Forget the witless protection program. What cards?

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8503

February 6, 2006
Prepare for Perpetual War
The real State of the Union
by Justin Raimondo
The Bizarro World illogic started right off the bat when George W. Bush intoned that what we need more of in public life is "a civil tone." This from a man who has repeatedly impugned the patriotism of his opponents, and just the previous week declared that critics of the Iraq war are giving "comfort to our enemies." That the president of "the United States of Amnesia" – as Gore Vidal puts it – doesn't remember what he says from one week to the next is not at all surprising. What's astonishing, however, is that we accept as normal behavior what, in a different (and better) era, would have been considered evidence of madness.

The megalomaniacs who rule us have no compunctions about the brazenness of their lies: they don't care how it looks, how it sounds, or even, in the end, how it sells. They know what they want, and they are single-minded in going after it. The message came through loud and clear in the president's State of the Union speech: prepare for perpetual war.

In the face of the abysmal failure of their policies, from Iraq to the occupied territories to New Orleans, Bush and his neoconservative Praetorian Guard are not backing down – far from it, they are going forward with their plans for the "liberation" and "democratization" of the Middle East, confident in the knowledge that the sheer momentum of the forces they unleashed in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" will carry them onward to their objective.

Well, then, what is their objective, anyway? The president reiterated his goal, enunciated in his second inaugural, of spreading "democracy" far and wide:

"In this decisive year, you and I will make choices that determine both the future and the character of our country. We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life. We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity. In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline. The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership, so the United States of America will continue to lead. Abroad, our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal: We seek the end of tyranny in our world."

At least we were spared the retro-Marxist rhetoric of the "fire in the mind" sort the president's speechwriters have regaled us with before. Yet the speech gave voice to the same neo-Trotskyite balderdash that so disturbed many conservatives, including Peggy Noonan and the editors of The American Conservative. This time, however, a new and dangerous note intruded itself on the highfalutin' rhetoric: as soon as Bush enunciated the words "retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life," alarm bells should have gone off all across America. The president of a nation founded on the idea that "the pursuit of happiness" is an end in itself is telling his citizen-subjects that they have no right to an "easy life." Instead, they must devote themselves to an ascetic "idealism" in the name of an abstract "freedom." But if we aren't free to have "an easier life," then what, exactly, is the value of this "freedom" we hear so much about?

The president raises the specter of "isolationism," but where oh where are the "isolationists? Not in Congress – which handed him a blank check to wage war wherever and whenever he pleases. Not in the highest councils of the president's advisers, teeming as they are with neoconservatives bent on war. Not on the Left, which applauded Clinton's wars even as they opposed Republican interventionism. Not on the Right, which, for the most part, is marching off in lockstep with the War Party. So how, pray tell, are these mythical "isolationists" luring us down the road to "danger and decline"? If the president wants to see intimations of decline, then let him look to the war debts he's piling up and the $100,000 per minute price tag of the Iraq war.

The president, though, is blind to these political and economic realities and sees himself as a noble "idealist":

"Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends on it. On September 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter terrorists, feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will act boldly in freedom's cause."

There is nothing "idealistic" about the dream of world conquest. Every tinpot dictator and two-bit demagogue down through the ages has entertained the same crazy delusion and imagined themselves to be great world-historical figures, giants towering over the pygmies of the earth and shaping their destiny. In the end, all these madmen met an appropriate fate, their "empires" turned to dust and ashes, their people reduced to starving semi-savagery. Every totalitarian system that sought to aggressively impose its strictures on the world did so in the name of "idealism" – and the results are to be seen in the bloody history of the last century, 100 years of world war and genocide. These "conservatives" who hold the reins of power today are a strange bunch indeed: they neither recognize nor understand the lessons of history, but instead seek to use a highly distorted version of it to advance their agenda of endless aggression:

"Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies on Earth. Today, there are 122. And we are writing a new chapter in the story of self-government, with women lining up to vote in Afghanistan and millions of Iraqis marking their liberty with purple ink and men and women from Lebanon to Egypt debating the rights of individuals and the necessity of freedom. At the start of 2006, more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half in places like Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran because the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well."

One-hundred twenty-two democracies? Exactly how this measure was taken is hard to fathom, and the president doesn't say. No doubt he means to include Iraq among that number – where Shi'ite death squads terrorize their political opponents under the colors of state authority and Kurdish writers are imprisoned for exposing the rampant corruption of Kurdish warlords. Yes, more countries hold elections in which the winners are given a mandate to tyrannize minorities and loot the public purse. I'm not impressed. Far more important is the irrefutable fact that, in 1945, America, the fountainhead of human freedom on earth, was a far freer country. This is one factor – perhaps the essential factor – the president left out of his equation. Government in America is bigger, more oppressive, and eats up more of our income than ever before – thanks largely to our noble president and his party of "smaller government."

Why in the name of all that's holy should we get worked up about "women lining up to vote in Afghanistan" when our own electoral system is so biased in favor of incumbents that congressional elections have all but ceased to be competitive? And why, one has to ask, is it a great step forward to empower Afghan women to vote the Taliban back into office? Purple fingers, my a** – I'd like to give the president another kind of finger as he chews up the American military in a futile war and spends the nation into penury.

The awkwardness of trying to tie in the occupation of Iraq to our fake "war on terrorism" is underscored by the president's claim that bin Laden and his legions aim to "seize power in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world." This is absurd. The terrorists don't need a "safe haven" in the form of a state: they just need a few hundred thousand dollars and a bottomless well of fanaticism to stage a repeat of 9/11. That was and is the lesson of 9/11: asymmetrical warfare of the sort favored by al-Qaeda is all about not needing the resources of a state in order to bring down a much more powerful enemy. The conquest of Iraq is not a defense against this tactic: it is, instead, a source of strength for the worldwide Islamist insurgency.

The president burnishes his "idealistic" credentials by assuring us that "no one can deny the success of freedom," but the reality is that freedom, far from being on the march everywhere, is a rare and precious blossom, one that only sprouts in hothouse conditions, and even then is easily threatened by the slightest gust of cold, wilting on the vine at the first hint of autumn. The history of humankind is a tale of virtually unending oppression, violence, and unrestrained cruelty; the few bright spots – Athens during the golden age of Greece, the early Roman Republic, the Renaissance, the American republic up until around 1900 – only underscore the long periods of unrelieved darkness. In the face of this record, it is not only possible to deny the alleged "success of freedom" – one also has to ask whether this presidential optimism is a form of madness. What world is the most powerful man on earth inhabiting?

"America rejects the false counsel of isolationism" – so says the prez, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. A Pew poll shows that what is generally derided by the elites as "isolationism" (i.e., minding our own business) is the most popular foreign policy doctrine among the great unwashed masses. What America rejects is the doctrine of "liberation" espoused by Bush and his neocon cronies. This speech won't put a dent in the "isolationist" wave: all the president and the War Party can do is brace themselves for the moment of impact and hope it doesn't wash them away.

Standing on the ramparts of his delusions, the president reiterated a by-now-familiar litany of our "achievements" in Iraq: these mystery achievements are on a par with our other alleged victories in Afghanistan and in the war on bin Laden. As the Taliban regroups and waits out the inevitable American withdrawal, the progress of Afghan "democracy" and liberty is measured by the growing hegemony of drug-dealing warlords. That bit about going "on the offensive" against al-Qaeda is unfortunate, in view of the recent failed attempt to kill a top bin Laden lieutenant – and is rendered absurd by the administration's preoccupation with Iran, another diversion from the task of rooting out the international terrorist gang that pulled off 9/11.

"The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home," says the president: in other words, they are never coming home, if he can help it, because "victory" in any sense is meaningless in this context. Does it mean that Iraq is transformed into a Jeffersonian republic, or will we take a Shi'ite theocracy with "democratic" trappings in order to save face? The president doesn't say: all he can say is that we continue to "make progress on the ground." This is the neo-Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution put into practice: perpetual war in the name of the "democratic" revolution.

Sure, we've made mistakes, Bush implies, but

"Our coalition has learned from experience in Iraq. We have adjusted our military tactics and changed our approach to reconstruction. Along the way, we have benefited from responsible criticism and counsel offered by members of Congress of both parties. In the coming year, I will continue to reach out and seek your good advice.

"Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

"With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor."

Let's stop the tape right there. Yes, we've "adjusted our tactics," all right. We've stepped up the air war against the insurgents, bombing large swaths of Iraq – how large, we don't know, because the reporters "embedded" in the U.S. government's propaganda machine aren't reporting it – and inflicting high casualties on civilians. This, in the president's view – and also Satan's – is "progress on the ground."

Why, one wonders, should opponents of this war hope for the "success" of an act they hold to be counterproductive to the interests of the United States and/or profoundly and unforgivably immoral? The Bushies want to conquer the whole damned world and we're supposed to wish them "success"?

