As Debt Collectors Multiply, So Do Consumer Complaints
By Caroline E. Mayer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 28, 2005; A01
Embarrassing calls at work. Threats of jail and even violence. Improper withdrawals from bank accounts. An increasing number of consumers are complaining of abusive techniques from some companies that are part of a new breed of debt collectors.
They are debt buyers, outfits that acquire unpaid bills from credit card firms and other credit providers for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Some of these companies go after bills so old that consumers can no longer be sued for them in court or punished for them on their credit reports.
As the amount of consumer debt has risen over the years, so too has the number of these firms, growing from about a dozen firms in 1996 to more than 500 today. Industry officials say the firms provide a real benefit to indebted consumers, letting them pay off their bills at steep discounts. But industry critics -- plaintiff attorneys, consumer advocates and regulators -- say that for some firms, the demand to make a profit on the debts they purchase has resulted in the increasing use of heavy-handed, and sometimes illegal, tactics.
Year in, year out, the Federal Trade Commission receives more complaints about debt collectors than any other industry. But in recent years, these complaints have skyrocketed -- from 13,950 in 2000 to 58,687 last year. Complaints about third-party debt collectors accounted for close to one in six of all FTC complaints last year, up from 9.5 percent in 2000.
Francis Buselli of Amherst, N.H., told the FTC that a debt collector called him repeatedly about a debt the company said his daughter owed -- even though she had moved out 15 years before. On Nov. 26, 2004, the company called about six times in 15 minutes. On the final call, the debt collector recited Buselli's Social Security number, mentioned his wife by name and threatened to send thugs to get him, according to Buselli's FTC complaint.
"They knew too much about me. That really scared me," he said in an interview.
Last year, the agency sued the collector, Capital Acquisitions and Management Corp. (CAMCO), a large nationwide collection agency that the FTC said bought old debt lists, often ones that may have been sold several times before. The commission alleged that CAMCO pursued consumers who were not the actual debtors, just people with similar or identical names living in the same area. The firm subsequently shut down.
A lawyer for former CAMCO executives did not return calls seeking comment.
Collection industry officials attribute the steep rise in complaints to the growing volume of consumer debt, which now totals more than $10 trillion, and to the Internet, which has made it easier for consumers to file reports with the government. CAMCO, they add, went far beyond the typical collection tactics practiced by the rest of the industry.
"In every sector, there are bad apples, but 95 percent of all debt buyers are good, nice business people," said Warren Dedrick, chairman of Marlin Integrated Capital Holding Corp., a large buyer of medical and utility debt. "I believe hardly any debt buyers break the law, but on the other hand, if you're talking to a consumer once a week for six weeks, it's going to do nothing but alienate the consumer base."
Dedrick has expressed concern that as the industry becomes more competitive, tough tactics would draw the attention of law-enforcement officials.
"I think we'll see more shutdowns from the FTC because debt buyers who purchase paper at higher prices will have to push consumers harder and harder to get their desired return on investment," Dedrick told Kaulkin Ginsberg, an advisory firm for the accounts-receivable industry, according to a recent report.
Harassment by some collectors "is definitely getting worse," said Sonya Smith-Valentine, a Greenbelt lawyer who has represented Maryland and District consumers in lawsuits against debt collectors for three years.
Particularly troubling, Smith-Valentine said, are the growing number of cases in which collectors persuade a consumer to pay just a little -- and then use the bank information from that payment to improperly withdraw more funds from the consumer's account.
That was the experience of Sheilah R. Henderson of Lanham, as detailed in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland. According to the suit, a collector threatened to sue her for a bill for a home-security system that had been incurred by Henderson's deceased mother. Although Henderson was not responsible for the debt, she agreed to have money automatically debited from her bank account on the 15th of every month. According to the complaint, the next thing she knew, the collector tried to withdraw money five times in three weeks, with Henderson incurring a returned check charge each time.
Henderson ordered a stop to the wire transfers, but then the collector started calling her at work, threatening to garnish her wages if she didn't pay. Henderson asked the collector to stop calling her at work, her right under federal law, but the collector told her he'd continue to call her there "until she lost her job," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit was settled under a confidentiality agreement.
The consumer debt-buying industry began in earnest in the early 1990s, when the federal government began selling off assets from failed savings and loans. Before then, credit card firms and other creditors rarely sold unpaid debt, instead hiring third-party firms or lawyers to collect the bills -- usually on a commission basis.
Between 1995 and 2004, the industry grew from purchasing $12 billion worth of consumer debt to $77.2 billion, according to the Nilson Report, a newsletter that monitors the credit industry. The report said that last year debt buyers paid an average of 5.4 cents for every dollar of unpaid debt.
For some firms, returns can run as high as five times the amount they paid for the debt, according to the report by Bethesda-based Kaulkin Ginsberg.
There are five publicly traded debt buyers, including Portfolio Recovery Associates, a nine-year-old Norfolk firm that went public in November 2002. Since its inception, the company -- whose motto is "giving debt collection a good name" -- has bought more than 6.2 million customer accounts with a face value of $11.1 billion for $265.8 million, or 2.39 percent. To date, it has collected debts at a rate of 2.5 to 3 times the purchase price, enabling the firm's revenue to grow from $6.8 million in 1998 to $113.4 million in 2004. In that same time period, profits increased to $27.5 million from $402,000.
"If you run it right, it can be a good business," said Portfolio Recovery's chairman, Steven Fredrickson, who added that collectors are a vital part of America's credit-driven economy. "Without collectors, you couldn't have much of a lending environment. There has to be people like us to help enforce original contracts made" in which consumers promise to pay their debts.
Frederickson said the company runs a six-week training program aimed at avoiding consumer complaints: "We think compliance is a big deal. . . . Nobody loves a debt collector, so you really need to mind your p's and q's."
Manny Newburger, a Texas attorney who represents many collection firms, estimates that the average collector makes between 40,000 and 50,000 calls a year. Multiply that by the 100,000 collectors that ACA International, the trade association for debt collectors, says are in the business and that comes to 4 billion phone calls a year. By comparison, the 58,687 complaints filed at the FTC are quite small, Newburger said.
The rise of the debt-buying industry has also led to an increase in complaints about attempts to collect what plaintiff attorneys often call "zombie debt," those unpaid bills that are so old the statute of limitations in which a creditor can sue to recover the debt has expired.
It's not illegal to try to collect this debt -- and collection industry officials say there are a lot of consumers who want to pay, even if they are no longer legally obligated to. However, federal rules make it illegal to sue or even threaten to sue to collect it.
That's one of the chief reasons the Federal Trade Commission sued CAMCO. In its court filing, the agency, which had received more than 2,000 consumer complaints about CAMCO, called the Rockford, Ill., firm "a debt collection company gone wild."
It alleged that CAMCO harassed thousands of consumers to pay old, unenforceable debts or even debts they didn't owe. CAMCO sometimes tried to find people with the same name in the same geographic area and tried to collect the debt from them, the agency alleged. Even if the consumer was not the actual debtor, CAMCO threatened jail, seizure of property or garnishment of wages unless they paid, the FTC said. CAMCO collected millions every year "and perhaps as much as 80 percent of the money" came from consumers who never owed the original debt, the agency said in its complaint.
CAMCO closed last December after the FTC filed suit. Its $1.75 billion portfolio of consumer receivables was auctioned off for $6.8 million -- to another debt buyer.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Thursday, July 28, 2005
The Iraq truth hits home hard
uly 28, 2005
Oil and Blood
By BOB HERBERT
It is now generally understood that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has become a debacle. Nevertheless, Iraqis are supposed to have their constitution ratified and a permanent government elected by the end of the year. It's a logical escape hatch for George W. Bush. He could declare victory, as a senator once suggested to Lyndon Johnson in the early years of Vietnam, and bring the troops home as quickly as possible.
His mantra would be: There's a government in place. We won. We're out of there.
But don't count on it. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.
A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.
All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," which was the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.
It's the oil, stupid.
What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.
Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.
The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.
Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.
The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
David Brooks is on vacation.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Oil and Blood
By BOB HERBERT
It is now generally understood that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has become a debacle. Nevertheless, Iraqis are supposed to have their constitution ratified and a permanent government elected by the end of the year. It's a logical escape hatch for George W. Bush. He could declare victory, as a senator once suggested to Lyndon Johnson in the early years of Vietnam, and bring the troops home as quickly as possible.
His mantra would be: There's a government in place. We won. We're out of there.
But don't count on it. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.
A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.
All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," which was the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.
It's the oil, stupid.
What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.
Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.
The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.
Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.
The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
David Brooks is on vacation.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Monday, July 25, 2005
Take Cheney's advice & do the opposite; practical advice
Arianna Huffington: Dick Cheney: The Magic 8 Ball of American Politics
Arianna Huffington Mon Jul 25, 2:04 PM ET
Is it just me or is Vice President Dick Cheney starting to become more and more like the comically malevolent Mr. Burns on The Simpsons? Except in the Vice President's case, the unpleasantness is not so comical.
It's certainly true that he has uncanny political radar. In fact, he exercises it with amazing consistency: you can count on him to do the wrong thing time after time after time.
Take his latest endeavor: a behind-the-scenes effort to kill legislation being drafted by Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner that would, among other things, "bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual."
The Senators are merely attempting to codify practices the White House says it's already following... and prohibiting the abuse of those held in U.S. custody seems like a tough goal to find fault with. But Cheney has, warning the three GOP stalwarts during a private meeting on Capitol Hill last week that their bill would undermine the president’s ability to wage the war on terror.
Sure it'd be nice if we could trust the Bush administration to do the right thing as it seeks to protect us from terrorist attacks -- but it’s proven that we can’t. And even if the White House had a shred of credibility left, we shouldn't. This nation was founded on skepticism and distrust of those in power. Our founding fathers didn't even trust themselves to do the right thing, creating specific rules for what a president should -- and shouldn’t -- be allowed to do, and giving the legislative branch oversight over how the executive branch fulfilled its duties. Remember "trust but verify?" It's just another way of saying oversight.
It's amazing the extent to which Congress has ceded that responsibility. This negligence of its constitutional duties is what allowed us to get so deeply into the disastrous war in Iraq in the first place.
If we could trust the executive branch, you wouldn't have to read sickening things like this story about the Defense Department defying a federal judge’s order to release secret photos and videos from Abu Ghraib.
The cluelessness of this administration about how to build and nurture a democracy clearly isn't confined to the Middle East.
My suggestion is that after he leaves office, we keep Mr. Burns Vice President Cheney around in an advisory capacity, a sort of political Magic 8 Ball. For every issue that comes up, we ask him what he would do. And then we do the opposite.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in Huffington Post commentary may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written authority of huffingtonpost.com.
Arianna Huffington Mon Jul 25, 2:04 PM ET
Is it just me or is Vice President Dick Cheney starting to become more and more like the comically malevolent Mr. Burns on The Simpsons? Except in the Vice President's case, the unpleasantness is not so comical.
It's certainly true that he has uncanny political radar. In fact, he exercises it with amazing consistency: you can count on him to do the wrong thing time after time after time.
Take his latest endeavor: a behind-the-scenes effort to kill legislation being drafted by Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner that would, among other things, "bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual."
The Senators are merely attempting to codify practices the White House says it's already following... and prohibiting the abuse of those held in U.S. custody seems like a tough goal to find fault with. But Cheney has, warning the three GOP stalwarts during a private meeting on Capitol Hill last week that their bill would undermine the president’s ability to wage the war on terror.
Sure it'd be nice if we could trust the Bush administration to do the right thing as it seeks to protect us from terrorist attacks -- but it’s proven that we can’t. And even if the White House had a shred of credibility left, we shouldn't. This nation was founded on skepticism and distrust of those in power. Our founding fathers didn't even trust themselves to do the right thing, creating specific rules for what a president should -- and shouldn’t -- be allowed to do, and giving the legislative branch oversight over how the executive branch fulfilled its duties. Remember "trust but verify?" It's just another way of saying oversight.
It's amazing the extent to which Congress has ceded that responsibility. This negligence of its constitutional duties is what allowed us to get so deeply into the disastrous war in Iraq in the first place.
If we could trust the executive branch, you wouldn't have to read sickening things like this story about the Defense Department defying a federal judge’s order to release secret photos and videos from Abu Ghraib.
The cluelessness of this administration about how to build and nurture a democracy clearly isn't confined to the Middle East.
My suggestion is that after he leaves office, we keep Mr. Burns Vice President Cheney around in an advisory capacity, a sort of political Magic 8 Ball. For every issue that comes up, we ask him what he would do. And then we do the opposite.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in Huffington Post commentary may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written authority of huffingtonpost.com.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Bush & CO. drowning in Plame flood water
The Plame Floodgates Open
by Hunter
Daily Kos
Fri Jul 22nd, 2005 at 13:24:15 PDT
It's only been a few days since the Supreme Court nominee was hurriedly announced in an attempt to get Karl Rove off the front pages. Since then, all hell has broken loose.
Bloomberg is reporting that Rove and Libby both gave testimony to the grand jury that flatly conflicts with the testimony given by those they said they talked to.
We now know that the Top Secret memo most consistent with the talking points that Rove and Libby told reporters was seen in the hands of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the days before the leak occurred. And that Fleischer told the grand jury he never saw it.
Update [2005-7-22 16:38:29 by Hunter]: [And Steve Clemons has verified that John Bolton was one of Judith Miller's regular sources on WMD issues, and that MSNBC stands by its story that Bolton gave testimony to the grand jury about the State Department memo in question. Bolton, you may recall, has previously been identified to have been involved in the Niger uranium claims that Wilson's trip helped disprove -- just to add even more gunpowder to this mix.]
This is, to use the most calm and soothing phrase possible in such circumstances, extremely f---ing bad for the administration. It shows the broad outlines not just of multiple perjury charges, but indeed of linked conspiracy charges against a number of administration officials.
We know that there are members of the administration familiar with the attack against Plame/Wilson who have been talking to prosecutors. At least, we can assume they've been telling prosecutors at least as much as they've been telling the press, or we'd have a whole passel of reporters likely joining Judith Miller in her Fortress of Suddenly Discovered Integrity. The fact that other administration officials have been giving their side of the story perhaps poses the most serious risk of all for Rove and others -- because it wouldn't be very difficult, for people in the right places, to shatter what little plausible deniability Rove, Libby, Fleischer, and others have been clinging to.
That branch may already be broken, in fact. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate the amount of legal danger here for Rove in particular, and Fleischer and Libby as well. The special counsel is likely trying to solidify how, exactly, Rove learned the information in the memo, since it's looking increasingly implausible that reporters told him, and looking more probable that Rove and Novak "agreed" on a storyline after the fact (reports are now saying that Rove's and Novak's stories don't quite match, too, further raising the stakes.) Note, however, that it may not matter whether the grand jury can fully identify how he came by the information. Rove has now been identified as confirming the classified info to both Novak and Cooper; that in and of itself represents a likely crime under the Espionage Act.
::
While we've been treated before to a series of fairly pointless leaks transparently by Luskin, Rove's attorney, since then we've been treated to far more significant leaks coming from the special counsel's office, the grand jury, and/or fellow witnesses unfriendly to Rove. Regardless of whether the leaks are intentional or not, it likely moves up Fitzgerald's timetable for any possible indictments -- once the information is public, and the defendants know what you're working on, it rapidly closes down avenues for further investigation, and it's time to put the cards on the table.
