Kautzman's AP GO PO Blog

By Chris Jordan
November 18, 2009

As a liberal, and an avid news consumer, there is no cable news channel that warms my heart more than MSNBC.

Why do I find MSNBC so appealing? The network made a business decision in recent years that it was good for ratings to move to the political left. With a few exceptions, strong liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and Chris Matthews have become the face of MSNBC.

The same trend is taking place on the opposite side of the cable divide. We’ve known for years that Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” act was a charade, but since Obama’s election, they’ve taken it to a whole new level.

Fox was instrumental in relentlessly promoting the right-wing “tea parties,” even going so far as to inform its viewers of their times and locations. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been given his own talk show. Glenn Beck has also joined Fox and has seen his ratings skyrocket after labeling the president a racist.

While Fox and MSNBC have shifted further away from the center, CNN has largely stuck to simply covering the news.

Anchors Larry King, Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper rarely promote a politically slanted agenda on their shows. What’s been their reward? Declining ratings.

The trend toward more partisan news is clear. Cable stations are transitioning to more and more commentary, less and less hard news.

I’m not trying to argue that opinions are bad. Heck, I’d be out of a job if we didn’t have opinions in the media. But this trend seems to indicate that news stations are increasingly going to have to “pick sides” or suffer lower ratings, and citizens are getting more news from one-sided sources.

Simultaneously, high-profile stories of late have demonstrated the mainstream media’s obsession with the political angle over substantive discussion and debate.

A perfect example is coverage of the health care issue. Until several weeks ago, the phrase, “the public option is dead” was spouted on cable news, oh, about 10,231 times, by my count. We’ve seen endless stories about the “fate” of this proposal, but it’s hard to remember if there was even a serious and thorough discussion of its merits.

While partisan news sources are on the rise, we are seeing less and less debate of key issues. News channels obsess over the politics of health care — Will it pass? Are there enough votes? Obama’s approval rating is down! — without paying much attention to the actual components of reform.

It’s no wonder then, that less than half of Americans, 47 percent, say they are very or somewhat familiar with the details of the health-care legislation, according to a recent Washington Post survey. While Congress is on the verge of passing the most important reform in decades, most people don’t even know what is in the bill.

Thanks a lot, news media.

As we strive to be informed citizens, it is important that we make extra effort to get a range of perspectives instead of merely “picking a team.” One-sided news is becoming increasingly prevalent. So next time you’re watching MSNBC, consider switching over to Fox during the commercial break (I know it’s painful) just to see what they’re saying, or seek out conservative opinions elsewhere. The same idea applies if Fox News is the channel that warms your heart: Seek out other views.

As far as a robust debate in the news media goes, we can only hope that the recent trend reverses itself and consumers start to reward those programs that go truly in depth on the issues.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

The more President Barack Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose – and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision – whether or not it is right.

The cost of indecision is growing every day. The United States and its people, the allies who have contributed their own troops to the struggle against al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the Afghans and their government are waiting impatiently, while the challenge is getting worse.

When Obama became commander in chief, his course of action seemed clear. He was bent on early withdrawal from Iraq and an increase in resources and emphasis on winning in Afghanistan – the struggle he repeatedly called “a war of necessity.”

He sent 21,000 more troops to hold it together through the Afghan election, and named two new generals: Stanley McChrystal to run the war and Karl Eikenberry to manage the politics and reconstruction from the ambassador’s office in Kabul.

McChrystal came up with a new plan of battle, emphasizing protection of population centers and requiring up to 40,000 more troops. Eikenberry, we now know, balked, giving voice to the widespread fear that Hamid Karzai, the carry-over winner of the election the ambassador helped arrange, was too weak and corrupt to govern the country effectively, even with an enlarged American force keeping order.

Their disagreement was echoed and amplified throughout the Obama administration. The secretaries of defense and state came down on McChrystal’s side; the vice president and many on the White House political staff with Eikenberry.

The president, notwithstanding his earlier rhetoric and actions, has hesitated to resolve the issue. Obama needs to remember what Clark Clifford said about the president he served, Harry Truman. Clifford, one of Truman’s closest advisers, said the president “believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”

While Obama deliberates, his party in Congress shows increasing reluctance to make an all-out commitment to the war effort. The chairmen of two key Senate committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, are arguing for retraining Afghan troops – if they can even be found – and turning over more of the burden of fighting to them.

Meanwhile, events in Afghanistan support McChrystal’s prediction that delay in expanding the American troop commitment will almost certainly lead to gains for the Taliban and greater risk for U.S. and allied troops.

In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals. Why are we in Afghanistan? Not because of its own claim on us but because the Taliban rulers welcomed the al-Qaida plotters who hatched the destruction of 9/11. The Taliban also oppressed their own people, especially women, but we sent troops because Afghanistan was the hide-out for the terrorists that attacked our country.

We knew governing Afghanistan would never be easy. It had resisted outside forces through the ages, and its geography, its tribal structure, its absence of a democratic tradition and its poverty all argued that once we went in, it would be hard to get out.

But George W. Bush said – and Obama seemed to agree – that withdrawal was not and is not an option.

That imperative is reinforced by the presence of Pakistan, a shaky nuclear-armed power across a porous mountain border. If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely – and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands.

Given all of this, I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress – as it has done in Iraq.

Obama did not believe that could happen there. But given what he inherited, and given what he has done himself so far, I think he has no choice but to play out that hand. If we can’t afford to lose, then play to win.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

by Kathleen Parker
The Spokesman-Review

Growing concern about incivility is one of America’s more appealing trends. Increasingly, individuals and institutions are seeking ways to burnish the golden rule.

The concern isn’t new – professor P.M. Forni started the Johns Hopkins Civility Project 12 years ago and published a book in 2002: “Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct.”

Civility even has a Facebook page called “The Civility Initiative,” where Forni and visitors exchange thoughts on the subject.

But recent events and trends – from rowdy town hall meetings to sideshow rants on television to the outburst of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson – have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus.

In Wilson’s home state, University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides has made civility a focal point of the institution’s goals. And an Atlanta public relations executive, Mark DeMoss, has organized a coalition of conservatives and liberals, religious and secular, in his own Civility Project to promote a grass-roots, voluntary effort toward renewed civility.

His Web site ( www.civilityproject.org) urges a voluntary pledge to be civil in discourse and behavior, and to stand against incivility.

President Barack Obama addressed civility directly in his commencement address to Notre Dame earlier this year, and recently said, “One of the things I’m trying to figure out is, how can we make sure that civility is interesting.”

That’s more than enough evidence to declare a trend. But do Americans really want to be civil?

Our nostalgia for civility, some say, is misplaced or at least exaggerated by wishful thinking. Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics. Often cited are the anti-federalists, though the federalists were hardly rearranging the doilies. In one case, when federalist legislators needed a quorum for a key vote, they dragged anti-federalists from their rooms and locked them in the statehouse.

Imagine the fun we’d have if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided to lock their moderate colleagues in the Capitol until they agreed to sign off on health care reform.

During the Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams election of 1828, the former general was called a murderer and a cannibal; his wife was accused of being a harlot. Closer to Joe Wilson’s stomping grounds, politics has always been a blood sport and most natives are proud of it. In the election of 1832, mobs assaulted candidates. Not very civil, that.

Nonetheless, something has changed – and what has changed is media. I don’t mean traditional media, the so-called mainstream media everyone loves to hate these days. In fact, old media have strict standards about civility and appropriate language in the public sphere. Such concerns prevented me recently from publishing the obscenity uttered in the Washington Post newsroom that provoked an editor to punch a writer.

Most crucial in the viral growth of incivility are new media – the Internet, the blogosphere and all the social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, and whatever else may have developed since I began typing this page.

Whereas in previous eras an uncivil exchange might be confined to a room, a building or a public square, today’s media technology means that it is captured, amplified, replayed and distributed – perpetually.

There are now Joe Wilson “You Lie” T-shirts and bumper stickers. Meanwhile, a recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that three-quarters of those surveyed were not “outraged” by Wilson’s outburst.

Incivility may be bad form, but it can be good politics. Susan Herbst, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, is finishing a book on civility in politics in which she argues that civility and incivility are both timeless strategic rhetorical assets. Some people are just more effective at using them.

The real challenge for the civility-minded is that incivility is more exciting. Human beings are drawn to spectacle, as the bookers of Rome’s Colosseum understood. Glenn Beck is proof of the constancy of human nature.

Herbst insists that if we really want civility to prevail, we have to find a way to make it exciting and interesting to young people, and she urges the teaching of debating skills to high school and college students.

“We will never see the sort of civil, thoughtful, inventive debate that enables good public-policy-making until we inspire the young adults in our midst how to pursue it themselves,” she wrote recently for the online publication Inside Higher Ed.

Making debate cool is a challenge, not least because clear thinking is hard work that requires skill and discipline. Perhaps a few Hollywood celebrities might help lead the way? Civility, after all, is nothing but great acting.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

Damn the pesky models! Full speed ahead.

By George F. Will | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

In last week’s NEWSWEEK, the cover story was a hymn to “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.” Beneath the story’s headline (”The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet”) was this subhead: “Al Gore’s views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.” Which was rather rude because, if true, his views have not advanced for 11 years.

There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased for that long. What we know is that computer models did not predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions of dollars and diminished freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data. Soon after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man’s Thinking Man—reported that global warming is “unequivocal,” there came evidence that the planet’s temperature is beginning to cool. “That,” Ball writes, “has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.”

Models are no better or worse than their assumptions, and Ball notes how dicey these assumptions can be: “The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet.” It gets worse: “The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation—and how clouds in turn affect temperature—remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.”

Some scientists say the cooling is a product of what Ball calls “the enigmatic ocean currents.” Others say that even if the cooling continues for several decades, as some scientists think it might, warming will resume.

And if it does not? A story in the April 28, 1975, edition of NEWSWEEK was “The Cooling World.” NEWSWEEK can recycle that article, and recycling is a planet-saving virtue.

Meanwhile, however, the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:

Waxman-Markey’s goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million—in 1875.

Such nonsense is rare, but nonsensical fears are not. In their new book, SuperFreakonomics, Steven D. -Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner revisit the great shark panic of the summer of 2001. Eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast was playing in the surf near Pensacola, Fla., when a bull shark bit off his right arm and gouged a piece of his thigh. The country, with an assist from the media, became fixated on the shark menace. Time’s cover proclaimed “The Summer of the Shark”; Time’s story began:

“Sharks come silently, without warning. There are three ways they strike: the hit-and-run, the bump-and-bite and the sneak attack. The hit-and-run is the most common. The shark may see the sole of a swimmer’s foot, think it’s a fish and take a bite before realizing this isn’t its usual prey.”

Jeepers. Everyone out of the water!

Or not. Time, to its credit, let the air out of its story by noting that the numbers of shark attacks “remain minuscule.” They were small during all of 2001, all over the globe. That year there were 64 shark attacks, only four of them fatal. Between 1995 and 2005, shark attacks worldwide varied between a high of 79 in a year and a low of 46, averaging 60.3. Fatalities averaged 5.9, about 50 percent higher than in 2001. The unfortunate Jessie Arbogast became an occasion for the fun of experiencing a frisson of synthetic fear. The real thing arrived in late summer 2001, on September 11.

George Will is also the author of One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation and With a Happy Eye But . . .: America and the World, 1997—2002 .

You can’t stop either. Why that’s good.

By Jacob Weisberg | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 31, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

“I think this would be a good time for a beer,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said upon signing a bill that made 3.2 percent lager legal, ahead of the full repeal of Prohibition. I hope Barack Obama will come up with some comparably witty remarks as he presides over the dismantling of our contemporary forms of prohibition—laws that prevent gay marriage, restrict cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance, and ban travel to Cuba. “You may now kiss the groom,” perhaps, or a version of the comment he once made about smoking pot: “I inhaled—that was the point.” (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg)

Prohibition now is different from Prohibition then. When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization. A predictable failure—the insult to individual rights, the impossibility of enforcement, the spawning of organized crime—it came to an end in 1933. Today it is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature.

Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they’re instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the ’20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. These reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed, but because society has.

