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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (470057)	10/2/2003 11:39:42 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

It doesn't add up that Plame was under cover? It doesn't add up that somebody in shrub's crew exposed her by using her cover name at the same time saying she was CIA? It doesn't add up that it's a felony?

To: Selectric II who wrote (470057)	10/2/2003 11:43:09 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

REVIEW & OUTLOOK Dr. Dean Rediscovers Mediscare He was right--in 1995. Thursday, October 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT Three cheers for Howard Dean. The old Howard Dean at least. In 1995, the then-Vermont Governor broke ranks with many Democratic partisans to support at least some of the Republican Congress's plans to reform entitlements such as Medicare. Now his Presidential primary opponents are trying to crucify him for it. At last week's debate Dick Gephardt accused the Democratic front-runner of siding with Republicans during the 1995 Medicare reform fight. "You've been saying for many months that you're the head of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. I think you are just winging it," said the former House Minority Leader. But Mr. Gephardt had more. "Howard Dean even met with Gingrich" (gasp!), he charged over the weekend, "and Newt Gingrich said they had 'agreed in principle' to cut Medicaid" too. Added rival John Kerry, "Despite what Howard Dean would have you believe today, he undeniably supported cutting $270 billion from Medicare." There is truth to the various Gephardt-Kerry charges, if no reason for the hysteria. Dr. Dean did once support raising the retirement age to 70. He did support moves to slow the growth of Medicare spending, if not necessarily the Republican voucher-style reform proposal. And he does appear to have been open to the Gingrich Medicaid reform proposal, which would have reduced aid to the states but freed them from costly federal mandates. "The direction is not a bad direction--decentralization, more block grants, but not total freedom for the states," Dr. Dean said of the GOP program in early 1995. His view on Medicaid made particular sense, then and now, from the point of view of a Governor. Runaway Medicaid spending is a major cause of the recent crisis in state budgets. Far from being outrageous, these positions are all perfectly defensible, even far-sighted. Anyone who is serious about public policy knows that entitlements for the elderly can't continue on their current path forever. Sooner or later the promises will collide with Baby Boom demographics and something has to give. Democrats themselves used to understand this. Democrats of all stripes cooperated on a bipartisan plan in 1983 to gradually raise the Social Security retirement age to 67. For elderly programs created when average life spans were far shorter than today, an even later retirement age shouldn't be off the table. In the 1990s, Louisiana Democrat John Breaux also became a champion of market-oriented Medicare reform. "Defending Social Security and Medicare against reform is like defending a sick patient against treatment," his former Senate colleague Bob Kerrey wrote at the time. The irresponsible position is to do nothing until the crisis arrives. In being open to the Gingrich reforms, Dr. Dean was showing political common sense and even the kind of leadership that voters want from, dare we say, a President. Alas, in his stretch run for the Democratic nomination, Dr. Dean is now walking away from his own record. "Nobody up here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich," he pleaded during last week's debate. He told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that he no longer supports raising the retirement age and that he only supported those Medicare cuts that President Clinton eventually signed. That's too bad. Dr. Dean's retreat will only encourage more Mediscare demagoguery. And that in turn will only delay the day that the inevitable reform in senior entitlements occurs. Witness the filibuster threat of Democratic Senators should House-Senate conferees produce a Medicare prescription drug bill with even a modest amount of Medicare reform. The Gephardt-Kerry attack offered Dr. Dean the perfect opportunity to establish himself as a genuine outsider when it comes to the "rules" of Washington debate. He might also have shown he isn't a paint-by-numbers liberal. By grasping instead for the Mediscare Democratic party line, the good doctor is missing a chance to lead.

To: Selectric II who wrote (470057)	10/2/2003 11:44:45 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769670

