By William Kristol

“In case you missed it, a few days ago Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock concert museum. Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.” This jab by John McCain at Hillary Clinton at the most recent Republican presidential debate received the evening’s only standing ovation. Admittedly, those standing were partisan Florida Republicans. Still, it was a moment–in its combination of high-spirited playfulness and polemical sharpness–that made me think happier days may lie ahead for the GOP.

The first two years of George W. Bush’s second term were rough: the situation in Iraq worsened, and his key domestic proposals–Social Security and immigration reform–flopped. The big Republican losses last November followed. Since then, it’s been conventional wisdom (including among many Republicans) that 2008 is likely to be a replay of 2006–this time leading to the loss of the White House too. But this conventional wisdom could well be wrong. Here are three reasons.

1) The Democrats’ takeover of both houses of Congress last November turns out to have been a mixed blessing for them. The approval numbers for the Democratic Congress have been trending downward. It hasn’t been easy for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to keep the party’s liberal base and its new supporters happy at the same time. And the Bush White House has made some adjustments. The election defeat coincided with a crisis about how to move forward in Iraq. Bush decided against Donald Rumsfeld but also against the Iraq Study Group, and for General David Petraeus and the surge. Democrats forecast an even deeper quagmire. Instead, we’ve seen progress–which could well continue and broaden. Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey–not Alberto Gonzales–will be making the case for the Administration on the tools it needs to conduct the war on terrorism. A respected and independent former judge, Mukasey will have credibility that Gonzales could only dream of.

2) Polls still show a hangover from November 2006, with Democrats having an advantage. But history suggests that may not hold up. Winning control of Congress doesn’t necessarily signify much about the next presidential contest. The last time Congress flipped was 1994–and that GOP sweep was followed by a Bill Clinton victory in 1996. Democrats took back the Senate (and thus control of both bodies of Congress) in 1986, and George H.W. Bush won easily in 1988. Voters like checks and balances.

It’s true that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama now run ahead of the GOP candidates in matchups. But as often as not in recent presidential elections, the candidate who eventually won had trailed at some point by margins as large as those now facing the likely Republican nominees. This was true of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. And in the two most recent elections, Republicans haven’t done badly. The GOP candidate made a far closer race of it than expected in a special election in the strongly Democratic 5th Congressional District in Massachusetts, losing by only 6 points despite being outspent about 4 to 1. And 36-year-old Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal won the governorship of Louisiana with a majority in the first round of balloting.

3) Watching the Republican candidates in the debate in Orlando, Fla., I wasn’t filled with dread about the general election. The Democrats are going to nominate either a one-term Senator (Clinton) or a half-term Senator (Obama), neither with much in the way of legislative achievements. Against that, the GOP will offer one of the following: a remarkably successful two-term mayor (Rudy Giuliani), a business leader as well as Governor (Mitt Romney), a four-term Senator and war hero (McCain), an effective two-term Governor (Mike Huckabee) or a Senator with as much experience as Clinton and who was a star prosecutor and has an appealing personal story (Fred Thompson).

And then there’s the McCain moment. Why did it galvanize the crowd? Perhaps because it brought together three Republican themes: the Democrats are the party of big spending (the museum earmark) and cultural liberalism (the Woodstock concert), while the GOP is the party that understands war (”I was tied up at the time”). It’s true that McCain is uniquely qualified to make that last point–but if he’s not the presidential candidate, he can advance it as the vice-presidential nominee or as a prospective Secretary of Defense. At a time of war, in a culturally conservative country with voters suspicious of Big Government liberalism, it would be foolish to underrate the chances of the presidential nominee of the more hawkish, socially conservative and anti-Big Government party.

By Steve Rushin

If the 2008 presidential election comes down to a choice between Hillary Clinton and front runner Rudolph Giuliani, Americans will elect a woman before they will elect a bald man. The U.S. has had more than five bald Presidents, but Americans haven’t voted one into office in 51 years, when Dwight Eisenhower won a second term over Adlai Stevenson–the second consecutive election in which two bald men went head to glorious head.

That was 1956, when 20th Century Fox released The King and I, starring Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. It was an annus mirabilis for hairless potentates but also the twilight of their brief golden age–the last time heads of state were not synonymous with heads of hair.

When President John F. Kennedy went hatless during his Inauguration speech in 1961, he committed in essence a double homicide: of the hat industry and of the prospect that any bald man would ever have to the nation’s highest office.