No thanks, buster: give me "defeatism" or give me death. If we should ever "succeed" in conquering the entire Middle East, and much of the rest of the globe to boot, it would be an albatross hung round our necks. Our republic would eventually be brought down by the sheer weight of it, strangled by the hubris of its leaders. A more likely scenario is that we will sink into bankruptcy long before we get that far.

I won't go here into the utter absurdity of the president's born-again conversion to the cause of "alternative" fuels and anti-petroleum crackpot-ism, except that one shudders to think he may one day discover we are also addicted to water, air, and indoor plumbing. Rather than tear into the extreme dottiness of the claim that we are "addicted" to oil, I'll just note that he seems to have stolen this idea from Arianna Huffington and leave it at that.

This rhetoric is scary because it is so clearly an effort to prepare us for the inevitable consequences of a wider regional war in the Middle East, one that sends the price of oil skyrocketing and plunges America and the rest of the world into an economic abyss. Won't someone stop this madman before he wrecks the country? Is there no one left in any position of authority who will step forward to say: Enough! Are there no patriots left in all the U.S. Congress, the national security bureaucracy, and the military? If there are, why do they remain silent, except for a relative few?

I long ago pronounced George W. Bush the worst president ever, and history has proven me right. Every day this modern day Caligula stays in office is a nail driven into the coffin of American liberty – and that is the real state of the Union in the year 2006.

Sad, but true

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/debatto.php?articleid=8509

February 7, 2006
From the Founders
to the Felons
The end of the republic is upon us
by Dave DeBatto
For the past several weeks now, we have had to deal, as a country, with the realization that the Pentagon, the White House, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, and who knows how many other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been secretly tapping into untold thousands of telephone conversations by U.S. citizens since 9/11, all without a warrant. President Bush has admitted these acts on national television and radio and has told us all repeatedly that he has both the legal and the "moral" authority to do so. The congressional vote in 2001 for the president to use "whatever means necessary" to protect America, as well as his role as commander in chief, gives him that authority, Bush claims.

This week, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is testifying before Congress on the legal justifications the administration has for the warrantless wiretaps. Gonzales, a staunch Republican ally of President Bush and the subject of raucous confirmation hearings in late 2004, will try to explain why his DoJ feels that the federal government owes no explanation to anyone when conducting warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens, as long as they, the feds, believe the citizens being illegally bugged are in some way connected to terrorism. We need to just trust them.

Nonsense.

What the Bush administration has been committing since 9/11 is just a good old-fashioned felony, pure and simple. You can dress it up all you want, divert the issue, credit the Almighty for the authority, call critics traitors, and launch retaliatory investigations. But at the end of the day, you will still have a felony being committed – actually, in this case, multiple felonies.

There is no wiggle room in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that protects the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." In addition, every state has its own laws prohibiting warrantless wiretaps. Some are actually more prohibitive than federal law. When I was in training to be a police officer, as well as during my Army Counterintelligence Special Agent course, it was drilled into our heads that we were not, under any circumstances, to secretly tape-record any conversation without a warrant. We were also told to ask the other party we were speaking with on the telephone if it was all right if we did tape the conversation. If they said no, you did not record the conversation. That sounds pretty clear to me. It was also pretty clear to every police officer and counterintelligence agent I have ever met. There is no "gray area" within that policy. It is solidly based in federal and state law as well several precedent-setting cases decided in many local, state, and federal courts over the past two centuries. No ambiguity, no confusion, no special "wartime" clause; nothing, nada, null, zilch, zip. Cut and dry.

What makes this particularly infuriating to me and most law enforcement and intelligence professionals is that there is no reason for it. The administration has staked its claim on the necessity to move at lightning speed in order to tap the phones of suspected al-Qaeda and other terrorists before they catch on and change phones, or some such logic. Again, this is unnecessary and misleading. The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows for application for a warrant up to 72 hours after the wiretap has been established. Now I'm not very good at math, but it seems to me that FISA gives someone up to three days to notify the special intelligence court after they have listened in on the suspect's phone conversations. Does that sound like enough time to let the court know you that you have just eavesdropped on an American citizen's private conversation without due process? It sure does to me. You also need to know that since the establishment of the FISA court in 1978, over 10,000 warrants have been applied for and only one has ever been denied. Pretty much a slam dunk, wouldn't you say? Regardless of whether or not you buy into their ludicrous ticking-time-bomb scenario, why in God's name can't the Bush administration do their warrantless wiretaps, then notify the court as the law stipulates?

For the life of me, I have not heard one administration official answer that one simple question in all the weeks this controversy has been on the front burner, and I have tried to hear it, believe me! Why is the after-the-fact warrant or court notification so much of a burden on these people? Surely they have enough law clerks at DoJ to can follow up on these cases. I mean, with a recently announced $2.7 trillion budget, there must be some small change left over for such low-level paper-pushers, no?

Folks, cliché or not, what we are witnessing here with this blatant shredding of one the most important of our constitutional guarantees is the beginning of the end of the republic. Make no mistake about it. When a sitting administration, through its highest officials, willfully, knowingly, and arrogantly violates the laws of the land as well as the sacred trust it has with the American public, then the end of the republic as we know it is right around the corner.

If nothing else, we have been a nation of laws. That has been one of the primary differences that set us apart from the other countries of the world. In order to remain so, however, the nation's government and leaders must also obey those laws. To do otherwise is tyranny.

What we are witnessing today in the United States at the hands of the Bush administration is nothing less than tyranny. Therefore, we must, as a nation of laws and as a free republic, stop this tyrannical behavior from bringing our form of government down. Sadly, we must begin impeachment proceedings immediately. Nothing else, it seems, will prevent a cataclysmic ending.

God bless America.

"Get Out of Jail Free" cards from a Monopoly game, perhaps ....

They'll be a "HOT ITEM" in the marketplace right now .....

Sad but true, jeffmoskin ....

I don't know if the Democrats are in the witless protection program, however ...

So much as the gutless protection program, perhaps ....

BUT ....

Not all of them are .....

I know a lot has been said about John Kerry ...

And much of it is not at all flattering ...

HOWEVER ...

Whatever else his faults might be, John Kerry does communicate ...

And he does stay in touch ...

And to me, a common American ...

That in and of itself is something of note .......

This is from so many days ago, and I am just now getting around to posting it ....

Thanks to your incentive above, jeffmoskin ....

Dear Livyjr,

Yesterday, 25 Democratic Senators joined our effort to filibuster the Alito nomination -- that's more votes to filibuster the Alito nomination than there were votes against Justice Roberts' nomination itself just a few months ago.

This morning, 42 Senators voted against Alito's nomination.

That's the highest number of votes against any Supreme Court nominee since Clarence Thomas in 1991.

It's hard to lose -- but it's important to fight for what we believe in.

I want to thank the hundreds of thousands of you who signed our petitions, called your senators, wrote letters to the editor and, most important, refused to stand silent while President Bush worked to pack the highest court in the land with far right ideologues.

We fought a fight that needed fighting.

We made sure the nation knew the truth about the Alito nomination.

We made sure America heard how a right wing ideological coup sandbagged Harriet Miers' nomination and replaced her with Judge Alito.

No one will be able to say, in five to ten years, that he or she is surprised by the decisions Judge Alito makes from the bench.

People who believe in privacy rights, who fight for the rights of the most disadvantaged, who believe in balancing the power between the President and Congress had to take a stand.

We also made it clear to the Bush administration that no matter what they throw at us in 2006 -- whether it's extreme nominees, special interest giveaways, shortsighted policy or Swift Boat-style attacks against Democratic candidates -- we will never surrender.

We will always fight back.

Now, we must be clear about something else.

Winning the 2006 congressional elections is the only way to change the dangerous path George W. Bush has put us on.

We need to defeat those Republicans who have overlooked this administration's incompetence, turned a blind eye to its failures, and lent a helping hand to its dangerous ideology.

Together, we have to act to make sure 2006 is the year Americans, led by Democrats, stand up to incompetence, cronyism and corruption, take back Congress, and get our nation moving in the right direction again.

I look forward to fighting alongside you.

Sincerely,

John Kerry

The REPUBLICANS and George W. Bush DO NOT SEEK THE END of tyranny in OUR world ....

That is crap ...

Since they are the PURVEYORS of it, themselves ...

What they seek is simply an end to competition ....

THERE SHALL BE NO TYRANNY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD BUT AMERICAN TYRANNY ......

And that tyranny shall be in the exclusive control of the REPUBLICAN PARTY OF AMERICA AND THE WORLD .....

SO ...

Let us have some real "TRUTH IN ADVERTISING", here, George .....

Tell it like it is ....

We can handle the truth, George ...

SO WHY CAN'T YOU?

I wonder where George W. Bush gets any of his ideas from .....

Besides off of the piece of paper, or the teleprompter screen before him ....

Because this is all a bunch of unsubstantiated BULL**** .....

SULLA was a real DICTATOR of Rome, and he restored order to Rome ....

And ended radicalism .....

And he put into place laws and codes which were intended to maintain some degree of stability in Rome ...

Which they did for years after his death .....

