by the judge on the same topic.

Although a government appeal is likely, the decision could eliminate or sharply curtail the FBI’s issuance of tens of thousands of national security letters (NSLs) each year to telephone companies, Internet providers and other communications firms. The FBI says it typically orders that such letters be kept confidential to make sure that suspects do not learn they are being investigated, as well as to protect “sources and methods” used in terrorism and counterintelligence probes.

The ruling follows reports this year by Justice Department and FBI auditors that the FBI potentially violated privacy laws or bureau rules more than a thousand times while issuing NSLs in recent years – violations that did not come to light quickly, partly because of the Patriot Act’s secrecy rules.

“The risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion to restrict such speech is that government agents, based on their own self-certification, may limit speech that does not pose a significant threat to national security or other compelling government interest,” Marrero said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

But Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit in the case, said the ruling “is yet another setback in the Bush administration’s strategy in the war on terror and demonstrates the far-reaching efforts of this administration to use powers that are clearly unconstitutional.”

Marrero’s decision would bar the use of NSLs to demand data from electronic communications companies. But the ruling appears to leave untouched the FBI’s ability to demand bank records, credit reports and other financial data related to counterterror and other probes, because those authorities are covered by other statutes, according to legal experts. Marrero delayed enforcement of his order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal.

Although the FBI has had the ability to issue NSLs for many years, the Patriot Act, enacted in October 2001, relaxed the rules for using them while increasing secrecy requirements. The result was been a surge in NSL requests, from fewer than 9,000 in 2000 to nearly 50,000 in 2005, according to Justice Department records.

Thursday’s ruling marks the second time that Marrero has struck down the Patriot Act’s NSL provisions. In 2004, after the ACLU filed suit on behalf of the same plaintiff – an Internet service provider identified as John Doe – he ruled that the NSL provisions were unconstitutional because they silenced recipients and gave them no recourse through the courts.

While a government appeal was pending, Congress passed legislation in 2005 aimed at solving the problems identified by Marrero. But the judge ruled Thursday that the revisions were not adequate and that under the new law, “several aspects … violate the First Amendment and the principle of separation of powers.”

The new legislation essentially required the courts to go along with the gag orders as long as the FBI certified that the secrecy was justified. Marrero suggested in his decision that Congress could solve the problems by more sharply limiting the FBI’s ability to silence recipients while allowing more oversight from the courts.

Marrero, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1999, warned of “far-reaching invasions of liberty” when the courts refuse to set limits on government power.

He pointed specifically to Supreme Court rulings that sanctioned the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and upheld racial segregation in schools and other public accommodations.

Moment of Truth

By Peter Beinart

Next time you listen to Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani, the two announced Republican front runners for 2008, try playing this game: count how many times they use some variation of Sept. 11, terrorism or jihad. Then count how many times they utter the word Iraq. When Romney gave a foreign policy speech at Yeshiva University in April, the score was 19 to 3. In an address at the Citadel in May, Giuliani’s score was 35 to 2.

Here’s what is happening: Republican voters, the folks Romney and Giuliani need to win over, want their party’s nominee to be as tough as nails in the war on terrorism. And they don’t want him to bash President George W. Bush on Iraq, because, well, that’s what Democrats do. But–and this is where things get tricky–they don’t exactly want him to support Bush’s Iraq policy either. Recent polls suggest that while most Republicans oppose a complete withdrawal from Iraq, they’d prefer a smaller U.S. presence, ensconced in bases far from Iraq’s bloody cities, training Iraqis to do the fighting. In short, they want what the Baker-Hamilton commission proposed last fall–exactly the position Bush rejected when he ordered the surge.

Luckily for Giuliani and Romney, most Republicans don’t associate them with the surge, as they do John McCain. Most either don’t know what the GOP front runners think or think they agree with them and support a Baker-Hamilton-style drawdown. In a July Hotline poll, only 17% of Republicans knew that Giuliani opposes any troop withdrawal from Iraq, and only 12% knew that Romney did. For both men, that’s good news. They don’t want to be identified with a policy that’s unpopular even among Republicans, let alone the rest of America. But they don’t want a high-profile break with Bush either, because most Republicans still like the guy and figure that publicly opposing him means jumping into bed with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Romney and Giuliani’s solution: when asked about Iraq, they talk about terrorism. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Romney argued that “whether or not the current ’surge’ in troop levels in Iraq succeeds,” the U.S. faces “challenges that go far beyond any single nation or conflict.” Giuliani told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “Whether Iraq turns out successfully … we’re still going to be at war.” Romney and Giuliani also bash the Democrats as defeatists who don’t recognize the jihadist threat and who want us to leave Iraq with our tail between our legs. In this way, they emphasize their antiterrorism toughness while keeping their Iraq views fuzzy. This gives them room to embrace a significant troop withdrawal next year once they have their party’s nomination in hand.