A few reference points: in April, Obama lifted restrictions on travel and remittances by Cuban-Americans. Last month the Justice Department announced that it would no longer prosecute cases involving medical marijuana. Same-sex marriages are recognized in six states and counting. In a larger frame, loosening restrictions and lax enforcement reflect evolving social norms. Gay unions have been celebrated on the New York Times weddings page since 2002. Since George W. Bush left office, American tourists no longer worry about being prosecuted for visiting Havana without a Treasury license. In L.A., you need only tell an on-site doctor at a walk-in pot emporium that you feel anxious to walk out with a legal bag of Captain Kush.

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What’s driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument, but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What’s advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don’t believe they should face legal jeopardy. What’s bringing the change on Cuba is not the epic failure of the 49-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks on the beach.

For similar reasons, there isn’t likely to be any retreat on the right to have an abortion or own a gun. Popular demand for an individual right is simply too powerful to overcome. The Internet has been a crucial amplifier of all such claims. With pornography and gambling, the Web itself became an irrepressible distribution tool. When it comes to gay marriage, it has accelerated the recognition of a new civil right by serving as an organizing tool and information clearinghouse. More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty. In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on personal behavior become increasingly untenable.

Politicians will continue to lag, rather than lead, these changes. Republicans face a risk in resisting the new realities. If the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian leaners and the young. Democrats face a different danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly. Nearly four decades after George McGovern became known as the candidate of amnesty, abortion, and acid, cultural issues are still treacherous territory for them. Why get in front of change when you can follow from a safe distance and end up with the same result?

Jacob Weisberg is also the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington .

by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Spokesman-Review

We don’t know why Faleh Hassan Almaleki came to this country in the mid-’90s, and it’s unlikely he’ll be able to tell us anytime soon. He’s in jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., at this writing, in lieu of a $5 million cash bond. It hardly seems far-fetched, however, to suppose he emigrated from his native Iraq for the same reason immigrants typically seek these shores: America promises opportunity and freedom.

But one wonders if he truly knew the meaning of the words.

Almaleki is the 48-year-old Glendale, Ariz., man who stands accused of using his Jeep Cherokee to run down his 20-year-old daughter, Noor, and another woman, Amal Edan Khalaf. Khalaf, said to be the mother of Noor’s boyfriend, is expected to survive the Oct. 20 attack in the parking lot of a state government building. Noor was less fortunate. She died last Monday.

About her, we know only a few things: She had a page on Facebook and another on MySpace. She was interested in modeling. And at some point she either went to Iraq and got married – or went there and rejected the suitor her family had arranged for her. Police are still trying to determine which of those stories, both in circulation, is true. Either way, she returned to the States, where she moved in with her boyfriend and his mother.

Something else we know: Almaleki felt his Facebook-using, husband-rejecting daughter had become too “Westernized.” His son, Peter-Ali, told a local TV news station that tensions ran high between father and daughter. Noor, he said, went “out of her way” to disrespect their conservative Muslim father.

And where Almaleki comes from, it is standard practice that the daughter who disrespects or brings shame upon her family is subject to what they call an honor killing. Repeating for emphasis: Almaleki is alleged to have run down two defenseless women as a matter of “honor.”

While you absorb that, let me tell you a few things I believe:

I believe that in most cases, I have no right to judge your culture by the standards of mine.

I believe what seems exotic to me might be enlightened to you.

I believe no culture has a monopoly on morality.

But I also believe you don’t run down your daughter because she has a page on Facebook and won’t marry the guy you choose.

That is not honor. It is, in fact, the opposite – an act of appalling cowardice suggestive not simply of religious extremism but of a people in fear of the sexuality and independence of women. It tells you something about a culture’s lack of faith in its own mores any time it feels compelled to use violence to enforce those mores upon its people. And it tells you something about Almaleki’s “honor” that he bolted like a scared rabbit after allegedly running the women down. It took over a week for authorities to capture him.

The U.N. Population Fund estimates that more than 5,000 women a year die in “honor” killings for such “crimes” as speaking to unrelated men or being raped. Take it as brutal evidence of the way half the human race continues to oppress the other half.

It is disgraceful that such a thing happens anywhere, but it is especially galling that it has happened here. Not just because this is home soil and such things are alien to most of us, but because it suggests, poignantly, that Faleh Hassan Almaleki did not truly understand the vastness of the hope that brings immigrants like him here. If America promised him freedom and opportunity to remake his life as he saw fit, he was apparently too short-sighted and concretized in old ways to see the obvious corollary.

It promised his daughter the same.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

by Don Barbieri
Special to The Spokesman-Review

In September, the U.S. Senate began deliberations on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, following passage of a comprehensive climate and energy bill by the House of Representatives in June. Regional energy experts led by Sen. Maria Cantwell and people I trust from Avista and Itron have convinced me that now is the time for the Inland Northwest to stand up for a clean energy economy. We have the resources and technology; we just need the national leadership to do what is right and begin a transition to a clean energy economy.

For those of us in Eastern Washington, the need for this legislation is clear. Temperatures in Washington are expected to rise 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, which will result in snowmelt occurring earlier and faster each year. Early snowmelt means more water resource problems for our dry region, including limited water supplies for drinking, agriculture and forest fire mitigation. Given these damaging consequences, we need to make sure that we’re at the forefront of the conversation to shift our nation to a clean energy economy.

Not only do we stand to gain by mitigating the impacts of climate change, we also stand to benefit significantly from investments in a new clean energy economy. Washington has what it takes to be the future powerhouse for clean energy. We currently rank fifth nationally in wind power and fourth nationally in clean energy venture capital investments. Under the national legislation we would receive $680 million for expanded energy efficiency investments.

Eastern Washington is home to some of the most dynamic leaders in clean energy innovation, and some of the nation’s foremost clean technology research and development capabilities are at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Our universities are joining smart researchers together with free enterprise leaders to find workable solutions. We have an abundance of renewable resources here: sun, water, wind and, most of all, the human resources to lead the way.

A strong national commitment to a bold clean energy transition will spur a flurry of investments that will accelerate economic recovery and drive solutions that pay dividends for years to come. Arguing against clean energy will shortchange our community’s future.

It’s also an argument against our national security. Our foreign affairs and defense are linked to our energy policy through our dependence on foreign oil. There is no doubt we as Americans rely on foreign oil reserves controlled by countries whose interests are at odds with our own; currently, we are sending billions of dollars overseas to pay for oil, leaving us and our military personnel vulnerable to unstable or hostile regimes.

It’s not just the threats to our national security. In these tough times, families are clipping coupons, buying in bulk and pinching pennies any way they can. As costs for everything from groceries to gasoline climb, the costs of not solving our economic crisis grow. However, if the Clean Energy Jobs bill passes, the average family in Washington is estimated to save over $5 per month on their energy bills and nearly $10 per month on vehicle fuel costs. Nationally, the legislation would create 1.7 million new clean energy jobs, of which at least 34,000 would be right here in Washington. The Clean Energy Jobs bill will help revive our nation’s struggling economy while protecting our planet; now is our moment to seize that opportunity.

Here in Washington state, we have the opportunity to help our nation lead. Our senators are both accomplished leaders. Sen. Cantwell has established herself as a clean energy champion and Sen. Patty Murray is an influential member of the Senate’s leadership. Now it’s up to these senators to ensure that the U.S. Senate passes the Clean Energy Jobs Act this year. We need them to do more than vote for the bill; they must speak loudly for the people of Washington and actively work to advance the bill.

In these challenging times, we need immediate action by the Senate to create jobs. We need the Senate to put us on a path to a clean energy economy and shift away from the carbon-based fuels that threaten our environment, our economy and our national security. We need Sens. Cantwell and Murray to take on their leadership roles to advance this legislation so that Washington state will reap the benefits of energy independence and building a clean energy economy. The future will be much brighter when Congress steps up to this enormous opportunity.

Don Barbieri is chairman of the board for Red Lion Hotels Corp.

by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics – most prominently, rising minorities and the young – would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia – presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ’08 for the first time in 44 years – went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 – a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ’08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.

November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm – and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm – deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years – because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America – from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt – the Tea Party demonstrators, the town hall protesters – as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the “rump” rebelled. It’s the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election – and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed – is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Amy Goodman
The Spokesman-Review

“Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year. Just this week, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York City, dismissed Arar’s case against the government officials (including FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Attorney General John Ashcroft) who allegedly conspired to have him kidnapped and tortured.

Arar is safe now, recovering in Canada with his family. But the decision sends a signal to the Obama administration that there will be no judicial intervention to halt the cruel excesses of the Bush-era “Global War on Terror,” including extraordinary rendition, torture and the use of the “state secrets privilege” to hide these crimes.

Arar’s life-altering odyssey is one of the best-known and best-investigated of those victimized by U.S. extraordinary rendition. After vacationing with his family in Tunisia, Arar attempted to fly home to Canada. On Sept. 26, 2002, while changing planes at JFK Airport, Arar was pulled aside for questioning. He was fingerprinted and searched by the FBI and the New York Police Department. He asked for a lawyer and was told he had no rights.

He was then taken to another location and subjected to two days of aggressive interrogations, with no access to phone, food or a lawyer. He was asked about his membership with various terrorist groups, about Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Palestine and more. Shackled, he was moved to a maximum-security federal detention center in Brooklyn, strip-searched and threatened with deportation to Syria.

Arar was born in Syria and told his captors that if he returned there, he would be tortured. As Arar’s lawyers would later argue, however, that is exactly what they hoped would happen. Arar was eventually allowed a call – he got through to his mother-in-law, who got him a lawyer – and a visit from a Canadian Consulate official.

For nearly two weeks, the U.S. authorities held the Syria threat over his head. Still, he denied any involvement with terrorism. So in the middle of the night, over a weekend, without normal immigration proceedings – without anyone telling his lawyer or the Canadian Consulate – he was dragged in chains to a private jet contracted by the CIA and flown to Jordan, where he was handed over to the Syrians.

For 10 months and 10 days, Maher was held in a dark, damp, cold cell, measuring 6 feet by 3 feet by 7 feet high, the size of a grave. He was beaten repeatedly with a thick electrical cable all over his body, punched, made to listen to the torture of others, denied food and threatened with electrical shock and an array of more horrors. To stop the torture, he falsely confessed to attending terrorist training in Afghanistan. Then, after nearly a year, he was abruptly released to Canada, 40 pounds lighter and emotionally destroyed.

The Canadian government, under conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, investigated, found its own culpability in relaying unreliable information to the FBI and settled with Arar, giving him an apology and $10 million. The U.S. government, on the other hand, has offered no apology and has kept Arar on a terrorist watch list. He is not allowed to enter the U.S. Two years ago, he had to testify before Congress via video conference.

He said: “These past few years have been a nightmare for me. Since my return to Canada, my physical pain has slowly healed, but the cognitive and psychological scars from my ordeal remain with me on a daily basis. I still have nightmares and recurring flashbacks. I am not the same person that I was. I also hope to convey how fragile our human rights have become and how easily they can be taken from us by the same governments that have sworn to protect them.”

Given the excesses of the Bush administration and Barack Obama’s promise of change, it has surprised many that these policies are continuing and that Congress and the courts have not closed this chapter of U.S. history. President Obama has never once condemned extraordinary rendition.

Arar’s lawyer, Maria LaHood, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, calls the court decision against Arar “an outrage.” In his dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, “I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.” Given the torture that Arar suffered, his own response was remarkably measured: “If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law.”

Amy Goodman hosts a daily international TV and radio news hour called “Democracy Now!” that airs on more than 800 stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

By Chris Jordan
November 5, 2009

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid surprised political observers everywhere with his announcement that the Senate’s health-reform bill would include a public-insurance option.

Despite polls showing strong public support for the proposal, TV pundits declared the public option dead due to a lack of support among moderate democrats.

Why would these democrats be so antsy about an idea that was backed by strong majority of voters? Insurance companies have been fighting the public option tooth-and-nail and have been lining the pockets of politicians in the process.

Take for example, Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee. He almost single-handedly killed the public option when his influential committee passed a bill replacing it with weaker “co-ops.” Not surprisingly, he has received almost $500,000 in campaign contributions from insurance and other health industry lobbyists and their clients.