And POMPEY THE GREAT was also a DICTATOR of Rome in a time of turmoil ...

And he restored order ...

And put in place laws and codes intended to restore stability in Rome ...

Which they did ....

And to this day, POMPEY and his adherents are credited with being very concerned with reform of government in Rome at that time ....

And INTEGRITY ....

At the time of SULLA and then POMPEY, there was great devisiveness in Rome ...

And so ..

A firm hand was required ....

While George W. Bush came into a nation that was relatively at peace with itself ...

AND HE HAS DONE NOTHING BUT TEAR THINGS ASUNDER .....

While spinning transparent lies to us ..

That are intended to keep us scared ...

And thus, "non-thinking" .....

So that we won't realize that the only real DICTATOR on the face of this earth right now that anyone has to fear ....

Is the one we have right on down there in the big WHITE HOUSE in Washington, D.C. right now ...

The one named George W. Bush .....

"IF, at some point in your life, you should come across ANYTHING better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage - than a MIND satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what is beyond its control - IF you find ANYTHING better than that ...."

"Embrace it without reservations ..."

"It must be an extraordinary thing, indeed ..."

"And enjoy it to the full ..."

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Sadly, Kerry is always looking forward to fighting, not actually engaging in it.

"There you go again." - The Great Constipator

HHHHhhhhhmmmm ....

An interesting observation, jeffmoskin ....

Certainly a thought-provoking statement, indeed ....

And this all goes to exactly what a United States Senator should be, here in OUR America ...

Which is a member of the HIGHER HOUSE in OUR two-part legislature, or law-making body ....

The more mature and seasoned HOUSE which is to balance out the impetuousness of the POPULAR ASSEMBLY ....

I have always thought ..

And always stated ....

That as a United States Senator ....

That is what John Kerry should be ....

And I think that he is finally starting to grow into that role, myself .....

And as a Senator, the nature of any "fight" that he is involved in should be one of wits and wisdom ...

Not fisticuffs ....

Nor demagoguery .......

Such as that employed by this Santorum character from down there in Pennsylvania, somewhere ....

SO ...

Some subletly ....

Or I would have it be so, anyway ....

To me, it is about INFLUENCE .....

And as a United States Senator, John Kerry certainly has much more than I do, or likely will ever have ...

And so ...

When a person like John Kerry is looking out for my interests as a small person here in OUR America, that makes a difference to me ...

Since as a United States Senator, all John Kerry really has is his voice ...

And one vote ....

NOW ....

With respect to John Forbes Kerry, the man behind the United States Senator ....

Back in 2001, I had an outrage committed against me on a public way in the Town of Poestenkill in Rensselaer County in the State of New York ....

An overt HATE CRIME ...

Where a young person came out on the road .....

And did what is called ....

"Cracking my spine" ....

Which is to say ...

Violently wrenching me sideways so as to partially dislocate my lower back ....

And he did this on videotape ...

And as the videotape rolled ...

This young man reviled me for being a disabled veteran .....

"LOOKA HIM SHAKE ..."

"RETARD ..."

"****ING RETARD ..."

And when I went to take action against this individual for this assault ...

The REPUBLICAN Rensselaer County Executive placed the protection of Rensselaer County around this man ...

Who was one of hers ....

And rather than belabor this post with more details, suffice to say, I brought the sanctioning and cover-up of this assault on myself as a disabled veteran here in OUR America to the attention of as many members of the United States Senate as I could reach by e-mail ....

And the only one I heard from ...

Was John Kerry ....

He actually had someone from his office call me at my home in New York State to inform me that he had heard my voice ....

And that he cared about my plight ....

Now ....

That did not change anything ...

So far as I know ...

And I certainly don't blame that on John Kerry .....

And so ....

Maiestas, Snuffysmith, maiestas .....

Why do we never hear of maiestas here in OUR America ...

From any members of OUR senate?

For we still have it ....

Maiestas, that is ...

And repetundae ......

And ambitus ....

We still have all of those things ...

Not as as Americans ...

BUT AS CITIZENS OF A REPUBLIC ....

And there is not a damn thing George W. Bush can do about that ...

As was made patently clear ....

By Cicero ....

By his voluntary exile ...

After he had the Catiline conspirators murdered ....

ABSENT DUE PROCESS OF THE PEOPLE'S LAW ....

Which even the highest magistrates of the Roman Republic ...

Could not contravene .....

And if they could not ...

George W. Bush sure as hell cannot too ....

For as American president, George W. Bush is imbued with NO MORE POWER OR AUTHORITY than that enjoyed by a consul of Rome .....

AND ...

OUR United States Senators ...

Should be the very first to know this ....

Since it is knowledge available to even the most common of OUR American citizens ....

At the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, it was well known what had come before OUR America in terms of other republics on the face of the earth throughout history ...

And so ....

It was believed by the founders that history would provide us with guidance for anything that we might encounter ...

Since in reality ...

With respect to governments ...

There is really nothing new under the sun ...

And what was forty years ago ...

Will likely be coming back ...

Right about now .....

And OUR United States Senate was supposed to be the storehouse of knowledge and wisdom .....

Hey ....

How about that Karl Rove and those "faith-based initiatives" of his, now will you ......

"States Eye Picketing at Soldiers' Funerals"

By CARRIE SPENCER GHOSE, Associated Press Writer Mon Feb 6, 3:15 PM ET

COLUMBUS, Ohio - States are rushing to limit when and where people may protest at funerals — all because of a small Kansas church whose members picket soldiers' burials, arguing that Americans are dying for a country that harbors homosexuals.

During the 1990s, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., went around picketing the funerals of AIDS victims with protest signs that read, "God Hates Fags."

But politicians began paying more attention recently when church members started showing up at the burials of soldiers and Marines killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Legislation is being considered in at least 14 states, and several of the bills moving quickly, with backing from legislative leaders and governors.

If they pass, the bills could set up a clash between privacy and free speech rights, and court challenges are almost certain.

"We're not proposing to silence the speech of the Westboro Baptist Church, as offensive as most of us find that," said Kansas Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, a Republican.

Instead, he said, he is trying to achieve a balance that respects "the rights of families to bury their dead in peace."

The church has about 75 members, most of them belonging to the extended family of Westboro Baptist's pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps.

The church is an independent congregation that preaches a literal reading of the Bible.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, Phelps' daughter and an attorney for the church, said states cannot interfere with their message that the soldiers were struck down by God because they were fighting for a country that harbors homosexuals and adulterers.

Lawmakers are "trying to introduce something that will make them feel better about the holes we're punching in the facade they live under," Phelps-Roper said.

"If they pass a law that gets in our way, they will be violating the Constitution, and we will sue them for that."

Among the states considering such measures: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Some of the bills specify noisy, disruptive behavior or signs with "fighting words," as in Wisconsin.

Some bar protests within one or two hours before or after a funeral starts; others specify distances ranging from 10 car lengths to five blocks away; some include both.

Violations can bring fines of a few hundred dollars, up to 30 days in jail, or more.

Wisconsin is calling for fines of up to $10,000; one of five Oklahoma bills would set a one-year jail sentence.

Missouri's bill was named for Army Spc. Edward Lee Myers, 21, whose wife went to his funeral an hour early to try to avoid protesters.

They were already across the road, holding signs that read "God Hates Fags" and "God Made IEDs," a reference to roadside bombs.

Her 5-year-old son kept asking why "mean people" were outside, undercover agents were in the church, and she worried that angry relatives might start a fight.

"I couldn't even pay my last respects because of everything that was going on," Jean Myers said.

Legislation against funeral protests was also introduced in West Virginia last month after a small knot of protesters from Westboro Baptist demonstrated outside a memorial for the 12 men killed in the Sago Mine disaster.

The protesters held signs reading, "Thank God for Dead Miners," "God Hates Your Tears" and "Miners in Hell," arguing that the miners' deaths were a sign of God's wrath at America for tolerating gays.

"It's just inhuman for a group that says it's coming in the name of the Lord to protest a funeral," said state Delegate Jeff Eldridge, a co-sponsor of the West Virginia bill.

If such restrictions are challenged, the courts will probably look to rulings on laws governing abortion protests, constitutional scholars said.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Florida ban on peaceful picketing within 300 feet of an abortion clinic, but allowed restrictions on behavior that impedes access to a clinic.

However, the courts have allowed restrictions on picketing in front of doctors' houses, saying privacy trumps free speech.

The question is whether a church, funeral home or cemetery is considered private or public during a ceremony, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.
___

On the Net:

Ohio bill: http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID126_HB_484

Missouri bill: http://www.senate.mo.gov/06info/BTS_Web/Bi...nTypeR&BillID90

First Amendment Center: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org

And I agree.

But during the 2004 campaign, a simple "Mr. Bush, you are a liar!" would have been sufficient.

I don't advocate violence.

I don't advocate improper or rude behavior.

But I know that an unrefuted lie soon becomes the truth.

And that is what Kerry let Bush do - - -lie lie lie.