So far, the strategy has worked beautifully. But there’s a problem. One way Romney and Giuliani have evaded clear answers on the surge is by delaying the question until September, when General David Petraeus will report on its progress. Now September is here. Petraeus will probably oppose any immediate troop withdrawal, deferring any drawdown until next spring. Bush and most conservative pundits will demand that the surge continue into 2008. And Romney and Giuliani will find it harder to bob and weave. The press, which has given both men an easy ride on the issue, may start turning the screws. With luck, so will McCain, who has paid a heavy price for his Iraq candor. Even the White House could get into the act. From the President’s perspective, after all, Romney and Giuliani haven’t exactly been profiles in courage: they’ve let Democrats punch the stuffing out of his Iraq policy without offering much of a defense.

So, what will Romney and Giuliani do if forced to finally come clean? They’ll back the surge. Romney is running as the conservative candidate, so he can’t alienate Iraq hard-liners. Neither can Giuliani, given his tough-on-terrorism persona. But once they back the surge, they’ll get a taste of what McCain has been experiencing all year. The more they’re defined by support for the war, the more Bush’s unpopularity will become their own, especially among independents, the people who have turned against McCain en masse. Backing the surge will instantly weaken them in the general election, because if they do eventually pivot in favor of some withdrawal, it will look like a flip-flop.

The best thing for Romney and Giuliani would be for the White House and Congress to halt the surge and agree on a phased withdrawal. Then they could go back to talking about 9/11 while Iraq recedes as a partisan issue. But that’s not likely to happen, because when it comes to Iraq, Bush is ignoring the polls. Romney and Giuliani should try it sometime.

Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

Why We Need a Draft
An Iraq veteran and 9/11 survivor says that we cannot win until all Americans sacrifice.
By CPL. Mark Finelli

Finelli is an inactive, noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps.
Newsweek Maybe we would have only lost those three instead of 13,” I thought to myself on a dusty Friday in Fallujah in early November 2005. I was picking up the pieces of a truck that hours before had been blown apart by an IED, wondering why our equipment wasn’t better and why three more Marines were dead. My unit, Second Battalion Second Marines, had lost 13 men in the previous two weeks–not from fire fights but from increasingly powerful roadside bombs. Just then I noticed a big vehicle–what I would later learn was called an MRAP (for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected)–driving by, one owned by a private contracting company. This thing made our truck look like a Pinto in a Ferrari showroom. It was huge, heavy, ominous, indestructible. I wanted to commandeer it. I wanted to live in it. I turned to my platoon sergeant. “Why are the private companies driving around in these things and not the Marine Corps?” I asked. He looked at me and rubbed together his thumb and forefinger. An MRAP costs five times more than even the most up-armored Humvee. That’s when it became clear to me that America’s greatest strength–its economic might–was not fully engaged in Iraq.

Why not? People need a personal, vested, blood-or-money interest to maximize potential. That is why capitalism has trumped communism time and again, but it is also why private contractors in Iraq have MRAPs when Marines don’t. America isn’t practicing the basic tenet of capitalism on the battlefield, and won’t be until we reinstitute the draft. Until the wealthy have that vested interest, until the sons of senators and the upper classes are sitting in those trucks, the best gear won’t be paid for on an infantryman’s timetable. Eighteen months after the Marines first asked for MRAPs, the vehicles are finally being delivered, though still less than half the number the Pentagon had promised for this year.

It’s not hard to figure out who suffers. Like previous generations of soldiers, the 160,000 servicemen and -women in Iraq are abundantly unrepresented in the halls of power. As a result, they’ve adopted what I find to be a disturbing point of view: many don’t want the draft because they believe it will ruin the military, which they consider their own blue-collar fraternity. They have heard the horror stories from their dads and granddads about “spoiled” rich officers. When a politician would come on TV in the Camp Fallujah chow hall talking about Iraq, the rank-and-file reaction was always something like, “Well, I am cannon fodder to this wealthy bureaucrat who never got shot at and whose kids aren’t here. But I know I am making America safer, so I’ll do my job anyway.”