Baucus may well be a totally honest guy who simply ignores these hundreds of thousands of dollars when deciding how to vote. It’s possible.

But examples like this help explain Congress’ recent approval rating of 21 percent. While giant corporations shell out millions in lobbying and campaign contributions, average citizens feel ignored. Congressmen and -women, in order to win re-election, spend enormous amounts of time raising money when that time should be spent at town halls getting input from the people they represent.

In order to end special interest dominance of our political process, it’s time Americans consider public financing of federal campaigns.

No existing reform laws have changed the fundamental reality that politicians rely on big donors and spend far too much time raising funds for the next election. One practical solution is the optional Clean Elections system being used in Maine and Arizona.

Under this system, candidates who gather a sufficient number of small contributions from citizens in their district qualify for a grant of public funds to run their campaign. Instead of spending months building connections among wealthy donors, candidates seeking office must go directly to the voters at a grassroots level for support in order to secure funding for their campaigns.

Clean Elections means election outcomes will be increasingly determined by the appeal of a candidate’s message, rather than how much money he or she is able to raise.

One persistent challenge to these sorts of public finance systems has been the Supreme Court. It has ruled that private donations amount to political speech protected by the First Amendment and that “rescue money” provisions are unconstitutional.

Regardless, it’s still possible to set up a public system that is so attractive an option to candidates that it effectively eliminates the incentive for private funding.

Clean Elections has proved to be a successful alternative funding method in Arizona. In 2008, 65 percent of candidates in the state ran as “clean” candidates. While cheaters have occasionally been able to game the system, some tweaks here and there should overcome the issue.

Following the example of Arizona and making improvements over time, Americans should embrace the Clean Elections model as superior to one dominated by the wealthy and special interest groups. Public financing offers great hope of diluting the influence of money in politics and making politicians more connected to their constituents.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Cal Thomas
The Spokesman-Review

Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution?

The Framers created a limited government, thus ensuring individuals would have the opportunity to become all that their talents and persistence would allow. The Left has put aside the original Constitution in favor of a “living document” that they believe allows them to do whatever they want and demand more tax dollars with which to do it.

Can they be stopped? Some constitutional scholars think the Tenth Amendment offers the best opportunity. The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In 1939, the Supreme Court began to dilute constitutional language so that it became open to broader interpretation. Rob Natelson, professor of Constitutional Law and Legal History at the University of Montana, has written that even before Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, it was changing the way the Constitution was interpreted, especially “how the commerce and taxing powers were turned upside-down, the necessary and proper clauses and incidental powers, the false claim that the Supreme Court is conservative, how bad precedent leads to more bad court rulings, state elections as critical for constitutional activists, and more.”

While during the past seven decades the court has tolerated the federal welfare state, Natelson says it has never, except in wartime, “authorized an expansion of the federal scope quite as large as what is being proposed now. And in recent years, both the Court and individual justices – even ‘liberal’ justices – have said repeatedly that there are boundaries beyond which Congress may not go.” … “Chief Justice John Marshall once wrote that if Congress were to use its legitimate powers as a ‘pretext’ for assuming an unauthorized power, ‘it would become the painful duty’ of the Court ‘to say that such an act was not the law of the land.’ ”

It would be nice to know now what those boundaries are and whether Congress is exceeding its powers as it prepares to alter one-sixth of our economy and change how we access health insurance and health care.

Natelson makes a fascinating argument in his essay, “Is ObamaCare Constitutional?” (www.tenthamend mentcenter.com/2009/08/18/is-obama care-constitutional), using the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. In Roe, he writes, the court struck down state abortion laws that “intruded into the doctor-patient relationship. But the intrusion invalidated in Roe was insignificant compared to the massive intervention contemplated by schemes such as HB3200. ‘Global budgeting’ and ‘single-payer’ plans go even further, and seem clearly to violate the Supreme Court’s Substantive Due Process rules.”

Constitutional attorney John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, tells me, “Although the states surrendered many of their powers to the new federal government, they retained a residuary and inviolable sovereignty that is reflected throughout the Constitution’s text. The Framers rejected the concept of a central government that would act upon and through the states, and instead designed a system in which the state and federal governments would exercise concurrent authority over the people. The court’s jurisprudence makes clear that the federal government may not compel the states to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.”

Lawyers are busy writing language only they can understand that seeks to circumvent the intentions of the Founders. But it will be difficult to circumvent the last four words of the Tenth Amendment, which state unambiguously where ultimate power lies: “… or to the people.”

Americans who believe their government should not be a giant ATM, dispensing money and benefits to people who have not earned them, and who want their country returned to its founding principles, must now exercise that power before it is taken from them. The Tenth Amendment is one place to begin. The streets are another. It worked for the Left.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

by Cal Thomas
The Spokesman-Review

“Don’t it always seem to go

Till it’s gone” – Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”

Some conservatives are prematurely salivating over President Obama’s declining poll numbers. According to a recent Gallup daily tracking poll, “the nine-point drop in the most recent quarter is the largest Gallup has ever measured for an elected president between the second and third quarters of his term, dating back to 1953.” That may comfort some Obama opponents, but three years is a long time until the next presidential election, so conservatives and Republicans (not always the same) had better think of a long-range strategy if they want to save the country from the long-term consequences of what many call “socialism.”

Matthew Spalding, of the Heritage Foundation, offers one component of that strategy in his new book, “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.” Spalding believes, “America is unique in that universal principles of liberty are the foundation of its particular system of government and its political culture.” He lists them and explains their history: liberty, private property, consent of the governed, equality, natural rights, religious freedom, rule of law, constitutionalism.

Middle-age and older Americans recall that these subjects were part of their high school and college curricula. Younger Americans may be less familiar with them, as the public schools no longer seem to emphasize what once held us together, preferring to teach “diversity” instead.

Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, introduced a bill to require a greater emphasis on American history and civics in public school classrooms. Alexander quoted federal Judge Aleta Trauger, who spoke at a swearing-in ceremony for 77 new citizens in Nashville: “We are Americans because we also share certain fundamental beliefs. We are bound together by the unique set of principles set forth in documents that created and continue to define this nation. We find our heritage and inspiration in the profound words of the Declaration of Independence: ‘All people are created equal and endowed with unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ We pledge allegiance to the Republic as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. But the greatest expression of our national identity is the Constitution of the United States, which established the responsibilities and rights that go with citizenship.”

All true in the past, but what if today’s schools no longer teach those principles and the Constitution is not supreme? What then?

Last week in New York City, the Children’s Scholarship Fund held a dinner in honor of Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Success Charter Network, which operates four charter schools serving about 1,500 students in Harlem. One of the speakers was Jaime Martinez, an eighth-grader who was rescued, along with his sister, Ashley, from a failing public school where he says he experienced bullying and fighting. Jaime’s grades are up at his Catholic private school; he sings in a choir and takes ballroom dancing lessons. (See his remarks at www.scholarshipfund.org.)

Children’s Scholarship Fund President Darla Romfo wants the education conversation to go “beyond arguments about vouchers, charter schools, and test scores into the newer territory of empowering parents and children with real information about how to choose schools and demand excellence, with the ultimate aim of expanding good options for every child.”

It is this objective that should be embraced by those wishing to “reclaim America,” not only for ourselves, but also for future generations.

If conservatives and Republicans support an exodus from public schools as a strategic goal, they will strike at the heart of liberalism, while simultaneously liberating minorities trapped in failed government schools. To free them and teach them about America and its promise of hope will produce everything they are looking for but can’t find in politics. It will also pay political dividends as children and their parents see which party and persuasion cares about them enough to bring real change to their lives.

It’s either this approach, with results, or continuing to put faith in politicians, who have proved themselves unworthy of such faith. If parents fail to act, they won’t know what they had till it’s gone.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

by Froma Harrop
The Spokesman-Review

Social Security is a glossy piece of paper on which nearly every politician wants to finger-paint an agenda. But Social Security has no need of ornament. It is a very grown-up program. Put some other toy into the political playpen.

Come January, for the first time since 1975, Social Security payments will not be ratcheted upward for inflation. The reason is simple: no inflation.

But now President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to send every senior a $250 check to compensate for … for … for what? For the fact that some Social Security recipients expect a “raise” every year, whether or not it is warranted? They saw a 6 percent hike in their benefits last year. But that was not a “raise.” It was a cost-of-living adjustment to maintain (not increase) the buying power of their monthly checks.

If the president wants to hand out checks to stimulate the economy, why make them age-specific? Money sent to low-income people, whether young or old, would make far more sense. And the still better stimulus is government spending on roads and other worthy projects. That money gets shot right into the economy.

Sending an extra check to Social Security beneficiaries is also about pandering to older voters. But politicians should first ask themselves, “How many other Americans got 6 percent ‘raises’ last year?”

There is another proposal to cut payroll taxes. The plan is foolish and reckless – and has drawn bipartisan support. These taxes pay for Social Security and Medicare. Cutting payroll taxes puts those programs in jeopardy, which is why some liberal economists, such as Robert Reich, should hang their heads in shame for wanting to monkey with them.

On the right, meanwhile, there is growing affection for the idea. First off, many conservatives hold that cutting taxes solves all problems. (That did wonders for the deficit, didn’t it?) Secondly, fooling with payroll taxes could undermine the public’s faith in Social Security by lending ammo to the false charge that the program’s trust fund is all a fraud.

You see, the Social Security taxes now paid by workers and their employers support current beneficiaries. What’s left over goes into the trust fund to be tapped in future years, when a surge in retirees puts pressure on the program. It’s been a conservative talking point that the Social Security trust fund doesn’t exist; the government has spent the money.

Not quite. The Treasury bonds in the trust fund are real IOUs representing real money taken from real workers for more than 25 years. No matter what the federal government did with that borrowed money, it still has to pay it back.

Make the argument, if you must, that the Treasuries sitting in the trust fund’s file cabinets are not like the super-safe government securities traded around the world – that the Treasury doesn’t have to make good on them. The truth is that these special Treasury bonds are different, but they still cannot be defaulted upon without a vote by Congress.

So here’s an assignment for anyone who calls the trust fund’s Treasuries “worthless pieces of paper”: Find me one member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who vows to vote against Washington’s promise to honor them. I’ll buy lunch.

According to the Social Security trustees’ latest report, payroll taxes will cover all of the retirees’ promised benefits until 2016. After that, the trust fund can make up for any shortfall until 2039. That is 30 years from now. We can worry about Social Security’s finances in 20 years.

You know what children with paint want to do with a clean sheet of paper? They want to mess it up. Social Security is a clean program. Let’s keep it that way.

Froma Harrop is a columnist for the Providence Journal.

by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster.

Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’ bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration – from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony Sept. 11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation – the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry – finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations – except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other – and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions (political parties, interest groups etc. . . ) should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical – and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN – which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mildly critical of President Barack Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation.

But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

by Chris Jordan
October 21, 2009

We’ve got a problem, people.

We’ve got a big, trillion-dollar problem. It’s no secret that our federal budget is in trouble, and “in trouble” is probably an understatement.

The economic crisis has forced the government to spend billions in unforeseen expenditures in order to rescue the financial system from disaster and stimulate the economy. As a result, the budget deficit has skyrocketed.

Recessions suck.

In order to begin to tackle this problem and bring things back into balance, it’s time we raised taxes on the rich. Yep, I said it.

Why, you ask, don’t we just cut unnecessary spending instead of burdening people with new taxes? This is a valid point, but if we’re honest about the scope of the problem, we’re going to need both approaches. We should be raising taxes on those at the top while cutting waste.

Raising taxes can be a touchy subject, especially during tough economic times. Hence, I’ve come armed with statistics.

One of the reasons I believe the rich should pay more is that, in recent history, their incomes have ballooned while the rest of us have been stuck in a rut. Despite increases in worker productivity, middle-class wages have remained stagnant. In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, since 1970, the average CEO income has increased a whopping 730 percent, while worker income has decreased 13 percent ­­­— all this in 2008 dollars.

This growing disparity is dangerous. When an entire generation of workers is worse off than their parents, the American dream is fundamentally threatened.

Today, our federal income tax rate on the highest bracket is 35 percent. Under Clinton in the 1990s, when CEO incomes doubled, it was 39.6 percent. Is President Obama really a “socialist” for suggesting we return to those 1990s levels? A little historical perspective ought to clear things up.