And in the middle, the President of the United States is wading in hipboots through the worst of it. As more leaks come out, Bush continues to embrace those figures now known to have played pivotal roles in the outing of a CIA NOC agent, even as the investigation becomes more encompassing and the questions, more pointed. Towards what end was Press Secretary Ari Fleischer -- who had already announced his imminent retirement from the administration, and was hardly a member of the Bush intelligence circle -- given access to classified Wilson information seemingly intended specifically, on Air Force One, for Powell and Bush? How is it that so many administration figures could be simultaneously involved, and the campaign against Wilson be orchestrated according to such specific classified talking points? What did the president and vice president know of the involvement of their immediate staff in the outing -- and, critically, when did they learn it, and what did they do about it?
What poses perhaps the greatest threat of all for the Bush administration is that, as each news agency puts the story in the hands of some of the best investigative reporters, the various threads of the story are being woven into a compelling -- and disastrous -- storyline. A Bush administration crime, carried out by Watergate-era and Iran-Contra figures that this administration has embraced wholeheartedly, done in the service of shoring up "fixed" evidence used to justify a preemptive war. And news services are tying the Plame outing to the "fixed" nuclear intelligence cited by Bush in his pre-war declarations to the nation. Those links are, finally, being made, and it's beginning to make the Nixon White House look like a Norman Rockwell painting in comparison.
There is very little time left for the White House to come up with some path -- any path -- by which to distance themselves from the wider allegations against not just Rove, but against the president and vice president themselves. Instead, they are stonewalling reporters asking them to clarify their involvement. In fact, both Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan haven't even backed off their previous public statements that Rove, by name, wasn't involved -- they've just refused to discuss it.
That's not going to cut it. The President needs to answer for his subordinates, who at this point are looking like they have given up any credible pretenses of innocence, and are now simply shopping for the weakest possible charges against them.
by Hunter
Daily Kos
Fri Jul 22nd, 2005 at 13:24:15 PDT
It's only been a few days since the Supreme Court nominee was hurriedly announced in an attempt to get Karl Rove off the front pages. Since then, all hell has broken loose.
Bloomberg is reporting that Rove and Libby both gave testimony to the grand jury that flatly conflicts with the testimony given by those they said they talked to.
We now know that the Top Secret memo most consistent with the talking points that Rove and Libby told reporters was seen in the hands of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the days before the leak occurred. And that Fleischer told the grand jury he never saw it.
Update [2005-7-22 16:38:29 by Hunter]: [And Steve Clemons has verified that John Bolton was one of Judith Miller's regular sources on WMD issues, and that MSNBC stands by its story that Bolton gave testimony to the grand jury about the State Department memo in question. Bolton, you may recall, has previously been identified to have been involved in the Niger uranium claims that Wilson's trip helped disprove -- just to add even more gunpowder to this mix.]
This is, to use the most calm and soothing phrase possible in such circumstances, extremely f---ing bad for the administration. It shows the broad outlines not just of multiple perjury charges, but indeed of linked conspiracy charges against a number of administration officials.
We know that there are members of the administration familiar with the attack against Plame/Wilson who have been talking to prosecutors. At least, we can assume they've been telling prosecutors at least as much as they've been telling the press, or we'd have a whole passel of reporters likely joining Judith Miller in her Fortress of Suddenly Discovered Integrity. The fact that other administration officials have been giving their side of the story perhaps poses the most serious risk of all for Rove and others -- because it wouldn't be very difficult, for people in the right places, to shatter what little plausible deniability Rove, Libby, Fleischer, and others have been clinging to.
That branch may already be broken, in fact. I don't think it's possible to exaggerate the amount of legal danger here for Rove in particular, and Fleischer and Libby as well. The special counsel is likely trying to solidify how, exactly, Rove learned the information in the memo, since it's looking increasingly implausible that reporters told him, and looking more probable that Rove and Novak "agreed" on a storyline after the fact (reports are now saying that Rove's and Novak's stories don't quite match, too, further raising the stakes.) Note, however, that it may not matter whether the grand jury can fully identify how he came by the information. Rove has now been identified as confirming the classified info to both Novak and Cooper; that in and of itself represents a likely crime under the Espionage Act.
::
While we've been treated before to a series of fairly pointless leaks transparently by Luskin, Rove's attorney, since then we've been treated to far more significant leaks coming from the special counsel's office, the grand jury, and/or fellow witnesses unfriendly to Rove. Regardless of whether the leaks are intentional or not, it likely moves up Fitzgerald's timetable for any possible indictments -- once the information is public, and the defendants know what you're working on, it rapidly closes down avenues for further investigation, and it's time to put the cards on the table.
And in the middle, the President of the United States is wading in hipboots through the worst of it. As more leaks come out, Bush continues to embrace those figures now known to have played pivotal roles in the outing of a CIA NOC agent, even as the investigation becomes more encompassing and the questions, more pointed. Towards what end was Press Secretary Ari Fleischer -- who had already announced his imminent retirement from the administration, and was hardly a member of the Bush intelligence circle -- given access to classified Wilson information seemingly intended specifically, on Air Force One, for Powell and Bush? How is it that so many administration figures could be simultaneously involved, and the campaign against Wilson be orchestrated according to such specific classified talking points? What did the president and vice president know of the involvement of their immediate staff in the outing -- and, critically, when did they learn it, and what did they do about it?
What poses perhaps the greatest threat of all for the Bush administration is that, as each news agency puts the story in the hands of some of the best investigative reporters, the various threads of the story are being woven into a compelling -- and disastrous -- storyline. A Bush administration crime, carried out by Watergate-era and Iran-Contra figures that this administration has embraced wholeheartedly, done in the service of shoring up "fixed" evidence used to justify a preemptive war. And news services are tying the Plame outing to the "fixed" nuclear intelligence cited by Bush in his pre-war declarations to the nation. Those links are, finally, being made, and it's beginning to make the Nixon White House look like a Norman Rockwell painting in comparison.
There is very little time left for the White House to come up with some path -- any path -- by which to distance themselves from the wider allegations against not just Rove, but against the president and vice president themselves. Instead, they are stonewalling reporters asking them to clarify their involvement. In fact, both Bush and Press Secretary Scott McClellan haven't even backed off their previous public statements that Rove, by name, wasn't involved -- they've just refused to discuss it.
That's not going to cut it. The President needs to answer for his subordinates, who at this point are looking like they have given up any credible pretenses of innocence, and are now simply shopping for the weakest possible charges against them.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Bush true to his campaign promise to appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court
Another Activist Judge
The Nation
John NicholsWed Jul 20, 1:05 AM ET
The Nation -- In 1999, when he was trying to appeal to the conservative base that would eventually deliver the Republican presidential nomination to him, Candidate George W. Bush said the Supreme Court justices he most admired were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The clear intimation was that, given the opportunity, Bush would nominate someone like Scalia and Thomas -- a conservative judicial activist bent on upsetting established law -- to the high court.
More recently, as he has finally been faced with the task of naming a nominee to the court, President George W. Bush has attempted to sound more moderate and thoughtful, suggesting that "a nominee to that court must be a person of superb credentials and the highest integrity, a person who will faithfully apply the Constitution and keep our founding promise of equal justice under law." President Bush has said that he prefers nominees who display "respect for the rule of law and for the liberties guaranteed to every citizen" and who "will strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench."
So which George W. Bush named federal appeals judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the opening on the Supreme Court created by the decision of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to retire? Is Roberts the Scalia/Thomas clone that Candidate Bush promised or is he the mainstreamer President Bush suggested he was looking for?
Chalk Roberts up as Candidate Bush's pick.
For more than a decade, Scalia and Thomas have campaigned without success to reverse the Court's 1973 Roe-v-Wade decision, which removed barriers to a woman's right to choose. This is the hottest of the hot-botton issues facing the court. And, on it, all indications are that Roberts will be the clone Scalia and Thomas need to complete their machinations.
When he served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States from 1989 to 1993 -- under Solicitor General Ken Starr -- Roberts filed a 1990 brief with the Supreme Court that declared: "Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."[T]he Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion," argued Roberts, "finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."
Never mind that Supreme Court justices selected by presidents of both parties had consistently concluded otherwise, Roberts had a different opinion and he did not hestitate to advance it. As the deputy solicitor general, he argued for a "gag rule" that prevented physicians working with family planning programs that were recipients of federal funding from discussion abortion with their patients. He even went so far as to appear before the court to argue in support of Operation Rescue during the period when the group's members were aggressively, sometimes violently, blocking access to health-care clinics that provided abortions.
Roberts was so feverish in his attempts to find a way to overturn Roe that Supreme Court justices openly joked about his over-the-top antics. Once, during an oral argument before the high court, one of the justices asked the deputy solicitor general: "Mr. Roberts, in this case are you asking that Roe v. Wade be overruled?"
Roberts replied, "No, your honor, the issue doesn't even come up."
"Well," the justice responded, "that hasn't prevented the Solicitor General from taking that position in prior cases."
The NARAL Pro-Choice America brief on Roberts, which reviews his aggressively advocacy for anti-choice positions, is blunt. "If Roberts is confirmed to a lifetime appointment, there is little doubt that he will work to overturn Roe v. Wade."
On this point, NARAL Pro-Choice America is in full agreement with Roberts' old pals at Operation Rescue.
The militant anti-choice group was among the first to hail Bush's selection of Roberts to fill the seat being vacated by O'Connor, who was generally a supporter of reproductive rights. "We pray that Roberts will be swiftly confirmed," announced Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.
Now, it is said that a president ought to have a great deal of latitude when it comes to making judicial nominations.
But all indications are that Roberts is not the nominee of President Bush, the man who condemns judges who would "legislate from the bench" and undermine "equal justice for all."
Rather, he is the political pick of Candidate Bush, who promised right-wing Republicans that he would give them another Scalia or Thomas. Indeed, Candidate Bush has found a nominee exteme enough to satisfy even Operation Rescue.
Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
The Nation
John NicholsWed Jul 20, 1:05 AM ET
The Nation -- In 1999, when he was trying to appeal to the conservative base that would eventually deliver the Republican presidential nomination to him, Candidate George W. Bush said the Supreme Court justices he most admired were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The clear intimation was that, given the opportunity, Bush would nominate someone like Scalia and Thomas -- a conservative judicial activist bent on upsetting established law -- to the high court.
More recently, as he has finally been faced with the task of naming a nominee to the court, President George W. Bush has attempted to sound more moderate and thoughtful, suggesting that "a nominee to that court must be a person of superb credentials and the highest integrity, a person who will faithfully apply the Constitution and keep our founding promise of equal justice under law." President Bush has said that he prefers nominees who display "respect for the rule of law and for the liberties guaranteed to every citizen" and who "will strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench."
So which George W. Bush named federal appeals judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the opening on the Supreme Court created by the decision of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to retire? Is Roberts the Scalia/Thomas clone that Candidate Bush promised or is he the mainstreamer President Bush suggested he was looking for?
Chalk Roberts up as Candidate Bush's pick.
For more than a decade, Scalia and Thomas have campaigned without success to reverse the Court's 1973 Roe-v-Wade decision, which removed barriers to a woman's right to choose. This is the hottest of the hot-botton issues facing the court. And, on it, all indications are that Roberts will be the clone Scalia and Thomas need to complete their machinations.
When he served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States from 1989 to 1993 -- under Solicitor General Ken Starr -- Roberts filed a 1990 brief with the Supreme Court that declared: "Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."[T]he Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion," argued Roberts, "finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."
Never mind that Supreme Court justices selected by presidents of both parties had consistently concluded otherwise, Roberts had a different opinion and he did not hestitate to advance it. As the deputy solicitor general, he argued for a "gag rule" that prevented physicians working with family planning programs that were recipients of federal funding from discussion abortion with their patients. He even went so far as to appear before the court to argue in support of Operation Rescue during the period when the group's members were aggressively, sometimes violently, blocking access to health-care clinics that provided abortions.
Roberts was so feverish in his attempts to find a way to overturn Roe that Supreme Court justices openly joked about his over-the-top antics. Once, during an oral argument before the high court, one of the justices asked the deputy solicitor general: "Mr. Roberts, in this case are you asking that Roe v. Wade be overruled?"
Roberts replied, "No, your honor, the issue doesn't even come up."
"Well," the justice responded, "that hasn't prevented the Solicitor General from taking that position in prior cases."
The NARAL Pro-Choice America brief on Roberts, which reviews his aggressively advocacy for anti-choice positions, is blunt. "If Roberts is confirmed to a lifetime appointment, there is little doubt that he will work to overturn Roe v. Wade."
On this point, NARAL Pro-Choice America is in full agreement with Roberts' old pals at Operation Rescue.
The militant anti-choice group was among the first to hail Bush's selection of Roberts to fill the seat being vacated by O'Connor, who was generally a supporter of reproductive rights. "We pray that Roberts will be swiftly confirmed," announced Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.
Now, it is said that a president ought to have a great deal of latitude when it comes to making judicial nominations.
But all indications are that Roberts is not the nominee of President Bush, the man who condemns judges who would "legislate from the bench" and undermine "equal justice for all."
Rather, he is the political pick of Candidate Bush, who promised right-wing Republicans that he would give them another Scalia or Thomas. Indeed, Candidate Bush has found a nominee exteme enough to satisfy even Operation Rescue.
Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
Monday, July 18, 2005
hmmm, Exxon, may need to be on the do not support list
Gene Karpinski: ExxposeExxon.com: Staging an Intervention
Gene KarpinskiMon Jul 18, 2:40 PM ET
The Huffington Post
One would expect ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, to be preoccupied with oil. Unlike some of its competitors, however, ExxonMobil seems to be an oil addict—working to drill to the last drop—and an oil pusher, eager to keep America hooked as well.
It’s easy to understand the high ExxonMobil gets from drilling for oil. ExxonMobil earned a record high $25.3 billion in net income in 2004. During the first quarter of 2005, ExxonMobil posted another record quarter with $7.86 billion in net income. But maintaining this high comes at a price.
Any mental health professional will tell you that addiction is almost always accompanied by “denial.” If someone tries to discuss the addict’s problem, he or she often simply refuses to talk about it or dismisses it and its consequences as not a real problem. In ExxonMobil’s case, the company is one of the only oil companies still denying that the burning of its products is having an effect on the climate—despite broad international scientific consensus to the contrary. CEO Lee Raymond stated recently that the company’s view is “it’s yet to be shown how much of [global warming] is really related to the activities of man.”
An addict develops a support system of family and friends who enable him or her to continue in denial, allowing the addiction to progress, the symptoms to intensify and the consequences to become worse for all concerned. For its part, ExxonMobil has spent millions developing that support system by funding organizations that either question mainstream scientific findings on global warming or have affiliated with a small group of climate “naysayers” who continue to do so. Moreover, ExxonMobil has worked intimately with the Bush administration to craft its global warming policies from the beginning—although it is difficult to judge who is enabling whom in this case.
At the same time, ExxonMobil has been acting as a pusher, working to keep oil as America’s drug of choice. In fact, the company’s president, Rex Tillerson, has said we “need to accept the reality” of America’s dependence on oil “rather than undertake expensive and risky steps trying to avoid it.” Tillerson’s solution is just to feed America’s oil addiction by drilling for oil in new locations, including places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rather than dramatically reducing our oil consumption by making cars and SUVs go farther on a gallon of gasoline.
ExxonMobil has the power to wreak significant damage on the world’s environment, but the company also has the power to direct the oil industry and American decision-makers toward a new energy future. That’s why 12 environmental and public interest groups joined together to form the Exxpose Exxon campaign (www.ExxposeExxon.com) to pressure the company to shed its past as an irresponsible oil company and move forward as a responsible energy company—one committed to more than drilling to the last drop.
Call it an intervention.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved.