Since Eisenhower left the White House, voters have carved out a Mount Brushmore of Presidents–Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton–with magnificent hair. What we need is a tonsorial memorial to those giants–Ike, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion–of the World War II era, that one brief and very shining moment in history when baldness was tantamount to greatness.

Today the only thing voters like less than a candidate who gets a $400 haircut is a candidate who doesn’t require one at all. Whether or not they realize it, voters think of great leaders as people with haircuts, and really great leaders as people with haircuts named for them. George Clooney once wore a Caesar. It is unlikely that he will ever ask his stylist for a Stevenson.

Or a Giuliani. Indeed, the last time Giuliani was elected to anything (re-elected as mayor of New York City in 1997), he had a scalp full of hair (wink, wink), even if that comb-over was the biggest political cover-up since Watergate.

In the present presidential campaign, some of Giuliani’s rivals have receded (John McCain), and some have even reseeded (Joe Biden, whose scalp is less spartan than it used to be), but none are nakedly, unabashedly bald. Not even Homer Simpson, who announced his candidacy to David Letterman and combs his pair of hairs to the right, a two-string comb-over that still leaves him two strings shy of a ukulele.

Hair is, quite literally, political cover. The emperor may have no clothes, but he damn sure better have a comb. Charles the Bald, the 17 century King of France and Holy Roman Emperor, was not bald but fully maned, to judge by the portraits and coins of the day. The nickname was evidently ironic, the way 300-lb. members of Hells Angels frequently answer to “Tiny.”

I wish it weren’t so. As a bald man, I long for a President who is, in the words of the English poet Matthew Arnold, “bald as the bare mountaintops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.” This is the baldness of Sean Connery or Michael Jordan or Buddha.

But as a realist, I know I can never be President, will never be part of the American hairistocracy. The presidency is not one of those high-profile jobs in which you can sneak by with a paisley head scarf (think Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band) or a pompadour wig (think Steven Van Zandt of The Sopranos).

Balder men can be aldermen, even Governors and Senators. We seem to have a competitive advantage as late-night TV sidekicks (Paul Shaffer and Kevin Eubanks) and early-morning TV weathermen (Al Roker and Willard Scott).

But no bald man has been voted into the White House in 12 elections. (Gerald Ford doesn’t count. And neither does Dick Cheney.) Before Ike, you have to go all the way back to the election of 1836 and Martin Van Buren. But his white sideburns were so overcompensating–two enormous parentheses bracketing the nonrestrictive clause of his face–that he is seldom thought of as bald.

The country’s most prolifically failed presidential candidate, Harold Stassen, ran nine times, and in many of those elections he wore a toupee so alarming that the Washington Post thought it resembled a “sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze.”

But Stassen knew that wearing a bronzed possum was safer than hitting the stump with a naked scalp. Why? For the same reason, perhaps, that bald men are icons of evil in the movies, from Lex Luthor to Dr. Evil to Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Sometime in our political history, baldness was downgraded from Churchillian to … Dr. Phil-ian.

Hairless breeds never win the Westminster Dog Show. And they no longer win the dog-and-pony show that is a presidential election, no matter what surveys say about Giuliani as the Republican front runner. Forget the Roper polls. I trust the barber poles.

In a new book, former Bush speechwriter and NEWSWEEK contributor Michael J. Gerson warns against learning the wrong lessons from Iraq.

By Michael J. Gerson

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:54 PM ET Oct 27, 2007

Whatever the eventual outcome of the Iraq War—a precipitous, politically driven withdrawal, a gradual counterinsurgency victory, or something in between—it is necessary to begin drawing some lessons. The first is unavoidable: Regime change is the most difficult of foreign policy options, the most fraught with unintended consequences, and the least suited to the American style of war. Regime removal, it turns out, is relatively easy, given our country’s unrivaled military capabilities. But regime removal is different from regime change, which may require a massive and costly effort of nation building—especially when a society has been debilitated by decades of totalitarian rule. For nearly thirty years, Saddam Hussein instilled terror and distrust, fed divisions of clan and tribe, and encouraged the fears of the Sunni minority. Wounds so deep heal slowly and gradually, and only in an atmosphere of security and order—an atmosphere the Coalition did not initially provide.

Throughout most of my White House experience, I intuitively sided with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s combative confidence against Secretary of State Colin Powell’s caution and diplomacy. But it is now clear to me that, despite its indisputable utility on today’s battlefield, the Rumsfeld Doctrine, with its stress on light and flexible high-tech military power, is less well suited to an occupation like Iraq than are certain elements of the Powell Doctrine—especially the need for clear goals and overwhelming force. Defeating an insurgency is possible (a fact proven in Malaysia and El Salvador); and sometimes it is necessary. But this kind of counterinsurgency campaign cannot be conducted quickly or on the cheap. For years, lower-level officers had made the case that when American troops in Iraq came into an area and stayed, there was relative calm. But for years there were not enough troops to make that strategy work on a sufficient scale in Baghdad.

