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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (11981)	10/12/2003 11:06:16 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793804

Molly points out a few of the more delicious ironies from both sides... Molly Ivins Creators Syndicate 10.09.03 It's a Fine Fall Irony Fest The irony's the fun part -- the rest is just sickening AUSTIN, Texas -- Not that any of us is in a position to criticize the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky, but don't you think She's been going a little heavy on the irony lately? All those folks who had conniption fits over Bill Clinton's affair are now pooh-poohing Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual misconduct -- and vice versa. The right-wingers who are always griping about Hollywood stars who express political opinions -- "Shut Up and Sing" -- suddenly find an actor perfectly fit for high political office based on his experience as The Terminator. Professional patriots who would have been screaming with horror had the Clinton White House ever leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent now struggle to justify or minimize such a thing. President Bush has spent $300 million trying to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and come up with zip, so now he wants to spend $600 million more. And let's mention the president's interesting theory that NOT finding any weapons of mass destruction means the Iraq war was fully justified. (Hello?) Connoisseurs of political folly who have been enjoying the antics in California should not overlook the doings in the Great State, where Texas Republicans have achieved such a pluperfect snafu that the state's primary will be delayed next year. The Iraqi Governing Council is complaining because the United States is wasting so much money in Iraq. Rush Limbaugh is apparently facing drug charges. Attorney General John Ashcroft demanded that federal prosecutors seek the maximum penalty in every case just before some perp(s) in the White House apparently broke the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. All in all, a fine fall Irony Fest. Less ironic and more in the sickening vein is the naked profiteering by various Bushies on the Iraq War. Bob Dole used to wander around the country demanding, "Where is the outrage?" Where's Dole when we need him? Joe Allbaugh, who was one of Bush's "Iron Triangle" when he was governor and later as his presidential campaign manager and head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is now in the Baghdad biz. Already the head of one consulting firm, Allbaugh and two partners, both lobbyists and former aides to Poppy Bush, have formed a new firm. "The opportunities evolving in Iraq are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in the United States and on the ground." Salivating over unprecedented booty and swag while American soldiers are getting killed every day is considered kind of tacky, in some circles. A former partner of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense and a major player in pushing the war, has joined a nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and apparently the source of much misinformation before the war. The nephew has opened a law office in Baghdad, and Feith's erstwhile law partner is marketing the firm in the United States. Hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts have already been awarded -- without competitive bidding -- to American businesses, including Halliburton and Bechtel. Hey, no favoritism there. Appearance of impropriety? Don't be a churlish nitpicker. Sen. Tom Daschle's office has documented the "gold-plating" of cost estimates in dozens of contracts. These include such gems as $6,000 each for handheld radios and satellite phones, as well as $200 million to protect 100 Iraqi families, at an average cost of $200,000 per family member. The federal witness protection program costs $10,000 per person per year. While the main cell-phone contract has yet to be announced, MCI has the preliminary contract. MCI has no experience in building cell networks -- and it also perpetrated the largest accounting fraud in history. We're footing the $87 billion-and-counting tab (not including the $79 billion we already spent) for this venture, and the Senate Finance Committee has the chutzpah to consider granting a $100 billion tax break to corporations that make profits overseas. This dandy notion would permit American firms to "repatriate" overseas profits at a reduced tax rate of 5.25 percent, rather than the current 35 percent. Now, does anyone think that doing so might, just might, encourage more corporations to move their operations overseas? El stinko to high heaven-o. workingforchange.com

To: JohnM who wrote (11981)	10/13/2003 2:05:00 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793804

Some common sense from Pollack on the "Chicken Little" network. Their call in "queston of the day" for today was, "Should we pull out of Iraq now?" ____________________________________________ DOES SADR MATTER? CNN brings on Ken Pollack of Brookings, an analyst much heard from last year because everyone was talking about his book The Threatening Storm. Like O'Hanlon, he is always to be listened to carefully, because the two of them are argumentative honest brokers -- they just don't spin, and they don't hesitate to offer up information that cut against the position they are arguing. What's the first question out of the gate? (and again, what insight does this offer into how CNN producers think?) "is this (meaning today's bombing) an indication the United States is in a quagmire we just can't get out of?" He won't bite, saying there is plenty good and positive going on in today's Iraq, and plenty negative going on, and that "today's bombing demonstrated both." Iraq, he warns, could go either way, become a model of democracy and freedom, or turn into another Lebanon, and it depends on how the US acts. What's the positive to take from the bombing? It was Iraqis who turned the bomber from his target, proving more and more Iraqis are taking part, want the reconstruction to succeed, are even willing to give their lives for it to succeed. But we have to give them the time to build a democracy from the ground up, he says: the worst thing we could do is to rush it. But there are groups coalescing now! the anchor cries. A Shiia cleric has just now declared an Islamic state! she frets. Sadr is the "exception that proves the rule" he says, a "minor figure," doing that precisely because he has "been marginalized." The other "Shiia clerics have decided to give the United States a chance to make it work, and he has been pushed aside." So far everyone with intimate knowledge of the Shiia community has said the same thing -- this guy is a small fry, and this effort is a PR stunt. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a breathless report about how "if" the Shiia turn against us it would be a disaster. rantingprofs.blogspot.com

