Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (672216)	2/15/2005 9:34:01 AM
From: DizzyG	Respond to of 769670

"You could have made the same argument (for prolonged job market sluggishness) after the 1990-91 recession, and we had a decade of phenomenal job growth," said David Autor, an associate professor of economics and labor specialist at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. "So I'm not so pessimistic." money.cnn.com

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (672216)	2/15/2005 11:01:55 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

kennyboy: this market kills naysayers !!!

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (672216)	2/15/2005 12:17:54 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Back From Battle By DAVID BROOKS his was going to be a column exclusively about a trans-Atlantic security conference that took place in Munich last weekend. But on the way back, the U.S. delegation stopped for refueling at Shannon Airport in Ireland. A bunch of us were milling about in the airport bar, holding little Irish coffees, when hundreds of marines started flooding into the terminal. This was their first chance at a beer after eight months of mayhem in the Sunni Triangle. They streamed in looking thick-necked and strong, but they also had wide-eyed, tentative expressions on their faces, like people trying to reacclimate to the manners of normal life. This unit had lost 22 men, including several in the last weeks. I talked to one kid who had a craggy scar running across the side of his skull. He was proud of how Election Day went and said Iraqis were working harder to take care of their own streets. I told a bunch of them some senators were on the other side of the bar if they wanted to shake hands. One of them was blasé, but the rest were pleased to go over - especially when they saw John McCain and Joe Lieberman. These were not guys grown cynical about their political leaders. I tried to think of the Munich conference from their perspective. If those marines had had the stomach to sit through all those panel discussions, would they have thought that the political class was playing games at luxury hotels, or that the politicians were doing something useful to make the most of those 22 Marine deaths? The first thing I'd tell these marines is that when these politicians went abroad to represent the U.S., they didn't take their squabbles with them. There were Democrats and Republicans in this delegation, but you couldn't tell who was who by listening to their speeches. Instead, what you heard were pretty specific, productive suggestions on winning the war against Islamist extremism. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham lobbied for ways to use NATO troops to protect a larger U.N. presence in Iraq. Democratic Representative Jane Harman was pushing the Europeans to classify Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Hillary Clinton suggested ways to strengthen the U.N., while also blasting its absurdities. Clinton affirmed that the U.S. preferred to work within the U.N., but she toughened her speech with ad-libs, warning, "Sometimes we have to act with few or no allies." The second thing I'd tell them is that the politicians were willing to talk bluntly to the tyrants. McCain sat on a panel with officials from Russia, Egypt and Iran. He began his talk with suggestions on how to use NATO troops in the Middle East. Then it was time for a little straight talk. He ripped the Egyptians for arresting opposition leaders. (The Egyptian foreign minister held his brow, as if in grief.) He condemned the Iranians for supporting terror. (The Iranian hunched over like someone in a hailstorm.) He criticized Russia for embracing electoral fraud in Ukraine. In the land of the summiteers, this was in-your-face behavior. Then I'd tell the marines about the European speeches. Let me say straight away that I covered Europe for four and half years and I'm no Europhobe. I'm glad trans-Atlantic relations are improving. But I'd tell the marines that I didn't hear too many Europeans giving specific ideas on how to make Iraq a success. Instead, I heard too many speakers evading this current pivot point in history by giving airy-fairy speeches about their grand visions of the future architecture of distant multilateral arrangements. I heard the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in his soaring, stratospheric mode, declaring that we need the "creation of a grand design, a strategic consensus across the Atlantic." We need a "social Magna Carta" to bind the globe. His chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, proposed a vague commission to rebuild or replace NATO. His president, Horst Köhler, insisted, "Unless we tackle global poverty, long-term security will remain elusive." Fine, let's tackle global poverty and have new arrangements. But maybe democracies should be contributing to Iraq now. That's called passing the credibility test. It occurred to me as we left Shannon that it's always been true that American and European politicians have different historical experiences and come from divergent strands of the liberal intellectual tradition. But now there's something else different. American politicians meet combat veterans all the time. They make the calls to bereaved families. That concentrates the mind.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (672216)	2/15/2005 12:38:55 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Reporters Must Testify in Plame Case, Court Rules By Carol D. Leonnig Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 15, 2005; 11:50 AM A New York Times reporter and a Time magazine reporter can be jailed if they continue to refuse to answer questions before a grand jury about their confidential conversations with government sources, a federal appeals court decided this morning. The decision upholds a trial court judge's ruling last year that Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine should be forced to answer these questions or be sent to jail. Both reporters fought to stop a subpoena from the Special Counsel to appear before a grand jury investigating whether senior Bush administration officials knowingly leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert operative, to the media in the summer of 2003. Lawyers said both the New York Times and Time magazine will seek a stay of the decision, to avoid having their reporters go to jail, while they appeal to the full appeals court and likely to the Supreme Court. But that request for a stay would have to be granted by Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, who first held Miller and Cooper in contempt of court and ruled they must obey the subpoena. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington rejected the contention that the First Amendment protects the information being concealed by the journalists, saying that a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision said just the opposite. The judges also found there is no common law protection for journalists' confidential sources when a criminal investigation seeks to determine if a law has been broken and information about those sources is critical to that inquiry. "We further conclude that if any such common law privilege exists, it is not absolute, and in this case has been overcome by the filings of the Special Counsel," the panel wrote. Judge David B. Sentelle wrote the opinion. Judges Karen Lecraft Henderson and David S. Tatel concurred. They cited the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the Branzburg case which found that a Kentucky reporter who witnessed and wrote about a drug-manufacturing ring had to answer questions about his confidential sources when a grand jury began investigating possible related drug crimes. The panel's decision is the first time in 30 years that a federal appeals court specifically addressed whether reporters can be forced to break their promise to unnamed sources when a prosecutor is trying to solve a crime. Lawyers for media organizations say the law on protecting reporters from subpoenas in criminal matters is very weak, and they had expected the appeals court to rule against the reporters. The expressed concern that the decision will drive confidential sources underground -- and leave the public more in the dark about the inner workings of its government. "We are deeply dismayed at the U.S. Court of Appeals decision to affirm holding Judith Miller in contempt, and at what it means for the American public's right to know," New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a statement. "If Judy is sent to jail for not revealing her confidential sources for an article that was never published, it would create a dangerous precedent that would erode the freedom of the press. "The protection of confidential sources was critically important to many groundbreaking stories, such as Watergate, the health-threatening practices of the tobacco industry and police corruption. The Times will continue to fight for the ability of journalists to provide the people of this nation with the essential information they need to evaluate issues affecting our country and the world. And we will challenge today's decision and advocate for a federal shield law that will enable the public to continue to learn about matters that directly affect their lives." Even the judge on the panel most supportive of applying a balancing test -- to determine the value of forcing reporters to discuss or identify confidential sources -- said the government had the advantage in this case. Tatel wrote that the purpose of the government leaks, based on a story that Cooper wrote in the summer of 2003, appeared to be to smear a person who alleged the Bush administration exaggerated the strength of its evidence justifying going to war with Iraq. "While requiring Cooper to testify may discourage future leaks, discouraging leaks of this kind is precisely what the public interest requires, " wrote Tatel. The case grows out of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation centering on administration contacts with the media in the summer of 2003. That was when Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, published an opinion piece saying he had led a special mission to Niger to determine whether Iraq had sought to obtain nuclear material there and complained that the Bush administration had exaggerated intelligence to justify a war with Iraq. On July 14, 2003, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak was the first to identify Plame as a CIA operative, and he quoted administration sources as saying she had recommended her husband for the mission.