Another lesson concerns the power of dramatic acts of violence in a media age. Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s strategy in Iraq, in the end—even after his own end—was successful. Al-Qaeda was not responsible for most of the attacks in Iraq, but it authored the most spectacular and bloody ones—the destruction of mosques, the carnage at busy markets. And this had two effects. It created images of hopeless chaos in the American media, undermining public support for the war. Even more destructively, the attacks fed sectarian divisions within Iraq at the expense of democratic aspirations. The attraction of freedom is powerful. But hatred is not without its appeal, either, especially in the absence of order. A small group of ruthless men proved capable of fanning that hatred through spectacular acts of murder …

Not long before I left the White House, the president put the situation to me bluntly: “If the definition of success is no bombings on TV, America is in trouble. If the definition of success is steady progress in Iraq toward self-sufficiency, we can win.” This explains President Bush’s emphasis on public resolve. “The most important thing to know,” he continued, “is that I’m not going to waver.” Resolve is not a substitute for effectiveness and competence in the War on Terror—but effectiveness and competence cannot prevail without it …

… There is also danger in learning the wrong lessons from Iraq—or in overlearning the lessons of caution. Some claim the American project in Iraq was doomed from the beginning, because Iraqis and Arabs more broadly are culturally incapable of sustaining democracy. That is a familiar historical charge, made in other periods, against Catholics in Southern Europe, Hindus and Muslims in India, Eastern Orthodox in Eastern Europe, and Confucian cultures across Asia. All of these groups experienced difficult days in their democratic transitions—moments when the skeptics seemed to be vindicated. Did Indian democracy look to be successful when more than a million people died by violence during the partition process in the later 1940s? But in all of these cases, betting against the advance of democracy was a poor wager.

It may be possible that the Arab world is the great exception to this trend of history; but if so, Iraq does not prove it. Americans who first entered Iraq did not report an inevitable sectarian conflict. To the contrary, the Shia were remarkably patient during the first two years after the liberation. Iraqis of every background, including most Sunnis, were pleased that Saddam was gone and were generally inclined to withhold judgment about the occupation. There was little resentment at the size of the occupation force, and great hope that the arrival of the Americans would improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Nor were the successive elections an illusion. They were real achievements. Iraqis voted under considerable threat, in percentages greater than do Western democracies—advances that should not be forgotten or denigrated.

Given these events, an imperious contempt for the Shia—a belief that barbarians will always be barbarians—is neither fair nor helpful. Iraqi patience and goodwill were not lacking; rather, they were squandered when the Coalition failed to provide security and basic services. Sectarian conflict was not preordained—it intensified when many of the Shia lost confidence in the ability of the Coalition and Iraqi army to defend them and turned for protection and revenge to militias and death squads. Iraq does not demonstrate that democracy is impossible in the Arab world; it demonstrates that founding a new democracy is difficult in a nation overrun by militias and insurgents.

This is not to say that support for democracy in the Arab world always requires immediate elections. Such elections in Saudi Arabia, for example, would likely result in a government more oppressive and dangerous than the current one. But in Iraq there was no alternative to elections. After the invasion and liberation—undertaken, it bears repeating, primarily for reasons of national security—the president was not about to install a potential Shia dictator in place of the old Sunni dictator. That kind of cynical power game would likely have facilitated a massive Shia retribution and perhaps even genocide against the Sunnis. Democracy is necessary in Iraq precisely because it is the only political system that eventually can tame sectarian tensions, giving the Shia majority the influence it deserves, while guaranteeing the rights and representation of the Sunni minority.

But democracy in Iraq certainly has enemies—jihadists, Baathist holdouts, and religious militias—who happen to be some of the worst criminals on the global stage. We have been led by history to a simple choice: do we stand with the flawed democrats of Iraq, or abandon them to overthrow and death? Some foreign-policy realists argue that such considerations of honor mean little in international affairs. But this national commitment is more than a matter of chivalry. If America abandons Muslim leaders and soldiers who are risking their lives to fight Islamic radicalism and terror—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—the War on Terror cannot be won.