The real failure of this war, the mistake that has led to all the malaise of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the failure to reinstitute the draft on Sept. 12, 2001–something I certainly believed would happen after I ran down 61 flights of the South Tower, dodging the carnage as I made my way to the Hudson River. (At the time I worked at the World Trade Center as an investment adviser for Morgan Stanley.) But President Bush was determined to keep the lives of nonuniformed America–the wealthiest Americans–uninterrupted by the war.

I assure you, no matter who wins the 2008 election, we are staying in Iraq. But with the Marine Corps and the Army severely stressed after four and a half years of combat in Iraq–equipment needs replacing, recruitment efforts are a struggle–you tell me how we’re going to sustain the current force structure without a draft. The president’s new war czar, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, essentially said as much last month, when he announced that considering the draft “makes sense.”

I don’t favor a Vietnam-style draft, where men like the current vice president could get five deferments. Such a system is ultimately counterproductive because of the acrimony it breeds. Since it allows the fortunate and, often, most talented to stay home, those who cannot get out of the draft feel marginalized, less important than the cause they are asked to die for. At the end of the day, it was this bitterness that helped fuel the massive antiwar movement that pushed Nixon to end the draft in 1973.

No, I am talking about a fair, universal, World War II-style draft, with the brothers and sons of future and former presidents answering the call (and, unfortunately, dying, as a Roosevelt and a Kennedy once did) on the front line. Only then will the war effort be maximized. This war needs to be more discomforting to the average American than just bad news on the tube. Democracies waging a protracted ground operation cannot win when the only people who are sacrificing are those who choose to go.
The Cost of Combat: A wounded soldier is lifted to safety in Latafiya, Iraq

Copyright (c) 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

 
By Steven Levy
Newsweek Next year we’ll have the second presidential election since the horribly botched one in 2000. Can we expect better? An answer comes from the highest election official in the most populated state in the Union. Worried about a string of reported vulnerabilities, Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of State, had asked computer scientists at the University of California to conduct a “top to bottom” analysis of the thousands of touchscreen electronic voting machines in use in the Golden State. Next year millions of voters will use these systems, manufactured by the industry’s largest suppliers, not only in California but in many other states as well. What did the study reveal? “Things were worse than I thought,” says Bowen. “There were far too many ways that people with ill intentions could compromise the voting systems without detection.” Some of those security holes could, in theory, allow a dirty trickster with access to a single machine to infiltrate the central vote-counting system and covertly toss an election to the wrong candidate.

It was the most devastating confirmation to date of what security experts have been saying for years: vulnerabilities in election machines are so severe that voters have no way of knowing for sure that the choices they enter into the touchscreens and ballots will actually be counted. “The studies show that these machines are basically poison,” says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins computer-science professor and voting-security expert.

Bowen’s response, on Aug. 3, was to take the extreme step of decertifying the voting machines (this to the dismay of those defending the touchscreen vendors, who claimed that the tests did not reflect real-world conditions). Because California voters do need something to vote on, though, she allowed the use of some, mandating a rigorous set of controls (like “hardening” the security protocols) to make sure that the flaws aren’t exploited. Now it’s up to those in charge of elections in other states to step up and take similar measures for 2008.

One desperately needed measure is a national law to implement what is known as a voting paper trail–the ballot equivalent of a receipt in a cash register. (Voters get to look at a printout of their voting choices and leave the paper behind for recounts and audits.) A “voting integrity” bill introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, would do just that–if it ever passes. “We just didn’t get it to the floor before the August recess,” says Holt, who is hoping for what seems like a long shot–that the bill will be quickly voted on, a similar bill in the Senate will also get the hurry-up treatment and that the president will sign it. (The GOP has generally been less active in pushing for this type of reform.) “It’s still possible [to get it done in time for '08], but each day it gets a little less possible,” he says.

The paper trail is no panacea: the California study shows that even that system can be hacked. And some reformers claim that the Holt bill doesn’t go far enough. But Holt insists that a national law is the only solution. “If you leave it to the states, some won’t do it,” he says.