It might shock you that between 1932 and 1981, income tax rates on the highest tax bracket fluctuated between an astonishingly high 63 percent and 92 percent. President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, oversaw the highest income tax rates in history and opposed efforts to lower them.

Evan Adam Smith, philosophical father of the free-market system and author of Wealth of Nations, argued for progressive taxation. In that very book, he stated, “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

I am not one who believes the rich to be bad or evil. Clearly, executives who would give themselves outrageous bonuses using taxpayer money lack a sound, moral conscience, but I don’t believe they are the norm. Many wealthy Americans are hard working and brilliant people, who deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

But getting rich is not a one-way street. You don’t become wealthy in a vacuum. You live in a country that supports free enterprise, protects your property rights, allows your wealth to be passed down from generations, and invests in the infrastructure and education that makes this economy, and thus your wealth, possible.

To say the rich owe nothing back to society is absurd. They benefit the most from our system and should, hence, pay the most to ensure its continued strength.

Estimates are that restoring tax rates on the wealthy to levels from the 1990s could generate roughly $400 billion in revenue over 10 years.

I am by no means advocating a return to the days of 92 percent, but increasing that top bracket rate by a couple percentage points could go a long way towards getting our budget crisis under control.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Cal Thomas
The Spokesman-Review

“That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change …” (Bruce Hornsby song lyric)

The Washington Post headline sounds as if a comedy writer, or someone fluent in George Orwell’s “Newspeak” wrote it: “Record-High Deficit May Dash Big Plans,” it said.

As if a contributing factor to the projected record-high deficit of $1.4 trillion has nothing to do with big spending by this and previous administrations. Is there no end? Will we ever reach a limit where government says, “no more, we’ve done enough; you’re on your own now”? Apparently not. The “greatest generation” mostly lived within their means. They knew what it meant to go without all but essentials. Today, we think the sky is the limit when it comes to spending and that if we can conceive it, then we are entitled to it.

This is partly because of how dysfunctional Washington has become and partly due to our own sense of “what we are owed.” Government can spend, tax and do whatever it wishes. If you oppose what it does, you are a selfish, greedy, rich elitist who cares nothing about people less fortunate than yourself. But wait. Did we have fewer poor people before government stepped in to “cure” poverty? Do we have fewer now? We aren’t sure if the war in Afghanistan can be won, but we know the war on poverty was lost. Once, the prospect of an empty stomach motivated most people to get up and start chasing opportunity. Today, people can do whatever they want and government will bail them out with a welfare check (for the poor) or a corporate welfare check (for the rich). Bad decisions? No problem. Failure is no longer an option.

Thomas, you are such a racist and an uncaring person. You’ve been lucky and should have to pony up for the less fortunate.

How about showing the “less fortunate” the way to become fortunate? Does anyone hear a politician in either party encouraging people to do for themselves, instead of relying on government? And that goes for big corporations, too.

People who play by the rules, stay in school, refuse to take drugs, marry before having children, and stay married, are no longer considered worthy role models by government, which has no intention of making them the norm. These norms have disappeared in a cloud of diversity and political correctness. Government now proposes to transform health insurance and tax responsible citizens at increased rates to pay for the votes, uh, benefits of others who are more content to take slices of other people’s pies rather than learn to bake their own.

If you have been an honest businessperson and give money to your church and charities to help others who want to succeed but are having difficulty doing so through no fault of their own, that no longer matters. In fact, government proposes to reduce the deductibility of your charitable giving because government sees itself as more capable of charity than you.

That’s what the Obama administration’s proposal to send a $250 check to every senior citizen is about. Seniors won’t get a cost of living adjustment in their Social Security checks next year because the cost of living hasn’t gone up. But because seniors have become accustomed to an annual raise, the president apparently thinks by giving it to them anyway, he can buy their support for health care legislation that is not in their interest.

Washington’s attitude toward those who make right decisions for themselves so as not to become a burden to government seems to be, “Good for you, but because you made all those right decisions (‘right’ being a relative term, so the government will say they were right FOR YOU), we will penalize your decisions and your success and take the money you earned and give it to others who didn’t earn it because we want their votes so we can preserve our political careers.”

“Well they passed a law in ’64,

To give those who ain’t got a little more,

But it only goes so far.”

For government, it’s never far enough.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.
Get more news and information at Spokesman.com

by Gary Crooks
The Spokesman-Review

While heading into work on Friday, I saw a small group on the corner of Second Avenue and Lincoln Street waving signs in opposition to Referendum 71, which would give voter approval to the “everything but marriage” law that was adopted by the Legislature last spring. The law grants to registered same-sex couples the same rights and benefits accorded married couples under state statutes.

Normally, I wouldn’t mind such a political display, but among those holding “Protect Children” placards were children themselves. Do you suppose the kids independently researched the topic before deciding they’d be imperiled if discrimination against same-sex couples were brought to an end? More likely, adults shoved the signs into their hands for emotional appeal. Must be that indoctrination I’ve been hearing about.

The use of children in politics has always bugged me, whether it’s the serene family photos on glossy brochures or those oh-so-cute appearances at political rallies. Then there’s the positioning of children near the lectern to dissuade questions about why politicians were sleeping around. But the anti-Referendum 71 example strikes me as particularly odious, because the signs make it seem like the issue is about child predators and one side is all for them.

The logical leap is that a household with a man and a woman is better for child-rearing. There is no firm empirical evidence of this, but even if there were, there are many socioeconomic factors that determine outcomes for children. Divorce and single parenthood matter. So do income, educational level and the age at which people marry.

So where are the campaigns to prohibit marriage (and the rights that go with it) for those who have low incomes or are under 25 years old or don’t have college degrees? Where are the signs protesting the impending marriages of those who tried it before and failed? There aren’t any, and I wonder why. Isn’t this about the kids?

Mixed message. Speaking of protecting children, a justice of the peace in Hammond, La., is making headlines for refusing to sign a marriage license because the couple is biracial. That’s right, Keith Barnwell turned away the couple because of his concern for their yet-to-be-born children. For one thing, he says, mixed-race couples are more apt to get divorced.

Barnwell says he’s not racist, because he has officiated at many marriages involving African-American men and women. But why would he do that when those couples have an above-average divorce rate? Don’t those kids matter?

Maybe we need to pass a law that prohibits adults from using children as an excuse for their bigotry.

You don’t say. It’s interesting how many arguments against gay marriage were first used to defend state laws that barred mixed-race nuptials. Here’s one:

“We aren’t bigoted,” said the backers of anti-miscegenation laws. “We just worry, what will happen to the children? They’ll be taunted and teased.”

It’s like telling a shoe salesman that size matters. Minorities don’t need a heads-up on the possibilities of bigotry. Neither do gays and lesbians. It’s a truth that’s self-evident.

Follow the balloon. A nation is transfixed. What is it? What keeps it aloft? How high will it go? What if it crashes? What if there’s too much inflation or sudden deflation? What if rescuers can’t get there in time? What if there’s no way to bail out? Who built it? Who approved it? Who could think it would ever be safe?

But enough about the economy, how about that balloon boy?

Smart Bombs is written by Associate Editor Gary Crooks and appears Wednesdays and Sundays on the Opinion page. Crooks can be reached at garyc@spokesman.com or at (509) 459-5026.

by Charles Krauthammer

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award “premature,” as if the brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president’s various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration – excuse me, outreach and understanding – is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let’s review.

What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? “The settlement push backfired,” reports the Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have “arguably regressed.”

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke – the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late?

Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

“Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart.” Such was the Washington Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that “threats, sanctions and threats of pressure” are “counterproductive.” Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved – to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? “We are not at that point yet,” she averred. “That is not a conclusion we have reached … it is our preference that Iran work with the international community.”

But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naiveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@ charleskrauthammer.com.

By Chris Jordan
October 14, 2009

“Tell me, Jimmy — what has Obama accomplished to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Heck — if he’s qualified, I think I could win it next year!”

Even if your name isn’t Jimmy, you’ve probably heard a version of this argument from friends, family or classmates in the wake of the president’s Nobel victory last Friday.

I agree with the skeptics (including the president himself), who say that Obama has probably not accomplished enough to deserve the prize. It is, however, ridiculous to claim that he’s “accomplished nothing,” or that he has not made great progress on major issues.

Before we start the Jimmy Carter comparisons, let’s not forget the guy is barely a sixth of the way through his first term. And before we judge success, let’s not forget the horrible mess that the last guy left for him to clean up.

Even in the most turbulent region on earth, the Middle East, the new president has made some important strides.

The administration is currently embroiled in an internal debate over the strategy in Afghanistan, with many of Obama’s key advisors split in their policy prescriptions.

The president has rightfully expressed concern over “mission creep,” the gradual shifting of objectives during a military campaign that often results in unwanted, long-term commitments. He’s also stated that the new strategy will focus on winning over civilians and the general population, a move that contributed to the success of the surge in Iraq.

Regardless of whether the Afghanistan strategy shift means more or less troops, we’ve gone from a “shock and awe” approach to genuine recognition that defeating extremists means more than simply killing all the terrorists you can hunt down. It means winning over the people and thus the source of future recruits.

Despite John McCain’s campaign warning that Obama’s Iran approach would be “naïve” and “dangerous,” talks between U.S. and Iranian diplomats began several weeks ago for the first time in 30 years. Aided by the recent revelation of Iran’s secret nuclear facility and strong internal opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, those talks are already beginning to bear fruit.

This is only a first step, and we should be alert that what Iran says and what Iran does might be two entirely different things.

But we’ve gone from merely shouting at Iran and threatening them to engaging in serious diplomatic talks that are, so far, getting results.

And the United States is finally realizing the importance of Pakistan as well. We have been spending $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 we spend in Pakistan, even though the latter has nuclear weapons and is the believed hiding spot of Al-Qaeda.

Congress just recently passed, and the president will soon sign, the Kerry-Lugar Bill, which increases annual economic aid to Pakistan significantly. This bill is an acknowledgment of the strategic centrality of Pakistan and the importance of undercutting conditions, such as poverty, upon which extremism thrives.

The conditional strings attached to this money have caused somewhat of a backlash in Pakistan. Despite the rough public relations rollout, this bill is a strategic step in the right direction for the United States.

We’ve gone from a Pakistan policy focused entirely on former President Musharraf to one that actually invests in the nation’s people and institutions and ties future aid to conditional goals.

So has Obama ended the violence and brought stability to Afghanistan? Has he prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Has he established a cooperative relationship with Pakistan? Not yet. But he is taking the necessary steps to move us closer to these goals.

Clearly, saving the world takes time.

If nothing else, perhaps every time the president glances up at that Nobel Prize hanging on the wall, he’ll be reminded of the hope so many have placed in him and find some additional will to rise to the challenge.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Cal Thomas

“War will continue until the end …” (Daniel 9:26)

Like the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, along with the Oscar and Emmy for film and television, the Nobel Peace Prize is an inside job in which liberal, wishful-thinking humanists give awards to each other.

For all I care, the Nobel Committee could have given their useless (except for the money) prize to Homer Simpson. Like President Barack Obama, Homer has done nothing to earn it, though he may be the only character who has been on TV more than the president.

According to the Web site www.globalsecurity.org, there are currently “42 active conflicts and/or wars in the world today.” Not all are shooting wars at the moment and there are several civil wars and conflicts between Israel and various terrorist groups, but 42 wars is a lot of war.

Peace generally occurs when aggressive evil is defeated, which is why Germany and Japan no longer war with the United States. The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could win the Nobel Peace Prize in an instant if he announced his god had told him not to eradicate Israel, or usher in Armageddon. But Ahmadinejad won’t, because he is evil and must be defeated. Neither will he respond to negotiations or sanctions. Same with Osama bin Laden. The United Nations would welcome him as a speaker and the Nobel Committee would award him their top prize if he would announce he no longer believes in terrorism and has become a follower of the Dalai Lama or some other “acceptable” pseudo-deity. He also will do no such thing because he is evil and must be defeated.