Another false lesson is found in the assertion that the Iraq War has actually been creating the terrorist threat we seek to fight—stirring up a hornet’s nest of understandable grievances in the Arab world. In fact, radical Islamist networks have never lacked for historical provocations. When Osama bin Laden proclaimed his 1998 fatwa justifying the murder of Americans, he used the excuse of President Clinton’s sanctions and air strikes against Iraq—what he called a policy of “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.” He talked of the “devastation” caused by “horrible massacres” of the 1991 Gulf War. All this took place before the invasion of Iraq was even contemplated—and it was enough to result in the murder of nearly three thousand Americans on 9/11. Islamic radicals will seize on any excuse in their campaign of recruitment and incitement. If it were not Iraq, it would be the latest “crime” of Israel, or the situation in East Timor, or cartoons in a Dutch newspaper, or statements by the pope. The well of outrage is bottomless. The list of demands—from the overthrow of moderate Arab governments to the reconquest of Spain—is endless.

America is not responsible for the existence of Islamist ideology. Yet the shifting prospect of American success or failure in the Iraq War does have an effect on the recruitment of radicals. All “pan movements”—political ideologies that claim historical inevitability—expand or contract based on morale. Bin Laden talks of how the Arab world is attracted to the “strong horse”—the victor, the evident winner—and there is truth in that claim. In an ideological struggle, perception matters greatly, and outcomes matter most. Israel’s perceived defeat in Lebanon in 1982 helped produce a generation of terrorists, convinced that armed struggle could humble their enemy. If America were really to retreat in humiliation from Iraq, Islamist radicals would trumpet their victory from North Africa to the islands of the Philippines … increase their recruitment of the angry and misguided … and expand the size and boldness of their attacks.

Perhaps the most dangerous and self-destructive lesson that might be drawn from Iraq is a hyper-caution indistinguishable from paralysis. In a backlash to the Iraq War, some Democrats seem to argue that any future American action or intervention will require both certainty as to the validity of our intelligence and international unanimity. The evidence on weapons of mass destruction must always be conclusive, or else it must always be mocked and dismissed. The United Nations must always grant its blessing and legitimacy. Were America to accept these ground rules, we would become a spectator in world events. The demand for intelligence certainty would allow flickering threats to become raging fires before any action were taken to extinguish them. The demand for international unanimity would make interventions to prevent genocide or ethnic cleansing nearly impossible. America acted in the former Yugoslavia under President Clinton without U.N. support, and may need to do the same in other places in the future. At some point, caution becomes demoralization, and humility becomes humiliation …

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62313

The always-evolving nomination process provides ample time and challenges to compel candidates to reveal their characters and skills.

By George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:25 PM ET Oct 27, 2007

Someone urging a “bold,” “decisive,” “comprehensive” solution to this or that problem tries to dispel doubts by blithely saying, “Hey, what is the worst that could happen?” If, hearing that, you think to yourself, “Oh, you have no idea,” you probably wisely flinch from a federal “solution” to the “problem” of the admittedly messy system of choosing presidential nominees.

Many states that think their interests are being slighted think other states are behaving badly—meaning self-interestedly—by holding early primaries. The entire process is untidy, as freedom often is, and the tidy-minded are threatening to have the federal government fix it.

Congress, they say, should divide the nation into four regions that vote in monthly intervals, with the order of voting rotating every four years. Or Congress should spread the voting over 10 two-week intervals, starting with clusters of small states, with the largest states voting last. Or something.

But all such federal solutions might be unconstitutional. Not necessarily, said Richard Hasen of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in recent testimony to a Senate committee. But probably, said William Mayer, professor of political science at Northeastern University, also testifying.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the time, place and manner of congressional elections. But regarding presidential elections, the Constitution gives Congress only the power to set the time for choosing presidential electors, leaving the manner of selecting them to state legislatures. On the principle that where the Constitution is silent regarding federal power it is permissive regarding states’ powers, some argue that Congress has no power to impose regional primaries on states. Furthermore, some Supreme Court rulings imply that such imposition would violate the parties’ First Amendment associational rights.

Hasen, however, notes that Article II gives Congress the power to set a single national date for presidential elections and, Hasen says, that power should extend to setting the time for the nomination of presidential candidates. In 1941, the Supreme Court held that Congress could regulate congressional primaries as well as general elections. And the court has read the Constitution as allowing Congress to regulate the financing of presidential as well as congressional campaigns, and the power to change the voting age for elections for all federal offices.

Hasen also argues that were Congress to legislate a national plan for primaries, this would limit the scheduling freedom of states without interfering with the internal workings of the parties. But it would interfere momentously: It would deny the parties the right to make for themselves the potentially high-stakes decision of when to select national convention delegates.

