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

To: American Spirit who wrote (477076)	10/16/2003 10:11:00 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769667

2 More Indicted in Bribery Case in New Jersey By RONALD SMOTHERS EWARK, Oct. 15 — A prominent waterfront developer was indicted on federal bribery charges on Wednesday, in the latest reverberation from the federal investigation of Robert C. Janiszewski, the former Hudson County executive. One of Mr. Janiszewski's closest friends, who investigators said had served as his "bag man," was also indicted, the United States attorney here said Wednesday. The developer named in the 16-count indictment was Joseph Barry, founder and former president of the Applied Companies, a privately held family firm. Mr. Barry, 63, is charged with paying Mr. Janiszewski, who was also the Hudson County Democratic leader, more than $140,000 in bribes from 1996 to 2001 in exchange for about $9 million in county, state and federal money to aid his projects — luxury and moderately priced housing developments that were helping to transform the faded Hoboken and Jersey City skylines into New Jersey's "Gold Coast." The indictment also named Paul J. Byrne, a longtime Hudson County political operative and consultant for county vendors. Mr. Byrne had a 50-year friendship with Mr. Janiszewski, who has already pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Mr. Byrne, 57, worked as a consultant to Mr. Barry's company during this time, but the United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, said at a news conference on Wednesday that Mr. Byrne had really played the role of "the classic bag man," receiving checks from Mr. Barry and converting some of them to cash that he passed along to Mr. Janiszewski. "I have been asked, when are we going to indict someone who paid bribes?" Mr. Christie said, acknowledging that his office had become known in the last two years mostly for focusing on public officials who were charged with accepting bribes. "Well, this is the day." Mr. Barry's lawyer and the lawyer for Mr. Byrne came out slugging on Wednesday as their clients made their first appearance before Magistrate Judge Mark Falk in United States District Court here. They both attacked Mr. Janiszewski, who has already pleaded guilty to taking these bribes and others, as a convicted extortionist and liar. They said federal investigators should have immediately removed Mr. Janiszewski from office rather than setting him loose among developers and other elected officials whom he secretly recorded for prosecutors. "We intend to mount a significant legal attack on this unprecedented federal action," said Joseph Hayden, Mr. Barry's lawyer, "in which a corrupt public official was permitted to stay in office for more than two years in order to further a federal fishing expedition." The indictment of Mr. Barry, who was trained as a lawyer and once served as a clerk to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which includes New Jersey, comes more than two years after federal investigators with search warrants descended on his company's Hoboken headquarters and confiscated boxes of documents. Shortly after that raid, Mr. Janiszewski, once one of the most powerful Democrats in the state, abruptly resigned as Hudson County executive and county Democratic leader. He later dropped out of sight amid talk that he had been wearing a secret recording device for federal investigators for nearly a year as he met with politicians and cut deals. Those reports were confirmed in October 2002, when Mr. Janiszewski, a onetime schoolteacher, turned up in a courtroom just down the hall from the one in which Mr. Barry and Mr. Byrne appeared on Wednesday. He pleaded guilty to taking bribes and pledged to cooperate with prosecutors in an effort to lessen his own punishment. Mr. Barry, in a statement released by his lawyer, said that he would prove his innocence at trial and spoke of his work developing housing for low- and moderate-income residents of Hudson County, as well as Newark and New Brunswick. It was work, he said, "of value to the people of our community." Less formal and more loquacious, Mr. Byrne, who has diabetes and is blind as a result, stood outside the federal courthouse and pronounced himself "guilty — guilty of being Bob Janiszewski's best friend for 50 years." Sounding alternately bitter and bemused, Mr. Byrne attacked Mr. Janiszewski and his wife, Beth, for embarking on a "second career of ratting out their friends" while drawing a hefty pension and enjoying condominiums in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Port Liberté in Jersey City. "If I wasn't blind, I would pull his head off," Mr. Byrne said. Mr. Barry, who turned over daily operation of the $108-million-a-year Applied Companies to his two sons two years ago, founded the business with his father in 1970. With what Robert Jackson, a former Montclair mayor and a fellow developer, called a shrewd eye for gauging the potential of otherwise sagging urban areas, Mr. Barry made a reputation by creating housing for young professionals in Hoboken and Jersey City. He also mixed his redevelopment work with low- and moderate-income housing. "He was not the largest among the developers, but he had a long track record and significant capital," said Bret D. Schundler, a former Jersey City mayor and a Republican. "Janiszewski's role was not a shock to me, but it is hard for me to believe that people who are as successful as Joe Barry would do this sort of stuff." According to the indictment, Mr. Barry paid Mr. Janiszewski and Mr. Byrne $12,000 to $30,000 on nine occasions and in return received federal or state allocations for infrastructure work aiding his developments, including a waterfront walkway in Hoboken. Mr. Barry is also charged with making payments that led to his receiving federal Department of Housing and Urban Development grants and loan guarantees for building projects.