It’s reasonable to ask why the same wizards who can come up with ATMs, predator drones and Google can’t produce secure, verifiable ballots. Eventually they will, if we encourage innovation, transparency and accountability in the ballot industry. But we’re electing a new president next year, and it’s so late in the game that the only measures to stop another mistrusted election are stopgaps. California’s secretary of State recognizes that. Plenty of citizens get it, too. Why aren’t more elected officials standing up for our elections?

By Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 6, 2007; A01

DURHAM, N.H., Sept. 5 — After months of testing the waters, former senator Fred Thompson (Tenn.) jumped into the race for the Republican presidential nomination on late-night television Wednesday, as his eight rivals clashed here in a debate that featured sharp exchanges over Iraq and immigration.

Thompson used an appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” to kick off his campaign. “I’m running for president of the United States,” Thompson told Leno during the show’s taping early Wednesday evening.

He followed that up at midnight with a longer video on his campaign Web site outlining his reasons for running, citing threats to national security and the economy and the need to change Washington. “I know that reform is possible in Washington because I have seen it done,” he said. “I do not accept it as a fact of life beyond our power to change that the federal government must go on expanding more, taxing more, and spending more forever.”

Thompson’s Republican rivals appeared unbowed by his entry and used their forum to take potshots at him for skipping the debate. “Maybe we’re up past his bedtime,” Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) quipped. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani joked: “I think Fred is a really, really good man. I think he’s done a pretty good job of playing my part on ‘Law & Order.’ ”

Asked by Leno why he wasn’t in New Hampshire, Thompson said, “I’ll do my share, but I don’t think it’s a very enlightening forum, to tell you the truth.”

Thompson’s long-awaited announcement brings a potentially formidable candidate into the Republican race. His Southern roots, conservative message and celebrity appeal from movies and television have already pushed him into second place in most national polls, behind Giuliani.

But Thompson’s late start leaves him well behind his rivals in organizing his campaign in early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has used television ads to build a lead in the polls, and in South Carolina and Florida, where Giuliani is currently ahead.

Thompson’s entry could quickly alter the dynamics of a wide-open Republican nomination battle that has evolved rapidly through the course of the year. When the campaign began, McCain was seen as the likeliest candidate to claim front-runner status, but his campaign ran aground by mid-summer.

The summer belonged to Giuliani and Romney. Romney surged in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire and capped off August with a victory in the Iowa Republican straw poll — a contest that Giuliani, McCain and Thompson skipped. For Giuliani, the summer months helped change a story line that said, despite his celebrity appeal, he had little chance of becoming the Republican nominee because of his support for abortion rights and gay rights. Now he is seen as a credible, if conventional, threat for the nomination.

The summer also helped to establish former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as the dark-horse candidate with the best chance of surprising one of his better-known rivals.

Now will come another phase in the race, in which Thompson attempts to capitalize on the lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters for their presidential choices. Thompson brings to the race a Southern conservative, something that has been missing since prospective candidates such as former senators George Allen (Va.) and Bill Frist (Tenn.) saw their prospects fade even before the campaign began.

But his start-up period proved extremely rocky. His early fundraising did not set any records, and he went through a succession of senior campaign advisers before recruiting Bill Lacy, who managed his 1994 Senate campaign. Lacy has replaced several high-level advisers with others who have more experience in campaigns.

Even with Thompson on the other side of the continent, Wednesday’s GOP debate was among the liveliest of the year. Once past an opening question about the missing Thompson, the candidates turned on one another. Romney, Giuliani, McCain and Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) sparred over immigration. McCain chastised Romney over his reluctance to say the “surge” policy in Iraq is clearly working. Huckabee and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) clashed over whether the United States should stay in Iraq or get out.

When Romney said he believed the troop buildup in Iraq was “apparently working,” McCain jumped him. “Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir.”

“That’s just what I said,” Romney responded.

“No, not ‘apparently.’ It’s working,” McCain replied.

Moments later, Huckabee and Paul engaged in an even more heated exchange. Paul repeated his call for the United States to pull out of Iraq, to which Huckabee objected. “We bought it and we broke it,” he said, adding that the United States must not leave without honor.

Paul said the decision to go to war was made by a handful of neoconservatives who, he argued, hijacked U.S. foreign policy. “They’re responsible, not the American people,” he said.