Mayer responds that the federal government has no constitutional authority to compel states to hold presidential primaries on particular dates or to select national convention delegates in particular ways. Furthermore, no government at any level has the power to compel political parties to use a particular way to nominate their presidential candidates.

The Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925, affirmed Congress’s power to legislate to protect government “from impairment or destruction, whether threatened by force or by corruption.” That acknowledgment of Congress’s power to protect what Mayer calls “the fundamental integrity” of election processes does not, however, license Congress to legislate against untidiness arising from free choices of the states and parties. Mayer considers it “almost willfully perverse to say that, because the Constitution permits Congress to determine the time of one particular step in the presidential selection process, it therefore gives Congress the power to determine the time of every step in the process.”

The law long ago stopped treating parties as purely private associations, in part to end the practice of white-only primaries. But since the 1970s the Supreme Court has, Mayer says, “upheld the claims of political parties almost every time they have come in conflict with state law.” Parties are not purely private entities, but neither are they appendages of government. They are voluntary associations, cloaked in the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of association. And the most important function for which people associate in parties is the selection of candidates.

Anyway, it is premature to pronounce the existing process unsatisfactory, or more so than whatever the next process might be. Regional primaries would penalize some candidates randomly, depending on the order regions voted in a particular year. If there had been regional primaries in 1992 and Southern states had voted last, that might have doomed Bill Clinton, who for the first five weeks won no primary or caucus outside the South. In 1976, Gerald Ford won an average of 60 percent in Northeastern primaries, 35 percent in Western ones. Jimmy Carter won 62 percent in the South, 35 percent in the Northeast, 21 percent in the West.

From one cycle to another, the process evolves as federalism allows—indeed incites—competitive improvisations. The salient question is: Does today’s process provide sufficient time and challenges to compel candidates to reveal their characters and skills? It does, thereby demonstrating this: What is messy is not necessarily a mess.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62305

Because of lynching’s violent, racist history, the mere invocation of it can make people insanely angry.

By Ellis Cose

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:20 PM ET Oct 27, 2007

In an age when lynching is no longer accepted, what is the meaning of a noose? When a twisted rope, evocative of such a hideous history, hangs so far away from the horrors that defined it, is it still worth getting worked up about? Or when nooses appear on trees, on doors and in well-traveled public places, should we dismiss them as tasteless diversions? Cries for attention from sick, benighted souls? If only the questions were purely hypothetical. In the past few weeks, nooses have appeared in numerous places, spawning an orgy of coverage along with questions about their significance and potential harm.

The catalyst seems to be the brouhaha in Jena, La. Last year six black students there were accused of beating up a white student after three nooses were found hanging from a tree outside a school. The blacks were charged with attempted murder. Though the charges were subsequently reduced, outrage over the students’ being charged with such a serious crime culminated in a demonstration last month that drew an estimated 10,000 protesters to the tiny town of 3,000.

Now, it appears, nooses have become the totem of choice for some troubled people. Earlier this month a black professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College found a noose hanging from her office door. USA Today recently cataloged an array of such incidents: nooses at the University of Maryland, in a Long Island, N.Y., police locker room and in a bus-maintenance garage in Pittsburgh, to name a few. RACIAL CRISIS? OR JUST ROPE IN THE HANDS OF FOOLS? asked the headline atop a New York Times column.

I’d lay odds on the latter. This is an outbreak of copycat idiocy perpetrated by mean-spirited people who get a thrill out of seeing others riled up. And a lot of people have taken the bait. At Columbia, the noose spawned a rally in support of the targeted professor. In her State of the College address, president Susan H. Fuhrman said the perpetrator had “targeted all of us who believe in diversity.”

It’s unclear exactly what effect the noose was supposed to have. But it is clear that it stirred emotions out of proportion to its threat. The reason, of course, has to do with the history of the noose—or, to be more precise, the legacy of lynching.

Between 1882 and 1951, more than 5,000 people were lynched in the United States, according to statistics kept by the Tuskegee Institute. Not all were black. Roughly a fourth were white, Mexican or Asian. But lynchings of blacks were different from lynchings of whites. Many were “spectacle” lynchings, public rituals designed to make the point that “black bodies still belonged to white people,” writes Cynthia Carr in “Our Town,” which explores a 1930 lynching in Marion, Ind. Newspapers and public officials frequently egged on the lynch mobs, plying them with lurid (and often false) details. “Stories of sexual assault, insatiable black rapists, tender white virgins … were the bodice rippers of their day … The cumulative impression was of a world made precarious by Negroes,” reports historian Philip Dray in “At the Hands of Persons Unknown.”