The Nobel Committee believes George W. Bush is evil, but apparently not bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. It cringes at leaders who wish to overcome evil by force rather than have the forces of evil overcome them. The Nobel Committee hates Israel, too. And this is because its members, and like-minded male wimps around the world, idolize Michael J. Fox instead of John Wayne and find their role models in the liberal ladies of “The View,” not in muscular characters like Jack Bauer (and Chloe, who gets it) on “24.”

The peace prize concept is flawed because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards for those who have confronted evil and produced peace in nations that have only known oppression. Candidates for such prizes would include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, who conspired to liberate Europe from the totalitarian hand of Soviet communism.

Bill Clinton would also be a legitimate candidate for his efforts that stabilized Bosnia. He could take some small credit for the peace in Northern Ireland, which, though worked on for decades, was finally brokered on his watch. President Obama was right when he acknowledged that he doesn’t deserve the prize. Neither did Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho or Al Gore.

The question should be: Why, despite man’s best efforts, including the League of Nations and United Nations, have we been unsuccessful in eradicating war? The answer lies in this ancient wisdom: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (James 4:1-3)

That’s why a peace prize is meaningless.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Christmas is probably unconstitutional.

I’m no lawyer, but the logic seems unassailable to me. Consider: Santa Claus aside, Christmas is an explicitly Christian holiday and the only holiday of any religion to be observed by the federal government. Which would seem to violate the First Amendment edict that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Yet to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has ever sued Christmas before the Supreme Court.

Not that I’m trying to give any ideas. No, I’m only trying to tease out an opinion I can live with in a case the court heard last week, about a cross in the Mojave Desert.

The original cross (it has been replaced a number of times over the years) was erected in 1934 as a tribute to the dead of World War I and sits in a remote corner of what is now the Mojave National Preserve. Its legal troubles began 10 years ago with a former employee of the National Park Service who sued because he thought the cross an improper display on federal land in that it celebrated one faith over others.

It’s a contention Justice Antonin Scalia sharply disputed last week. “It’s erected as a war memorial,” he said. “I assume it is erected in honor of all the war dead.”

To which Peter Eliasberg, a lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union, shot back: “I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

Scalia was unconvinced: “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that the cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

But Eliasberg’s conclusion was, of course, perfectly valid, and Scalia’s obstinate insistence that the cross is a generic symbol manages to simultaneously demean Christianity and deftly illustrate the sort of bullying the Constitution discourages. How easily and readily the majority embraces the myopic view that its symbols and norms represent us all.

That said, I keep wondering what good can come of this.

The plaintiff is said to be a devout Catholic, so we can take it on – ahem – faith that he is motivated solely by principle. For the record, the principle is one I support.

You need only look at Iran to know the separation of church and state is a good thing. You do not post the Ten Commandments in court for the same reason you do not mandate prayer in schools or require Bible study to get a job: There is a coercive effect that is wholly unfair to those of other faiths or no faith at all.

But I have trouble seeing the coercive effect of a cross in the middle of nowhere.

I submit that this is a battle poorly chosen. Yes, the argument arguably has legal merit, but you have to ask yourself: What’s the point? Is someone really injured by a cross in the desert? Or is this not about validating principle at all costs – even public peace and common sense?

Indeed, by the same reasoning, one might sue cities that allow crosses to be planted at roadsides where traffic fatalities have occurred. Except that if it comforts some grieving family and your only “injury” is to glimpse it while driving by at 65 mph, why would you bother? Principle absent human compassion is just intellectual masturbation.

So forgive me if I am unimpressed by the argument that a cross in the middle of nowhere is unconstitutional. Understand: I think the argument may well be correct.

But that’s not the same as being right.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

by Charles Krauthammer

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious – particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

“I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected.

“This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq – while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq war bad, Afghan war good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 – a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don’t commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.”

Conclusion, mind you. Not the beginning. Not a process. The conclusion of an extensive review, the president assured the nation, that included consultation with military commanders and diplomats, with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with our NATO allies and members of Congress.

The general in charge was then relieved and replaced with Obama’s own choice, Stanley McChrystal. And it’s McChrystal who submitted the request for the 40,000 troops, a request upon which the commander in chief promptly gagged.

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Joe Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy – “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge – you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago – Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans – the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Perhaps you are familiar with an old saying: even a broken clock is right twice a day. I’ve found that maxim valuable as I wade through the recent hand-wringing and recrimination among journalists and their critics over the fact that most mainstream media were slow to pick up on the story of corruption at ACORN.

New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt (a former colleague) and Andrew Alexander, his counterpart at the Washington Post, are among those who have asked whether that laggard performance reflects an unfortunate deafness to conservative media. As one of my readers put it, “There is a lot wrong with ACORN, and Fox was the only channel talking about it.”

I might join this pity party if I thought Fox a credible news source. I do not. Consider just a few of the network’s and its hosts’ recent lowlights:

June 3 – In a column Bill O’Reilly says he never called murdered abortion doctor George Tiller “a baby killer.”

This is wrong. PolitiFact.com has documented 24 instances, just since 2005, of O’Reilly referring to the doctor as “Tiller the baby killer.”

June 10 – Glenn Beck asks, “Why do we have automatic citizenship upon birth? We’re the only country in the world that has it.”

This is incorrect. Canada has it, as do 32 other nations.

June 18 – Sean Hannity says that under the cash for clunkers program, “all we’ve got to do is … go to a local junkyard, all you’ve got to do is tow it to your house. And you’re going to get $4,500.”

This is false. The program requires the car to be drivable and to have been registered for at least a year.

July 22 – Beck says the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

This is untrue. The claim is based on a textbook John Holdren co-authored in 1977 that analyzed and “rejected” such coercive means of birth control.

July 31 – Kimberly Guilfoyle claims the government will get total access in perpetuity to the computer of any participant in the cash for clunkers program who signs up at the government Web site, cars.gov.

This is inaccurate. FactCheck.org reports this claim is based on a security notice required of “car dealers” who access a secure area of the Web site.

Let me make this next point crystalline: Every news organization from CNN to CBS to Miami’s Herald to L.A.’s Times gets it wrong on occasion, and every single report risks reflecting the biases – political, racial, religious, class, educational, geographical, generational – of the reporter. This will be true until the day the news business is no longer run by human beings.

But Fox is in a class by itself. In its epidemic inaccuracy, its ongoing disregard for basic journalistic standards of fairness, its demagogic appeals and its blatantly ideological promotions it is, indeed, unique – a news source in name only. That’s not just an opinion: A 2003 study found Fox viewers more likely to be misinformed than those who get their news elsewhere.

Yet because this network that cries wolf, this network of birthers, terrorist fist bumps and tea party promotions, got it right for a change, mainstream media should wear sackcloth and ashes for their failure to take it seriously? No.

What missing the ACORN story suggests is a need for mainstream reporters to develop more sources among conservative activists and bloggers. But Fox forfeited any expectation of being taken seriously by serious people when it made itself an echo chamber less concerned with reporting news than with affirming the ideological biases of its viewers.

When faced with a broken clock, after all, the person who wants to know the time has two options: Try to guess when the reading is right …

Or get another clock.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Mr. President, please stay off TV.

By Howard Fineman | NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 26, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He’s a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked “done.” This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he’s not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

The model is a man whose political effectiveness Obama repeatedly says he admires: Ronald Reagan. There was never doubt about what he wanted. The Gipper made his simple, dramatic tax cuts the centerpiece not only of his campaign but also of the entire first year of his presidency.

Obama seems to think he’ll get credit for the breathtaking scope of his ambition. But unless he sees results, it will have the opposite effect—diluting his clout, exhausting his allies, and emboldening his enemies.

That may be starting to happen. Health-care legislation is still weeks, if not months, from passage, and the bill as it stands could well be a windfall for the very insurance and drug companies it was supposed to rein in. Climate-change legislation (a.k.a. cap-and-trade) is almost certainly dead for this year, which means that American negotiators will go empty-handed to the Copenhagen summit in December —pushing the goal of limiting carbon emissions even farther into the distance. In the spring Obama privately told the big banks that he was going to change the way they do business. It was going to be his way or the highway. But the complex legislation he wants to submit to Congress has little chance of passage this year. Doing Letterman again won’t help. It may boost the host’s ratings, Mr. President, but probably not your own.

Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country .

by David S. Broder

Barack Obama has reached the moment of truth for answering the persistent question about his core beliefs and political priorities. The coming votes in the House and Senate on his signature health care reform effort will tell us more about the president than anything so far in his White House tenure.

The challenge is not one he invited. All during last year’s campaign, Obama skillfully skirted the question of whether he was a moderate, consensus-seeking pragmatist, as his words suggested, or a faithful adherent to the liberal agenda, as his voting record demonstrated.

In stylistic terms, he cultivated the pragmatic image. On issues, he was alternately one or the other – lining up with the liberals on Iraq and civil liberties, for example, but joining the hard-liners on Afghanistan and the budget.

In the campaign, he took the moderate side of the health care debate – disagreeing with Hillary Clinton on the necessity for an individual mandate to buy health insurance and suggesting he would be satisfied with incremental progress toward covering all the uninsured.

But now, a number of factors have combined to strip him of the camouflage he once enjoyed when it comes to health care policy.

His effort to craft a bipartisan package with significant Republican support has failed, as GOP leaders in Congress have chosen to take their chances on handing him a costly defeat rather than opting to claim a share of the credit for success. With Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine apparently the only Republican who might vote for the evolving legislation, Obama will have to find virtually all the votes he needs among his fellow Democrats.

Also, the debates inside the five House and Senate committees that have shared in drafting the bills have dramatized the deep ideological splits on the Democratic side of the aisle. The symbolic issue has been the public option – the proposal for a Medicare-like insurance plan competing with those offered by private companies.

Four of the five committees have included that proposal; the fifth, the Senate Finance Committee, has explicitly rejected it.

Beyond that much-hyped dispute are multiple disagreements on the cost and financing of the overall reform, with no consensus between the more conservative Democratic Blue Dogs and the more numerous liberals, especially in the House.

The first imperative for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is to find a formula that will produce 218 Democratic votes in the House and 59 of the needed 60 votes in the Senate.

Obama will have to be an active player in that process. But in addition, he will have to negotiate something that will be workable in the real world. As he contemplates a re-election race in 2012, he needs at least three years when his most important domestic initiative has not blown up in his face.

What are his chances of pulling it off? It will not be easy. In the House, Pelosi and a clear majority of the Democratic caucus members want a liberal bill, including the public option. They may have to offer some cosmetic concessions to the Blue Dogs, but they are unlikely to yield on the main points.

In the Senate, on the other hand, while the liberals may prevail on floor amendments to install the public option, they cannot by themselves deliver 60 votes for passage. At this point, the leverage swings to the handful of more conservative, small-state Democratic senators who, with the Republicans, may be able to force substantive changes.

As this plays out – finally, in a House-Senate conference committee – the political cost of the Republican decision to be simply a blocking force will become clear. Had the GOP furnished even a few votes in return for seeing some of their concerns addressed, chances are Obama and the Democratic congressional leaders would not have felt the necessity to keep all the liberals in line. This would have given the president more room to maneuver.

As it is, his main leverage point is the realization among nearly all Democrats that nothing would be as costly to them, in their individual 2010 races, as the failure of this Congress, with its heavy Democratic majorities, to pass a substantive health reform bill.

That may be enough in the end for Obama to succeed. But the task of getting there will really test him – and expose his core values.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

By Chris Jordan
October 1, 2009

As UW students flock back to school this week, their representatives in Congress will have recently flocked back to their D.C. offices after an August recess marked by angry town halls and endless health-care ad wars.

President Barack Obama’s signature domestic agenda item has faced a tough road, and no doubt his own strategy and execution is partly to blame. By failing to explain what health-care reform means to those who already possess insurance, the President left a vague plan open to attack.

Such Republican scare tactics and outright lies (see “death panels”) have unfortunately had an impact. They’ve inflamed the passions of anti-Obama activists on the right and sewn doubt in the minds of many Americans about health insurance reform.

The key sticking point in this debate has been the inclusion of a government run “public option” that would compete with private health insurance. While support has declined for the Democratic plan in general, a CBS poll in September showed support for a public option strong at 68 percent. Another poll published in September found that 73 percent of doctors support the public option.

Republicans have used confusion over this proposal to paint the entire reform effort as a “government takeover.” They have constantly claimed that Americans will be forced from their private insurance into a “big government plan.”