“If we make a mistake,” Huckabee replied, “we make it as a single country: the United States of America, not the divided states of America.”

On immigration, Romney accused Giuliani of coddling illegal immigrants as mayor of New York. “I think saying, as he did, if you happen to be an undocumented alien, we want you in New York, we’ll protect you in New York, I think that contributed to 3 million illegals in this country becoming 12 million illegals coming into this country,” he said.

“The reality is, my programs and policies led to a city that was the safest large city in the country, so they must have been sensible policies,” Giuliani replied.

Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (Calif.) drew the lone question about Sen. Larry E. Craig (Idaho). Asked about the news that Craig is reconsidering his resignation after being arrested in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, both said he should go ahead with his resignation.

Wednesday’s 90-minute debate was sponsored by the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, the University of New Hampshire and Fox News Channel and was carried nationally.

Thompson made a brief appearance during the lead-in to the debate when his campaign aired its first commercial. In the ad, he warned that “on the next president’s watch, our country will make decisions that will affect our lives and our families far into the future,” adding: “We can’t allow ourselves to become a weaker, less prosperous and more divided nation.”

In his announcement video, Thompson portrays himself as someone from ordinary roots who has enjoyed great success in life. “I have worked for minimum wages, for salaries more than I ever thought I would make, and for everything in between. I have had dinners on the factory floor, while working the graveyard shift, and I have dined with world leaders in foreign capitals.”

Thompson plans to hit the campaign trail Thursday morning, boarding a bus in Des Moines for a three-day trek around the perimeter of the state. He is then to spend two days in New Hampshire and a day in South Carolina.

Best known for his portrayal of Arthur Branch, the gruff New York district attorney on “Law & Order,” Thompson, 65, began his career in politics when he was recruited by then-Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.) to serve as the Republican counsel on the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

An early case as a lawyer opened a door to Hollywood, where he appeared in numerous movies over the years. He was elected to the Senate in the 1994 GOP landslide. He left the Senate in 2003, returning to Hollywood and to a lobbying career.

His first marriage ended in divorce. He later remarried, and he has five children from the two marriages.

In April, Thompson revealed that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma in 2004 but said that had been treated and is in remission.

Shear reported from Des Moines.

What are your thoughts on the questions posed in this “quiz”?

Should we know the answers to any/all of these questions?

If you were to construct a political literacy test, what questions do you think any potential participant/voter should be able to answer?

POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE “QUIZ”

1.) President of the United States

2.) Vice-President of the United States

3.) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

4.) Associate Justices of the Supreme Court (name two)

5.) Speaker of the House of Representatives

6.) Majority Leader – Senate

7.) Majority Leader – House of Representatives

8.) Party in control of House of Representatives

9.) Party in control of Senate

10.) “Party in Power” – what determines this?

11.) Senator from WA (name one)

12.) Representative from the 5th District in House of Representatives

13.) Governor of Washington

14.) Current Mayor of Spokane

15.) President of Mexico

16.) Prime Minister of Canada

17.) President of Russia

18.) Political Leader of China

19.) Prime Minister of Great Britain

20.) Prime Minister of Israel

21.) Three judges on American Idol

22.) Three characters from the Simpsons

23.) Three characters from the South Park

24.) Three characters from the Sopranos

25.) The last five presidents of the United States (present one excluded)

Breaking down surge politics

Michael Barone
U.S. News and World Report
September 5, 2007

He who frames the issue tends to determine the outcome of the vote. That’s a basic rule of political consultants that applies to elections and to the legislative process, as well.

In July, when Congress was considering legislation limiting American military involvement in Iraq, the issue was framed – by Democratic leaders and the mainstream media – as whether Americans should continue to sacrifice life and treasure in a futile attempt to carry on a war that was already lost. It took some considerable shrewdness and steadfastness by Republican congressional leaders to prevent a stinging repudiation of the Bush administration.

They may have been helped by Republican members’ recoiling against the harsh partisanship of Democratic leaders – just as Democratic solidarity may be increased by what is perceived as the harsh partisanship of Republicans.

Now, as Congress awaits the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the issue seems to be framed in a different way. Democrats as harshly partisan as Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and as steadfastly opposed to military action in Iraq as Washington Rep. Brian Baird have had to admit or report that Petraeus’ “surge” strategy and forward-moving tactics have produced military progress in Iraq. We are making gains that even strong supporters of the administration were unwilling to claim in July. For Baird, this means Congress should support the surge and not attempt to recall troops now.