Because of lynching’s violent, racist and sexually charged history, the mere invocation of it can make people insanely angry—or, as Clarence Thomas demonstrated during his Senate confirmation hearings (when he referred to his treatment as a “high-tech lynching”), silence a roomful of normally loquacious politicians. Still, 2007 is different from 1907.

Hate crimes didn’t even have a name then. It was reasonable to believe, especially in the South, that “uppity,” or even just random blacks, could be lynched with impunity. In 1990, Congress mandated the attorney general to collect data on hate crimes, and the FBI pledged to work with local officials to prosecute such transgressions. More important, lynchings and other hate crimes—be they anti-Semitic, anti-gay or anti-black—no longer have broad public support.

People still engage in hateful behavior: the FBI recorded 7,163 bias incidents in 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, down slightly from the 7,947 recorded a decade earlier. The majority were racial incidents, mostly against blacks. Still, no one really believes a Columbia professor is about to be lynched.

A position paper by the American Psychological Association concluded that most hate crimes were the work of “otherwise law-abiding young people.” Their actions were sometimes fueled by alcohol or drugs, “but the main determinant appears to be personal prejudice,” which blinds aggressors “to the immorality of what they are doing.” Extreme crimes “tend to be committed by people with a history of antisocial behavior.”

Maybe it’s time to stop getting so upset about these stupid gestures. Use them as occasions to educate—to revisit and extract lessons from history. And in cases where prosecutable crimes are committed, make the fools feel the full impact of the law. But to treat their acts as a serious expression of anything other than cruelty is to grant them an importance that they do not deserve.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/62297

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
November 2, 2007

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden weren’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, then he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9-11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George W. Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed-Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division. But Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks.

As Newsweek International put it in August: “Since 9-11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years, while Raytheon’s had doubled.”

Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first President Bush and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were severely cutting the military budget for high-ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer-existent Soviet military. Sure, they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.

Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9-11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9-11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.

The bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 box knives, but Bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein’s army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.

Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so called “war on terror,” a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from high-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand.

As Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: “With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings or naval fleets – the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. … It does not require half-a-trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.”

That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in Bush’s 2008 budget requests. Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts, and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of mujahedeen terrorists, once our “freedom fighters” in that earlier Afghanistan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War.

“The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget,” writes Lawrence J. Korb, “surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense. … And much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower.”

Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9-11. They should give bin Laden his cut.

Judiciary Chairman Endorsed Justice Nominee but Says He, Like Other Democrats, Is Concerned About Torture Question
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer and washingontpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, November 2, 2007; A03

As Democratic opposition builds over attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey, no Democratic lawmaker has found himself in a tighter spot than Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who had eagerly recommended the former federal judge as a consensus candidate.

After Mukasey refused to say whether an interrogation technique called waterboarding amounts to illegal torture, Schumer has watched a growing number of his colleagues announce their opposition to the judge.

Schumer, who has remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the furor, said in an interview yesterday that he is now “wrestling” with whether to vote against a nomination that he was instrumental in bringing about. He compared the controversy to the 2005 nomination battle over Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

“From this administration, we will never get somebody who agrees with us on issues like torture and wiretapping,” Schumer said at one point, suggesting an argument in favor of Mukasey, who faces a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Tuesday. “The best thing we can hope for is someone who will depoliticize the Justice Department and put rule of law first.”

But Schumer said minutes later that his mind is not made up: “He’s the best we can get, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure a yes vote. I thought John Roberts was the best we could get, but I voted no.”

The outcome of Schumer’s internal struggle could prove pivotal to Mukasey’s chances, as a growing number of Democrats, including four other members of the Judiciary Committee, have announced their opposition to the nominee, as have all four senators who are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

The deteriorating political situation led President Bush yesterday to mount a vigorous defense of Mukasey, saying that Democrats are subjecting the former federal judge to standards that no candidate for attorney general could meet.

“It’s wrong for congressional leaders to make Judge Mukasey’s confirmation dependent on his willingness to go on the record about details of a classified program he has not been briefed on,” Bush said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “If the Senate Judiciary Committee were to block Judge Mukasey on these grounds, they would set a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general. That would guarantee that America would have no attorney general during this time of war.”

But key Democrats continued to signal opposition to the suddenly controversial nominee. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said his position is not “much of a secret,” saying Mukasey’s attempt at explaining his view on waterboarding has left his nomination in doubt.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) announced his opposition yesterday, becoming the fourth Democrat on the Judiciary Committee to promise a no vote. Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who originally predicted easy confirmation but has since become deeply critical of Mukasey, is expected to announce his position today in Vermont.