And Kerry never called him on it.

None of which can be denied, jeffmoskin ....

Not at all ...

And in the end ...

Maybe John Kerry just was not meant to be sitting in the White House ...

For a good senator ....

Does not automatically a president make ....

Too much politeness is what I think it was ....

A fear to be seen attacking a sitting president in a time of perceived war ....

Maybe in the end, jeffmoskin, you and I are just people's Tribunes at heart ...

And so ....

I wonder if "CON-JOB CONNIE" and those "intelligence types" in the C and I of A saw this one coming ....

"Four die in fresh cartoon protests"

By Robert Birsel

56 minutes ago

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan police shot dead four people protesting on Tuesday against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that have unleashed waves of rage and soul-searching across the Muslim world and Europe.

Tens of thousands of Muslims demonstrated in the Middle East, Asia and Africa over the drawings, first published in Denmark, then Norway and then several other European countries.

Some Muslim leaders urged restraint.

In Iran, locked in a nuclear stand-off with the West, a crowd pelted the Danish embassy with petrol bombs and stones for a second day.

Protesters hurled a petrol bomb and broke windows at Norway's mission.

The 12 cartoonists whose work touched off the firestorm were reported to be in hiding, frightened, and under police guard.

Iran's best-selling newspaper launched a competition to find the best Holocaust cartoon.

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller called his Iranian counterpart "and demanded in clear terms that Iran does all it can to protect the embassy and Danish lives," a spokesman said.

Tehran has cut trade ties with Denmark.

Afghan crowds attacked a base of NATO Norwegian troops with guns and grenades and police opened fire, bringing the death toll in protests against the cartoons to nine.

F-16 warplanes flew overhead in a show of force while the Norwegians fired tear gas, rubber bullets and warning shots, managing to restore order by early evening.

After rioters set Danish missions ablaze in Syria and Lebanon at the weekend, the European Union presidency issued a strongly-worded warning to 19 countries across the Middle East that they were obliged to protect EU missions.

Iran's ambassador to Vienna said an attack on Austria's embassy in Tehran on Monday was directed at "the EU presidency" rather than Austria itself, current holder of the presidency.

FANNING FLAMES

Accusing "radicals, extremists and fanatics" of fanning the flames of Muslim wrath to "push forward their own agenda," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen repeated a call for dialogue with offended Muslims.

U.S. President George W. Bush called him to express support and solidarity, Rasmussen said.

The White House said both leaders "reiterated the importance of tolerance and respect for religions of all faith and freedom of the press."

Depicting the Prophet is prohibited by Islam.

Moderate Muslims, while condemning the cartoons, have expressed fears radicals are hijacking debate over the boundary between media freedom and religious respect.

Militants in Iraq have called for the seizure and killing of Danes and the boycott of Danish goods over the cartoons, one of which depicts Mohammad wearing a turban resembling a bomb with a burning fuse.

In London, protesters have brandished placards demanding the beheading of those who insulted Islam.

One dressed as a suicide bomber but later apologized.

Copies of a British student paper which reproduced one of the cartoons were hastily shredded and the editor suspended from a student union.

A French court however refused to order the confiscation of a magazine which planned to print the images.

"ALLIANCE OF CIVILISATIONS"

Echoing calls for calm by leaders, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: "I urge all who have authority or influence in different communities ... to engage in dialogue and build a true alliance of civilizations, founded on mutual respect."

Further protests erupted on Tuesday in Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, Djibouti, Gaza and Azerbaijan.

At least 10,000 people marched in the Bangladeshi capital and tens of thousands turned out in Niger's capital Niamey to vent their anger.

State assembly members in mostly Muslim Kano, northern Nigeria, burned Danish flags.

Croatia became the latest country where a newspaper printed the drawings.

The cartoons have appeared in Australia, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Fiji, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United States, Ukraine and Yemen.

Iran, which has withdrawn its ambassador from Denmark, said the cartoons "launched an anti-Islamic and Islamophobic current which will be answered."

A radical Muslim group in Belgium put on its Web site a cartoon of Adolf Hitler in bed with Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who wrote a wartime diary of hiding from Nazi persecution.

Saudi Arabia's Okaz newspaper rejected violence:

"Violence, spreading chaos and destroying facilities ... only distorts Islam's image, especially after our enemies have tried to label us with so many accusations," it said.

Some Danish Muslims agreed. "Fire and stones are taking things too far," said Copenhagen barber Farzan Khatami.

Denmark's Jyllands-Posten daily has apologized for the cartoons, first published last September.

The Danish government has refused to do so, saying it is the paper's responsibility.

A religion is an inner faith in which a person believes.

Vandalism is a behavior that a civilized society must stop.

Otherwise, it is no loger civlized.

"Protests Over Drawings a 'Global Crisis'"

Tue Feb 7, 11:22 AM ET

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Denmark's Prime Minister on Tuesday called protests over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad a global crisis and appealed for calm.

"We are now facing a growing global crisis," Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

"It now is something else than the drawings in Jyllands-Posten."

The Jyllands-Posten, a Danish paper, first published the drawings that have sparked violent protests in Muslim countries worldwide.

They have since been reprinted in media around the world.

Demonstrators in Afghanistan on Tuesday clashed with NATO forces, and three protesters were killed.

"Now it has become an international political matter," he said.

"I urge calm and steadiness."

Outraged Muslim demonstrators, who have set fire to the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon and have held chaotic protests elsewhere, have demanded the Danish government apologize for the cartoons, which Jyllands-Posten printed in September.

But Fogh Rasmussen's statements indicated that Denmark is not contemplating changes in its strategy for responding to the spiraling tensions.

Fogh Rasmussen has insisted that Denmark's press freedom culture means the government cannot apologize for what an independent newspaper does.

The newspaper has apologized for any offense caused to Muslims but has defended its printing of the drawings as a legitimate exercise in freedom of expression.

The drawings — including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb — have touched a raw nerve in part because Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.

"We appeal to Muslims around the world to look beyond the headlines and the rhetoric," Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said alongside Fogh Rasmussen.

Earlier, the Foreign Ministry said the Danish embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, has been temporarily closed because of fears it would be stormed.

Niels Erik Andersen, Denmark's ambassador to Indonesia, said Muslims groups throughout Indonesia had been burning Danish flags and effigies of Fogh Rasmussen.

And now ...

For something ....

Completely different ...

We have ....

"Scientists find 'Lost World' in Indonesia"

By ROBIN McDOWELL, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:26 p.m., Tuesday, February 7, 2006

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Soon after scientists landed by helicopter in the mist-shrouded mountains of one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, they stumbled on a primitive egg-laying mammal that simply allowed itself to be picked up and brought to their field camp.

Describing a "Lost World" -- apparently never visited by humans -- members of the team said Tuesday they also saw large mammals that have been hunted to near-extinction elsewhere and discovered dozens of exotic new species of frogs, butterflies and palms.

"We've only scratched the surface," said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the monthlong trip to the Foja Mountains, an area in the eastern province of Papua with roughly 2 million acres of pristine tropical forest.

"There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the mountain range, accompanied the expedition, and "they were as astounded as we were at how isolated it was," Beehler said.

"As far as they knew, neither of their clans had ever been to the area."

The December expedition was organized by U.S.-based Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and funded by the National Geographic Society and several other organizations.

Minutes after the small team of American, Indonesian and Australian scientists were dropped into a boggy lake bed and set up camp near the mountain range's western summit, they said they encountered a new species of bird -- a red-faced and wattled honeyeater.

The next day they saw Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise, described by hunters in the 19th century and named for the wires that extend from its head in place of a crest.

They watched in amazement as a male bird performed a courtship dance for a female, shaking the long feathers on his head, and later took the first known photograph of the bird.

The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species -- including a microhylid frog less than a half-inch long -- four new butterfly species, and at least five new types of palms.

Among their most memorable experiences were their encounters with the Long-beaked Echidna, members of the primitive egg-laying group of mammals called the Monotremes, which twice allowed themselves to be picked up and brought to the scientists' camp for observation.

Beehler attributed the lack of fear displayed by the long-snouted spine-covered Echidnas (pronounced eh-KID-na) to the fact that they probably had never come into contact with humans.

But other animals, like the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction, were much more shy, he said, and quickly disappeared into the dense forest after being spotted.

Though the scientists' findings will have to be published in scientific journals and reviewed by peers before being officially classified as new species, other environmentalists said the discoveries were hardly surprising in a country renowned for its rich biodiversity.

"There are many species that have not been identified" in Indonesia, said Chairul Saleh of the World Wildlife Fund, which has made hundreds of its own discoveries in the sprawling archipelago in the last 10 years.

Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has killed an estimated 100,000 people, is one of Indonesia's most remote regions geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.

The scientists said they needed six permits before they could legally visit the mountains located on the western side of New Guinea island.

Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum in Adelaide said he and other team members got a glimpse of what the island "was like 50,000 years ago, because there's been no hunting, no impact of transport or anything like that."