For Durbin, it means that the focus should be on lack of political progress by the Iraqi Congress. But the recent agreement between Iraqi parliamentary leaders may undercut that view, as well. The central figure in the debate this month is likely to be Petraeus. He was universally praised when he was nominated to the Iraq command early this year and was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.

He’s been taking some sniping from the left-wing blogosphere lately, but, as the author of the military’s counterinsurgency manual and as an uncommonly articulate speaker, he seems likely to gain general respect. The public comments he’s made so far make it clear that he won’t present a totally positive report. But they also make it clear that he sees genuine military progress. Parts of Iraq that looked irretrievably lost to insurgents and al-Qaida now appear pacified and normal.

This would pose, as House Democratic Whip James Clyburn said in late July, “a real big problem for us.” Anti-war activists have been running ads and holding rallies to persuade Republican members to vote for a timetable for withdrawal. As the issue was framed in July, they had reason to hope these efforts would be successful. But if the issue is framed as continuing a policy that has had military success, the pressure will shift to the other side.

Clyburn conceded that if the issue were framed that way, he would have a hard time persuading Blue Dog Democrats to vote for withdrawal. Democrats were hoping they might get up to 300 votes in the House for such a stance. Now it looks as though they may get only 200 – less than a majority.

History gives a little guidance here. Harry Truman’s job ratings hovered around 25 percent between the firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 and the November 1952 election because he offered no hope of anything but bloody military stalemate – much bloodier than Iraq – in Korea. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, fared well with the voters in 1972 when American troops were being withdrawn with the communists seemingly defeated in Vietnam. American voters are not so much anti-war as anti-stalemate – and anti-defeat. Between stalemate and withdrawal, they’ll lean to withdrawal.

Between victory and withdrawal, however, they’ll usually pick victory.

Will that be seen as the choice facing Congress this month? Efforts to undercut a positive Petraeus assessment are under way, such as a pessimistic draft of a Government Accountability Office report on political progress leaked to the Washington Post last week. (The GAO released its report Tuesday.) But Democratic leaders today don’t have the huge majorities they had in 1975 when they blocked the Air Force from repelling the communist invasion of South Vietnam. They may persist in proclaiming that the surge isn’t working. But the facts seem to be framing the issue another way.

Leading the way

Western states take the initiative to fight global warming

Tri-City Herald
September 5, 2007

The following editorial appeared Thursday in the Tri-City Herald.

It’s more a leveling than it is a breakthrough, but the Western Climate Initiative is good news just the same.

In it, eight Western states and Canadian provinces have agreed to a regional goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2020.

That’s not exactly a new goal. According to the Associated Press, it is an aggregation of goals set individually by the states and provinces and does not change any existing targets.

But by combining forces and agreeing on some minimal regional standards, the initiative members serve as pathfinders for other regions and the Canadian and U.S. national governments.

Members of the initiative are Washington, Oregon, Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, British Columbia and Manitoba.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski says the group is “leading the way for North America in adopting real measures and programs to combat global warming and to secure economic and environmental opportunity.”

It’s easy to understand why the West is out front. Dam operators, water district managers, farmers, conservationists and scientists are predicting dire water shortages in the region if the effects of global warming aren’t curbed.

Already, snowfall is diminishing and spring runoff is coming earlier. In the mid-Columbia, where much of the agricultural industry depends on melting snow in the Cascades to irrigate summer crops, the potential damage would be devastating.

Among the revelations before a Senate committee: The spring snowpack already has declined at nearly 75 percent of all weather recording stations in Washington, Oregon and California.

If trends continue, tens of thousands of irrigated acres could fall out of production in the West as water supplies tighten, the senators were told this summer.

The regional initiative’s aims include mandating use of renewable energy resources, imposing stricter standards on new power plants and buying alternative-fuel vehicles where practical. These are hardly radical ideas, and their costs shouldn’t be prohibitive.

Also important is that the initiative should help reduce the ever-popular notion that if one state undertakes something, those who oppose it need do nothing more than cross state lines to get a bargain.

Not any more – not in these states.

And the planet may just benefit. That, in the end, is the whole idea.