Gene KarpinskiMon Jul 18, 2:40 PM ET
The Huffington Post
One would expect ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, to be preoccupied with oil. Unlike some of its competitors, however, ExxonMobil seems to be an oil addict—working to drill to the last drop—and an oil pusher, eager to keep America hooked as well.
It’s easy to understand the high ExxonMobil gets from drilling for oil. ExxonMobil earned a record high $25.3 billion in net income in 2004. During the first quarter of 2005, ExxonMobil posted another record quarter with $7.86 billion in net income. But maintaining this high comes at a price.
Any mental health professional will tell you that addiction is almost always accompanied by “denial.” If someone tries to discuss the addict’s problem, he or she often simply refuses to talk about it or dismisses it and its consequences as not a real problem. In ExxonMobil’s case, the company is one of the only oil companies still denying that the burning of its products is having an effect on the climate—despite broad international scientific consensus to the contrary. CEO Lee Raymond stated recently that the company’s view is “it’s yet to be shown how much of [global warming] is really related to the activities of man.”
An addict develops a support system of family and friends who enable him or her to continue in denial, allowing the addiction to progress, the symptoms to intensify and the consequences to become worse for all concerned. For its part, ExxonMobil has spent millions developing that support system by funding organizations that either question mainstream scientific findings on global warming or have affiliated with a small group of climate “naysayers” who continue to do so. Moreover, ExxonMobil has worked intimately with the Bush administration to craft its global warming policies from the beginning—although it is difficult to judge who is enabling whom in this case.
At the same time, ExxonMobil has been acting as a pusher, working to keep oil as America’s drug of choice. In fact, the company’s president, Rex Tillerson, has said we “need to accept the reality” of America’s dependence on oil “rather than undertake expensive and risky steps trying to avoid it.” Tillerson’s solution is just to feed America’s oil addiction by drilling for oil in new locations, including places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rather than dramatically reducing our oil consumption by making cars and SUVs go farther on a gallon of gasoline.
ExxonMobil has the power to wreak significant damage on the world’s environment, but the company also has the power to direct the oil industry and American decision-makers toward a new energy future. That’s why 12 environmental and public interest groups joined together to form the Exxpose Exxon campaign (www.ExxposeExxon.com) to pressure the company to shed its past as an irresponsible oil company and move forward as a responsible energy company—one committed to more than drilling to the last drop.
Call it an intervention.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved.
This I like, the Republican Dictionary
Debunking the Spin About Framing
Katrina vanden HeuvelMon Jul 18,11:52 AM ET
The Nation --
"Whenever the other side has you talking their language, they've got you. That, to me, is what it's about in a nutshell and it's almost that simple." George Carlin in an interview with Tim Russert, when asked why he thought the Democratic Party and John Kerry failed to connect with the voters. (November 23, 2004)
*******
Matt Bai had a cover story in Sunday's New York Times magazine. ("The Framing Wars," July 17, 2005) It's spin about spin. On one level, it's an article about how Democrats now understand the value of "framing"--that language and narrative matter in politics.
It's also a tale about what Dems are doing to contest the well-funded Republican spin machine which has twisted America's political language for decades to deceive the public for its own base purposes. (Over the past few decades, the radical right has engaged in a well-funded program of Orwellian doublespeak, transforming American political discourse to suit its political ends. Think "death tax" or "tax relief" or "personal accounts" or "partial birth abortion.").
On another level, Bai's essay is also a profile of "the father of framing"--George Lakoff. (Others who've toiled long in the "framing" fields sent out e-mails on Sunday, ticked off that Bai made Lakoff out to be the guru of the field, ignoring the serious work of other "framers.")
Bai's piece will be familiar to progressives who've been arguing for years that individual issues must be tied together by some larger (preferably moral) frame that articulates a vision and speaks to the kind of country we want to live in. But Bai does raise some legitimate questions: Is the Dems' problem bigger than a battle of language? Maybe the focus needs to be on the battle of ideas?
My problem is with the article's snarky reductionism; in the end, Bai suggests, the Dem's framing is really all about spin, or weird and wonky linguistic theories. But what about the fact that there is a a real science involved in framing? And isn't there a very real connection between language and ideas. Why not make the point that many Republican ideas are slogans without substance or, as Mark Schmitt points out on Josh Marshall's new site, TPMCafe, "substance that contradicts the slogans, while liberal ideas are more likely to be serious, substantive, meaningful, but lack a slogan." And as Jonathan Chait argues in his New Republic cover story of last week, not only do progressives have plenty of ideas but what the right calls "ideas" is really something very different.
I believe we need a campaign to debunk the Right's language--with conviction and, most important, humor. A few months ago, sick and tired of the Right's verbal gymnastics (spin and deceptions), I set out to do another kind of "framing.": I asked Nation.com readers to suggest satirical definitions of Republican slogans. Believing lies melt away in the face of mockery, I wanted to skewer the GOP with the fine tipped sword of satire. And I wanted to find a way to combine Lakoff with, well, one of the most effective political communicators in America today--Jon Stewart.
The result was a grassroots groundswell of hilarious and illuminating submissions from Americans who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. I've collected the sharpest, funniest, most hard-hitting in The Dictionary of Republicanisms--coming to your local bookstore in late October. (We'll also be featuring selections of the book at TheNation.com.)
Some examples:
Clarify, v. To repeat the same lie over and over again.
Compassionate Conservatism, n. Though shalt not exploit thy neighbor for thyself.
Faith, n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary.
Fiscal Conservative, n. A vanishing subspecies of the Republican party
Fox News, n. We distort, you comply.
God, n. The Republican-in-Chief.
Moral Values, n. Do as we say, not as we do.
No Child Left Behind, riff. There are always jobs in the military.
Pro-life, adj. Valuing human life up until birth.
Simplify, v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors.
Voter fraud, n. A significant minority turnout.
Thousands of definitions were entered from all over the country, 44 states in all, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. As would be expected, entries from blue states predominated, especially New York, Massachusetts, and California. But there were some surprises. The state with the most submissions? Texas.
Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
Katrina vanden HeuvelMon Jul 18,11:52 AM ET
The Nation --
"Whenever the other side has you talking their language, they've got you. That, to me, is what it's about in a nutshell and it's almost that simple." George Carlin in an interview with Tim Russert, when asked why he thought the Democratic Party and John Kerry failed to connect with the voters. (November 23, 2004)
*******
Matt Bai had a cover story in Sunday's New York Times magazine. ("The Framing Wars," July 17, 2005) It's spin about spin. On one level, it's an article about how Democrats now understand the value of "framing"--that language and narrative matter in politics.
It's also a tale about what Dems are doing to contest the well-funded Republican spin machine which has twisted America's political language for decades to deceive the public for its own base purposes. (Over the past few decades, the radical right has engaged in a well-funded program of Orwellian doublespeak, transforming American political discourse to suit its political ends. Think "death tax" or "tax relief" or "personal accounts" or "partial birth abortion.").
On another level, Bai's essay is also a profile of "the father of framing"--George Lakoff. (Others who've toiled long in the "framing" fields sent out e-mails on Sunday, ticked off that Bai made Lakoff out to be the guru of the field, ignoring the serious work of other "framers.")
Bai's piece will be familiar to progressives who've been arguing for years that individual issues must be tied together by some larger (preferably moral) frame that articulates a vision and speaks to the kind of country we want to live in. But Bai does raise some legitimate questions: Is the Dems' problem bigger than a battle of language? Maybe the focus needs to be on the battle of ideas?
My problem is with the article's snarky reductionism; in the end, Bai suggests, the Dem's framing is really all about spin, or weird and wonky linguistic theories. But what about the fact that there is a a real science involved in framing? And isn't there a very real connection between language and ideas. Why not make the point that many Republican ideas are slogans without substance or, as Mark Schmitt points out on Josh Marshall's new site, TPMCafe, "substance that contradicts the slogans, while liberal ideas are more likely to be serious, substantive, meaningful, but lack a slogan." And as Jonathan Chait argues in his New Republic cover story of last week, not only do progressives have plenty of ideas but what the right calls "ideas" is really something very different.
I believe we need a campaign to debunk the Right's language--with conviction and, most important, humor. A few months ago, sick and tired of the Right's verbal gymnastics (spin and deceptions), I set out to do another kind of "framing.": I asked Nation.com readers to suggest satirical definitions of Republican slogans. Believing lies melt away in the face of mockery, I wanted to skewer the GOP with the fine tipped sword of satire. And I wanted to find a way to combine Lakoff with, well, one of the most effective political communicators in America today--Jon Stewart.
The result was a grassroots groundswell of hilarious and illuminating submissions from Americans who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. I've collected the sharpest, funniest, most hard-hitting in The Dictionary of Republicanisms--coming to your local bookstore in late October. (We'll also be featuring selections of the book at TheNation.com.)
Some examples:
Clarify, v. To repeat the same lie over and over again.
Compassionate Conservatism, n. Though shalt not exploit thy neighbor for thyself.
Faith, n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary.
Fiscal Conservative, n. A vanishing subspecies of the Republican party
Fox News, n. We distort, you comply.
God, n. The Republican-in-Chief.
Moral Values, n. Do as we say, not as we do.
No Child Left Behind, riff. There are always jobs in the military.
Pro-life, adj. Valuing human life up until birth.
Simplify, v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors.
Voter fraud, n. A significant minority turnout.
Thousands of definitions were entered from all over the country, 44 states in all, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. As would be expected, entries from blue states predominated, especially New York, Massachusetts, and California. But there were some surprises. The state with the most submissions? Texas.
Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
Monday, July 11, 2005
Rove in hot seat over Plame disclosure, finally!
Matt Cooper's Source
What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
July 18 issue - It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.
For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.
The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.
Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
July 18 issue - It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.
For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.
The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.
Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
Sunday, July 10, 2005
David Corn weighs in on the Rove/Plame disclosure
David Corn: Explosive New Rove Revelation Coming Soon? UPDATE: It's Here
David CornSun Jul 10, 1:28 PM ET
The Huffington Post
UPDATE: The Newsweek story I described below is out. Reporter Michael Isikoff has obtained a copy of an email that Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11, 2003--three days before conservative columnist Bob Novak first published the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Wilson/Plame. In that email, Cooper wrote that he had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that Joseph Wilson's "wife...apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." "Agency" means CIA. Read the full Newsweek piece here, and read the item below for why it is so important.
Time to get ready for the Karl Rove frog-march?
I don't usually blog on Saturday evenings. But I've received information too good not to share immediately. It was only yesterday that I was bemoaning the probability that -- after a week of apparent Rove-related revelations--it might be a while before any more news emerged about the Plame/CIA leak. Yet tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official -- told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.
To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove -- despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" -- did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA. No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine -- over Cooper's objection--surrendered Cooper's emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper's source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper's emails and notes "it is clear to us we need [Cooper's] testimony perhaps more so than in the past." This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.
This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson -- even classified information related to national security -- to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?
On September 27, 2003 -- after the news broke that the Justice Department, responding to a request from the CIA, was investigating the Plame/CIA leak -- White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of the Plame/CIA leak, "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing." He also declared that the allegation that Rove was involved in this leak was "a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true." Days later, Bush issued a straightforward statement about the Plame/CIA leak:
There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my administration, I want to know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.
Perhaps Bush won't have to "take care of" Rove if this new evidence does not lead to a prosecutable violation of the law. But Bush also called on any government official with knowledge of the leak to "come forward and speak out." Has Rove done so? No. So it seems he violated a presidential command. Would Bush be obliged to fire him for insubordination? And there's another key point to consider: whether Rove told the truth when he testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has acknowledged that Rove appeared before the grand jury, and Luskin has said that Rove did speak to Cooper prior to the publication of the Novak column. But what did Rove tell Fitzgerald and the grand jury about this conversation with Cooper? And -- here's the big question -- does Rove's account jibe with the new documentary evidence that Newsweek is scheduled to disclose? If it does not, Fitzgerald would have a good start on a perjury charge against Rove.
At a public meeting in the summer of 2003, Joseph Wilson, responding to a question about the leak, quipped that it would be interesting "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." He then had to pull back from that comment and concede he had no evidence to support his hunch that Rove was one of the leakers. (By the way, Novak cited two unnamed Bush administration officials when he published the Plame/CIA leak.) With Newsweek's latest article, we may be getting closer to frog-marching time.
******
By the way, for other recent pieces I've written on the Plame/CIA leak case, please check out my own blog at www.davidcorn.com.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com.
David CornSun Jul 10, 1:28 PM ET
The Huffington Post
UPDATE: The Newsweek story I described below is out. Reporter Michael Isikoff has obtained a copy of an email that Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11, 2003--three days before conservative columnist Bob Novak first published the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Wilson/Plame. In that email, Cooper wrote that he had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that Joseph Wilson's "wife...apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." "Agency" means CIA. Read the full Newsweek piece here, and read the item below for why it is so important.
Time to get ready for the Karl Rove frog-march?
I don't usually blog on Saturday evenings. But I've received information too good not to share immediately. It was only yesterday that I was bemoaning the probability that -- after a week of apparent Rove-related revelations--it might be a while before any more news emerged about the Plame/CIA leak. Yet tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official -- told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.
To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove -- despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" -- did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA. No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine -- over Cooper's objection--surrendered Cooper's emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper's source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper's emails and notes "it is clear to us we need [Cooper's] testimony perhaps more so than in the past." This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.
This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson -- even classified information related to national security -- to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?
On September 27, 2003 -- after the news broke that the Justice Department, responding to a request from the CIA, was investigating the Plame/CIA leak -- White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of the Plame/CIA leak, "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing." He also declared that the allegation that Rove was involved in this leak was "a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true." Days later, Bush issued a straightforward statement about the Plame/CIA leak:
There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my administration, I want to know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.
Perhaps Bush won't have to "take care of" Rove if this new evidence does not lead to a prosecutable violation of the law. But Bush also called on any government official with knowledge of the leak to "come forward and speak out." Has Rove done so? No. So it seems he violated a presidential command. Would Bush be obliged to fire him for insubordination? And there's another key point to consider: whether Rove told the truth when he testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has acknowledged that Rove appeared before the grand jury, and Luskin has said that Rove did speak to Cooper prior to the publication of the Novak column. But what did Rove tell Fitzgerald and the grand jury about this conversation with Cooper? And -- here's the big question -- does Rove's account jibe with the new documentary evidence that Newsweek is scheduled to disclose? If it does not, Fitzgerald would have a good start on a perjury charge against Rove.
At a public meeting in the summer of 2003, Joseph Wilson, responding to a question about the leak, quipped that it would be interesting "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." He then had to pull back from that comment and concede he had no evidence to support his hunch that Rove was one of the leakers. (By the way, Novak cited two unnamed Bush administration officials when he published the Plame/CIA leak.) With Newsweek's latest article, we may be getting closer to frog-marching time.
******
By the way, for other recent pieces I've written on the Plame/CIA leak case, please check out my own blog at www.davidcorn.com.
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com.
Monday, June 27, 2005
A Blogger Worth The Read on Presidunt BushCo.
6/24/2005
BushCo: Forget the insurgents! Kill the liberals!
Filed under: Constructive Criticism — MrBogle @ 5:28 pm
A few days, back I wrote about this Administration’s “new” public relations campaign to woo people back into “the Iraq Invasion = great” camp. This past week, BushCo. revealed the details of the plan. It’s pretty awesome.