Because of the rich diversity in the forest, the group rarely had time to stray more than a few miles from their base camp.

Beehler, vice president of Conservation International's Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, said he hopes to return this year with other scientists.

One of the reasons for the rain forest's isolation, he said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills is so abundant they have no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.

There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.

"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system -- not a single road," Beehler said.

"But clearly, with time, everything is a threat."

"In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan."

"They will be very hungry for logs."

--------

On the Net:

Conservation International, http://www.conservation.org

Yeah.

Sure.

Same prohibition in 10 Commandments.

1. "Thou shalt have no graven images before me"

Didn't stop the great artists of the Renaissance.

There are strict fundy Jews who still (to this day) obey that law.

Moderation, interpretation, tolerance.

Otherwise, what good is it?

"Extremism in the pursuit of Religion is surely a vice." (with apologies to B. Goldwater)

AMEN!

February 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic.

In 2000 and 2004, G.O.P. gunslingers played into the Western myth and mined images of manliness, feminizing Al Gore as a Beta Tree-Hugger, John Kerry as a Waffling War Wimp With a Hectoring Wife and John Edwards as his true bride, the Breck Girl.

Now, in the distaff version of Swift-boating, they are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies, a knife-wielding Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and a snarling Scarlett Johansson in "Match Point." (How many pregnant mistresses does Woody Allen have to kill off in movies before he feels he's reversed Dostoyevsky and proved that if the crime is worth it, there should be no punishment?)

Republicans think that men who already have nagging, bitter women in their lives will not want for president the sort of woman who gave W. a dyspeptic smile or eye-rolling appraisal during State of the Union addresses.

In "Commander in Chief," writers were careful to make Geena Davis's chief executive calm and controlled under pressure — even when her rival, played by Donald Sutherland, made an insulting menopause crack.

The hit on Hillary may seem crude and transparent. But in the void created by dormant Democrats, crouching in what Barack Obama calls "a reactive posture," crude and transparent ploys work for the Republicans. Just look at how far the Bushies' sulfurous scaremongering on terror, and cynical linkage of Saddam and Osama, have gotten them.

The gambit handcuffs Hillary: If she doesn't speak out strongly against President Bush, she's timid and girlie. If she does, she's a witch and a shrew. That plays particularly well in the South, where it would be hard for an uppity Hillary to capture many more Bubbas than the one she already has.

It's the riddle of the Sphinx that has been floating around since the selection of Geraldine Ferraro. Betty Friedan worried then that a woman seen as a threat to men would not get to the White House. But how can a woman who's not a threat to men get there?

The G.O.P. honcho Ken Mehlman kicked off the misogynistic attack on George Stephanopoulos's Sunday show. "I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates," he said. Referring to Hillary's recent taunts about Republicans, he added, "Whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger."

Hillary did not sound angry when she made those comments — she's learned since her tea-and-cookies outburst in the '92 campaign. A man who wants to undermine a woman's arguments can ignore the substance and simply dismiss her as unstable and shrill. It's a hoary tactic: women are more mercurial than men; they get depressed more often and pop pills more often. As a top psychiatrist once told me, women are "hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable."

But as the G.O.P. tars Hillary as hysterical, it is important to note that women are affected by lunar tides only once a month, while Dick Cheney has rampaging hormones every day.

Republicans have also labeled men hysterical (from the Greek for "womb"). Howard Dean was skewered on the Scream. And when John McCain was soaring in the 2000 primaries, Bush supporters viciously whispered that his fits of temper signaled that he had come back from Vietnam with snakes in his head.

Senator McCain went over the top again this week in a letter to Senator Obama. Although Mr. McCain tried to cast his "I'm the reformer — you back off, new guy" letter as "straight talk" after an Obama dis, it was snide and bitchy, more like an angry missive of a spurned lover to an ex-boyfriend than a note from a respected senior senator to a respected junior one.

Mr. McCain could take a lesson from Condi Rice, who gets hyperarticulate and bristly when she's mad, but not bitchy. Or Oprah, whose anger at James Frey had a Mosaic dignity.

Hillary's problem isn't that she's angry. It's that she's not angry enough. From Iraq to Katrina and the assault on the Constitution, from Schiavo to Alito and N.S.A. snooping to Congressional corruption, Hillary has failed to lead in voicing outrage. She's been too busy triangulating and calculating to be good at articulating.

The Republicans can't marginalize Hillary. She has already marginalized herself.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

That charge of graven images was leveled against the Catholic Church as well, if I recall my history ....

Calculating ...

Now ...

There is a word that seems to fit Ms. Hillary, alright ....

It's a funny thing that she came up here to New York to be a United States Senator .....

It must have been for some reason ...

But who knows what that was ....

Outside of Hillary ....

And that makes many people distrust her ....

Sort of a reverse Carpet Bagger .....

She "carpet-bagged" herself up here as a political opportunist ...

And people up here already have a gut-full of them to contend with ..

So one more is really not all that welcome ....

In terms of being "embraced" by the people, anyway, as one of theirs ...

Which Hillary definitely is not .....

I think Maureen Dowd is right ...

IF Hillary is marginalized ...

It was she who drew the lines ...

In such a public way ...

That nobody can help noticing ...

And capitalizing on that ...

If it is to their benefit ...

Such as the REPUBLCIANS are apparently doing ...

According to Ms. Dowd ....

which is why "art" as we know it didn't really get going until the time of the Reformation.

People can be really strange creatures, eh, jeffmoskin ....

The Bible says that God is in ALL things ....

And then ...

What you really have to do ...

To be a GOOD CITIZEN of somewhere or other ....

Is to start subtracting from there .....

Because people are uncomfortable with that, apparently ....

God being in all things, I mean ....

SO ....

ALL THINGS minus one ...

Because of course, God really is not here ...

ALL THINGS minus two .....

Because of course, GOD is really not over there ....

And on ...

And on ...

And on ...

Until eventually ....

God is really nowhere at all ...

Except maybe in Jerry Falwell's pocket ...

Or this DEMAGOGUE Reverend Lusk's ....

Or George W. Bush's for that matter .....

And I wonder who came up with that proscription against pictures of Mohammed the Prophet .....

BECAUSE I DON'T BELIEVE IT WAS HIM ....

It wasn't.

There are four "Hadiths", written about 100 to 200 years after the Prophet's death, which chronicle his deeds and customs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith

Like the Gospels, they were compiled from hand-me-down oral legends, and written to codify things that the "originator" may never in fact have said, done, or even approved of.

And this is my view on all of this "PROPHET" business, jeffmoskin ....

That it is really pretty overblown .....

And if you like to argue, or engage in acts of violence, hanging around prophets is a good place to find fertile ground for that kind of thing ....

The American Indians had a prophet in the 1800's ....

And whatever else he might have accomplished ...

He sure managed to get a bunch of them killed in the "ghost dancing" times ....

And so ...

All the ones who made some profits off of selling bullets and stuff to kill the Indians with during the "ghost dancing" times were quite happy to have that prophet around ...

For a while, anyway ....

And the Chinese also had a prophet ....

And around the same time as Wovoka ....

The Taiping ......

Said to be one of the bloodiest periods in history, period ....

And there was the Mahdi, of course ....

Down there in the Sudan ....

And again, this was in that same period as Wovoka and the Ghost Dance ...

And the Taiping in China ...

Which I find interesting ....

SO ...

What is it with GOD and these prophets, jeffmoskin .....

That might be the question ...

GOD, being from good CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN stock, not a BUSH, of course, but liked by them, nonetheless, is really for PROFITS ....

BUT ...

Being omniscient, and all-knowing, and that kind of stuff ...

GOD knows that PROFITS do not come from nothing ...

And so ..

He or she, in his or her infinite wisdom (not as infinite as a Bush's, of course, but close) sends us a PROPHET ....

So the PROPHET can get some followers ....

So GOD's real people can then make some PROFITS killing off the PROPHET's people ....

Who are not really GOD's people at all ...

Just targets, instead ....

And fillers of body bags, of course ....

Got to have something to justify the use of those body bags, after all ....

And there is good money to be made in the manufacture and sale of body bags ...

I mean, they are a commodity ....

And so ....

Send us some more PROPHETS, God ...

They are good for the American economy ...

And let us be realistic here, folks ....

WHAT ELSE ON EARTH IS THERE REALLY, BESIDES THAT?

Too many sharp weapons among people ....

And the nation grows confused ....

Too much cunning strategy among people .....

AND STRANGE THINGS START TO HAPPEN ....

- Lao Tze, Tao Te Ching

Like George W. Bush being elected president of the United States of America .....

Not once ...

But twice ....

And then having the gall to attribute that to the goodness of God towards the REPUBLICAN PARTY ...

Of America ...

And the world ....

"Cartoon Protesters Direct Anger at U.S."

By NOOR KHAN, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 19 minutes ago

QALAT, Afghanistan - Police killed four people Wednesday as Afghans enraged over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad marched on a U.S. military base in a volatile southern province, directing their anger not against Europe but America.