All nine Republicans on the committee are likely to support Mukasey, but if all 10 Democrats oppose the nominee, the confirmation would die in committee.

Republicans privately say that the nominee’s prospects hang on a few votes, particularly those of Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has broken ranks with her party in the past. Should Schumer and Feinstein side with other Democrats in opposition, Judiciary Republicans are likely to seek to forward the nomination with a neutral or negative recommendation to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.

Schumer originally suggested Mukasey to head the Justice Department eight months ago, after the senator became the first Democrat to call for the resignation of then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales over his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys. Schumer, whose chief counsel is a former federal prosecutor in the Manhattan courts that were overseen by Mukasey, had also recommended him as a worthy Supreme Court candidate in 2005.

But Mukasey, who was sailing to an easy confirmation, alarmed many Democrats on Oct. 18 when he repeatedly refused to say whether waterboarding is torture. The technique, which simulates drowning, has been used by the CIA but is barred by the U.S. military and has been widely condemned as torture by human rights groups.

Mukasey tried to mollify Democrats by saying in a letter earlier this week that he found the technique personally “repugnant,” but he reiterated that he could not determine whether it is illegal without being privy to classified details.

Mukasey’s response has been deemed insufficient by many Democrats and sparked an outcry among antiwar liberals who provided much of the political energy — and financial contributions — that propelled Democrats to the majority. Schumer, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, needs those supporters as he tries to expand the majority next year. One group, Democrats.com, began an e-mail campaign last night urging its supporters to withhold donations to Schumer if he votes for Mukasey.

During yesterday’s telephone interview, Schumer said that his decision will hinge largely on whether he believes Mukasey would be independent of the White House. He said that was “called into question” by some of Mukasey’s views.

“The question is whether he will show the requisite independence,” Schumer said. “That’s what I want to clear in my own head. . . . If Congress passes a law forbidding waterboarding, would he enforce that?”

Schumer’s colleagues are keenly aware of his awkward position. In announcing his opposition to Mukasey on Wednesday, Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said he could not predict the outcome of the close vote and noted the undecided posture of Schumer, with whom Durbin lives in a group house of Democrats. “I haven’t polled my colleagues, including the one I live with,” Durbin said.

Some Republicans, meanwhile, are openly chortling at Schumer’s dilemma.

“Mukasey and Schumer, aren’t they partners? Wasn’t that the Schumer pick?” Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said yesterday. “It’s become a problem for him.”

Comedian planned multi-primary run

Comedian Stephen Colbert speaks Sunday in Columbia, S.C.Associated Press (Associated Press)

Gabrielle Russon
Chicago Tribune
November 2, 2007

WASHINGTON – TV comedian Stephen Colbert’s mock presidential campaign suffered a setback Thursday when Democrats in South Carolina, the lone state where he pledged to run in both the Republican and Democratic primaries, denied him the political stage.

Although he paid a $2,500 filing fee, the executive committee voted to keep Colbert off the Democratic ballot, said state party chairwoman Carol Fowler. The filing fee will be returned to him, she said.

“I think this committee that votes took their responsibilities seriously. Our rules are pretty specific about what makes a legitimate candidate,” Fowler said. “There was nothing personal about him; they like him a lot, but they think this is a serious process.”

Colbert also missed the deadline Thursday to pay a $35,000 filing fee for a spot on the GOP ballot, a Republican official said. During Wednesday’s episode of “The Colbert Report,” Colbert said he wouldn’t spend the $35,000 for the GOP’s filing fee.

“Thirty-five thousand, guys?” he asked. “I understand you have to keep a club exclusive, but I paid less for my black-market liver.”

On the campaign trail recently, Colbert said, “I promise, if elected, I will crush the state of Georgia … Our peaches are more numerous than Georgia’s. They are more juiciful.”

With his deadpan delivery, Colbert first gained notoriety on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” before leaving for “The Colbert Report.”

Many have followed the television star’s every move since Colbert first announced his candidacy, which coincides with the release of his new book, “I Am America, (And So Can You!).”

Kate Riley
Seattle Times
November 1, 2007

You could have knocked me over with a WASL test book.

My 10-year-old son received a letter signed by Gov. Christine Gregoire and Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson. “Congratulations!” it started. “… We are very proud of you, and you should be very proud of yourself.”

Apparently, my son “achieved the state reading, writing and mathematics learning standards.”