I find this to be a strange argument because, as I understand it, you can’t be forced into something that is by definition an option.

The public option is intended to provide competition to private insurance by giving Americans more choices. If people choose to abandon their private insurance for a public option, it’ll be because they make the decision that they can get better care at a lower cost with that plan. It won’t be because the evil, socialist government forced them to do it.

We can all agree that the goals of health reform should be to lower overall costs and increase the quality of care. We can also agree on the general principle that more choice for consumers and competition in the marketplace leads to both lower costs and an increased quality of the product being sold. That’s what the public plan will do; provide another choice to consumers and force private insurers to compete.

For those who suggest that the public option would drive private insurers out of business, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 11 to 12 million people will sign up for it. Not to mention the fact that reform will require everyone to have insurance, similar to the way everyone is required to have auto insurance. With roughly 45 million Americans currently lacking any plan, private insurance companies will be signing up new customers faster than they can take them.

And for those who suggest that the public option would be too costly, the President has said that it must be self-sustaining and funded by those who pay to use it.

We should set up a health-care system that is uniquely American; one that combines the best aspects of our own system (high quality care, innovation) with the best of other systems (universal coverage, lower cost). That’s why Obama is not proposing a government takeover, he’s proposing a government option that will pay for itself and provide more health insurance choices, and thus competition.

If the public option does not survive into the final bill, we will have lost a great tool for controlling health-care costs.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

THE nation is abuzz with praise for law enforcement. After months of careful investigation, involving extensive surveillance and international monitoring of travel and financial records, the authorities disrupt a major Qaeda cell operating domestically, arresting the primary conspirators. The conspirators are indicted and detained, and the nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Until the subway explodes.

The situation described above is not, thankfully, what has happened in the wake of the arrests this month of Najibullah Zazi, his father and several alleged confederates in Colorado and New York. Instead, it describes what happened in England in 2004 when the authorities, in Operation Crevice, arrested several terrorists (five of whom were eventually convicted) but had insufficient evidence to charge several other associates. Those other men went on to bomb the London subway on July 7, 2005.

Taken together, the Zazi and British cases illustrate a daunting challenge facing the criminal justice system in dealing with domestic terrorism attacks: law enforcement must constantly balance its need to develop evidence sufficient to convict the conspirators against the potentially devastating consequences of allowing the conspiracy to ripen into an attack.

To arrest the suspects prematurely is to run the risks of acquittal, of forcing prosecutors to advocate and courts to accept overly broad interpretations of existing criminal statutes, and perhaps of arresting innocent people. To decide to wait, however, continuing surveillance in the hope of developing better proof, is to risk losing the suspects and placing the public in mortal peril.

Police departments, prosecutors and the F.B.I. all face similar challenges in other criminal contexts. Anyone who has been involved at a senior level in serious investigations is aware of the suspected sexual predator or armed bank robber — or even the suspected serial killer — who must be left at large because of the lack of admissible evidence. Sometimes, proof is developed and the perpetrator is caught; sometimes, people get hurt.

As a society, we have weighed the risks to public safety in curtailing police power against the risks to public liberty of allowing too much police power. The balance we have struck is reflected in our constitutional protections. The question posed by terrorism, however, is whether the stakes — possibly tens of thousands of deaths — are sufficiently higher to alter that balance in favor of greater government power.

History shows that our decisions have yielded mixed results. During the mid-1990s, the authorities were able to develop strong evidence against Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheik, and his fellow conspirators who were plotting to blow up New York City landmarks; they were convicted in 1995. In an earlier case, however, the unwillingness of a confidential informant to develop evidence that could be used in court led the F.B.I. to cut ties with him in 1992; the group on which he had been informing went on to bomb the World Trade Center the following February.

Prosecutors in the Zazi case to date have been unable to charge several other suspected co-conspirators — as many as 24, according to some reports. And while Mr. Zazi has now been accused by authorities of conspiring to make bombs, the other arrestees have been charged only with the relatively minor offense of lying to the authorities. Law enforcement is described in several news reports as “stretched thin” as it conducts surveillance of Mr. Zazi’s associates.

This has an ominous precedent: in the wake of the 2004 arrests, British authorities followed the other associates who had appeared on video surveillance with the conspirators, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other investigations. Those forgotten men proceeded to kill 52 people and wound 700 more.

Time will tell whether the decision to arrest Mr. Zazi and his associates was premature. If the case against them does not develop beyond what has been reported, and if no useable evidence is developed against the 24 other men, the decision to arrest will be second-guessed. That would be grossly unfair. From a public safety perspective, law enforcement officers and prosecutors cannot be faulted for acting when they believe that the public is in imminent peril, even if that means compromising an investigation.

The larger issue raised here is whether there is a viable alternative to the nerve-racking game of chicken that law enforcement must play in terrorism cases. The obvious — though extremely unpopular — alternative is the passage of a preventive detention statute.

Such statutes have been upheld in the context of people with a demonstrated proclivity toward violent conduct, like sexual predators; the concept could be adapted, in a way that withstands constitutional scrutiny, to cover people with a demonstrated proclivity toward terrorism. That approach would give law enforcement additional means to disrupt potential terrorist plots. It has the virtue of honesty, obviating the strained and sometimes disingenuous use of material-witness and false-statement statutes that are now frequently used to arrest and hold suspected terrorists, and would remove the temptation to criminalize conduct that borders on free speech.

Still, preventive detention is hardly a panacea. What should the burden of proof be in using “civil commitment” regarding terrorism? When should that burden be adjusted, if ever? How often would a subject’s status be reviewed? How long may someone be held? There is, moreover, something about detaining someone before he has committed an offense that runs counter to our core constitutional values.

The Zazi case may well end up providing more questions than answers. In the absence of some mechanism allowing for preventive detention, the F.B.I. and police must continue to make hair-trigger judgments in real time about whether and when to arrest and charge suspects. Those are decisions our law enforcement officials routinely make, and make well, in other contexts; in terrorism cases, however, we have to ask if the stakes are too high for the system we have in place.

John Farmer Jr., a former attorney general of New Jersey, is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law at Newark and the author of “The Ground Truth.”

by David S. Broder

David Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

For years, death-penalty opponents and supporters have been working their way toward a moment in which each side would rethink things. They were seeking a case in which a clearly innocent defendant was wrongly put to death. In a 2005 Supreme Court case that actually had nothing to do with the execution of innocents, Justices David Souter and Antonin Scalia tangled over the possibility that such a creature even existed. Souter fretted that “the period starting in 1989 has seen repeated exonerations of convicts under death sentences, in numbers never imagined before the development of DNA tests.” To which Scalia retorted: “The dissent makes much of the newfound capacity of DNA testing to establish innocence. But in every case of an executed defendant of which I am aware, that technology has confirmed guilt.” Scalia went on to blast “sanctimonious” death-penalty opponents and a 1987 study on innocent exonerations whose “obsolescence began at the moment of publication,” then concluded that there was not “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”

This suggested that if anyone found such a case, the Scalias of the world would rethink matters. As of today, the Innocence Project, a national organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing, claims there have been 241 postconviction DNA exonerations, of which 17 were former death-row inmates spared execution. The gap between their facts and Scalia’s widens every year. And now we may have found that case of an innocent put to death: Cameron Todd Willingham, executed by the state of Texas in 2004 for allegedly setting a 1991 house fire that killed his three young daughters.

David Grann, who wrote a remarkable piece about the case in last week’s New Yorker, sifted through the evidence against Willingham to reveal that the entire prosecution was a train wreck. And at every step in his appeal, Willingham’s claims of innocence were met with the response that he’d already had more than enough due process for a baby killer.

But you needn’t take Grann’s word for it. In 2004 Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, conducted an independent investigation of the evidence in the Willingham case and came away with little doubt that it was an accidental fire—likely caused by a space heater or bad wiring. Hurst found no evidence of arson, and wrote a report to try to stay the execution. According to documents obtained by the Innocence Project, it appears nobody at the state Board of Pardons and Paroles or the Texas governor’s office even took note of Hurst’s conclusions. Just before Willingham was executed, he told the Associated Press, “[T]he most distressing thing is the state of Texas will kill an innocent man and doesn’t care they’re making a mistake.”

Since Willingham’s death, two other independent inquiries found no evidence of arson. In 2007 the state of Texas commissioned another renowned arson expert, Craig Beyler, to examine the Willingham evidence. Beyler’s report, issued two weeks ago, concluded that investigators had no scientific basis for claiming the fire was arson.

One might think that all this would give a boost to death-penalty opponents, who have long contended that conclusive proof of an innocent murdered by the state would fundamentally change the debate. But that was before the goalposts began to shift this summer. In June, by a 5–4 margin, the Supreme Court ruled that a prisoner did not have a constitutional right to demand DNA testing of evidence in police files, even at his own expense. “A criminal defendant proved guilty after a fair trial does not have the same liberty interests as a free man,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. And two months later, Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas went even further when the Supreme Court ordered a new hearing in Troy Davis’s murder case, after seven of nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimony. Justice Scalia, dissenting from that order, wrote for himself and Thomas, “[T]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

As a constitutional matter, Scalia’s assertion is not wrong. The court has never found a constitutional right for the actually innocent to be free from execution. When the court flirted with the question in 1993, a majority ruled against the accused, but Chief Justice William Rehnquist left open the possibility that it may be unconstitutional to execute someone with a “truly persuasive demonstration” of innocence. Now, in Scalia’s America, the Cameron Todd Willingham whose very existence was once in doubt is legally irrelevant. We may execute a man for an accidental house fire, while the Constitution itself stands silently by.

Lithwick also writes for slate.com.

Well, we survived August, which is good news. It was not a month that will be recorded in the Enlightened Discourse Hall of Fame. In fact, it was a national embarrassment — not just the steady stream of misinformation about the nature of President Obama’s health-care proposals, but the racism — both overt and opaque — the death threats, the imprecations (calling someone a Nazi is evidence of the evil of banality), the idiots bearing assault rifles at presidential events. As the lunatics took over the asylum, the President’s poll ratings dropped, and the chances for a truly bipartisan health-care-reform effort vanished, if they existed in the first place. Consequently, we have had a back-to-school fusillade of advice for the President from my columnizing peers — and an effusion of premature crowing from conservatives about the collapse of the Obama presidency.

The drop in the President’s poll numbers represents a natural political process. When politicians talk about spending their political capital, they are talking about their poll numbers — and the cliché is somewhat misleading. They are actually investing their political capital, hoping for a greater return if their gamble succeeds. George W. Bush invested his capital in privatizing Social Security, and the stock tanked. Barack Obama is investing in health-care reform. We are at the point of the legislative process where all seems hopeless, but Obama should be heartened by the fact that most of his Republican adversaries oppose the bill for crass political rather than ideological reasons. They assume that if it passes, his investment of political capital will result in higher poll numbers — which means they assume the public will like the changes he is proposing. (See TIME’s photo-essay “The Health-Care Debate Turns Angry.”)

And, I fearlessly predict, the public will. If insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, or drop people who get too sick, the public will love it. If health-care exchanges give individuals and small businesses the power to negotiate lower premiums from the insurance companies, people will love that too. Making health care available to everyone, even if some people — young, healthy people — who are not buying in now are told they have to join up, will also be well received. The odds are better than even that a bill containing those provisions will pass in Congress this fall.

But even if most of the noise about Obama is nonsense, there is one area of concern that could affect the ultimate success of his presidency. It is his tendency to overlearn the lessons of past presidencies, especially when those lessons enable him to avoid taking responsibility for tough decisions. It has been widely observed that Obama overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health-care effort by deferring to Congress to write the legislation. It has been less widely observed that the President overlearned the lesson of Bush’s hyperpoliticized Justice Department by leaving to Attorney General Eric Holder the decision about whether to investigate the CIA for torture abuses.

What should the President have done? Well, there’s a path between the 1,300-page Clinton health-care plan and the 1,000-page Henry Waxman plan that will be voted on in the House. The President could have laid out a set of principles and said, “I will veto any bill that doesn’t contain the following …” (Indeed, he still could do so.) They should be clear, simple, popular and achievable. My list would include insurance reform, health-care exchanges, near universal coverage and tort reform. (Obama’s position on tort reform is another abdication of responsibility: he says he’s open to it, knowing the congressional Democrats are closed to it.) (See “Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide.”)