The U.S. base was targeted because the United States "is the leader of Europe and the leading infidel in the world," said Sher Mohammed, a 40-year-old farmer who suffered a gunshot wound while taking part in the demonstration in the city of Qalat.

"They are all the enemy of Islam."

"They are occupiers in our country and must be driven out," Mohammed said.

Wednesday's violence began when hundreds of protesters tried to storm the U.S. base, said Ghulam Nabi Malakhail, a provincial police chief.

When warning shots failed to deter them, police shot into the crowd, killing four and wounding 11, he said.

Flying rocks injured eight police and one Afghan soldier, he said.

Two Pakistanis arrested for allegedly firing at police were being questioned to see whether they were linked to al-Qaida, Malakhail said.

Some officials accuse al-Qaida of inciting three days of bloody riots across Afghanistan that have left 11 dead.

Protesters also burned three fuel tankers waiting to deliver gasoline to the base, said Malakhail.

He said U.S. troops fired warning shots into the air.

U.S. military spokesman Col. James Yonts said the American forces fired flares above the crowd, but he said it was not clear whether they fired their weapons.

Muslims around the world have demonstrated over the images — including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb — printed in Western media.

Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of the prophet.

In Baghdad, Iraq's top Shiite political leader criticized attacks on foreign embassies by Muslims.

"We value and appreciate peaceful Islamic protests," said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

"But we are against the idea of attacking embassies and other official sites."

In the West Bank, about 300 Palestinians overpowered a Palestinian police detail and attacked an international observer mission in the city of Hebron.

Sixty members of the mission were inside, said Gunhild Forselv, spokeswoman for the Temporary International Presence in Hebron.

A few protesters forced their way in, where unarmed observers waved clubs in an attempt to drive them off.

Police reinforcements eventually restored order.

Muslims also demonstrated in Indian-controlled Kashmir, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Turkey.

In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Iran and Syria of instigating protests in their countries, and President Bush called upon governments to stop the violence and protect the lives of diplomats overseas.

The United States and other countries were looking into whether extremist groups may be inciting protesters to riot, said Yonts, the U.S. spokesman in Afghanistan.

Iranian vice president Isfandiar Rahim Mashaee rejected Rice's assertion that Iran was inflaming Muslim anger over the cartoons.

"That is 100 percent a lie," Mashaee said in Jakarta, Indonesia.

"It is without attribution."

Zahor Afghan, editor for Erada, Afghanistan's most respected newspaper, said the riots in his country have surprised him.

"No media in Afghanistan has published or broadcast pictures of these cartoons."

"The radio has been reporting on it, but there are definitely people using this to incite violence against the presence of foreigners in Afghanistan," he said.

Afghans who rioted Wednesday said they heard about the cartoons on the radio but none questioned had seen printed versions.

"The radio is talking about them all the time."

"Everybody heard about them this way," said 28-year-old shopkeeper Ramatullah, who uses only name.

Wednesday's riot erupted despite an appeal from Afghanistan's top Islamic organization, the Ulama Council, for an end to the violence.

"Islam says it's all right to demonstrate but not to resort to violence."

"This must stop," senior cleric Mohammed Usman told The Associated Press.

"We condemn the cartoons but this does not justify violence."

"These rioters are defaming the name of Islam."

In France, President Jacques Chirac asked media to avoid offending religious beliefs as another French newspaper reprinted the caricatures.

The satirical French weekly Charlie-Hebdo also printed a new drawing under the headline "Muhammad Overwhelmed by the Fundamentalists" that showed the prophet with his head in his hands, remarking, "It's hard to be loved by idiots."

And in that same cartoon, there stood George W. Bush saying back to Muhammad, "Oh, I don't know, I'm doing pretty well by it, here in America ..."

And moving right along here, with the news ...

As is our habit in here each day ....

We have ....

THE ECONOMY ....

Will the housing "BUBBLE" ever burst ...

Or is it a figment of someone's wild imagination ...

In the first place ....

HYPE continually spewed by these realtor associations so as is to keep us panicked and off balance .....

"Home sales expected to slow, but not sink in '06"

By Sue Kirchhoff, USA TODAY

Wed Feb 8, 7:01 AM ET

U.S. home sales are expected to slow in 2006, though remaining near peak levels, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.

Realtors' chief economist David Lereah predicts existing home sales will dip 4.7% to 6.74 million units, while new-home sales decline 8.5% to 1.17 million units.

That would still be the third-best year on record.

In another sign the housing market might be cooling after five record-setting years, luxury home builder Toll Bros. said signed contracts in the first quarter of 2006 declined 21% from the same, record period in 2005.

"Selling homes this first quarter was certainly more difficult," said CEO Robert Toll.

"We experienced softening demand ... in a number of markets."

Toll said activity seems to be improving, though speculative buying has eased off.

Economists, including Lereah, have long predicted the housing market will slow this year, partly because of Federal Reserve short-term interest rate increases, which affect mortgage rates.

Prices have risen so fast in some hot markets on the East and West coasts that affordability is a problem.

Government data show existing home sales drifting down in recent months, though new-home sales perked up last month.

A slower housing market could affect the economy by weakening construction employment and slowing consumer spending as homeowners have less ability to extract home equity.

However, a report by mortgage giant Freddie Mac Tuesday indicated consumers continue to borrow against the value of their homes.

Fully 80% of Freddie Mac-owned loans that were refinanced in the fourth quarter of 2005 resulted in new mortgages at least 5% higher than the original loan balance.

That's up from 73% in the third quarter.

"The overwhelming majority of these borrowers were extracting home equity rather than trying to reduce their monthly payments," says Freddie Mac chief economist Frank Nothaft, adding consumers were using cash-out refinancing because 30-year mortgage rates near 6.25% are below home equity rates, linked to the 7.5% prime rate[/u].

People with adjustable-rate mortgages might also be refinancing into fixed-rate loans.

Freddie Mac expects homeowners to extract $117 billion in equity from their homes in 2006, down from $243 billion in 2005.

The Realtors predict the national median existing-home price will rise 5% this year to $219,200.

The median new home price should rise 5.7% to $250,900, with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hitting 6.9%.

"Home sales are a little lower than projected, but they can be sustained around current levels," Lereah said.

What we really have is this "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" program of George W. Bush's .....

Which no one seems to really understand ...

At least up here where I am ...

WHAT EXACTLY IS IT THAT THESE CHILDREN WILL NOT BE KEPT AWAY FROM?

I mean ...

NO child left behind ...

That implies a line of children ....

And someone is taking them somewhere ...

Or someone is leading them someplace ....

And someone else is watching, apparently, to make sure none escape ....

And up here, in the cold country ...

Where there is really not much to do during the winter ...

Well, us yokels get to sitting around the fire ...

And we get to talking ....

And musing ....

And we consider whose program this really is ....

Which is George W. Bush's ...

And we consider this man ...

Who is violent ....

And who is in favor of torturing OUR fellow human beings ...

And we consider that HIS "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" program really is intended to let the BUSH MILITARY MACHINE have access to America's children ....

ALL OF THEM ...

For these wars that George W. Bush intends to start all over the world ...

As he and his go about erasing national boundaries ....

From Gaza and Iraq all the way through Indonesia ...

And beyond ...

As they IMPOSE REPUBLICAN DOMINATION and TYRANNY on all the world ....

And what we figure ...

Based on the evidence before us up here ....

Is that George W. Bush wants to ensure that NO AMERICAN CHILD IS LEFT BEHIND FROM HAVING TO LIVE IN FEAR EACH DAY AS THEY TRY AND COPE WITH THE VIOLENCE in their school buildings ....

That is providing George W. Bush and the REPUBLICAN WAR MACHINE with the killers they need for today, tommarow and the day after that ....

To take over the world ...

And thereby make it safe for REPUBLICANS ...

But no one else, really ....

And certainly not the non-violent children ...

Here in OUR America ....

I mean, what the hey ...

It is a dog-eat-dog world out there, despite what these women-men Democrats and LIB-RAWLS might have to say about it, over a glass of chardonay ......

And only the tough can really survive ....

And those are the ones that George W. Bush is looking for ...

So as to be able to flesh out his MILITARY JUGGERNAUGHT with fresh meat for cannon fodder ...

And so ....

Begin the process of "bringing forth" those new recruits ...

While they still are in kindergarten ...

"Teachers warn of violent students - Livingston staff asks for formation of alternative middle school in Albany"

By BRIAN NEARING, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Thursday, February 9, 2006

ALBANY -- Discipline is so bad at Philip Livingston Magnet Academy that nearly a fifth of the students should be removed to a more restrictive alternative school, according to a teacher who pleaded to the school board for help.

Sixth-grade science teacher Susan Paultre said the middle school has "become a dangerous place" where students strike and stab at each other with sharpened ends of rattail combs.

"Threatening staff members and classmates, using language that isn't even fit for a brothel, bringing in weapons; gang activity and violence have become the norm, not the exception," said Paultre, flanked by about 30 Livingston teachers and staff as she addressed the board at its meeting Tuesday.