First, you deny there’s a problem. Second, you ignore the polls and deny that Americans are against the Iraq “war.” Third, you say that, IF there ARE Americans against the “war,” they are aiding the terrorists. Fourth, you say you really care about all the American troops being killed and this whole war thing is “hard.” Fifth, you link Iraq with 9/11 and smush all the facts together as if playing with clay, ignoring and re-inventing history like a Ritalin-dosed five-year-old. Sixth, and most importantly, you attack “liberals” who are against the Iraq quagmire and, somehow, bring in 9/11 and questions about their patriotism. Wow!
This whole deal began last week when BushCo. sent out the Pillsbury DoughBoy’s evil twin, Karl Rove, on the PR circuit. The pasty-faced Texan took his slime-trail, first, to “Hardball,” wherein in a warm-up of what was to come later, declared that, in spite of EVERY SINGLE POLL done in the last three months, Americans support Bush’s illegal invasion and….the polls were wrong.
Declared Rove: “You can find a poll and ask any questions you want, but I believe that if you say to the American people, ‘is it in the interest of the United States to see a stable and democratic Iraq arise at the center of the Middle East and should we do whatever is necessary to make that happen?’ that I’m sure Americans would say yes.”
(NOTE: Only if they could respond after working two or three jobs just to get their mortgage and bills paid and buy schoolbooks for their kids.)
Substitute host (who should be permanent host), NBC Chief White House correspondent David Gregory blinked.
GREGORY: “You don’t think there’s majority opposition to the war?”
ROVE: “I think Americans are concerned about war, its ugly, its dangerous. Anybody who has got a family member who’s gone over there — I know it. I’ve had family members in the MidEast. I know how Americans who have loved ones abroad feel. I can I read, like you. the newspapers and watch the television and it is not a pleasant sight seeing people die. Whether it is (an) Iraqi civilian standing in line at a market or an Iraqi policeman whose goal is to serve his nation, or a US military personnel who is there on behalf of us so that we can fight the insurgents and the jihadists in the Middle East rather than facing them here. But having said that, that’s not the real question.
“The question is ‘is it in the American interest, will the world be safer, will the world be more peaceful if America and our coalition partners stand with the people of Iraq and move towards a democracy, or will we be better off if we turn tail and run?’ I know of only a handful of people in the United States Congress, and I suspect a relatively small number of Americans, who say we ought to pull up stakes and pull out, regardless of what the consequences are, because I think most Americans understand how vital it is for our interests that we have a stable and democratic Iraq.”
NO! THAT WASN’T THE QUESTION!!!! WE DON’T CARE ABOUT IRAQ! WE NEVER DID! Oh, the headaches! Migraines! Where’s my aspirin? Oh, yeah. It got better.
GREGORY: “You’re talking about the goal, there’s also question about the way the war is being run, prosecution of the war and you’re hearing from both sides of the aisle more calls for an exit strategy. This week Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican, was quoted as saying ‘America is losing in Iraq’ and he says the White House is ‘completely disconnected from reality about the war.’ Your reaction?”
ROVE: “I respectfully disagree. This president talks every week (NOT EVERY FRIGGIN’ DAY????) with the commanders in the field by a video link. He gets briefed by the front line every single week. He meets virtually every single day with the sec of defense (OH, GREAT! THIS IS LIKE DOPEY TALKING TO GRUMPY.) who talks with him about the progress of the war in Iraq. He meets with the national intelligence director every single morning to receive a briefing. With all due respect to Senator Hagel, I understand he has strong feelings about this, but this president is in connection, is in touch with the men and women who are on the front line of this war who are making the decisions and making the recommendations about our policy.”
(ACK!)
GREGORY: “The vice president said recently that he thinks the insurgency in Iraq is in its last throes —its final throes, do you agree with that?”
ROVE: (Note: This is a good one. Study it. This is the definition of “spin.”) “We know that when a movement like this, a jihadist movement, a terrorist movement, is most dangerous when it is running out of options. We saw, you saw earlier this year Zarqawi and some of the other leaders of Al Qaeda and its affiliates talk about the dangers and about the struggles that they were in. They were complaining about the circumstances in which they found themselves, pressed by on all sides, by U.S. coalition and Iraqi forces. So I do believe the vice president said it correct: we will find these Jihadists and the Al Qaeda most dangerous when they are at the moment of greatest danger for them.”
Amazingly, Gregory’s head didn’t blow up after hearing all this nonsense. Rove went on to blame US for not understanding what’s really going on. “I think more Americans need to do a better job of letting Americans know what is going on there,” he stated, ignoring his slime-trail.
There will be a slight pause while I either smack myself in the head, put on a tin-foil hat or have a stiff drink. WTF? Sigh. Okay. Let’s go on. I’ve done all three.
Rove also stated that Americans are falling into the hands of the enemy — if the polls, which he doesn’t acknowledge as meaning anything, show that Americans are smelling a skunk: “Look, Americans don’t like war. I mean nobody likes war and waking up and seeing on the screen people dying is something that Americans don’t like to see. Whether its American men and women in uniform, or rather it’s Iraqis in uniform or Iraqi civilians. But we need to remember, that’s part of the goal of the insurgents. Their goal is to weaken our resolve by being so violent and so dangerous and so ugly that they hope that we will turn tail and run. They have misjudged the American people though. And they have certainly misjudged this president.”
After subtly bashing liberals for wanting to litigate terrorists, defending Gitmo, and declaring that the Presidunce has always leveled with us about how long and hard this war would be, (Hmmmm. I seemed to remember a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Naaah. Probably just my ‘magination.) he quipped, re: the Bolton as bully vote: “I’m an idealist. I always hold out hope.”
And I’m the fuggin’ Tooth Fairy, Karl. Let me punch-out a tooth and I’ll give you a quarter.
Krafty Karl hit his stride a day later whilst gasbagging in front of a gaggle representing the Conservative Party of New York State, at a site dangerously close to the remnants of the Twin Towers. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war,” he slimed, “liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
“I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.”
Referring to Senator Richard J. Durbin’s (D, Illinois) comments about American mistreatment of detainees being equal to those used by Nazis, Soviets or other mad regimes, he oozed: “Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the MidEast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”
See the pattern, here?
One day later, Veep Cheney snarled ominously to Wolfe Shitzer on CNN re: liberals: “There were some who opposed what we did in Afghanistan.”
Okay, this is classic Bushit. After the Bishistas ignored all warnings and allowed the Twin Towers to be taken down, the Senate voted 98-0 and the House voted 420-1 for a resolution authorizing Shrub to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the act. The lone hold-out was Rep. Barbara Lee, a Dem. from California.
After the vote, Bush said in a statement. “I am gratified that the Congress has united so powerfully by taking this action. It sends a clear message - our people are together, and we will prevail.”
This entire Rove-Cheney riff was designed to distract the American public from the fact that Bush made a gigantic a mistake when he plunged us into invading Iraq and that countless more gallons of American blood will be spilled over there in order for Bush to declare himself a victor. A hero. A peace-maker. A War Preznant.
It should be noted that, at the same time all this verbal crap was being flung, Bush was out on the trail, stumping for his domestic debacles and quipping at one rally in Lusby, Maryland: “I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it, Mayo. (Five second pause.) Pass the Mayo. (Laughter and applause.) His wife, Molly, appreciated that. (Laughter.)”
Awwww, come on, Sparky. Get a fuggin’ grip.
Also, please note, that two days later, Dubya would be talking about how “hard” it is for him to deal with the families of dead soldiers in Iraq. How about letting us see their caskets? There’s never a rimshot around when you really need one.
And there’s never a reporter with enough balls to call Bush on this crap.
In terms of Rove, the Democrats, who always apologize for saying anything honest, demanded an apology from the slug. No way, said the White House, via sweaty Scott McClellan. The “press conference” following Rove’s declarations, was classic.
Q Scott, you ask us oftentimes for specifics — does Karl have in mind a particular Democratic leader who suggested therapy for the folks who attacked on 9/11?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think you can look at his remarks, Mark.
Q He didn’t mention any names, and I’m asking you if you know.
MR. McCLELLAN: I know, so you should go look at your remarks.
Q So in other words, there are no —
MR. McCLELLAN: Clearly, there are people who have taken a different approach, and I don’t think we need to get into names.
Q But someone who specifically has suggested therapy?
MR. McCLELLAN: Mark, if you want to make more than it was, then you’re welcome to, but I think you should go back and look at his remarks. I didn’t see his remarks.
Q He didn’t name any names, which is why I’m asking you.
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and you can go back and look at his remarks and see for yourself what it says.
I’m getting dizzy, how about you? Can we, with intelligence, puke now?
No, save those dry heaves. The Administration is on the march. Oooolp.
Then, there was Rumsfeld, re-writing history and obliterating the facts before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Following the top American commander in the Persian Gulf telling Congress that the Iraqi insurgency has not grown weaker over the past six months, despite a claim by Vice Resident Cheney that it was in it’s “last throes,” Rumsfeld barked: “Those who say we are losing this war are wrong. We are not.”
After Rummy was accused by Senator Ted Kennedy of disassembling the facts and after Ted declared there “was no end in sight” to this quagmire, Rummy smirked: “Well, that is quite a statement. First let me say that there isn’t a person at this table who agrees with you that we’re in a quagmire and that there’s no end in sight.”
“The suggestion by you that people — me or others — are painting a rosy picture is false,” lied Rumsfeld.
Shortly thereafter, a bright red winged monkey flew out of his butt. (The cameras were off by that time. Trust me on this one.)
One day later, after various Administration flunkies kept Rove’s delusions in the news (aided by outraged Democrats, who really should know better than to respond to trite taunts by now) and the winged monkey was given press credentials by Spanky McClellan, our “War Presnent” met Iraqi Prime Minster FUBARi, I mean, Jaafari at the White House.
Afterwards, at a Press Sprint, Dubya opined on the insurgents: “They try to kill — and they do kill innocent Iraqi people, women and children, because they know that they’re — the carnage that they wreak will be on TV. And they know that they are — they know that it bothers people to see death — and it does, it bothers me, it bothers American citizens, it bothers Iraqis. They’re trying to shake our will. That’s what
they’re trying to do. And so of course we understand the nature of that enemy…
“In other words, they figure if they can shake our will and affect public opinion, then politicians will give up on the mission. I’m not giving up on the mission. We’re doing the right thing, which is to set the foundation for peace and freedom…”
Undaunted by a populace that has slowly begun to realize that he lied his ass off to go into Iraq, Bush declared: “I think I said at this press conference here in the East Room, you know, it’s like — following polls is like a dog chasing his tail. I’m not sure how that translates. But my job is to set an agenda and to lead toward that agenda. And we’re laying the foundation for peace around the world.”
So, let’s get this straight, in spite of the fact that the CIA has said Bush’s idiocy has transformed Iraq into the primo spot to train ultra-sophisticated terrorists (Even better than Afghanistan! Yaaay!), in spite of the fact that all American military leaders in Iraq conclude that we’re between A-wreck and a hard place, in spite of the fact that most Americans have woken up and have spotted that BushCo. is dismantling the country and has committed a fatal error of supreme arrogance….everything is fine.
Next Tuesday, Bush will give a prime-time speech in front of the indoctrinated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Expect nothing but missing your favorite re-runs.
The new PR campaign?
There’s a reason that if you hit “I’m feeling lucky” whilst Googling “worst president” and/or “miserable failure,” you’re taken directly to the official White House biography of George W. Bush.
Let’s see Karl Rove spin that.
BushCo: Forget the insurgents! Kill the liberals!
Filed under: Constructive Criticism — MrBogle @ 5:28 pm
A few days, back I wrote about this Administration’s “new” public relations campaign to woo people back into “the Iraq Invasion = great” camp. This past week, BushCo. revealed the details of the plan. It’s pretty awesome.
First, you deny there’s a problem. Second, you ignore the polls and deny that Americans are against the Iraq “war.” Third, you say that, IF there ARE Americans against the “war,” they are aiding the terrorists. Fourth, you say you really care about all the American troops being killed and this whole war thing is “hard.” Fifth, you link Iraq with 9/11 and smush all the facts together as if playing with clay, ignoring and re-inventing history like a Ritalin-dosed five-year-old. Sixth, and most importantly, you attack “liberals” who are against the Iraq quagmire and, somehow, bring in 9/11 and questions about their patriotism. Wow!
This whole deal began last week when BushCo. sent out the Pillsbury DoughBoy’s evil twin, Karl Rove, on the PR circuit. The pasty-faced Texan took his slime-trail, first, to “Hardball,” wherein in a warm-up of what was to come later, declared that, in spite of EVERY SINGLE POLL done in the last three months, Americans support Bush’s illegal invasion and….the polls were wrong.
Declared Rove: “You can find a poll and ask any questions you want, but I believe that if you say to the American people, ‘is it in the interest of the United States to see a stable and democratic Iraq arise at the center of the Middle East and should we do whatever is necessary to make that happen?’ that I’m sure Americans would say yes.”
(NOTE: Only if they could respond after working two or three jobs just to get their mortgage and bills paid and buy schoolbooks for their kids.)
Substitute host (who should be permanent host), NBC Chief White House correspondent David Gregory blinked.
GREGORY: “You don’t think there’s majority opposition to the war?”
ROVE: “I think Americans are concerned about war, its ugly, its dangerous. Anybody who has got a family member who’s gone over there — I know it. I’ve had family members in the MidEast. I know how Americans who have loved ones abroad feel. I can I read, like you. the newspapers and watch the television and it is not a pleasant sight seeing people die. Whether it is (an) Iraqi civilian standing in line at a market or an Iraqi policeman whose goal is to serve his nation, or a US military personnel who is there on behalf of us so that we can fight the insurgents and the jihadists in the Middle East rather than facing them here. But having said that, that’s not the real question.
“The question is ‘is it in the American interest, will the world be safer, will the world be more peaceful if America and our coalition partners stand with the people of Iraq and move towards a democracy, or will we be better off if we turn tail and run?’ I know of only a handful of people in the United States Congress, and I suspect a relatively small number of Americans, who say we ought to pull up stakes and pull out, regardless of what the consequences are, because I think most Americans understand how vital it is for our interests that we have a stable and democratic Iraq.”
NO! THAT WASN’T THE QUESTION!!!! WE DON’T CARE ABOUT IRAQ! WE NEVER DID! Oh, the headaches! Migraines! Where’s my aspirin? Oh, yeah. It got better.
GREGORY: “You’re talking about the goal, there’s also question about the way the war is being run, prosecution of the war and you’re hearing from both sides of the aisle more calls for an exit strategy. This week Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican, was quoted as saying ‘America is losing in Iraq’ and he says the White House is ‘completely disconnected from reality about the war.’ Your reaction?”
ROVE: “I respectfully disagree. This president talks every week (NOT EVERY FRIGGIN’ DAY????) with the commanders in the field by a video link. He gets briefed by the front line every single week. He meets virtually every single day with the sec of defense (OH, GREAT! THIS IS LIKE DOPEY TALKING TO GRUMPY.) who talks with him about the progress of the war in Iraq. He meets with the national intelligence director every single morning to receive a briefing. With all due respect to Senator Hagel, I understand he has strong feelings about this, but this president is in connection, is in touch with the men and women who are on the front line of this war who are making the decisions and making the recommendations about our policy.”
(ACK!)
GREGORY: “The vice president said recently that he thinks the insurgency in Iraq is in its last throes —its final throes, do you agree with that?”
ROVE: (Note: This is a good one. Study it. This is the definition of “spin.”) “We know that when a movement like this, a jihadist movement, a terrorist movement, is most dangerous when it is running out of options. We saw, you saw earlier this year Zarqawi and some of the other leaders of Al Qaeda and its affiliates talk about the dangers and about the struggles that they were in. They were complaining about the circumstances in which they found themselves, pressed by on all sides, by U.S. coalition and Iraqi forces. So I do believe the vice president said it correct: we will find these Jihadists and the Al Qaeda most dangerous when they are at the moment of greatest danger for them.”