The President’s deferral of responsibility for the CIA investigation is more serious than his health-care meanderings. This is a matter of national security that will directly affect the morale and behavior of our clandestine services. The President can’t say he wants to look forward, not backward, then allow his Attorney General to look backward. The most egregious practices, like waterboarding, were (outrageously) declared legal by the Bush Justice Department. How can you prosecute one interrogator for threatening a prisoner with an electric drill and let others who waterboarded a prisoner 83 times off the hook? Is it right for the interrogators to be prosecuted and the real miscreants — people, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ordered, and still approve of, the torture — to escape unpunished? Most legal experts believe that such cases would be difficult to prosecute. But whether you favor an investigation or not, this is a presidential decision the President avoided.

In the great sweep of history, this presidency has barely begun. The mistakes Obama has made are rookie mistakes that can be corrected. And the general tendency of his Administration — toward civility, as opposed to the ugliness we’ve seen in the past month — is the right one. But he can’t allow his desire for civility to neuter the requirements of leadership. He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting right now.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Froma Harrop is a columnist for the Providence Journal.

Dr. Robert Golden is a urologist in Spokane.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@ washpost.com.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

Derrick Skaug (former MSHS AP GO PO Student)

The Daily Evergreen

Published: 08/31/2009 6:49pm

Being called a liberal used to be an insult, but after eight years of former President George W. Bush, being a liberal is not only acceptable, it is preferable. Now that conservatives have realized tarring someone as a liberal is not an effective election strategy, dirtier words are being slung.

President Barack Obama’s economic policies are being labeled as socialism, communism and even fascism. I will not speak for the legitimacy of communism or fascism because both systems are, at best, ineffective and, at worst, dangerous. Socialism, on the other hand, should not be considered an insult or something to be feared because we are all socialists.

It’s true. No matter what Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck say, the U.S. has been a socialist state for a very long time. Not one country on earth operates under a true laissez-faire economy.

Every single student at WSU is supporting a socialist program – public schools. A socialist education system still offers choice unlike communist systems. Parents can pay to have their children attend a private school, or they can send their kids to a taxpayer-supported public school.

The shipping and mail industry is the same way. When I buy products off of Ebay or Amazon, some of my products are delivered by FedEx. On the other hand, the U.S. Postal Service, which is an independent government agency, which provides jobs for Americans, delivers the rest of my mail.

The U.S Constitution actually gives Congress the right to set up post offices. Apparently, that dreaded socialism even managed to taint our sacred constitution.

Another government-funded segment of society interfering with the free market nature of raging wildfires is the fire department. A scene in Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York” depicted two private firefighting companies grappling over who would get to put out a raging inferno that was destroying an entire city block. This was not drawn out of thin air. A vast multitude of private fire companies did exist. Thankfully, very few still do. A true, free market supporter should find the closest private firefighting company and put that number on speed dial.

It’s ironic that the only socialist program that conservatives like to support is the military, which tends to have a monopoly on national defense. Most Americans seem to prefer the military rather than their private sector counterpart, Blackwater. And there seems to be no private sector competitors to the police, except maybe bodyguards.

The question boils down to how conservatives can support so many socialist programs, including the bailouts of entire industries, but not a public health care option.

Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP are all popular socialist health care programs that conservatives would never tamper with. Yet these programs let many Americans fall through the cracks – those with preexisting conditions, the lower-middle class and many others. Most Americans just want to be able to make their own choice between a public or a private option when it comes health care.

Supporters of a public option are socialists, but then again, aren’t we all?

By Michael Barone

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Dr. Donald F. Condon is a physician in Spokane.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

Froma Harrop is a columnist for the Providence Journal.

Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By JONAH GOLDBERG

August 29, 2009 –IF you read the papers or watch the news, you’ll encounter a long list of accomplishments by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. You’re less likely to hear, however, that in his death Kennedy proved Rush Limbaugh right.

In March, the talk-show host and bete noir of progressives everywhere said that the health-care bill wending its way through Congress would eventually be dubbed “the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill.” At the time, the official position of the Democratic Party was outrage and disgust. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee initiated a petition drive demanding that the Republican Party formally denounce Limbaugh for his “reprehensible” and “truly outrageous” comments.

Fast-forward to a few hours after the announcement of Kennedy’s death. Suddenly, naming the bill after Kennedy would be a moving tribute.

ABC News reports that “the idea of naming the legislation for Kennedy has been quietly circulating for months” but was kicked into overdrive by Sen. Robert Byrd, the Democratic Party’s eldest statesman.

Intriguingly, this suggests that either Democrats already had the idea when Limbaugh floated it, which would mean their protests were just so much opportunistic and cynical posturing — or they actually got the idea from Limbaugh himself, which would be too ironic for a Tom Wolfe novel.

But that Kennedy’s death should be marked by cynicism, opportunism and irony is not shocking, given that these qualities are now the hallmarks of the party he largely defined.

The Democratic Party’s determination to exploit his death for political gain puts the commentator who doesn’t wish to speak ill of the dead in something of a bind. So let us be clear that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Kennedy himself — or any Kennedy — would object to such a ploy.

Whether one calls it exploitation or heroic perseverance, the Kennedy dynasty’s longevity is best understood as a response to fatal tragedies. Shortly after her husband’s murder, Jacqueline Kennedy lamented Lee Harvey Oswald’s inconvenient political views: “It had to be some silly little Communist.”

Fortunately, her husband’s handlers had things well in hand, orchestrating with a compliant media the grand fiction that Kennedy had somehow been a martyr to civil rights, taken out by right-wing “hate.”

The real JFK, who cut capital-gains taxes and only reluctantly supported Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, had never been nearly as liberal as the posthumous legend created to give new life to liberalism — and the Kennedy name.

According to the mythmakers, JFK would have pulled us out of Vietnam. Meanwhile, the real JFK boasted (mere hours before his murder) that he’d massively boosted defense spending and ordered a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in Vietnam. The prior March, he’d asked Congress to spend 50 cents out of every dollar on defense.

Hence one of the great ironies of Ted Kennedy’s career: He was the chief beneficiary of an inheritance from a brother whose views he didn’t share.

Such contradictions never bothered Ted Kennedy, nor his fellow Democrats, when he was alive — so why should there be compunction now?

After all, the Kennedys and the Democrats have mythologized and exploited the deaths of three brothers (and minimized the deaths of Mary Jo Kopechne and Martha Moxley) in order to protect the Kennedy brand. Naming a massive expansion of the federal government after Ted Kennedy, particularly when it was indeed his life’s cause, seems entirely fitting and fair.

My only objection is the notion that somehow anyone but partisan Democrats should be expected to cave in to the “Do it for Teddy” bullying.

Conservatives should surrender to something that violates their fundamental principles out of deference to the very man liberals celebrate for never abandoning his fundamental principles? No one expected Ted Kennedy to become a champion of free markets out of deference to Ronald Reagan’s memory.

Now, if liberals want to rally their own troops by putting Kennedy’s name on the bill, that’s their right, even if it will likely result in an even more unpopular bill than the ones now under consideration.

I suspect that they’ll be disappointed to discover that the currency of the Kennedy name purchases far less than it once did — thanks in large part to what Ted Kennedy did with it.

JonahsColumn@aol.com

(Extension:  When the history books are written and the Ted Kennedy section comes to light, what will be stated?  Do  a little research and enlighten us as to the accomplishments and/or failure of the “Lion of Liberalism”?)

Linda P. Campbell is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram. Her e-mail address is lcampbell@star-telegram.com.

Leonard Pitts Jr.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@ washpost.com.

by Chris Jordan – Former AP GO PO Student
I’m watching Fox News right now and it’s really tough to do.

Sean Hannity is on covering the “Universal Nightmare” and every time
he talks about Obama’s healthcare plan, computerized blood flashes
across the screen. Classy…

He just had some “expert” on his show explaining why the Public Option
that we’ve heard so much about is a horrible idea. This is exactly
what he said…

“When President Obama says ‘If you like your current plan, you can
keep it,’ he’s not telling the truth. Millions of Americans will be
forced from their current insurance because the government run plan
will be able to come in at a lower cost.” And then he went on with all
the usual stuff about how horrible government-run healthcare is.

First of all, it is absolutely impossible for anyone to be FORCED from
their current plan into something called a Public OPTION that you can
only enter into by choice. The government run OPTION is intended to
provide competition to private insurance. If millions of people CHOOSE
to abandon their private insurance for a public option, it’s because
they’ve made the decision that they could get better care for a lower
cost with that plan. It won’t be because the evil government FORCED
them into a government plan. People will choose what is best for their
families, and if that so happens to be a government plan, so be it!

If conservatives and whoever else really believe that private
insurance is superior, and that government run healthcare is really so
horrible and low quality, then the only way to find out is to have
them compete. If we can set it up in a way so that the competition is
fair, shouldn’t everyone want private insurance if it’s really so
awesome?

We should set up a healthcare system that is uniquely American – one
that combines the best aspects of our own system (high quality care,
innovation) with the best aspects of other systems (universal
coverage, lower cost). That’s why Obama is not proposing a government
takeover (much to my dismay)– he’s proposing introducing a public
OPTION that people can choose to go into if they don’t like their
current insurance. People will choose whatever plan is best for them,
public or private.

I agree that choice and competition will lower prices. And that’s why
I support the public option – because it’s one more choice Americans
will have as THEY decide the insurance that is best for them.

May the best plan win!

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

May 29, 2009

By Michael Gerson

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Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/29/entering_the_trap_96716.html at May 29, 2009 – 10:06:26 AM PDT

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.

Beth Thew is secretary-treasurer of the Spokane Regional Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Troup. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By Rich Noyes

January 13, 200

By Reed Galen

As President-Elect Obama readies his ascent to the White House less than two weeks from now, it appears that his political acumen extends not only to those in all parts of the Democratic party, but in no small part to Senator John McCain as well. Just three short months ago we were inundated with McCain’s talk of Bill Ayres and ‘That One,’ but an easy détente appears to have developed between the former rivals.

To that end, President-Elect Obama has committed four distinct acts that telegraph his political savvy when it comes to Senator McCain. His first move was to invite McCain to Chicago for a face-to-face meeting soon after the election. This magnanimous and post-partisan action surely played to McCain’s sense that politics has gotten far too ugly for its own good and was probably much appreciated as a sign of respect for the Arizonan personally.

Next, Obama selected Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security. Aside from being qualified for the job on a number of fronts (former US Attorney, state Attorney General, Governor of Arizona, a major border state, etc.) the Obama team again did Senator McCain a favor. With Napolitano firmly ensconced at the Nebraska Avenue headquarters of DHS, Senator McCain’s toughest potential opposition to re-election in 2010 is out of the picture. Having already announced his intention to seek another term in the Senate, this will allow McCain to carry out his Goldwater-esque desire to bring centrism and civility to the Senate and to the GOP.

In another act that was both gracious and pragmatic, the President-Elect helped ensure that Senator Joe Lieberman would retain his Chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. This after Lieberman spent almost two years on the campaign trail in support of his friend John McCain. Rarely hesitating in his criticism of the Obama campaign, Lieberman is lucky to be invited to sit with either caucus.

Lastly, Obama announced that he had selected former Congressman Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, as his Transportation Secretary. Aside from having oversight over that department when he was the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, McCain and LaHood are good friends. McCain must have been pleased with such a choice.

Why, though, would the President-Elect go to all the trouble of giving so much consideration to an opponent whom he soundly defeated? Continuing the thread of wise political judgment that has so far defined his transition, Obama understands that having John McCain as an ally in the United States Senate is a major boon to his policy initiatives. As the recent standard-bearer for the GOP, McCain will be enormously helpful; any Republican imprimatur on Obama legislation could help clear stubborn obstacles. The prospect of having a troika of votes in the Senate (McCain, Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) may have also played into the strategy; pushing a bill from 58 or 59 to the magic level of 60 votes is invaluable as the Democrats stand on the cusp of their magic number.