"We ask, no, we beg the school board to acknowledge our problem," Paultre said.

"We desperately need an alternative placement for those middle school student who make our school unsafe daily."

A full-time city police officer is assigned to the school, but more security is needed, Paultre said in an interview on Wednesday.

During her eight years on the faculty, she said, she has been shoved by students who then were suspended only to return and repeat the behavior.

She estimated that as many as 100 of the 560 students at Livingston must be removed to restore order.

The district has two middle schools -- Livingston and Hackett -- but no alternative middle school like that in place for disruptive high school students.

Harriet Gibbons High School is at capacity, with more than 200 students.

In a statement released Wednesday, District Superintendent Eva Joseph said the teachers' concerns are "always important to us."

"We appreciate hearing their perspective regarding this important matter and we will respond to their suggestions."

Joseph said safety issues will be studied by the new Youth Safety Task Force, which includes the superintendent and Police Chief James Tuffey, and by new safety committees that have been formed at each city school.

Paultre said the committees must propose specific solutions to address student misconduct.

"We want to see action," she said.

Brian Nearing can be reached at 454-5094 or by e-mail at bnearing@timesunion.com.

Out here in Kah-lee-FAWN-Yah, that is the median price of a doghouse.

A fixer-upper at that.

Minus the dog.

Is that because a coyote ate the dog?

And getting back to this on-going story about the cartoons ....

And the uproar ....

It seems if you look hard enough ...

There is a BUCK to made in anything ..

And so ....

"European Papers Benefit in Cartoon Uproar"

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 10 minutes ago

PARIS - Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

That street corner cry of yesteryear is resonating at some European publications that have enjoyed a boom in sales and Web traffic after printing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have stoked outrage across the Islamic world.

Denmark's biggest-circulation broadsheet, Jyllands-Posten, triggered the controversy in September by publishing 12 cartoons of the prophet, including one showing his turban as a bomb.

Its weekday circulation of about 154,000 hasn't moved much.

But for newspapers in France and Norway that reprinted the drawings with much international ado, sometimes in defense of free speech, the caricatures have become a profile boost and tonic for lackluster sales.

If there's a lesson, it's an old one: Controversy sells.

Mohamed Bechari, a vice president at the French Council of the Muslim Faith, France's largest Islamic organization, said he thinks French readers are buying up the newspapers out of "curiosity" — not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeling.

"Here's some advice to those newspapers today facing ruin, bankruptcy or collapse: All you need do is insult Muslims and Islam, and sales will get hot as blazes," he told The Associated Press at a Paris conference Thursday on promoting dialogue between the West and the Muslim world, convened in response to the furor over the drawings.

Demonstrators in Syria, Lebanon and Iran have attacked Western embassies.

Protests and boycotts of Danish goods erupted in numerous Arab and Islamic countries.

Three days of riots across Afghanistan left 11 people dead.

France Soir's Feb. 1 issue with the drawings sold 40 percent more than the usual daily circulation, and executives are tantalized that the newspaper's souped-up profile could translate into long-term gains.

"Over time, it could change the brand image of France Soir ... it shows we're capable of running scoops — and leading a battle for freedom of the press," circulation director Philippe Soing told the AP.

Satirical French weekly Charlie-Hebdo reprinted the drawings Wednesday, behind a cover page showing Muhammad with his head in his hands, crying and saying: "It's hard to be loved by idiots."

The paper quickly sold out all 160,000 copies of the issue — 60,000 more than the typical weekly run — and was printing another 160,000, spokeswoman Liliane Roudiere said.

Print sales at Norway's Magazinet, an Evangelical Christian newspaper, have been flat since it ran the drawings Jan. 10.

But daily hits on its Web site have more than tripled, to about 800,000, said Vegard Kobberdal, a consultant for the thrice-weekly paper.

Spanish daily El Mundo, which posted some of the images on its Web site, said it was impossible to determine which news item was affecting sales.

The rise of the Internet, rising competition for advertising money and the advent of free dailies across Europe have meant tough times for many newspapers.

France Soir, a legendary daily whose circulation hovered around a million a day in the late 1960s, is now in financial straits, and the paper is up for sale.

"If we wanted to use this to save France Soir, we'd need a story like this every day, and I dare hope that there won't be," editor-in-chief Arnaud Levy, with a bodyguard in tow, told the AP at the conference.

___

Associated Press Writers Harold Heckle in Madrid, Doug Mellgren in Oslo and Paul Duke in Paris contributed to this report.

And looking back in on this potentially money-making opportunity for these country folks up here to exploit as one of the BENEFITS of GLOBAL WARMING ....

We have ....

"Landslide piques some downstream worry"

By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, February 7, 2006

GREENPORT -- Emergency responders and engineers continue to monitor the site at which a landslide into Claverack Creek last week created a dam that could threaten residents downstream.

The collapse Thursday of a 60-foot-high, 300-yard-long section of embankment in the Columbia County town also caused high water near the bridge that takes Route 66 over the creek, Fire Chief Gary Mazzacano said.

The town set up a command site at the Sons and Daughters of Italy Lodge on Bridge Street near the landslide and a communications system with officials in the hamlets of Stottville and Stockport, both in the town of Stockport and downstream from the landslide.

Water levels there could reach four to five times the creek's normal level.

About 25 homes have been identified as being in potential danger.

"They've been advised there could be flooding if this lets go," Mazzacano said.

Mazzacano said, so far, water levels at the dam site are not continuing to rise; the water found an outlet around a stand of trees and the earthen dam.

Heavy rains could change that.

"Thank God we aren't getting any more rain," Mazzacano said.

"If it gets colder, that would be better."

end quotes

NOW ...

We have these White House types telling us that GLOBAL WARMING will create a lot of new economic opportunities ....

And so ...

Must be these Greenport folks got a real MONEY-MAKER on their hands here ....

If they could only figure out how to work the crank ...

To get that MONEY-MAKER making some money ...

For them ...

Because right now ...

It seems to me that it is costing them a bunch instead ....

AH ...

HHHHmmm ...

Maybe they are Democrats ....

And so ...

Just can't see a real MONEY-MAKING OPPORTUNITY ....

When it is staring them in the face ....

There was quite a good photo this morning accompanying this following story of Dick Cheney and the famous "BIG GRIZ" snarling look that he cultivated up there in the tourist bars and boutiques of trendy Jackson Hole, Wyoming ....

It is something how that man can peel his lips back just so, and look so much like a big, rampant grizzly bear ....

They say that at one time, old Dick was quite a tourist attraction himself up there ....

Every now and then, with the right prodding they say, old Dick would all of a sudden rear up to his full height, peel his lips back in that rictus he still sports to this day, and then he would let out his now-famous "BIG GRIZ" roar ....

And the tourists would take pictures ....

And clap their hands ...

And exclaim how very rustic it all was ....

And look where that got Dick Cheney ...

Just goes to show ...

If you got the right act, well, you can go just about anywhere ...

Right, SCOOTER ....

"Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks"

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 20 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.

The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president.

Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public.

It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.

In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.

"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment.

"Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.

William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.

Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters.

He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.

Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger.

The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.

"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said.

"The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious."

"If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."

In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.

In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.

Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said.

"Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.

The famous REPUBLICAN REFORM AGENDA ....

What a crock of pure crap-ola that all was ....

Aaaahhhh, yes ....

Those wily REPUBLICANS ....

There they all were .....

Just days ago, it seems ...

GOT TO CLEAN HOUSE ....

Make the American people think that they got ethics, all of a sudden ....

Yesterday, I heard on FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED that this new guy they got in there to replace "TWO-GUN TEXAS TOMMY", this Boehner, that he was backing way off on any kind of ethics reform for the REPUBLICANS in OUR Congress ....

Not really needed is what he is saying ...

The fault did not lie with the REPUBLICANS ....

The fault did not lie with Abramoff ....

IT REALLY WAS THE FAULT OF THE INDIAN TRIBES ....

They need to be regulated more ...

NOT THE REPUBLICANS ....

Hey, America ...

Let's face it ..

The REPUBLICANS are only selling what everyone wants to buy, anyway ..

So where is the harm in that, says Boehner ....

After all, a "working guy" has to make his living, too, don't he ....

"Boehner Rents Apartment Owned by Lobbyist in D.C."

By Thomas B. Edsall and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; Page A03

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who was elected House majority leader last week, is renting his Capitol Hill apartment from a veteran lobbyist whose clients have direct stakes in legislation Boehner has co-written and that he has overseen as chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee.

The relationship between Boehner, John D. Milne and Milne's wife, Debra R. Anderson, underscores how intertwined senior lawmakers have become with the lobbyists paid to influence legislation.

Boehner's primary residence is in West Chester, Ohio, but for $1,600 a month, he rents a two-bedroom basement apartment near the House office buildings on Capitol Hill owned by Milne, Boehner spokesman Don Seymour said yesterday.