To: American Spirit who wrote (477076)	10/16/2003 10:56:26 PM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 769667

Kerry may wish he did not look SO FRENCH!! France: The Agony of Decline By Paul Webster The Observer \| October 16, 2003 At the FNAC Etoile in Paris, more a multi-storey literary warehouse than a bookshop, the shelves are buckling under the weight of ammunition for a political and social war. With titles such as French Arrogance, Falling France and French Disarray, this is heavy-calibre weaponry that is being trained on France's political elite in a war that has broken out over the very soul of the country. Launched against a background of top-level disillusionment with Europe, accelerating unemployment rates, spectacular company failures and a stagnant economy, the books - by some of France's leading social commentators - have added an incendiary factor to popular protests over reforms that could end the 35-hour week, cut social security benefits and introduce across-the-board austerity. Having recently emerged battered from national education strikes and months of street demonstrations over reduced retirement benefits, Jacques Chirac's administration is looking on with dismay at media encouragement for right-wing intellectual claims that France is now the weak man of Europe, mired in hypocrisy nationally and internationally, indifferent to popular needs such as care of the aged, and shaken by the aftershocks of vain defiance of the US-led war in Iraq. In short, that France is going down the pan. 'Reading these books, France is in agony, powerless and irretrievably condemned to decline,' Dominique de Villepin, the suave but widely mistrusted Foreign Minister, complained over two pages in Le Monde last week, comparing today's prophets of doom to anti-republicans who collaborated with the Nazis. Equally piqued by France's depiction is the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who sought out America's Time magazine to complain about state-educated French intellectuals 'scrutinising French society while perched on the summit of a pyramid' and obsessed with 'declinism'. And it is a pretty bleak picture, even by the account of the most rational of the 'declinists', Alain Duhamel, whose lugubrious face haunts every TV channel and serious newspaper column and charges that the country has been struck down by an 'insidious evil'. 'French democracy, the political balance and even the nation's personality are at risk,' he writes in Le Désarroi français. It is an argument bolstered by Nicolas Baverez, a historian and free-market evangelist and author of La France qui tombe, who in only 134 pages trots out a thousand historical and contemporary statistics to claim that France is paralysed by 'economic, political, social and intellectual immobility and is plunging towards decline'. Both pale into insignificance alongside L'Arrogance française, where the journalist authors, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, state: 'With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights, we (the French) have pissed off the planet. Worse: we make them laugh. 'It's a sickness to which French people are addicted - believing that France must offer the world Light, Law and Liberty; that their leaders are the carriers of a universal message.' Arguments on the inevitability of French decline are based on three premises: chaotic history up to the end of decolonisation, the domestic mess caused by lost opportunies and mistaken choices since 1970; and, finally, the months following Chirac's re-election in May 2002 with 82 per cent of the vote which has been followed by some of the worst economic statistics since the war, and an admission by Raffarin that the country is in recession. Since Agincourt, they say, French rulers have been repeatedly trapped by overconfidence. Napoleon in Moscow in 1812, his nephew at Sedan in 1870, and the Third Republic in 1940. They point to a national tendency for self-immolation - the Terror, the Paris Commune, and Vichy - before going on to dissect the consequences of reckless decisions by all-powerful Presidents of the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle and Mitterrand among them, a tradition that they claim is pursued by Chirac. In this they argue that, blinded by their unchallengeable status at home, French Presidents stumble into their own diplomatic and social ambushes constructed with the help of a state-educated elite from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, ENA. But none admits his mistakes or apologises for appalling, almost comical, blunders typified by the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, by hapless frogmen in 1985. And it is the suave De Villepin who is mocked with iconoclastic vigour for his vanity in L'Arrogance française, as a cypher for this state-moulded super-class and who is never forced to admit being wrong. And it is De Villepin who is blamed in particular for persuading a malleable President to take such an uncompromising stand on Iraq although other advisers correctly warned of the long-term damage of taking no account of US hegemony and offending the emerging EU Eastern bloc. It is not just the elites that come in for criticism; by implication it is the considerable number of ordinary Frenchmen who have put their faith in the rural campaigner, José Bové, a neo-Poujadist. Much of this wave of populism, say the declinists, is fed by an insistence of both Left and Right on l'exception française, a modern form of chauvinism in which legal fences are built around French language and culture. It is an 'exception' that is mocked in L'Arrogance française as a hallucinatory drug that spills over into all facets of life from haute cuisine to the heavily subsidised and introverted cinema industry. It is all pretty apocalyptic stuff. But in one respect the declinists may be right: that their political masters seem somewhat blinkered to the way in which many, from the Murdoch press to the Bush White House, regard La Belle France. And it is De Villepin who is most exposed in this regard. 'Abroad,' he writes in his answer to declinists: 'France rests a pole of thought and culture, a major economic, military and political power.'