Here’s the punch line to my son’s letter. He is autistic in a self-contained special-education classroom with limited mainstreaming, can read some words, can add a little and can barely draw a straight line. Much as it pains me, I told my colleagues a few months ago, there is no way my pride and joy will ever meet state learning standards.

And then he did – or so they say.

Recently, a bright young acquaintance confided she didn’t pass the fourth-grade math test. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my son, whose limitations she is aware of, nailed it!

I’m feeling a little hoodwinked.

I was an editorial writer before I was a mother. I drank the high-standards Kool-Aid way back in 1993 when education reform started. I was moved by my work as a tutor for an adult literacy program. I was stunned to learn my student with a third-grade reading level had graduated high school. If she had gotten help at 10 instead of 30, her whole life might have been different.

Since then, I have written scores of editorials supporting the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. I defended keeping standards high.

“The diploma has to mean something,” I argued. Over. And over. And over.

As the stakes ratcheted up to become the threshold for graduation this year, I was persuaded to spike my WASL Kool-Aid with a little accommodation.

Sure, let’s have alternative ways to pass the WASL. The students still have to meet standards, they’ll just do it in different ways. So a kid who has test anxiety gets to show he meets the same high standards in a different way, in a portfolio of work.

Which is how my son took the test – by portfolio in the Washington Alternate Assessment System. It was a meticulously kept body of work, representing honest, hard effort and, indeed, progress. But it did not – repeat, did not – meet any common-sense interpretation of fourth-grade standards.

Turns out, in education’s semantics wonderland, there are standards and then there are standards. Under the No Child Left Behind policy, the federal government requires states to establish standards for special-education students. In Washington, special-education students have only to meet their own personal “standard” based on the goals in their annually revised Individual Education Plans.

There is no accountability to ensure these individual special-education “standards” aren’t low-balled, although state officials say accountability measures are on the way.

OK. Let’s get this straight. This stupid assessment doesn’t change the worth of my kid, or any kid. He’s still the nicest, most fun member of the family to be around and he’s got great taste in music.

But what these tests should tell us honestly is whether a student meets one reasonable minimum standard of academic achievement – for all kids. Most can – with work and support. Sadly – and this is from one parent who struggles out of denial every day – some cannot. That’s a fact.

“You don’t want him to count against the school, do you?” was a question I heard more than once as I asked questions. Well, no, but I don’t want him to artificially inflate the school’s success rate, either. I especially don’t want to let schools off the hook if they are failing younger versions of my adult student years ago, who, when given a chance, advanced quickly to ninth-grade reading level.

Most troubling to me is the larger public-policy implication of my son’s letter. He goes in the “pass” column for his school, his district and the state. He is a supporting statistic in federal reports to show adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind program.

I hold this astonishing letter in my hands, and can’t help but feel like a co-conspirator in a public sham.

Philadelphia Inquirer
November 1, 2007

PHILADELPHIA – On the day after the Democratic debate here, the tempest generated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s handling of the issue of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants refused to go away.

Democratic and Republican presidential candidates alike joined in criticizing her Wednesday.

And the Clinton campaign, hoping the episode will not become a metaphor for evasiveness, clarified her position on the issue and put out a Web video mocking her opponents for “piling on.”

In the debate, Clinton struggled with a question about whether she supported a proposal by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to allow illegal immigrants to get licenses.

At first, she appeared to endorse the idea, saying she understood why Spitzer wanted to issue licenses. Then, she seemed to reject it, saying she “didn’t think this was the best thing for any governor to do.”

Her Democratic rivals seized upon her performance, hoping to use it as confirmation of their claim that she has avoided specific positions.

“I think last night’s debate really exposed this fault line,” Illinois Sen. Barack Obama said on Wednesday. Wednesday, the Clinton campaign issued a statement confirming that she does, in fact, support the Spitzer plan.

Republicans joined in the attack on the Democratic front-runner, slamming her both for waffling and her support for an idea that the electorate does not welcome.

According to a CNN/USA Today survey taken in mid-October, Americans oppose licenses for illegal immigrants by a 3-1 ratio. Democrats oppose it by almost 2-1.

The candidates themselves are divided on the issue, a fact obscured by all of the attention paid to Clinton’s back-and-forth during the debate.

Obama, after saying that he couldn’t “tell whether she was for it or against it,” supported licenses for illegals.

In a show of hands during the debate, three other candidates appeared to support it: Edwards, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio.

Senators Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, and Joseph Biden, of Delaware, said they opposed the proposal.