Amazingly, Gregory’s head didn’t blow up after hearing all this nonsense. Rove went on to blame US for not understanding what’s really going on. “I think more Americans need to do a better job of letting Americans know what is going on there,” he stated, ignoring his slime-trail.
There will be a slight pause while I either smack myself in the head, put on a tin-foil hat or have a stiff drink. WTF? Sigh. Okay. Let’s go on. I’ve done all three.
Rove also stated that Americans are falling into the hands of the enemy — if the polls, which he doesn’t acknowledge as meaning anything, show that Americans are smelling a skunk: “Look, Americans don’t like war. I mean nobody likes war and waking up and seeing on the screen people dying is something that Americans don’t like to see. Whether its American men and women in uniform, or rather it’s Iraqis in uniform or Iraqi civilians. But we need to remember, that’s part of the goal of the insurgents. Their goal is to weaken our resolve by being so violent and so dangerous and so ugly that they hope that we will turn tail and run. They have misjudged the American people though. And they have certainly misjudged this president.”
After subtly bashing liberals for wanting to litigate terrorists, defending Gitmo, and declaring that the Presidunce has always leveled with us about how long and hard this war would be, (Hmmmm. I seemed to remember a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Naaah. Probably just my ‘magination.) he quipped, re: the Bolton as bully vote: “I’m an idealist. I always hold out hope.”
And I’m the fuggin’ Tooth Fairy, Karl. Let me punch-out a tooth and I’ll give you a quarter.
Krafty Karl hit his stride a day later whilst gasbagging in front of a gaggle representing the Conservative Party of New York State, at a site dangerously close to the remnants of the Twin Towers. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war,” he slimed, “liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
“I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.”
Referring to Senator Richard J. Durbin’s (D, Illinois) comments about American mistreatment of detainees being equal to those used by Nazis, Soviets or other mad regimes, he oozed: “Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the MidEast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”
See the pattern, here?
One day later, Veep Cheney snarled ominously to Wolfe Shitzer on CNN re: liberals: “There were some who opposed what we did in Afghanistan.”
Okay, this is classic Bushit. After the Bishistas ignored all warnings and allowed the Twin Towers to be taken down, the Senate voted 98-0 and the House voted 420-1 for a resolution authorizing Shrub to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the act. The lone hold-out was Rep. Barbara Lee, a Dem. from California.
After the vote, Bush said in a statement. “I am gratified that the Congress has united so powerfully by taking this action. It sends a clear message - our people are together, and we will prevail.”
This entire Rove-Cheney riff was designed to distract the American public from the fact that Bush made a gigantic a mistake when he plunged us into invading Iraq and that countless more gallons of American blood will be spilled over there in order for Bush to declare himself a victor. A hero. A peace-maker. A War Preznant.
It should be noted that, at the same time all this verbal crap was being flung, Bush was out on the trail, stumping for his domestic debacles and quipping at one rally in Lusby, Maryland: “I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That’s a pretty cool first name, isn’t it, Mayo. (Five second pause.) Pass the Mayo. (Laughter and applause.) His wife, Molly, appreciated that. (Laughter.)”
Awwww, come on, Sparky. Get a fuggin’ grip.
Also, please note, that two days later, Dubya would be talking about how “hard” it is for him to deal with the families of dead soldiers in Iraq. How about letting us see their caskets? There’s never a rimshot around when you really need one.
And there’s never a reporter with enough balls to call Bush on this crap.
In terms of Rove, the Democrats, who always apologize for saying anything honest, demanded an apology from the slug. No way, said the White House, via sweaty Scott McClellan. The “press conference” following Rove’s declarations, was classic.
Q Scott, you ask us oftentimes for specifics — does Karl have in mind a particular Democratic leader who suggested therapy for the folks who attacked on 9/11?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think you can look at his remarks, Mark.
Q He didn’t mention any names, and I’m asking you if you know.
MR. McCLELLAN: I know, so you should go look at your remarks.
Q So in other words, there are no —
MR. McCLELLAN: Clearly, there are people who have taken a different approach, and I don’t think we need to get into names.
Q But someone who specifically has suggested therapy?
MR. McCLELLAN: Mark, if you want to make more than it was, then you’re welcome to, but I think you should go back and look at his remarks. I didn’t see his remarks.
Q He didn’t name any names, which is why I’m asking you.
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, and you can go back and look at his remarks and see for yourself what it says.
I’m getting dizzy, how about you? Can we, with intelligence, puke now?
No, save those dry heaves. The Administration is on the march. Oooolp.
Then, there was Rumsfeld, re-writing history and obliterating the facts before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Following the top American commander in the Persian Gulf telling Congress that the Iraqi insurgency has not grown weaker over the past six months, despite a claim by Vice Resident Cheney that it was in it’s “last throes,” Rumsfeld barked: “Those who say we are losing this war are wrong. We are not.”
After Rummy was accused by Senator Ted Kennedy of disassembling the facts and after Ted declared there “was no end in sight” to this quagmire, Rummy smirked: “Well, that is quite a statement. First let me say that there isn’t a person at this table who agrees with you that we’re in a quagmire and that there’s no end in sight.”
“The suggestion by you that people — me or others — are painting a rosy picture is false,” lied Rumsfeld.
Shortly thereafter, a bright red winged monkey flew out of his butt. (The cameras were off by that time. Trust me on this one.)
One day later, after various Administration flunkies kept Rove’s delusions in the news (aided by outraged Democrats, who really should know better than to respond to trite taunts by now) and the winged monkey was given press credentials by Spanky McClellan, our “War Presnent” met Iraqi Prime Minster FUBARi, I mean, Jaafari at the White House.
Afterwards, at a Press Sprint, Dubya opined on the insurgents: “They try to kill — and they do kill innocent Iraqi people, women and children, because they know that they’re — the carnage that they wreak will be on TV. And they know that they are — they know that it bothers people to see death — and it does, it bothers me, it bothers American citizens, it bothers Iraqis. They’re trying to shake our will. That’s what
they’re trying to do. And so of course we understand the nature of that enemy…
“In other words, they figure if they can shake our will and affect public opinion, then politicians will give up on the mission. I’m not giving up on the mission. We’re doing the right thing, which is to set the foundation for peace and freedom…”
Undaunted by a populace that has slowly begun to realize that he lied his ass off to go into Iraq, Bush declared: “I think I said at this press conference here in the East Room, you know, it’s like — following polls is like a dog chasing his tail. I’m not sure how that translates. But my job is to set an agenda and to lead toward that agenda. And we’re laying the foundation for peace around the world.”
So, let’s get this straight, in spite of the fact that the CIA has said Bush’s idiocy has transformed Iraq into the primo spot to train ultra-sophisticated terrorists (Even better than Afghanistan! Yaaay!), in spite of the fact that all American military leaders in Iraq conclude that we’re between A-wreck and a hard place, in spite of the fact that most Americans have woken up and have spotted that BushCo. is dismantling the country and has committed a fatal error of supreme arrogance….everything is fine.
Next Tuesday, Bush will give a prime-time speech in front of the indoctrinated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Expect nothing but missing your favorite re-runs.
The new PR campaign?
There’s a reason that if you hit “I’m feeling lucky” whilst Googling “worst president” and/or “miserable failure,” you’re taken directly to the official White House biography of George W. Bush.
Let’s see Karl Rove spin that.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Bush's Fiscal Wrecklessness
June 26, 2005
The New York Yimes
A Glide Path to Ruin
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The biggest risk we Americans face to our way of life and our place in the world probably doesn't come from Al Qaeda or the Iraq war.
Rather, the biggest risk may come from this administration's fiscal recklessness and the way this is putting us in hock to China.
"I think the greatest threat to our future is our fiscal irresponsibility," warns David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States. Mr. Walker, an accountant by training, asserts that last year may have been the most fiscally reckless in the history of our Republic. Aside from the budget deficit, Congress enacted the prescription drug benefit - possibly an $8 trillion obligation - without figuring out how to pay for it.
Mr. Walker, America's watchdog in chief and head of the Government Accountability Office, is no Bush-basher. He started out his career as a conservative Democrat, then became a moderate Republican and has been an independent since 1997.
Now he's running around with his hair on fire, shrieking about America's finances. Well, as much as any accountant ever shrieks.
I asked Mr. Walker about Paul Volcker's warning that within five years we face a 75 percent chance of a serious financial crisis.
"If we don't get serious soon," Mr. Walker replied, "it's not a question of whether it'll come, but when and how serious."
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, says he is also "very worried."
"I find it very difficult to know how to put a number" on the probability of a crisis, he added, "but there's a widespread sense in the market that there is a substantial chance."
Another issue is that three-fourths of our new debt is now being purchased by foreigners, with China the biggest buyer of all. That gives China leverage over us, and it undermines our national security.
On fiscal matters both parties have much to be ashamed of, but Republicans should be particularly embarrassed at their tumble. Traditionally, Republicans were prudent, while Democrats held great parties. But these days, the Bush administration is managing America's finances like a team of drunken sailors, and most Republicans keep quiet in a way that betrays their conservative principles.
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, wrote a couple of years ago: "Republicans used to believe in balanced budgets. ... We have lost our way." He's right.
Critics have pounded the Bush administration for its faulty intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But President Bush peddled tax cuts with data that ultimately proved equally faulty - yet the tax cuts remain cemented in place.
Go to www.whitehouse.gov and read Mr. Bush's speech when he presented his first budget in February 2001. He foresaw a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years and emphasized that much of that would go to paying down the debt.
"I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in debt during the next 10 years," Mr. Bush said then, between his calls for tax cuts. "That is more debt, repaid more quickly, than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history." His budget message that year promised that the U.S. would be "on a glide path toward zero debt."
Oh?
More than two centuries of American government produced a cumulative national debt of $5.7 trillion when Mr. Bush was elected in 2000. And now that is expected to almost double by 2010, to $10.8 trillion.
Some readers may be surprised to see me fulminating about budget deficits, since often I'm bouncing over ruts abroad trying to call attention to some forgotten crisis, like Darfur. But there is a common thread: These are issues that aren't sexy, that don't get television time and that most Americans tune out - yet demand action on our part for both moral and practical reasons.
America's fiscal mess may be even harder to write about engagingly than Darfur, because the victims of our fiscal recklessness aren't weeping widows whose children were heaved onto bonfires. But if you need to visualize the victims, think of your child's face, or your grandchild's.
President Bush has excoriated the "death tax," as he calls the estate tax. But his profligacy will leave every American child facing a "birth tax" of about $150,000.
That's right: every American child arrives owing that much, partly to babies in China and Japan. No wonder babies cry.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Yimes
A Glide Path to Ruin
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The biggest risk we Americans face to our way of life and our place in the world probably doesn't come from Al Qaeda or the Iraq war.
Rather, the biggest risk may come from this administration's fiscal recklessness and the way this is putting us in hock to China.
"I think the greatest threat to our future is our fiscal irresponsibility," warns David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States. Mr. Walker, an accountant by training, asserts that last year may have been the most fiscally reckless in the history of our Republic. Aside from the budget deficit, Congress enacted the prescription drug benefit - possibly an $8 trillion obligation - without figuring out how to pay for it.
Mr. Walker, America's watchdog in chief and head of the Government Accountability Office, is no Bush-basher. He started out his career as a conservative Democrat, then became a moderate Republican and has been an independent since 1997.
Now he's running around with his hair on fire, shrieking about America's finances. Well, as much as any accountant ever shrieks.
I asked Mr. Walker about Paul Volcker's warning that within five years we face a 75 percent chance of a serious financial crisis.
"If we don't get serious soon," Mr. Walker replied, "it's not a question of whether it'll come, but when and how serious."
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, says he is also "very worried."
"I find it very difficult to know how to put a number" on the probability of a crisis, he added, "but there's a widespread sense in the market that there is a substantial chance."
Another issue is that three-fourths of our new debt is now being purchased by foreigners, with China the biggest buyer of all. That gives China leverage over us, and it undermines our national security.
On fiscal matters both parties have much to be ashamed of, but Republicans should be particularly embarrassed at their tumble. Traditionally, Republicans were prudent, while Democrats held great parties. But these days, the Bush administration is managing America's finances like a team of drunken sailors, and most Republicans keep quiet in a way that betrays their conservative principles.
Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, wrote a couple of years ago: "Republicans used to believe in balanced budgets. ... We have lost our way." He's right.
Critics have pounded the Bush administration for its faulty intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But President Bush peddled tax cuts with data that ultimately proved equally faulty - yet the tax cuts remain cemented in place.
Go to www.whitehouse.gov and read Mr. Bush's speech when he presented his first budget in February 2001. He foresaw a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years and emphasized that much of that would go to paying down the debt.
"I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in debt during the next 10 years," Mr. Bush said then, between his calls for tax cuts. "That is more debt, repaid more quickly, than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history." His budget message that year promised that the U.S. would be "on a glide path toward zero debt."
Oh?
More than two centuries of American government produced a cumulative national debt of $5.7 trillion when Mr. Bush was elected in 2000. And now that is expected to almost double by 2010, to $10.8 trillion.
Some readers may be surprised to see me fulminating about budget deficits, since often I'm bouncing over ruts abroad trying to call attention to some forgotten crisis, like Darfur. But there is a common thread: These are issues that aren't sexy, that don't get television time and that most Americans tune out - yet demand action on our part for both moral and practical reasons.
America's fiscal mess may be even harder to write about engagingly than Darfur, because the victims of our fiscal recklessness aren't weeping widows whose children were heaved onto bonfires. But if you need to visualize the victims, think of your child's face, or your grandchild's.
President Bush has excoriated the "death tax," as he calls the estate tax. But his profligacy will leave every American child facing a "birth tax" of about $150,000.
That's right: every American child arrives owing that much, partly to babies in China and Japan. No wonder babies cry.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
K Street lobbyist profits grow under Bush as we struggle to make ends meet
The Road to Riches Is Called K Street
Lobbying Firms Hire More, Pay More, Charge More to Influence Government
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 22, 2005; A01
To the great growth industries of America such as health care and home building add one more: influence peddling.
The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy.
The lobbying boom has been caused by three factors, experts say: rapid growth in government, Republican control of both the White House and Congress, and wide acceptance among corporations that they need to hire professional lobbyists to secure their share of federal benefits.
"There's unlimited business out there for us," said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. "Companies need lobbying help."
Lobbying firms can't hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to "move downtown" from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen's Congress Watch.
Political historians don't see these as positive developments for democracy. "We've got a problem here," said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. "The growth of lobbying makes even worse than it is already the balance between those with resources and those without resources."
In the 1990s, lobbying was largely reactive. Corporations had to fend off proposals that would have restricted them or cost them money. But with pro-business officials running the executive and legislative branches, companies are also hiring well-placed lobbyists to go on the offensive and find ways to profit from the many tax breaks, loosened regulations and other government goodies that increasingly are available.
"People in industry are willing to invest money because they see opportunities here," said Patrick J. Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton's top lobbyist and is now in private practice. "They see that they can win things, that there's something to be gained. Washington has become a profit center."
Take the example of Hewlett-Packard Co. The California computer maker nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists to $734,000 last year and added the elite lobbying firm of Quinn Gillespie & Associates LLC. Its goal was to pass Republican-backed legislation that would allow the company to bring back to the United States at a dramatically lowered tax rate as much as $14.5 billion in profit from foreign subsidiaries.