From Senator McCain’s perspective, this scenario would allow him to return to the role he truly relishes: Being the deal-maker or swing vote in the Senate is much more his style and most importantly to him, keeps him imminently relevant. Acting as manager or administrator is not in McCain’s make-up, nor did he ever seem to enjoy the prospect of having to play that part. In addition, much like the aftermath of the 2000 campaign, 2009 finds John McCain not much a fan of the conservative wing of the GOP nor they of him. In 2001 he went out of his way to break with President Bush and Republicans on tax cuts and spending.

Once again Barack Obama has shown that in addition to his abundant charisma and soaring oratory, he possess deft political skills. One would be hard-pressed to find another recent example of a President (-Elect) and his opponent in the Presidential contest willing to work together, at least in theory. What’s more, now is legacy time for John McCain. With his almost assured re-election next year, it will not be much of a surprise if McCain, more often than not, turns out to be an ally of the Obama Administration.

The Democrats are folding like an ironing board over this Roland Burris business, and for some reason people are surprised.

Just to catch up: The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is in scalding-hot water over allegations he wanted to sell Barack Obama’s still-warm Senate seat. This was discovered via federal wiretaps of the helmet-haired governor’s phone conversations and fueled by some juicy dialogue better suited for fleet week in Manila.

In response, Senate Democrats took a Churchillian stand, vowing that no Blago appointee would ever be accepted by the Senate. No appointee, the Democrats insisted, so tainted with scandal could be allowed to sit in the same chamber that Ted Kennedy calls home.

The party of the infinitely elastic “living Constitution” suddenly planted their flag of principle in the terra firma of constitutional concrete and watched it flap in the hot wind of their political bloviation. Even after Blagojevich announced he was appointing Roland Burris, a respected but unremarkable black Illinois politician, to Obama’s seat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada stood his ground, pronouncing the move “unacceptable.”

But that resolve melted like a Hershey bar in a Nevada parking lot the moment Mr. Burris came to Washington. Apparently, the Constitution wasn’t on the Democrats’ side (Fancy that!) and liberals lacked the stomach to stand in the doorway of the Capitol and block admittance of a black man.

Indeed, that was Blago’s thinking all along. When the Democratic governor announced his decision, he assembled various black Illinois pols to support the move, including Rep. Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Chicago’s South Side and a founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Rush immediately played the race card at the press conference. “There are no African-Americans in the U.S. Senate. And I don’t think any U.S. senator who’s sitting in the Senate right now wants to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the U.S. Senate,” he said.

In case you needed a ball peen hammer to drive the point into your forehead, he added: “I would ask you to not hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer …”

Rush assembled more than 60 black ministers Sunday to rally around Burris at a Chicago church. “We are just faced with a hard-headed room of people in the Senate who want to keep an African-American out of the Senate,” Rush said. He condemned the Senate, where until recently Barack Obama served before becoming president of the United States, as “the last bastion of plantation politics.”

And that was all she wrote for Reid, who by next week should be on all fours like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House,” shouting, “Thank you sir! May I have another?” as Burris paddles him.

Now, I certainly understand why Reid & Co. caved. For starters, Reid’s not exactly the brightest crayon in the box.

But why all the fuss in the first place? Isn’t this how it always works? The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, an impressive African-American writer, is amazed that “Reid has been outmaneuvered by the sort of overt, ham-fisted identity politics deployed in the ’70s.”

The ’70s? So this sort of thing stopped more than three decades ago? I had no idea. What planet do my newscasts come from?

I thought this was simply what liberals and Democrats do. When Newt Gingrich introduced the Contract with America, black Democrats denounced it as racist. Charlie Rangel proclaimed, “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” When impeachment threatened Bill Clinton, he draped himself in black ministers and staffers. The NAACP ran an ad narrated by the daughter of James Byrd, a black man brutally murdered in a hate crime, insinuating that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush’s refusal to support hate-crime legislation in Texas was like murdering her father again. In the recent campaign, nearly the entire liberal punditocracy insisted that opposition to Barack Obama could only be explained by racism, a story line egged on by Obama himself when convenient.

And don’t tell me Blago’s corruption changes the equation. Has anyone read about the baleful history of minority set-aside programs in cities like Chicago? Cronies and grifters are routinely given sweetheart contracts under the guise of fighting discrimination when in reality it’s all a riot of kickbacks, “pay-to-play” and cronyism. People don’t call Jesse Jackson a shakedown artist for nothing.

There are two reasons why this spectacle shocks some liberals. The first is that Blago, Burris and Rush used this tactic on fellow Democrats. And since Democrats can’t be motivated by racism, any ploy like this must be cynical. When the same gambit is used on Republicans, it’s called “speaking truth to power.” Second, some honestly believed that Obama represented a real change of the racial landscape. So far, alas, these folks just look naive.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online. His e-mail address is jonahscolumn@aol.com.

David S. Broder

It was not lost on anyone that the president-elect of the United States, riding the crest of his popularity, and the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate were outsmarted last week by a state politician who won his last election almost 20 years ago.

When and if Roland Burris claims the Senate seat from Illinois formerly occupied by Barack Obama, it will represent the greatest climb-down by an incoming president since Sam Nunn turned Bill Clinton around on the issue of gays in the military at the start of Clinton’s first term.

Fortunately for Obama, the voters are much more concerned with the economy and Obama’s effort to fix it than they are with the infighting over the Illinois Senate seat.

But politicians keep score on each other all the time. And, after a near-perfect month of transition operations, Obama has stumbled twice in two weeks, first being caught unaware by the investigation of Bill Richardson, his choice for commerce secretary, and then being outmaneuvered by Burris and his tawdry sponsor, Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

There are lessons for Obama in both incidents, starting with the importance of really knowing the other players in the game. Obama has had such a rapid rise in national politics that there are many key figures in both parties he barely has had time to size up.

But Richardson was a familiar fellow traveler on the 2007-08 presidential campaign trail, and Obama should have known that there were reports of a grand jury investigation of pay-for-play in New Mexico.

As for Blagojevich, Obama had to know, from his years in Springfield and Chicago, about the governor’s tawdry and ruthless reputation. But Obama seriously underestimated him.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, got all 50 members of his caucus to sign a statement vowing they would never accept a Senate appointee from Blagojevich’s tainted hands, after prosecutors had published excerpts of wiretaps in which the governor had salivated obscenely over the way he could cash in on Obama’s Senate vacancy.

Obama personally endorsed that hard-line stand against seating anyone “tainted” by Blagojevich, issuing a statement that backed Reid and the others. But Burris was no more impressed than Blagojevich had been.

When the governor called the senators’ bluff, Burris launched a public relations blitz on television, insisting that it would be unfair to punish him for the governor’s alleged sins. Ignored for the moment was the fact that Burris had been rejected by the voters in three straight Illinois Democratic gubernatorial races and in one primary for mayor of Chicago. Had the Democrat-controlled Legislature ordered a special election, the odds against Burris would have been enormous.

But Burris’ ego is limitless. And it turned out that Reid had, once again, failed to do his homework or line up his votes. When Chicago black congressman Bobby Rush played the race card, questioning why anyone would stand in the way of Burris succeeding Obama as the lone African-American senator, you could feel a wave of anxiety go through Democratic ranks.

Soon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chairman of the Rules Committee and a potential candidate for California governor next year, publicly called on Reid to relent. The Congressional Black Caucus weighed in on Burris’ behalf. By the time Burris sat down with Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, the fight was effectively over and Burris was gracious about accepting their surrender. Obama conceded as well, saying that if the Senate seated Burris, “then I’m going to work with Roland Burris just like I work with all the other senators.”

Obama justifiably figured that Burris was not worth a knockdown fight when he has so many bigger battles ahead of him. But the lesson that other politicians have drawn is that Obama may not always be able to count on his congressional allies and they may not be able to count on him. That is not the way he wanted to begin.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

If the United States and Israel hope to ever truly come up with a successful strategy for fighting extreme militarism and threats to their security, they need bigger imaginations.

Pretend just for a minute that you are a mainstream Palestinian person living in Gaza. You, like 66 percent of your fellow Palestinians, support some sort of peace process with Israel. You are fairly moderate and generally prefer peace to violence, but in 2006 you voted for Hamas in the elections. You didn’t necessarily agree with Hamas’s more radical rhetoric, but at the same time you found the status quo unacceptable. You voted for change.

Now in 2008, you are under attack. Israel has launched air strikes that make you afraid to go outside. Then their troops invade. You may not like how things have gone under Hamas’s rule, but at least they are there vowing to fight back against Israeli attacks.

It is baffling that Israel is unable to use its imagination to put itself inside the shoes of Palestinians and understand how Israeli actions are driving Palestinians toward supporting Hamas.

Hamas is a political entity. After winning the elections in 2002, it still faces threats to its power from other political factions. Its periodic rocket attacks could not possibly destroy Israel, but were intended to annoy and provoke; Israel has fallen right into the trap and has taken the bait. Why would Hamas provoke Israel?  Because Hamas knows that if Israel responds with military force, threatens Palestinians, and kills civilians, it will further radicalize Muslim opinion worldwide against the Israelis and strengthen Hamas’s position domestically with the Palestinian people.

The Israelis would do much better for themselves, strategically, to take a different approach. In the past, Hamas has indicated its willingness to negotiate with Israel. The Israeli government should take them up on this offer and make a good faith effort to talk and compromise. If Hamas engages Israel honestly, then perhaps some sort of agreement will materialize. If not, it will be clear to moderate Muslims and the Palestinian people that Hamas is standing in the way of peace, and not the Israelis. Ultimately, Hamas must answer to the Palestinian people, and obstructing peaceful negotiation when it is the will of the people is not a good political strategy.

By choosing to attack instead of talk, Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds across the world. The anti-Israeli sentiment that follows breeds tolerance for extremism and an environment that anti-Semitic militants ultimately thrive on. Losing the masses is a mistake the United States made in Iraq, a mistake it made in Afghanistan and a mistake Israel is making with Muslims and mainstream Palestinians.

Clearly neither Hamas nor Israel has much moral high ground to stand on right now. Hamas provoked Israel with rocket attacks, and is operating in densely populated areas to intentionally drive up the number of civilians killed by Israeli bombs. Despite the fact that these latest Hamas attacks didn’t result in any deaths, Israeli retaliations resulted in the death of more than 400 Palestinians, and 60 civilians. I can understand both why Israel did what it did and the criticisms of its actions.

The question we should be asking ourselves is what can America do to bring peace and stability? Vast majorities of the populations in every major Muslim country have a negative view of the United States, and a lot of that ill will is a result of our policy, which has basically been to sit on the sidelines and condemn Hamas at every opportunity.

Israel is a strong ally, and America should not abandon her. At the same time, we need a change. We need a policy that takes the high ground and Israel needs one that won’t draw the fire of the Muslim world, and that’s in its strategic interest. America should press Israel to seek peace, not war. The only chance Israel has to undercut extremism is through reaching out with their voices, not their bombers.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.  Chris is a MSHS graduate and former AP GO PO Student.

by Joel Stein

Joel Stein is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. His e-mail address is jstein@latimescolumnists.com.

Current wisdom has it that if there had been a few less hanging chads in Florida in November 2000, the world would be a different place.

Al Gore would have won the presidency, the Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, and several hundred thousand people who perished in that war would be alive today. That conclusion is based on the generally unchallenged belief that Iraq is George W. Bush’s war: that he and a cabal of like-minded right-wingers conceived and executed the invasion for their own ideological motives. Or, as Frank Harvey, a research professor of international relations at Dalhousie University, puts it: “A few powerful ideologues exploited public fears (and international goodwill) in the aftermath of 9/11 to amplify Iraq’s WMD threat as a primary justification for an unnecessary, preventive invasion.”

That view, notes Harvey, “has emerged as the dominant narrative for explaining the U.S. attack. It represents the prevailing consensus running through dozens of the most popular books on the Bush administration, and hundreds of frequently cited (and widely circulated) scholarly articles, media reports and blog entries on the invasion. In fact, casual observers engaged in a cursory review of the literature will find the same thesis repeated (and usually defended) by prominent scholars, journalists and Washington ‘insiders’ on the left and right of the political spectrum.”

Harvey believes the conclusion is dead wrong. In a new paper for the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, he deconstructs the thesis and finds it “overlooks almost all of the relevant historical facts.” More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have. (more…)