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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (950)	6/30/2002 1:21:11 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

The September 11 X-Files commondreams.org <<...Official accounts ought not to be absorbed without scrutiny. Clandestine agendas and unacknowledged geostrategic factors--such as oil--may well shape George W. Bush's war on terrorism. And there are questions that have gone unaswered...>>

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (950)	6/30/2002 6:50:31 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Makin' Us Dizzy By MAUREEN DOWD Editorial The New York Times 6/30/02 WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney is a sly old fox. He wanted the Congressional cat to start chasing its tail. So he sicced the F.B.I. dogs on it. The vice president called Porter Goss and Bob Graham, the chairmen of the Congressional intelligence committees looking into the 9/11 security debacle, to berate them about a leak to the press detailing missed interceptions at the National Security Agency about "zero hour" and "the big match." Never mind that this story had been circulating for months and that any number of agencies could have leaked it. A churlish Cheney spurred the Goss & Graham team to call up John Ashcroft and ask him to conduct an F.B.I. inquiry into whether their committees had been guilty of the leak. Mr. Cheney created a Machiavellian Mobius strip: the F.B.I. is now investigating the committees that are investigating the F.B.I. Faced with the specter of interviews, polygraphs and new leak accusations, the lawmakers will be so busy playing defense with the G-men, they won't have time to go on offense against W.'s men. They'll grow tentative about rooting through sensitive, damaging material about the F.B.I. for fear that the F.B.I. will find their fingerprints. Everywhere you look these days, you see situations that are absurdly contradictory and circular and self-defeating. Reality has turned into one huge, self-consuming loop. Call it Catch-2002. Nervous that the stench of mendacious and felonious Big Business will cling to Republicans, the president is speaking out loudly against the latest robber barons. Mr. Bush must condemn deep-pocketed corporations that gave him the money to get elected president so he can be re-elected and protect corporations' deep pockets. Catch-2002. We must helplessly witness spectacularly greedy and fraudulent corporations as they betray stockholders and lay off thousands of workers even as they pay or prepare obscene bonuses for the very executives who were wittingly or unwittingly betraying the stockholders. Catch-2002. And here's Martha Stewart, who thought every kitchen needed a propane torch for browning meringues. After making a fortune giving us tips about the myriad rules of perfect homemaking, she faces ruin as a result of suspicions about a stock tip and an indifference to rules. Catch-2002. At a fund-raiser on Thursday night at the Chelsea nightclub Lot 61, Al Gore tried to link the president to the business scandals, telling young supporters: "You see now what it means to have an administration that's that committed to fighting and working on behalf of the powerful and letting the people of this country get the short end of the stick." Al and Tipper gathered fund-raisers and donors for a retreat this weekend at Memphis's Peabody Hotel, hoping the fat cats swanning amid the ducks would signal Democrats that Al is ready to rumble. Democratic poobahs hate the thought of a Gore campaign. But they have to pretend they're willing to do the Tennessee waltz in 2004 because they don't want to let the Democratic rage of 2000 subside. They're stuck acting as though the guy who lost the election even though he won could win again even though they're sure he'd lose. Catch-2002. On Monday, the president declared that he would deal only with a democratic leader of Palestine — Abu Jefferson — even though he deals with the region's kings, autocrats, tyrants and military dictators stalling on democratic elections. Catch-2002. The Washington Post had a front-page article last week reporting that a significantly higher percentage of American college graduates are women and quoting experts saying that would make it harder for women to find suitably smart mates. And a new study from Rutgers about why more men are putting off marriage suggests that moms who warned daughters that guys would think, "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk free?" may have been right: women have sex to get men to marry them, but men think they don't need to marry because they're already having sex. Which brings us back to the dread findings of Sylvia Ann Hewlett: Women having trouble finding husbands get better educations and bigger jobs to support themselves, which ends up scaring away possible husbands. Catch-2002. nytimes.com

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (950)	6/30/2002 6:55:43 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Unhealthy Air By JIM JEFFORDS Editorial The New York Times 6/30/02 WASHINGTON - It is already too late for the United States to lead the world in the fight against global warming. President Bush saw to that last year, when he abandoned his promise to make power plants reduce the amount of carbon dioxide they send into the air. But if the president won't lead the world, then the business community, the American people and their elected representatives in Congress must lead the president. This month President Bush gave up all pretense of moving forward in the effort to clean up the oldest and dirtiest power plants. First he denigrated the climate action report released by his own administration. That report follows the National Academy of Sciences and the vast majority of scientists by stating that global warming is real and poses a significant threat. Then his administration announced possibly the biggest rollback of the Clean Air Act in history, proposing wholesale weakening of the "new source review" provision that requires old power plants to install modern pollution controls when they are renovated. Pollution from power plants causes a variety of problems. Three in particular are health-threatening: mercury contamination linked to birth defects, ozone smog that triggers asthma attacks and fine particulate soot that can actually lead to death. In addition, these plants emit the chemicals that cause acid rain and haze in our parks, as well as large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which I am chairman, voted to set strong limits on the three major health-threatening types of power-plant pollution and to put a cap, for the first time in American history, on the release of carbon dioxide from power plants. The administration's climate action report projects that American emissions of carbon dioxide will rise by 43 percent by 2020. Yet its climate policy does little or nothing to control or reduce this increase. This is a problem with a solution. The technology to clean up these plants already exists; some of it has been around for decades. What has been missing is the political will either to tell the owners to install this technology or to create a market to encourage that investment. America is on the verge of a boom in power-plant construction, and that gives us a rare opportunity. Including carbon dioxide reductions in a comprehensive cleanup plan now is the most efficient and least costly way to address the threat of global warming. The power industry realizes that the question on carbon dioxide is not whether it will be regulated, but when. Dealing with global warming is too important to leave solely to Washington. Several states, including New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, are acting on their own to limit power-plant emissions. But Washington has a crucial role. The scientific consensus has never been stronger. A broad and growing coalition of public health and environmental organizations and several utility companies agree that we must act now. I hope that at some point President Bush will follow this lead. _______________________________ Jim Jeffords, independent of Vermont, is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee nytimes.com