The extra lobbying paid off. The legislation was approved and Hewlett-Packard will save millions of dollars in taxes. "We're trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House," said John D. Hassell, director of government affairs at Hewlett-Packard. "There is an opportunity here for the business community to make its case and be successful."
The Republicans in charge aren't just pro-business, they are also pro-government. Federal outlays increased nearly 30 percent from 2000 to 2004, to $2.29 trillion. And despite the budget deficit, federal spending is set to increase again this year, especially in programs that are prime lobbying targets such as defense, homeland security and medical coverage.
In addition, President Bush has signed into law five major tax-cut bills over the past four years. His administration has also curtailed regulation. Over the past five years, the number of new federal regulations has declined by 5 percent, to 4,100, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The number of pending regulations that would cost businesses or local governments $100 million or more a year has declined even more, by 14.5 percent to 135 over the period.
Companies have had to redouble their lobbying merely to keep track of it all. "Much of lobbying today is watching all the change that's going on in Washington," Cigler said. "Companies need more people just to stay apprised of what regulators are doing."
At the same time, government activism has presented potential problems for business. "As government grows, unless you're right there to limit it, it can intrude in just about any industry," Livingston said. "There are agencies that love to do things and acquire new missions. People in industry better have good lobbyists or they're going to get rolled over."
But whether it is to protect themselves against harm or to win more benefits, executives and insiders say they have no choice but to hire lobbyists who are deeply rooted in official Washington and its complexities. "Hiring a lobbyist is part of system these days," said Kent Cooper, co-founder of PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan compiler of lobbying and campaign-funding information.
Jonas Neihardt, vice president of federal government affairs for Qualcomm Inc., the San Diego technology company, agreed: "Without professional lobbyists I don't see how a company can monitor everything that's going on or provide the inputs that are necessary to explain why rules and laws have to be changed."
The result has been a gold rush on K Street, the lobbyists' boulevard. Quinn Gillespie has added at least 16 clients and six professionals since its co-founder, Edward W. Gillespie, announced last November that he was returning after a stint as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC, another lobbying firm, increased the number of lobbyists to 15, from eight in 2003.
The owner of a large lobbying shop said that five years ago he could hire veteran Capitol Hill staffers for $200,000 a year or less. Now the going rate is closer to $300,000 a year and the most-sought-after aides can expect even more. In 2002, Susan B. Hirschmann, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), had so many lobbying offers that she enlisted Robert B. Barnett, the attorney for Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), to receive and filter them.
For retiring members of Congress and senior administration aides, the bidding from lobbying firms and trade associations can get even more fevered. Well-regarded top officials are in high demand and lately have commanded employment packages worth upward of $2 million a year. Marc F. Racicot, a former Montana governor who chaired the Republican National Committee, will soon collect an annual salary of $1 million-plus as president of the American Insurance Association.
The fees that lobbyists charge clients have also risen substantially. Retainers that had been $10,000 to $15,000 a month for new corporate clients before President Bush took office now are $20,000 to $25,000 a month or more, lobbyists say.
All-Republican lobbying firms have boosted their rates the most. Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock and the Federalist Group report that at the end of the Clinton administration, $20,000 a month was considered high. Now, they say, retainers of $25,000 to $40,000 a month are customary for new corporate clients, depending on how much work they do.
Such fee inflation is widespread, even by newcomers. Venn Strategies LLC, a bipartisan lobbying firm that opened in 2001, has doubled its retainer for new clients. "When we first started, most of them came in at $7,500 a month or $10,000 a month," said Stephanie E. Silverman, a principal in the firm. "Now retainers are more in the $15,000- and $25,000-a-month range."
Corporate clients accept the extra cost as the price of success in Washington. At the turn of the year, the American Ambulance Association decided to step up its lobbying and switched to Patton Boggs LLP, the Capitol Hill powerhouse, from a smaller lobbying shop across town. In the process it boosted its lobbying budget by about a third, to more than $300,000 a year.
"It is essential we have a very strong presence," said Robert L. Garner, president of the association. "It's pricey, but it's the cost of doing business in the federal environment."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Lobbying Firms Hire More, Pay More, Charge More to Influence Government
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 22, 2005; A01
To the great growth industries of America such as health care and home building add one more: influence peddling.
The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy.
The lobbying boom has been caused by three factors, experts say: rapid growth in government, Republican control of both the White House and Congress, and wide acceptance among corporations that they need to hire professional lobbyists to secure their share of federal benefits.
"There's unlimited business out there for us," said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. "Companies need lobbying help."
Lobbying firms can't hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to "move downtown" from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen's Congress Watch.
Political historians don't see these as positive developments for democracy. "We've got a problem here," said Allan Cigler, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. "The growth of lobbying makes even worse than it is already the balance between those with resources and those without resources."
In the 1990s, lobbying was largely reactive. Corporations had to fend off proposals that would have restricted them or cost them money. But with pro-business officials running the executive and legislative branches, companies are also hiring well-placed lobbyists to go on the offensive and find ways to profit from the many tax breaks, loosened regulations and other government goodies that increasingly are available.
"People in industry are willing to invest money because they see opportunities here," said Patrick J. Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton's top lobbyist and is now in private practice. "They see that they can win things, that there's something to be gained. Washington has become a profit center."
Take the example of Hewlett-Packard Co. The California computer maker nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists to $734,000 last year and added the elite lobbying firm of Quinn Gillespie & Associates LLC. Its goal was to pass Republican-backed legislation that would allow the company to bring back to the United States at a dramatically lowered tax rate as much as $14.5 billion in profit from foreign subsidiaries.
The extra lobbying paid off. The legislation was approved and Hewlett-Packard will save millions of dollars in taxes. "We're trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House," said John D. Hassell, director of government affairs at Hewlett-Packard. "There is an opportunity here for the business community to make its case and be successful."
The Republicans in charge aren't just pro-business, they are also pro-government. Federal outlays increased nearly 30 percent from 2000 to 2004, to $2.29 trillion. And despite the budget deficit, federal spending is set to increase again this year, especially in programs that are prime lobbying targets such as defense, homeland security and medical coverage.
In addition, President Bush has signed into law five major tax-cut bills over the past four years. His administration has also curtailed regulation. Over the past five years, the number of new federal regulations has declined by 5 percent, to 4,100, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The number of pending regulations that would cost businesses or local governments $100 million or more a year has declined even more, by 14.5 percent to 135 over the period.
Companies have had to redouble their lobbying merely to keep track of it all. "Much of lobbying today is watching all the change that's going on in Washington," Cigler said. "Companies need more people just to stay apprised of what regulators are doing."
At the same time, government activism has presented potential problems for business. "As government grows, unless you're right there to limit it, it can intrude in just about any industry," Livingston said. "There are agencies that love to do things and acquire new missions. People in industry better have good lobbyists or they're going to get rolled over."
But whether it is to protect themselves against harm or to win more benefits, executives and insiders say they have no choice but to hire lobbyists who are deeply rooted in official Washington and its complexities. "Hiring a lobbyist is part of system these days," said Kent Cooper, co-founder of PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan compiler of lobbying and campaign-funding information.
Jonas Neihardt, vice president of federal government affairs for Qualcomm Inc., the San Diego technology company, agreed: "Without professional lobbyists I don't see how a company can monitor everything that's going on or provide the inputs that are necessary to explain why rules and laws have to be changed."
The result has been a gold rush on K Street, the lobbyists' boulevard. Quinn Gillespie has added at least 16 clients and six professionals since its co-founder, Edward W. Gillespie, announced last November that he was returning after a stint as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC, another lobbying firm, increased the number of lobbyists to 15, from eight in 2003.
The owner of a large lobbying shop said that five years ago he could hire veteran Capitol Hill staffers for $200,000 a year or less. Now the going rate is closer to $300,000 a year and the most-sought-after aides can expect even more. In 2002, Susan B. Hirschmann, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), had so many lobbying offers that she enlisted Robert B. Barnett, the attorney for Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), to receive and filter them.
For retiring members of Congress and senior administration aides, the bidding from lobbying firms and trade associations can get even more fevered. Well-regarded top officials are in high demand and lately have commanded employment packages worth upward of $2 million a year. Marc F. Racicot, a former Montana governor who chaired the Republican National Committee, will soon collect an annual salary of $1 million-plus as president of the American Insurance Association.
The fees that lobbyists charge clients have also risen substantially. Retainers that had been $10,000 to $15,000 a month for new corporate clients before President Bush took office now are $20,000 to $25,000 a month or more, lobbyists say.
All-Republican lobbying firms have boosted their rates the most. Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock and the Federalist Group report that at the end of the Clinton administration, $20,000 a month was considered high. Now, they say, retainers of $25,000 to $40,000 a month are customary for new corporate clients, depending on how much work they do.
Such fee inflation is widespread, even by newcomers. Venn Strategies LLC, a bipartisan lobbying firm that opened in 2001, has doubled its retainer for new clients. "When we first started, most of them came in at $7,500 a month or $10,000 a month," said Stephanie E. Silverman, a principal in the firm. "Now retainers are more in the $15,000- and $25,000-a-month range."
Corporate clients accept the extra cost as the price of success in Washington. At the turn of the year, the American Ambulance Association decided to step up its lobbying and switched to Patton Boggs LLP, the Capitol Hill powerhouse, from a smaller lobbying shop across town. In the process it boosted its lobbying budget by about a third, to more than $300,000 a year.
"It is essential we have a very strong presence," said Robert L. Garner, president of the association. "It's pricey, but it's the cost of doing business in the federal environment."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Clinton delivers update on tsunami relief efforts
June 22, 2005
The New York Times Editorial
Six Months After
By WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
IT has been nearly six months since the tsunami struck 11 nations surrounding the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people. The tragedy touched the chord of our common humanity. Forty countries committed military forces to provide food, water and shelter to the survivors. Millions of Americans contributed more than $1 billion to the relief effort. Millions of others across the world also sent contributions, and the United Nations and hundreds of charitable organizations rushed to the region.
This rapid response yielded substantial dividends. Widespread starvation was avoided. There were no epidemics.
Of course, the recovery effort has a long way to go. Hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless, and unable to work. Thousands of schools have to be built, and many of the region's children remain frightened and distressed. Fortunately, the United Nations, international financial institutions, governments, businesses and nongovernmental organizations have pledged billions of dollars to help the tsunami generation "build back better."
As the special envoy for tsunami relief for the United Nations, I am working to make good on that commitment. To achieve our goals, I have asked all those involved in tsunami relief to agree to the following agenda:
First, we are developing a joint action plan detailing precisely who will do what, where and when, to avoid duplication of effort, ensure efficient use of resources and leave no person or community behind. For example, we all agree on the need for an early warning system. The plan will identify who is responsible for financing and building the system, where it will be located, how the system will actually alert the public, and who will oversee its maintenance and reliability.
We are also devising a reporting system to ensure that donations are being used appropriately and a unified scorecard to show what we have achieved and what remains to be done.
Second, we will work to restore the livelihoods of the survivors; to finance new economic activities to raise family incomes above their pre-tsunami levels; and to increase the capacity of local governments, nongovernmental organizations and businesses to undertake the gargantuan reconstruction effort.
To diversify the affected economies, we need to make small loans - micro-credit - available for new ventures or for the expansion of existing ones. And we must help restore tourism in the entire region, especially in the Maldives, where destruction of tourism facilities, fishing operations and other enterprises and homes ran up losses in excess of 60 percent of the country's annual gross domestic product. Most tourist operations are open for business, but most potential visitors don't seem to know that.
Jobs for local people in the reconstruction will require large vocational training programs. Thousands of masons, woodworkers, supervisors and laborers are needed.
Third, we must move survivors from tents and barracks to decent transitional shelters as soon as possible. Although there are still some frustrating delays in getting government approval for contracts and for imports of machinery and materials, there are fewer bureaucratic obstacles every day. All of the affected countries have good plans, with able people in charge of executing them.
Still, the housing shortage presents a serious challenge. Last year, before the tsunami, 5,000 new homes were built in Sri Lanka. Now survivors in Sri Lanka alone need almost 100,000 homes. In Aceh Province in Indonesia, 2,000 schools and 200,000 homes must be constructed. Even the United States would have a difficult time getting a million people back into their houses in a year or two.
The construction effort also carries significant environmental risks. Wholesale, unrestricted logging can cause deforestation in some regions, particularly in Indonesia, doing great damage to rainforests and setting the stage for more natural disasters. Timber needs to be obtained legally, and conservation measures, like replanting mangrove trees rather than developing the land from which they were uprooted, should be part of the reconstruction.
The housing problem is further complicated because many ownership records were swept away by the waves. And in many small villages, such documents never existed. In some of the affected countries, up to 90 percent of displaced people have lost their identity documents. The World Bank is financing a "titling" project in Aceh to help Indonesians develop an effective property-rights system - it is an initiative that should be replicated across the region. (Sri Lanka must also resolve conflicts arising out of the government's policy largely prohibiting reconstruction within a "buffer zone" near the water. Many survivors who want to return to their old land oppose the restrictions and their concerns should be taken into account as they are in Indonesia.)
Finally, we must do all we can to assure that the voices of the most vulnerable are heard. Will women survivors be involved in the design and execution of the recovery process? Will their property rights be protected? Will the Dalits (also known as the "untouchables") of India be discriminated against? Will poor families get documentation for their assets and have access to lines of credit? Will national governments give localities greater flexibility to meet their particular needs? Will children who survived be able to get back to school? Will the disaster usher in a new chapter in the peace processes in Sri Lanka and Aceh, thereby making it easier for aid to be distributed and reconstruction to take place wherever it's needed?
Thanks to the generosity of millions of people, we will have the resources to meet these daunting challenges. The World Food Program of the United Nations is feeding more than 700,000 people daily. Unicef is making substantial commitments to meeting the area's large needs for water and sanitation. Other United Nations agencies are doing their part.
But most of the financing for reconstruction and recovery is in the hands of donor governments and charitable groups like the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and hundreds of other nongovernmental organizations. In order for the recovery effort to succeed, these groups have to be treated as equal partners in the planning process.
Of course, the reconstruction process will proceed more smoothly in Aceh and Sri Lanka if all parties to the longstanding conflicts there are involved. Cooperation might even lead to greater prospects for peace in both places.
On my most recent trip to the region, I visited the Jantho camp for displaced people in Aceh, where I met a woman who had lost nine of her 10 children. As one of the camp leaders, she introduced me to the youngest camp member: a 2-day-old boy. She said the child's mother wanted me to give him a name. I asked if there was an appropriate Indonesian word for "new beginning" and was told that there was: "dawn," which in their language is a boy's name. I think a lot about that little boy, and our obligation to give him a new dawn. We can do it together.
William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd president.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times Editorial
Six Months After
By WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
IT has been nearly six months since the tsunami struck 11 nations surrounding the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people. The tragedy touched the chord of our common humanity. Forty countries committed military forces to provide food, water and shelter to the survivors. Millions of Americans contributed more than $1 billion to the relief effort. Millions of others across the world also sent contributions, and the United Nations and hundreds of charitable organizations rushed to the region.
This rapid response yielded substantial dividends. Widespread starvation was avoided. There were no epidemics.
Of course, the recovery effort has a long way to go. Hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless, and unable to work. Thousands of schools have to be built, and many of the region's children remain frightened and distressed. Fortunately, the United Nations, international financial institutions, governments, businesses and nongovernmental organizations have pledged billions of dollars to help the tsunami generation "build back better."