To: JohnM who wrote (11981)	10/13/2003 2:27:46 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793804

Now here is an article I have needed. An expert who defines the terms, and explores the voting record. Money Quote So far Republicans have been far more sophisticated at understanding religious voting patterns than Democrats have. I suspect it's because religion gives the willies to a lot of secular liberals, who just happen to be the folks who run political campaigns and cover them for the media. _______________________________ faith-based How Prayers Poll Debunking myths about the religious right. By Steven Waldman Slate Steven Waldman is editor in chief of Beliefnet, the leading multifaith spirituality and religion Web site. I heard about this guy who called himself "evangelical," said he lived a "Bible-centered life," had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ … and voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush. A confused, lonely, iconoclast? Actually, in 2000, at least 10 million white "evangelical Christians" voted for Gore. Many people, especially secular liberals, misunderstand the nature of religion in politics—which is, to be fair, ever shifting. To them, if it's not about Jerry Falwell or Joe Lieberman, it's kind of a blur. So, just in time for another religion-packed election, here is a guide to sorting through some common myths about God and American politics: Myth 1: Evangelicals all vote Republican. People often confuse the words "fundamentalist" and "evangelical." Fundamentalists are very conservative and almost entirely Republican because they view the deterioration of traditional morality as the primary public policy crisis. But fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals, which is a more diverse group. John Green, a professor at the University of Akron and the foremost scholar of evangelical voting behavior, spliced and diced data some time ago and managed to delineate a group of moderate evangelicals. I like to call them "freestyle evangelicals" because they are socially more liberal (they don't vote strictly for pro-life candidates, for example) and politically "in play." There are about 8 million to 10 million of them. This group went for Bill Clinton 55 percent to 45 percent over Dole in 1996* and 55 percent to 45 percent for W. over Gore in 2000. That's a swing of about a million votes. And that qualifies them as a serious voting bloc in 2004. Myth 2: The religious right flooded the polls for George W. Bush in 2000. Turnout among the members of the "religious right" (that's the goofy way pollsters make people self-identify) was 56 percent, says Green, only slightly higher than the national average—and actually lower than that of devout Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Jews. The "religious right" gets a lot of attention because a) to liberals, they are verrrrrrry scarrrrrry and b) their turnout has been on the rise in the past few decades. But Bush's political folks view this as a huge target of opportunity. They were able to increase turnout among religious conservatives in the 2002 congressional elections through aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts. The 2004 election may turn in part on whether religious Christians behave more like they did in 2000 or 2002. Myth 3: Bush's religion talk has appealed to his base but has alienated moderate swing voters. Actually, 56 percent of independents think he mentions his religious faith just the right amount compared to 20 percent who say he does it too much, according to a Pew Religion Forum study. Even most Democrats agree. Attacking Bush's religiosity will not be politically fruitful; alternatively, a Democratic candidate unable to discuss his own faith will place himself defiantly outside the mainstream. Myth 4: In this era, no candidate would lose votes just based on his or her religion. The same Pew study tried to assess which religions carried the most electoral baggage. When they asked people if they would be less likely to vote for someone because of religion, the big losers were not Jews or Catholics. Rather, the groups with the most political baggage were atheists, evangelicals, and Muslims. (Interestingly, many even atheists didn't like the idea of voting for an atheist.) We have become a much more tolerant country, but that doesn't mean we don't hold religious biases. Myth 5: Most religious extremists are in the GOP. Defining "extremist" as someone on the far end of the religious spectrum, it is true that most fundamentalists are Republican. But what about the other end of the religious spectrum? Statistically speaking, secular people (atheists, agnostics, etc.) are extreme, too, in the sense that they are well outside the public opinion norm. They tend to be Democrats. According to one study 60 percent of first-time white delegates to the 1992 Democratic convention claimed no attachment to religion. Myth 6: Hispanics are conservative. The perception of Hispanics as conservative is misshapen by the political behavior of Florida's Cubans, who are indeed overwhelmingly Republican. But on the question of gay marriage, for instance, Hispanics were at the national average (54 percent opposed). Professor Green has found a big difference between Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic Protestants, with the latter group more conservative than the former. American Hispanic Catholics, it turns out, aren't that religious. Professors Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio put voters into three groups according to religious intensity—"traditionalists," "moderates," and "secularists." Only 10 percent of Hispanics turned out to be traditionalists—this fraction in the African-American community was much larger. So, Republicans shouldn't assume that issues like abortion will lure large numbers of Hispanic Catholics. Myth 7: The key to the Catholic vote is abortion. It is true that in some ways Catholicism is in flux. John Kennedy beat Nixon among Catholics by 54 percentage points, and Hubert Humphrey beat Nixon by 26 points; but Reagan won them by 21 points, and from that day forward Catholics were "in play." Clinton won them by 20 points in 1996, but Gore did by only 6 points. So, figuring out how to appeal to swing Catholics is important. While it's true that many Catholics are pro-life and dislike the Democrats' position on abortion, they tend also to be more interested in social issues, such as health care, and may be influenced by opposition to the Iraq war expressed by the pope and the bishops. For Bush, then, it's important that he still tout "compassionate conservatism," not so much to appeal to conservative evangelicals as to appeal to swing Catholics. Some bits of conventional wisdom about religion are true. Republicans are also attempting to lure Jews, who are one of the few groups that vote "against" their own socio-demographic class. Based on their income and education levels, Jews ought to be voting Republican, and the GOP sees their strong support of Israel and the Iraq war as a way to make inroads. So far Republicans have been far more sophisticated at understanding religious voting patterns than Democrats have. I suspect it's because religion gives the willies to a lot of secular liberals, who just happen to be the folks who run political campaigns and cover them for the media. Perhaps the biggest religion question of the 2004 campaign will be whether the Democratic nominee can talk about his faith without gagging. Correction, Oct. 10, 2003: The original version of this article said Bill Clinton garnered 55 percent of the evangelical vote over Bush Sr. in 1996. In fact, he won those votes over Bob Dole. (Return to the corrected sentence here.) Article URL: slate.msn.com