To: American Spirit who wrote (477076)	10/16/2003 11:13:58 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

You conveniently ignore the devastating economic impact of 9/11. We've done remarkably well to recover and rebuild since then. Clinton didn't create a single job. Well, maybe a b-job with Monica's help. Meanwhile, American entrepreneurs and businesses created a lot of jobs, while Al Qaeda plotted and planned 9/11, unfettered by any threat from Clinton. He was too busy focusing on his pants and Kathleen Willey. The economic downturn began in 1999, while Clinton was President. There's no such thing as a "Clinton economic system," unless you mean political corruption showcased by illegal campaign contributions coming in from all over the globe. You have a remarkably short and narrow frame of reference.

To: American Spirit who wrote (477076)	10/17/2003 12:18:36 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

kerry going down the tube: Democratic voters in the three states are divided over their choices for the nomination. In Iowa, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) and former Vermont governor Howard Dean were running roughly even with each other (27 percent to 26 percent). Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) was the only other Democrat to hit double digits in that state (16 percent). In New Hampshire, Dean held a solid lead over Kerry (38 percent to 21 percent), with retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark the only other Democrat in double digits (11 percent). In South Carolina, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) registered 14 percent, but with five other Democrats between 10 percent and 13 percent, the race there appears mostly unformed. Dean's candidacy gained support and energy through his strong opposition to the war in Iraq, but the polls show that his position is favored by a minority of likely voters in each of the three states. In Iowa, 37 percent of the likely caucus attendees said they preferred a candidate who had always opposed the war; 59 percent said they preferred someone who backed ousting Hussein but also criticized Bush's approach. New Hampshire voters were nearly identical in their views. In South Carolina, the division was less significant, with 41 percent saying they preferred someone consistently opposed to the war and 50 percent saying they wanted a critic of Bush who also supported action against Hussein. "They're not looking for a Johnny One-Note who has passed a litmus test on Iraq as the sole criterion for selecting a candidate," Greenberg said, adding that many Democrats "want someone with a more nuanced position on Iraq than simply opposition from Day One -- and that includes a fair number of Dean voters." In all three states, likely Democratic voters said they preferred a nominee who supports the party's core values and stands up to Bush rather than one who appeals more broadly to independents. Asked whether it was more important to nominate a candidate who stands up for Democratic Party values or one who has the best chance of defeating Bush, Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic voters said electability was more important. In South Carolina, where African American voters make up more than 40 percent of the likely primary electorate, voters narrowly favored someone who stands up for the party's core issues. washingtonpost.com