As the special envoy for tsunami relief for the United Nations, I am working to make good on that commitment. To achieve our goals, I have asked all those involved in tsunami relief to agree to the following agenda:
First, we are developing a joint action plan detailing precisely who will do what, where and when, to avoid duplication of effort, ensure efficient use of resources and leave no person or community behind. For example, we all agree on the need for an early warning system. The plan will identify who is responsible for financing and building the system, where it will be located, how the system will actually alert the public, and who will oversee its maintenance and reliability.
We are also devising a reporting system to ensure that donations are being used appropriately and a unified scorecard to show what we have achieved and what remains to be done.
Second, we will work to restore the livelihoods of the survivors; to finance new economic activities to raise family incomes above their pre-tsunami levels; and to increase the capacity of local governments, nongovernmental organizations and businesses to undertake the gargantuan reconstruction effort.
To diversify the affected economies, we need to make small loans - micro-credit - available for new ventures or for the expansion of existing ones. And we must help restore tourism in the entire region, especially in the Maldives, where destruction of tourism facilities, fishing operations and other enterprises and homes ran up losses in excess of 60 percent of the country's annual gross domestic product. Most tourist operations are open for business, but most potential visitors don't seem to know that.
Jobs for local people in the reconstruction will require large vocational training programs. Thousands of masons, woodworkers, supervisors and laborers are needed.
Third, we must move survivors from tents and barracks to decent transitional shelters as soon as possible. Although there are still some frustrating delays in getting government approval for contracts and for imports of machinery and materials, there are fewer bureaucratic obstacles every day. All of the affected countries have good plans, with able people in charge of executing them.
Still, the housing shortage presents a serious challenge. Last year, before the tsunami, 5,000 new homes were built in Sri Lanka. Now survivors in Sri Lanka alone need almost 100,000 homes. In Aceh Province in Indonesia, 2,000 schools and 200,000 homes must be constructed. Even the United States would have a difficult time getting a million people back into their houses in a year or two.
The construction effort also carries significant environmental risks. Wholesale, unrestricted logging can cause deforestation in some regions, particularly in Indonesia, doing great damage to rainforests and setting the stage for more natural disasters. Timber needs to be obtained legally, and conservation measures, like replanting mangrove trees rather than developing the land from which they were uprooted, should be part of the reconstruction.
The housing problem is further complicated because many ownership records were swept away by the waves. And in many small villages, such documents never existed. In some of the affected countries, up to 90 percent of displaced people have lost their identity documents. The World Bank is financing a "titling" project in Aceh to help Indonesians develop an effective property-rights system - it is an initiative that should be replicated across the region. (Sri Lanka must also resolve conflicts arising out of the government's policy largely prohibiting reconstruction within a "buffer zone" near the water. Many survivors who want to return to their old land oppose the restrictions and their concerns should be taken into account as they are in Indonesia.)
Finally, we must do all we can to assure that the voices of the most vulnerable are heard. Will women survivors be involved in the design and execution of the recovery process? Will their property rights be protected? Will the Dalits (also known as the "untouchables") of India be discriminated against? Will poor families get documentation for their assets and have access to lines of credit? Will national governments give localities greater flexibility to meet their particular needs? Will children who survived be able to get back to school? Will the disaster usher in a new chapter in the peace processes in Sri Lanka and Aceh, thereby making it easier for aid to be distributed and reconstruction to take place wherever it's needed?
Thanks to the generosity of millions of people, we will have the resources to meet these daunting challenges. The World Food Program of the United Nations is feeding more than 700,000 people daily. Unicef is making substantial commitments to meeting the area's large needs for water and sanitation. Other United Nations agencies are doing their part.
But most of the financing for reconstruction and recovery is in the hands of donor governments and charitable groups like the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and hundreds of other nongovernmental organizations. In order for the recovery effort to succeed, these groups have to be treated as equal partners in the planning process.
Of course, the reconstruction process will proceed more smoothly in Aceh and Sri Lanka if all parties to the longstanding conflicts there are involved. Cooperation might even lead to greater prospects for peace in both places.
On my most recent trip to the region, I visited the Jantho camp for displaced people in Aceh, where I met a woman who had lost nine of her 10 children. As one of the camp leaders, she introduced me to the youngest camp member: a 2-day-old boy. She said the child's mother wanted me to give him a name. I asked if there was an appropriate Indonesian word for "new beginning" and was told that there was: "dawn," which in their language is a boy's name. I think a lot about that little boy, and our obligation to give him a new dawn. We can do it together.
William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd president.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Sad But True Stats On Blacks & HIV
HOMOPHOBIA AMONG BLACKS FUELS HIV/AIDS CRISIS
By Cynthia TuckerSat Jun 18, 8:05 PM ET
Black Americans represent only 12 percent of the population, but we account for more than half of all new cases of HIV/AIDS. That frightening fact was one of the headline statistics to emerge from a conference in Atlanta last week held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The highest rate of infection in the country occurs among bisexual black men. And that has implications for black women, who are 19 times more likely to be infected than white women. That's because so many black men have unprotected sex with other men but then conceal that fact and have unprotected sex with women, too.
Yet there has been little activity that would suggest a crisis, especially among those activists who can usually be counted on to draw attention to the suffering of black Americans. Where are the rallies and town hall meetings, the urgent press conferences, the demands for more money for research and prevention? The usual suspects -- Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the leadership of the NAACP -- have had little to say about a plague spreading like wildfire.
Perhaps that's because they'd have to aim their criticism within, not just at the irresponsible sexual behavior that spreads HIV, but also at the demoralizing prejudice against gays that shares the blame. Black Americans harbor a profound homophobia that assists the spread of HIV by driving men to have sex with other men "on the down low."
Of course, white America shares that prejudice. You only have to recall the outing of former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey to remember that some gay white men also engage in surreptitious gay sex and expose their wives and girlfriends to HIV. But black Americans are far more vulnerable in so many ways -- including access to health care -- that homophobia does more damage.
Some sociologists and other observers believe that gay or bisexual black men are more afraid to come out of the closet than whites because they already face racial discrimination and are reluctant to take on the added burden of homophobia. After all, they'd face that in their own homes and churches.
Atlanta writer E. Lynn Harris, who rocketed to fame and fortune with a series of spicy novels about black men who secretly have sex with other men, wrote in Essence: "The truth is that most brothers who are attracted to men are desperately afraid of revealing it. ... Many ... fear that ... they'll be drummed out of their families, destroying their only safe haven in an already unwelcoming society."
Though AIDS researchers have suspected for years that a culture of clandestine gay sex was helping to fuel the epidemic, the "down low" syndrome has only recently become widely known. Last year, J.L. King wrote a book -- "On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep with Men" -- about his secret life. And Essence, a magazine oriented toward black women, has published several pieces about the down-low phenomenon.
But those revelations have produced more recriminations than introspection. Some Essence letter writers were furious that the magazine dared broach the subject.
"A brother writes a book and goes on Oprah warning sisters about men who are infecting them with AIDS. This is pointing fingers at black men, who aren't the only people living on the down low," wrote one. Another said: "How dare you print an article shaming our people? (The article) misrepresented the black male, and (it) was repulsive and ignorant."
The gay-bashing from black clergy continues unabated, as well. In December, a leading black Atlanta minister, Eddie Long, staged a march to highlight his opposition to gay marriage. He attracted thousands of black marchers, including Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (By contrast, his widow, Coretta Scott King, has been among the rare voices condemning black homophobia.)
Fear. Hatred. Secrets and lies. That's the sort of climate in which HIV thrives.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.
By Cynthia TuckerSat Jun 18, 8:05 PM ET
Black Americans represent only 12 percent of the population, but we account for more than half of all new cases of HIV/AIDS. That frightening fact was one of the headline statistics to emerge from a conference in Atlanta last week held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The highest rate of infection in the country occurs among bisexual black men. And that has implications for black women, who are 19 times more likely to be infected than white women. That's because so many black men have unprotected sex with other men but then conceal that fact and have unprotected sex with women, too.
Yet there has been little activity that would suggest a crisis, especially among those activists who can usually be counted on to draw attention to the suffering of black Americans. Where are the rallies and town hall meetings, the urgent press conferences, the demands for more money for research and prevention? The usual suspects -- Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the leadership of the NAACP -- have had little to say about a plague spreading like wildfire.
Perhaps that's because they'd have to aim their criticism within, not just at the irresponsible sexual behavior that spreads HIV, but also at the demoralizing prejudice against gays that shares the blame. Black Americans harbor a profound homophobia that assists the spread of HIV by driving men to have sex with other men "on the down low."
Of course, white America shares that prejudice. You only have to recall the outing of former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey to remember that some gay white men also engage in surreptitious gay sex and expose their wives and girlfriends to HIV. But black Americans are far more vulnerable in so many ways -- including access to health care -- that homophobia does more damage.
Some sociologists and other observers believe that gay or bisexual black men are more afraid to come out of the closet than whites because they already face racial discrimination and are reluctant to take on the added burden of homophobia. After all, they'd face that in their own homes and churches.
Atlanta writer E. Lynn Harris, who rocketed to fame and fortune with a series of spicy novels about black men who secretly have sex with other men, wrote in Essence: "The truth is that most brothers who are attracted to men are desperately afraid of revealing it. ... Many ... fear that ... they'll be drummed out of their families, destroying their only safe haven in an already unwelcoming society."
Though AIDS researchers have suspected for years that a culture of clandestine gay sex was helping to fuel the epidemic, the "down low" syndrome has only recently become widely known. Last year, J.L. King wrote a book -- "On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep with Men" -- about his secret life. And Essence, a magazine oriented toward black women, has published several pieces about the down-low phenomenon.
But those revelations have produced more recriminations than introspection. Some Essence letter writers were furious that the magazine dared broach the subject.
"A brother writes a book and goes on Oprah warning sisters about men who are infecting them with AIDS. This is pointing fingers at black men, who aren't the only people living on the down low," wrote one. Another said: "How dare you print an article shaming our people? (The article) misrepresented the black male, and (it) was repulsive and ignorant."
The gay-bashing from black clergy continues unabated, as well. In December, a leading black Atlanta minister, Eddie Long, staged a march to highlight his opposition to gay marriage. He attracted thousands of black marchers, including Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (By contrast, his widow, Coretta Scott King, has been among the rare voices condemning black homophobia.)
Fear. Hatred. Secrets and lies. That's the sort of climate in which HIV thrives.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.
Repubbies Now Critize The Red Cross & Question Funding, what is next with that group of fools?
Blaming the Messenger
The Nation
June 21
Ari Berman
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned the Bush Administration about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, secret detainees in Afghanistan and the now-confirmed allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay. So naturally, Republicans are ignoring the findings and blaming the messenger.
A new report by Senate Republicans lumps the 140-year-old, three-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient into the "anti-American" category and calls on the Bush Administration to reassess its funding support. "The ICRC is no longer an impartial and trustworthy guardian," writes the Senate Republican Policy Committee. "It has become yet another clamoring interest group" that has "lost its way" by adopting positions that are in "direct opposition to the advancement of US interests." The report warns, with no hint of irony, that ICRC actions threaten to "sap its credibility."
Senate Republicans thus duly prescribe the full UN-treatment: a comprehensive review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to determine whether the annual US contribution ($1.5 billion since 1990) is advancing American interests and a GAO audit of the ICRC's core and non-core activities. The crimes committed by the ICRC, in Republican eyes, include such ghastly activities as upholding the Geneva Convention and lobbying for the Chemical Weapons Convention and the treaty against landmines. How the group's actions in Iraq or Afghanistan violate the ICRC's founding principles of neutrality and impartiality is anyone's guess. "The paper's purpose appears to be to discredit the ICRC by putting forward false allegations and unsubstantiated accusations," ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said last week.
"In fact," writes University of Virginia law professor Rosa Brooks, "the real issue underlying the attack is that the ICRC has quietly but firmly pushed back against the Bush Administration's 'anything goes' detention and interrogation policies." Confidential criticisms of ghost detainees, open-ended detentions and the rendition of suspected terrorists to countries employing torture are hardly unique to the ICRC. Anyone outside of Donald Rumsfeld's office, including White House officials who've defended the organization against the Senate report, know that ICRC monitoring helps the American military far more than it hurts.
"For US military commanders, the ICRC is crucial as their feedback loop," says Ruth Wedgwood, an international law expert at Johns Hopkins University. "That's how a commander knows what's happening down in their ranks--even on the night shift. We really do need that function. That's why we pay them a lot of money--not just to assist on tsunamis."
The chickenhawk choir in Congress could clearly use a history lesson, and preferably some combat action.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
The Nation
June 21
Ari Berman
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned the Bush Administration about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, secret detainees in Afghanistan and the now-confirmed allegations of Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay. So naturally, Republicans are ignoring the findings and blaming the messenger.
A new report by Senate Republicans lumps the 140-year-old, three-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient into the "anti-American" category and calls on the Bush Administration to reassess its funding support. "The ICRC is no longer an impartial and trustworthy guardian," writes the Senate Republican Policy Committee. "It has become yet another clamoring interest group" that has "lost its way" by adopting positions that are in "direct opposition to the advancement of US interests." The report warns, with no hint of irony, that ICRC actions threaten to "sap its credibility."
Senate Republicans thus duly prescribe the full UN-treatment: a comprehensive review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to determine whether the annual US contribution ($1.5 billion since 1990) is advancing American interests and a GAO audit of the ICRC's core and non-core activities. The crimes committed by the ICRC, in Republican eyes, include such ghastly activities as upholding the Geneva Convention and lobbying for the Chemical Weapons Convention and the treaty against landmines. How the group's actions in Iraq or Afghanistan violate the ICRC's founding principles of neutrality and impartiality is anyone's guess. "The paper's purpose appears to be to discredit the ICRC by putting forward false allegations and unsubstantiated accusations," ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said last week.
"In fact," writes University of Virginia law professor Rosa Brooks, "the real issue underlying the attack is that the ICRC has quietly but firmly pushed back against the Bush Administration's 'anything goes' detention and interrogation policies." Confidential criticisms of ghost detainees, open-ended detentions and the rendition of suspected terrorists to countries employing torture are hardly unique to the ICRC. Anyone outside of Donald Rumsfeld's office, including White House officials who've defended the organization against the Senate report, know that ICRC monitoring helps the American military far more than it hurts.
"For US military commanders, the ICRC is crucial as their feedback loop," says Ruth Wedgwood, an international law expert at Johns Hopkins University. "That's how a commander knows what's happening down in their ranks--even on the night shift. We really do need that function. That's why we pay them a lot of money--not just to assist on tsunamis."
The chickenhawk choir in Congress could clearly use a history lesson, and preferably some combat action.
Copyright © 2005 The Nation
Bush, Inc: Time To Come Clean On iraq
Americans deserve candor, not more hopeful 'updates'
USA Today
Tue Jun 21, 7:09 AM ET
Another day, another round of bombings, electricity cuts, death and destruction in Iraq. Monday's grim tally included a suicide attack in northern Iraq that killed at least 15 traffic policemen and wounded 100. Insurgents' sabotage of water pipes left 2 million sweltering Baghdadis without water.
Nothing, in other words, out of the ordinary. Just more evidence that the United States is bogged down in Iraq, battling a fierce insurgency with the outcome uncertain. More than two years after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, no end is in view for the 140,000 U.S. troops. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives.
Not surprisingly, public support for the war in Iraq is slipping. Almost six in 10 Americans, in a Gallup poll this month, want some or all troops to come home. For the first time, a bipartisan group of congressmen is beginning to press for an exit deadline.