To: JohnM who wrote (11981)	10/13/2003 5:30:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793804

Kind of a shame to interrupt Josh and your when you are drooling, but here is Sullivan's version. _____________________________ A Perfect Scandal D.C.'s Latest High You've heard of the expression "an actor's actor," or a "man's man" or a "cricketer's cricketer." Well, in Washington right now, we have a scandal-monger's scandal. It's almost a perfect exemplum of the form; world-class, really. It contains every element you could possibly wish for (even a little sex, war, and a distant African country), pits classic political elements against one another (CIA versus White House versus Democrats versus journalists in a never-ending circle), and is so far almost completely incomprehensible. In that sense, it's a perfect Washington storm - full of sound, spin and fury - but so far very few people outside the central players, and maybe not even most of them, have any idea of what's really going on. Here's the rough plot. A while back, the Bush administration sent an old diplomat, Joseph Wilson, to the African country of Niger to try and figure out whether Saddam had tried to get uranium from its rulers. Wilson spent a few days by the hotel pool, politely asking people if Saddam had been sniffing around for nuke material, and came back and said there was no evidence of it. The Bushies ignored him, and, relying on British intelligence, maintained that there was some evidence of Saddam WMD mischief in Africa (though not necessarily Niger). Wilson felt understandably slighted to have his work ignored, was a fire-breathing liberal Democrat anyway and vented in the New York Times earlier this summer that the Iraq war was based on false evidence. A little while later, a veteran and highly unpleasant hack, Robert Novak, wrote a mystifying column where he mentioned, a propos of nothing much, that Wilson's wife was, in fact, a CIA operative. It turns out that she was in some sense "undercover," although you'd need a doctorate in CIA-speak to grasp the full subtlety of the category in which she was in. So she was "outed;" which could well be illegal; and Novak's source was someone in the administration. The story went nowhere until last weekend, when an anonymous administration source told the Washington Post that someone in the White House had deliberately leaked the name out of revenge for Wilson's New York Times op-ed, and had contacted six other hacks as well to spread the dirt. The intent, apparently, was to intimidate other CIA sources from coming forward with their own doubts and grievances about Iraq intelligence. Still with me? You can certainly see why this is a problem. Exposing a CIA agent's cover is a dangerous thing to do and illegal to boot (if you're in the government). In a war on terror, which the Bush administration takes seriously, you need all the good intelligence you can get. Exposing your own side - for the pettiest of partisan reasons - is both suicidal and despicable. It's unclear yet what damage might have been done to Mr Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, or her contacts, if she had many. But just when your outrage is rising to the level of splutter, along comes Wilson himself, posing for photographs, feet up on his desk, musing out loud to the media about which actress might get to play his wife in the movie. Then you find out that he has described it as his "personal mission" to bring down "neoconservatism" and all the right-wing crazies he thinks are in the White House and Defense Department. He adds for good measure that he's looking forward to seeing Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, "frog-marched" out of the White House, and blames him personally for the leak. Then he concedes he has no evidence it was Rove himself, but that he assumes Rove condoned the tactic. Then you ask yourself another question: why would leaking the cover of Wilson's wife accomplish anything for the administration anyway? Doesn't the fact that she worked in the CIA and was an expert in WMDs actually add to Wilson's credibility, rather than detract from it? And isn't it obvious that it would be big news if someone's CIA cover were blown and immediately rebound on the administration? How does that intimidate anyone? If anything, it's likely to convince future leakers and whistle-blowers that the White House has gone completely bonkers and there's nothing to lose by piling on. None of it makes any sense. Perhaps that's why the six journalists who got the info never wrote anything about it. If you're