Radio Free California The Davis recall is a triumph for the new media. Thursday, October 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT There were 31 petition drives to recall a California governor before the one directed at Gray Davis. All failed to make the ballot. Ted Costa, the antitax crusader who became the official sponsor of the Davis recall, knew this one would be different when in early February he appeared on Eric Hogue's Sacramento talk show at 5 a.m. to announce he was collecting signatures for a recall. Within minutes a few of his neighbors were pounding on his door wanting to sign up. Within hours more than 300 people had appeared at his office. California's recall revolution was an unusual confluence of citizen anger at a failed political establishment, a governor who seemed competent only at manipulating the political process for his own selfish ends, and a budget crisis that he helped hide from the voters until after the 2002 election. The whole process was fueled by talk radio and the Internet. "Without the support of talk show hosts, it might not have happened," says recall strategist Dave Gilliard. "These shows have created activists, people who go out and work." Consultant Sal Russo, who worked for Davis challenger Bill Simon last year, says, "Talk show hosts are the new precinct captains of democracy in California. The Internet piggybacked on talk radio as a vehicle for both fundraising and downloading petition forms so people could just sign it and mail it in." Howard Dean isn't the only one to realize the potential of the Internet in politics. Everyone has written about the $2 million that Rep. Darryl Issa contributed to the recall effort in May and June. That money was invaluable in ensuring the collection of the necessary 897,000 signatures in time for special election this year. But many observers agree that even without Mr. Issa's dollars, the recall would have qualified for the March 2004 ballot fueled by smaller donations from a larger number of donors and the organizing power of talk radio and the Internet. "Californians spend more time stuck in their cars listening to conservative talk radio than sitting in easy chairs reading the state's uniformly liberal newspapers," says George Neumayr of The American Spectator. Regular listeners may total only 20% of the general public, but they vote and discuss politics with their friends far more often than most people. It's hard to trace the origin of the recall effort, though answers may come from books now being written on the recall by journalists Daniel Weintraub, John Gizzi and Steve Greenhut. All three agree that the recall was far more a spontaneous populist uprising than an effort of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Pat Caddell, a Democratic pollster who worked for both Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, said he first started talking up the recall after last November's election when he realized that low voter turnout after Gov. Davis's negative campaign had substantially reduced the signature threshold for a recall--12% of the vote cast in the previous gubernatorial election. Mr. Russo said he met with some dissident Democrats in Sacramento on Jan. 24. "They wanted to get rid of Davis for reasons of ethics and ideology," he recalls. "They urged me to help engineer a broad-based recall." The recall leadership ended up not including major Democrats, but polls still show 30% of Democrats will likely vote in favor of the recall next week. But talk radio didn't wait for the consultants to strategize; it gave the recall a life of its own. The flashpoint appears to have been a Jan. 20 interview with Shawn Steel, the outgoing chairman of the California Republican Party. Mr. Steel appeared on a morning talk show on San Francisco's KSFO hosted by Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan. Ms. Morgan pointed out how estimates of the state's budget deficit had nearly tripled since the election and asked him, "What can we do about Davis?" Mr. Steel paused for a moment and said "What about a recall?" The phone lines suddenly lit up, and Mr. Steel and Ms. Morgan had a movement behind them. Mr. Steel and others call Ms. Morgan "the mother of the recall." Within days two statewide recall drives were launched. One was headed by Mr. Costa's Sacramento-based group, People's Advocate. The other was spearheaded by Howard Kaloogian, a former GOP state legislator from San Diego who had often clashed with Gov. Davis. Mr. Kaloogian soon got Roger Hedgecock, San Diego's most popular talk-show host, interested. "My listening audience has been energized by this issue like no issue I've ever seen," says Mr. Hedgecock, a former mayor of San Diego. "They saw the recall as a way to focus their frustration and take citizen action. Rather than call this recall democracy run amok, isn't that the essence of what we want voters to do: get involved?" Ms. Morgan and Mr. Hedgecock got so involved that they ended up making radio commercials promoting the recall that ran on their own stations and those of their competitors. Soon national talk show hosts got into the act, most prominently Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Mr. Limbaugh made a splash in August when he told his listeners that Arnold Schwarzenegger "was no Ronald Reagan, and no solid conservative." After Mr. Schwarzenegger came out with a free-market economic program, Mr. Limbaugh softened his critique and noted that the actor seemed to have decided to run a more conservative campaign. Mr. Hannity made news by securing the first interview with Mr. Schwarzenegger in which the candidate announced he opposed gay marriage, supported the medical use of marijuana and opposed statewide school vouchers (though he left the door open to local ones). Mr. Schwarzenegger seems to have been the first candidate to grasp fully how much the new media have begun to overshadow the old media of newspapers and broadcast TV in California's political process. Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, told MSNBC this week that he thought that the actor had "created some Teflon" for himself with his emphasis on nontraditional media such as talk radio, the Internet and entertainment TV shows. "We in the sort of more traditional media are sitting back. We're going, 'Hey, what about us? We're supposed to be important,' " he said. "So if Arnold Schwarzenegger wins without us, we're going to be looking at our role in the future and exactly what that should be." So too will officeholders in California and elsewhere. They know their public image and ability to govern is being affected by faster news cycles and the ability of people to find information about their record on their own. As Gov. Davis has found, these forces can create an unforgiving political climate that render political spin useless. Mr. Davis theoretically understood that big changes were coming, but characteristically failed to act on that knowledge. In an op-ed he co-wrote three years ago, he noted that "we live in a remarkable moment when technology is turning the impossible into the commonplace. . . . It is a matter of time before these innovations transform the way we govern ourselves." Little did he know that one of the first political uses of this transforming technology would be facilitating a way to boot him out of office.