The White House response? A series of speeches starting this week intended, according to spokesman Scott McClellan, as an "update" for the American people. But far more is needed than another hopeful scenario, or a set of idealistic goals without a hard assessment of the realities on the ground and what has brought the USA to this point.
That sort of assessment has been missing from the Bush administration, which still seems in denial that its Iraq adventure has strayed so far from the original plan.
Instead of candor, the administration has supplied a stream of shifting explanations about the reasons for the Iraq war, realities on the ground, expected costs, duration and outcome.
Start with the primary reason President Bush cited for the war: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the USA. No such weapons were found. Nor was any credible connection to al-Qaeda. The administration then switched to the argument that its chief aims were to remove a dictator and bring democracy to the region.
Or the low-balling on costs. Former Deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq strategy, early on estimated a "range from $10 billion to $100 billion." The war tab so far tops $200 billion.
Or the too-early declaration of victory. On May 1, 2003, Bush landed on a returning aircraft carrier, declaring major combat operations over against the backdrop of a "Mission Accomplished" banner. The triumph was short-lived as an insurgency took hold.
Since then, officials have repeatedly underestimated the insurgency. Every event that was supposed to derail it - the capture of Saddam, the transfer of sovereignty, the elections in January - has failed to do so. Just three weeks ago, Vice President Cheney said the insurgency was in its "last throes." Tell that to the families of dozens of Iraqis and Americans who've died since.
No battle plan, the military truism runs, survives the first contact with the enemy. But winning the battles, and the wars, requires recognizing misjudgments and recalibrating.
How to recalibrate in Iraq? Start with unflinching answers to three questions:
• What is the right U.S. troop level? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted Iraq to be a showcase for his efforts to transform the military into a lean, high-tech force. The 150,000 combat troops deployed turned out to be enough to topple Saddam - but not enough to secure the peace. Today, reports from Iraq suggest that forces are stretched too thin to overwhelm the insurgency.
Meanwhile, recruiting has become difficult, forces are drawn thin elsewhere and a draft is a political non-starter. Caught in that squeeze, it's fair to wonder where the administration's thinking begins. Does it ask first what's needed to win the war and then supply it? Or does it say this force level is what's politically possible; make do. The latter invites failure.
• When will Iraqis be able to take over? The U.S. strategy, properly, is for Iraqi forces to defend their country. Improving their skills is supposed to ease the pressure on U.S. forces, and their number, 169,000, is impressive. Nonetheless, it hides a dismal reality: They are patchily trained. Minimum competence could take two years or more.
• How long can public support be maintained? Americans have until now generally backed the war, but recent erosion is ominous. Painting more rosy scenarios that are never attained would accelerate that erosion, eventually making the war unsustainable. Americans need to understand what success is supposed to look like, and they need benchmarks they can see achieved.
In our view, there is no choice but to stay the course. Cutting and running would cauterize the losses, but the longer-term risks are alarming: of Iraq becoming a terrorist refuge; of full-scale civil war; of hopes for democracy crumbling in Iraq and the region.
Preventing all that from happening requires looking at the facts as they are, not as some might wish them to be, and adjusting the approach accordingly.
The White House declined to submit an opposing view to this editorial.
Copyright © 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
USA Today
Tue Jun 21, 7:09 AM ET
Another day, another round of bombings, electricity cuts, death and destruction in Iraq. Monday's grim tally included a suicide attack in northern Iraq that killed at least 15 traffic policemen and wounded 100. Insurgents' sabotage of water pipes left 2 million sweltering Baghdadis without water.
Nothing, in other words, out of the ordinary. Just more evidence that the United States is bogged down in Iraq, battling a fierce insurgency with the outcome uncertain. More than two years after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, no end is in view for the 140,000 U.S. troops. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives.
Not surprisingly, public support for the war in Iraq is slipping. Almost six in 10 Americans, in a Gallup poll this month, want some or all troops to come home. For the first time, a bipartisan group of congressmen is beginning to press for an exit deadline.
The White House response? A series of speeches starting this week intended, according to spokesman Scott McClellan, as an "update" for the American people. But far more is needed than another hopeful scenario, or a set of idealistic goals without a hard assessment of the realities on the ground and what has brought the USA to this point.
That sort of assessment has been missing from the Bush administration, which still seems in denial that its Iraq adventure has strayed so far from the original plan.
Instead of candor, the administration has supplied a stream of shifting explanations about the reasons for the Iraq war, realities on the ground, expected costs, duration and outcome.
Start with the primary reason President Bush cited for the war: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the USA. No such weapons were found. Nor was any credible connection to al-Qaeda. The administration then switched to the argument that its chief aims were to remove a dictator and bring democracy to the region.
Or the low-balling on costs. Former Deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq strategy, early on estimated a "range from $10 billion to $100 billion." The war tab so far tops $200 billion.
Or the too-early declaration of victory. On May 1, 2003, Bush landed on a returning aircraft carrier, declaring major combat operations over against the backdrop of a "Mission Accomplished" banner. The triumph was short-lived as an insurgency took hold.
Since then, officials have repeatedly underestimated the insurgency. Every event that was supposed to derail it - the capture of Saddam, the transfer of sovereignty, the elections in January - has failed to do so. Just three weeks ago, Vice President Cheney said the insurgency was in its "last throes." Tell that to the families of dozens of Iraqis and Americans who've died since.
No battle plan, the military truism runs, survives the first contact with the enemy. But winning the battles, and the wars, requires recognizing misjudgments and recalibrating.
How to recalibrate in Iraq? Start with unflinching answers to three questions:
• What is the right U.S. troop level? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted Iraq to be a showcase for his efforts to transform the military into a lean, high-tech force. The 150,000 combat troops deployed turned out to be enough to topple Saddam - but not enough to secure the peace. Today, reports from Iraq suggest that forces are stretched too thin to overwhelm the insurgency.
Meanwhile, recruiting has become difficult, forces are drawn thin elsewhere and a draft is a political non-starter. Caught in that squeeze, it's fair to wonder where the administration's thinking begins. Does it ask first what's needed to win the war and then supply it? Or does it say this force level is what's politically possible; make do. The latter invites failure.
• When will Iraqis be able to take over? The U.S. strategy, properly, is for Iraqi forces to defend their country. Improving their skills is supposed to ease the pressure on U.S. forces, and their number, 169,000, is impressive. Nonetheless, it hides a dismal reality: They are patchily trained. Minimum competence could take two years or more.
• How long can public support be maintained? Americans have until now generally backed the war, but recent erosion is ominous. Painting more rosy scenarios that are never attained would accelerate that erosion, eventually making the war unsustainable. Americans need to understand what success is supposed to look like, and they need benchmarks they can see achieved.
In our view, there is no choice but to stay the course. Cutting and running would cauterize the losses, but the longer-term risks are alarming: of Iraq becoming a terrorist refuge; of full-scale civil war; of hopes for democracy crumbling in Iraq and the region.
Preventing all that from happening requires looking at the facts as they are, not as some might wish them to be, and adjusting the approach accordingly.
The White House declined to submit an opposing view to this editorial.
Copyright © 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Monday, June 20, 2005
A Compelling Article Of Gay Pride
Articles of Faith: In the Spirit of Pride
The Task Force Media
By Christian de la Huerta
The Pride celebrations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community celebrated across the country during June must seem a strange ritual to outsiders. With a wild mix of go-go boys, drag queens and topless lesbians, all throbbing to tribal drumbeats, this seemingly self-indulgent display causes outrage for social conservatives, and chagrin for those in the gay community who would like to see us acting more conventionally. But perhaps there is another way to look at Pride besides as an exercise in hedonism: perhaps it represents the pressing back of cultural boundaries by a people uniquely qualified for spiritual exploration.
Throughout history, people we today label lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender have been honored for their roles of spiritual service and leadership. In many cultural contexts, gay people have been the healers, teachers, shamans, keepers of beauty, mediators and peacekeepers; those who "walked between the worlds." For queer spiritual practitioners, not only is their homosexuality or gender identity not a sin, sickness or abomination, it is a gift, a blessing and a privilege. It is the element of their personality that has pushed them outside the realm of comfort and conventionality and into the place of mystery inhabited by those who fulfill roles of sacred service. If there is any doubt about the pervasiveness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in religious leadership roles, it would be a compelling exercise if, on some weekend, every single queer minister, rabbi, music director, teacher or other spiritual functionary stayed home from religious services.
The term "Gay Pride" barely begins to capture the sense of honor and respect this rich spiritual heritage deserves. According to the Dagara tribe in Africa, certain people Westerners would identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender are uniquely physically and energetically suited to be "gatekeepers," the guardians of the doorways into other worlds, realms and realities. The Dagara believe that much of the pain and woundedness of the world can be traced to a lack of respect for these spiritual gatekeepers. In fact, author and speaker Malidoma Some says that part of the reason the world is in the shape that it is in is because the gatekeepers "have been fired from their jobs."
Similarly, among Native American peoples, the Two-Spirit were thought to have special powers and played key roles in tribal ceremonies. These people, who lived on the edges of tribal life, were associated with the gift of prophecy and the implementation of rituals, and were said to possess healing powers. Today Two-Spirits are regaining their place of honor among many Native American communities after being annihilated or forced to go underground during the European invasion.
Is it any wonder that mystics and saviors of many spiritual traditions can often be found with those on the margins of society? Perhaps, beyond "healing" the poor, the religiously unclean and the sexually different, these prophets found in these people a spiritual kinship that sustained their ministries. If the historical figures of Elijah, Buddha, or Jesus were to come back today, I would not be surprised to find them in gay bars, with "welfare moms" or with AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. For it is people in the boundary places of the world who are often closest to the Divine.
All this does not mean that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are better than straight people. (After all, heterosexuals should not be blamed for not having a "choice" about their sexual orientation!) It does mean, however, that queer people should have a sense of responsibility to continue bringing light, healing and spirit to the world, even if the world does not yet realize or fully appreciate our value and contributions.
Furthermore, it is time for religious leaders to stop asking queer people to apologize for who we are and to recognize our innate spiritual offerings of service and leadership. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have gravitated to and fulfilled spiritual roles throughout history, in numbers that far exceed our proportion to the overall population. We have contributed tremendously to the evolution of humanity.
For those who snicker or cringe at the fabulous excess of Gay Pride festivals, realize this: These are the outsiders, the spiritual warriors, the scouts of consciousness who are integrating spirit and sexuality for much of the rest of society. We owe these modern-day shamans the latitude they need and the respect they deserve to do this crucial work.
And for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, the world is crying out for us to speak from a place of real power and pride. We must know, in the deepest recesses of our souls, in the very fabric of our tissues, in every one of our cells in every part of our bodies, that we are blessed in the ways we express our love and our passion. Our blessing is that we know love, and we must love deeply, passionately and selflessly. It is our calling as a people. It is our calling as human beings.
This spiritual calling is what I will be celebrating during Gay Pride. I invite all of you who hear this call within you to do the same.
Christian de la Huerta is a member of the National Religious Leadership Roundtable of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He is the author of Coming Out Spiritually, and founder of Q Spirit and Revolutionary Wisdom.
First convened in 1998, the National Religious Leadership Roundtable of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is an interfaith collaboration of more than forty denominations and faith-related organizations. The Roundtable seeks to reframe the public religious dialogue on issues involving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community by amplifying the voices of LGBT-affirming people of faith, countering religious voices of bigotry and intolerance, and working to advance full equality for all.
The Task Force Media
By Christian de la Huerta
The Pride celebrations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community celebrated across the country during June must seem a strange ritual to outsiders. With a wild mix of go-go boys, drag queens and topless lesbians, all throbbing to tribal drumbeats, this seemingly self-indulgent display causes outrage for social conservatives, and chagrin for those in the gay community who would like to see us acting more conventionally. But perhaps there is another way to look at Pride besides as an exercise in hedonism: perhaps it represents the pressing back of cultural boundaries by a people uniquely qualified for spiritual exploration.
Throughout history, people we today label lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender have been honored for their roles of spiritual service and leadership. In many cultural contexts, gay people have been the healers, teachers, shamans, keepers of beauty, mediators and peacekeepers; those who "walked between the worlds." For queer spiritual practitioners, not only is their homosexuality or gender identity not a sin, sickness or abomination, it is a gift, a blessing and a privilege. It is the element of their personality that has pushed them outside the realm of comfort and conventionality and into the place of mystery inhabited by those who fulfill roles of sacred service. If there is any doubt about the pervasiveness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in religious leadership roles, it would be a compelling exercise if, on some weekend, every single queer minister, rabbi, music director, teacher or other spiritual functionary stayed home from religious services.
The term "Gay Pride" barely begins to capture the sense of honor and respect this rich spiritual heritage deserves. According to the Dagara tribe in Africa, certain people Westerners would identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender are uniquely physically and energetically suited to be "gatekeepers," the guardians of the doorways into other worlds, realms and realities. The Dagara believe that much of the pain and woundedness of the world can be traced to a lack of respect for these spiritual gatekeepers. In fact, author and speaker Malidoma Some says that part of the reason the world is in the shape that it is in is because the gatekeepers "have been fired from their jobs."
Similarly, among Native American peoples, the Two-Spirit were thought to have special powers and played key roles in tribal ceremonies. These people, who lived on the edges of tribal life, were associated with the gift of prophecy and the implementation of rituals, and were said to possess healing powers. Today Two-Spirits are regaining their place of honor among many Native American communities after being annihilated or forced to go underground during the European invasion.
Is it any wonder that mystics and saviors of many spiritual traditions can often be found with those on the margins of society? Perhaps, beyond "healing" the poor, the religiously unclean and the sexually different, these prophets found in these people a spiritual kinship that sustained their ministries. If the historical figures of Elijah, Buddha, or Jesus were to come back today, I would not be surprised to find them in gay bars, with "welfare moms" or with AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. For it is people in the boundary places of the world who are often closest to the Divine.
All this does not mean that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are better than straight people. (After all, heterosexuals should not be blamed for not having a "choice" about their sexual orientation!) It does mean, however, that queer people should have a sense of responsibility to continue bringing light, healing and spirit to the world, even if the world does not yet realize or fully appreciate our value and contributions.
Furthermore, it is time for religious leaders to stop asking queer people to apologize for who we are and to recognize our innate spiritual offerings of service and leadership. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have gravitated to and fulfilled spiritual roles throughout history, in numbers that far exceed our proportion to the overall population. We have contributed tremendously to the evolution of humanity.
For those who snicker or cringe at the fabulous excess of Gay Pride festivals, realize this: These are the outsiders, the spiritual warriors, the scouts of consciousness who are integrating spirit and sexuality for much of the rest of society. We owe these modern-day shamans the latitude they need and the respect they deserve to do this crucial work.
And for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, the world is crying out for us to speak from a place of real power and pride. We must know, in the deepest recesses of our souls, in the very fabric of our tissues, in every one of our cells in every part of our bodies, that we are blessed in the ways we express our love and our passion. Our blessing is that we know love, and we must love deeply, passionately and selflessly. It is our calling as a people. It is our calling as human beings.
This spiritual calling is what I will be celebrating during Gay Pride. I invite all of you who hear this call within you to do the same.
Christian de la Huerta is a member of the National Religious Leadership Roundtable of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He is the author of Coming Out Spiritually, and founder of Q Spirit and Revolutionary Wisdom.
First convened in 1998, the National Religious Leadership Roundtable of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is an interfaith collaboration of more than forty denominations and faith-related organizations. The Roundtable seeks to reframe the public religious dialogue on issues involving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community by amplifying the voices of LGBT-affirming people of faith, countering religious voices of bigotry and intolerance, and working to advance full equality for all.
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