a hack trying to write a story, how do you connect that information to anything? All sorts of theories have been aired. Maybe it was a leak designed for disgruntled neoconservatives who were complaining that a big lefty like Wilson had been picked in the first place. The White House could argue that his wife was a WMD expert and so he was qualified. Nice try, but not exactly a winner. They could easily have achieved that objective by a whisper campaign at a few cocktail parties. Or were they trying to say that Wilson got his job through his wife and so was a hapless example of nepotism? Nepotism? That's a slightly glass house accusation coming from an administration whose president is the son of a former president. The best explanation came from Slate's Jack Shafer who opined, with a slight air of desperation, that the leak "makes as much sense as the White House ordering a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters five months before the incumbent president is poised to smother his Democratic opponent in a landslide." Uh-oh. But this White House? To the exasperation of every hack in town, it's been as water-tight as any administration in memory, doling out tiny trickles of information to very few people with extreme precision. After the cacophonous, constant splish-splash of the Clinton years, it's been a bone-dry capital. Either the White House is cracking up under the strain or some big, nasty internal fight just spilled over accidentally. So we have an inquiry into who leaked what to whom, in which, in all likelihood, no one in the administration is going to fess up and no reporter is going to violate a source. So the sound you're hearing is a big, fat, long, just-started silence being endlessly and probably fruitlessly investigated. Alas, in real life, you can't tell everyone they're going to stay behind after school until someone comes clean. And even the scandal-loving editors of the major papers can only spin out silence for a few news cycles. They did their best, though. I loved the Thursday efforts: the equivalent of: "Some Say a An Independent Counsel Is Needed;" "CIA and White House at Odds." Democrats Attack Republicans - Shock Horror." Mercifully, just as hysteria was fusing with incipient boredom, news broke from the other coast that we had ourselves a real winner. Scharzengropergate burst on the scene. This scandal was crude by Washington standards - and didn't even include a law-suit. A leading politician was revealed to have had serial gropings and leerings toward women, many of whom had felt humiliated. The liberal Los Angeles Times dropped the bombshell in order to damage Arnold's campaign with only a few days left to go. The Democrats defended their man, accusing the others of a partisan witch-hunt, dismissing the women as attention-seekers and manipulated by dark forces of Republicanism ... oh, sorry, that was the Clinton era. This time, the Democrats thought it was an absolute disgrace, no woman should vote for Schwarzenegger, didn't the Republicans get it? ... and on and on. (The Republicans switched sides just as swiftly, with nary a breath before they defended Arnold in almost the same tones that the Dems once defended Clinton.) Actually, they didn't have to try too hard. Within a news cycle, Arnold fessed up to much of it, apologized, said he'd make up for it in office and beamed away, hoping his new lead in the opinion polls wouldn't drop under the pressure. He's a pro. Hey, if he gets into office, maybe a few of these women will sue. And then we can have a Clintonite scandal in Sacramento and a Nixonian scandal in Washington and cable ratings will finally climb back to O.J. levels. And if all else fails, find an ancient film-script with Arnold praising Hitler! Anything, I guess, to keep our minds off a world war. This is a reluctant empire, after all. October 5, 2003, Sunday Times. copyright © 2003, 2003 Andrew Sullivan andrewsullivan.com

To: JohnM who wrote (11981)	10/13/2003 6:34:58 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793804

The Post article gives a hint as to where the leak originated from. The FBI is trying to determine when White House officials and members of the vice president's staff first focused on Wilson and learned about his wife's employment at the agency. One group that may have known of the connection before that time is the handful of CIA officers detailed to the White House, where they work primarily on the National Security Council staff. A former NSC staff member said one or more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson relationship.