Boehner's monthly rent appears to be similar to other rentals of two-bedroom English basement apartments close to the House side of the Capitol in Southeast, based on a review of apartment listings.

Milne's clients -- including restaurant chains and health insurance companies -- hired him to lobby on issues at the heart of Boehner's work, including minimum-wage increases, small-business tax breaks and tax-free savings accounts to help cover insurance costs, congressional lobbying records show.

In the weeks preceding last week's GOP leadership elections, Boehner acknowledged his close ties to the lobbying community, but he assured Republican lawmakers that all of his relationships were ethical and he campaigned on a platform of change and reform.

Seymour reiterated that message last night.

"John Milne does not lobby John Boehner on any issue and has not lobbied him on any issue during the time period in which John has been renting the property," he said.

Seymour added that he does not know if other members of Milne's mCapitol Management firm have lobbied Boehner.

"We really have no idea on this one," he said.

"We'd have to know who else works for those firms, which we don't offhand."

"It's possible the answer is yes, but we don't know."

House members may not accept anything from lobbyists worth more than $50.

If Boehner is paying market-rate rent, it would appear he is not violating that rule.

Boehner's work closely coincides with the interests of Milne.

In 2002, the House approved the Economic Security and Worker Assistance Act, a tax measure originally drafted by Boehner, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.) as the Back to Work Act.

The measure eventually was signed into law.

Lobbying disclosure forms indicate that one of Milne's clients, Fortis Health Plans, hired him to lobby the Economic Security and Worker Assistance Act.

Another client, the Buca di Beppo chain of Italian restaurants, hired Milne to push the Small Business Tax Fairness Act, which would allow restaurants to deduct the cost of investments at a faster pace.

The measure was introduced by Rep. Kay Granger (R-Tex.) in 2003, with Boehner as one of 15 co-sponsors.

Many of its provisions have since become law.

Fortis, now called Assurant Health, also asked Milne to push Health Savings Accounts, the tax-free savings accounts established by Congress to help with health care costs not covered by high-deductible plans.

Boehner is a proponent of such accounts, which President Bush is targeting for a major expansion.

Buca di Beppo and another restaurant chain, Parasole Restaurant Holdings Inc., also hired Milne to lobby on the minimum wage and tax credits for tips, issues directly under the Education and the Workforce Committee's purview.

The restaurant industry has long fought minimum-wage increases, seeking instead to augment restaurant wages with tips that become more valuable if they can avoid taxation.

Despite numerous attempts by Democrats and some pro-labor Republicans, the minimum wage has not been raised since 1997, when it was lifted from $4.75 to $5.15.

Since then, inflation has eroded its value to near-record lows.

That such companies would hire Milne is no mystery.

His firm overtly promotes its connections to influential lawmakers.

"At mCapitol Management, we specialize in leveraging relationships on our clients' behalf."

"Our bipartisan team's unique resources allow our clients unparalleled access at the international, federal, state and local level," the firm's Web site boasts.

Milne could not be reached by phone or e-mail.

His wife, Anderson, who is on the advisory board of mCapitol, said she and her husband have been friends with Boehner and his wife for years.

After buying the house in 2004, she said, she mentioned at a social gathering that they had a place to rent, and Boehner said he was interested.

Anderson described Boehner as an "excellent tenant" who pays his rent on time.

Seymour said Boehner originally met Anderson in the early 1990s, when she worked in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

Let's be realistic.

Tenants that pay their rent on time are hard to find.

So -----


Why be picky about a few minor transgressions in the realm of ethics?

To paraphrase our brilliant minister of defense -----

You make rules and laws with the Congress you have -

Not the Congress you want.

A.B.

The very best that money can buy, they say ....

Our Congress boys and girls ...

And hey ...

With respect to this Boehner ....

A "working man" has got to make a living, too ...

And so ...

And that was a good point you made above, Mr. A.B. .....

Having a tenant who pays the rent on time is important ...

And so ....

And talk about HACK-O-CRATS ....

In the HACKOCRACY of George W. Bush ....

Here's another one gone ....

And HOORAY for that say I ....

"Man Who Left NASA Says He's Under Attack"

Thu Feb 9, 9:35 PM ET

COLLEGE STATION, Texas - A staffer who resigned from NASA after he was accused of restricting access to a noted climate scientist said Thursday he was targeted because of his political ties.

George C. Deutsch, 24, resigned from the agency's public relations department earlier this week.

"What you do have is hearsay coming from a handful of people who have clear partisan ties and they are really coming after me as a Bush appointee," he told radio station WTAW.

"I was an easy target."

"I was low-hanging fruit."

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Deutsch attempted to limit reporters' access to Jim Hansen, a noted NASA climate scientist, and insisted that a Web designer insert the word "theory" before any mention of the Big Bang.

Deutsch denied the allegations.

"I have never been told to censor science, to squelch anything or to insert religion into any issue, absolutely not," said the former Bush campaign worker.

HEY, BROWNIE - YOU'RE DOING ONE HECK OF A JOB!

"Ex-FEMA Chief Shifts Katrina Blame to DHS"

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

8 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown, the face of the government's listless response to Hurricane Katrina, said Friday he told top Bush officials the day the storm howled ashore of massive flooding in New Orleans and warned "we were realizing our worst nightmare."

More defiant than defensive, Brown told senators he dealt directly with White House officials the day of the Aug. 29 storm, including chief of staff Andrew Card and deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin.

He also said officials from the Department of Homeland Security were getting regular briefings that day.

Administration officials have said they did not realize the severe damage Katrina had caused until after the storm had passed.

Under oath, Brown told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that he could not explain why his appeals failed to produce a faster response.

"I expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything they could ... that I didn't want to hear anybody say that we couldn't do everything they humanly could to respond to this," Brown said about a video conference with administration officials — in which President Bush briefly participated — the day before Katrina hit.

"Because I knew in my gut this was the bad one."

In the end, the storm claimed more than 1,300 lives, uprooted hundreds of thousands more and caused tens of billions in damage.

The devastation in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities left Americans with enduring images of their countrymen dying in flooded nursing homes and pleading for rescue from rooftops.

Brown, in his second Capitol Hill appearance since Katrina, told his side to the senators five months after he quit under fire as chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He agreed with some senators who characterized him as a scapegoat for government failures.

"I feel somewhat abandoned," said Brown,

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know that New Orleans' levees were breached until Aug. 30.

Bush at the time said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

At an occasionally contentious White House briefing Friday, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

"We knew of the flooding that was going on," McClellan said.

"That's why our top priority was focused on saving lives."

"... The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that's the way it should be."

After three hours of testimony, Brown was handed a subpoena ordering him to reappear in front of a House panel investigating the storm response.

Brown is expected to be questioned by House investigators this weekend — days before the panel is expected to release its findings on the storm.

Recounting conference calls that described initial damage reports the day Katrina hit, Brown scoffed at claims that Homeland Security didn't know about the devastation's scope until the next day.

He called those claims "just baloney."

Some senators suggested Brown look inward before pointing the finger elsewhere.

"You're not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies," said Norm Coleman, R-Minn.

"Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this."

Brown responded: "That's very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government."

The disjointed federal response, Brown said, was in part the result of FEMA being swallowed in 2003 by the newly created Homeland Security Department, which he said was focused on fighting terrorism.

Natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security," he said.

Had there been a report that "a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that," he added.

Some senators attempted to trace the failures back to the White House.

"You quite appropriately and admirably wanted to get the word to the president as quickly as you could," said Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., asking about Brown's conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29.

"Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?"

Brown answered: "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true."

Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, suggested Brown may have delayed the federal response by cutting Homeland Security out of the loop about the levee failures and going straight to the White House.

"I think I now understand why Secretary Chertoff says he didn't know," Bennett said.

"The reason he didn't know is because you didn't think it important to tell him."

Brown said he communicated directly with the White House instead of Homeland Security because FEMA's parent agency "just bogged things down."

Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse:

It is now obvious the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam's long-gone WMD program and certainly less to do to do with fighting International terrorism than it has to do with gaining strategic control over Iraq's hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintain the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9698.htm

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faes...ar-in-iraq.html

Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
Paul R. Pillar
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006


Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

PAUL R. PILLAR is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP

The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments.

Public discussion of prewar intelligence on Iraq has focused on the errors made in assessing Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons programs. A commission chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Senator Charles Robb usefully documented the intelligence community's mistakes in a solid and comprehensive report released in March 2005. Corrections were indeed in order, and the intelligence community has begun to make them.

At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however mistaken that view may have been.

In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration, congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and intelligence services. But in making this defense, the White House also inadvertently pointed out the real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive its decision to go to war. A view broadly held in the United States and even more so overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place. That the administration arrived at so different a policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam was driven by other factors -- namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.

A MODEL UPENDED

The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and policymaking sharply separates the two functions. The intelligence community collects information, evaluates its credibility, and combines it with other information to help make sense of situations abroad that could affect U.S. interests. Intelligence officers decide which topics should get their limited collection and analytic resources according to both their own judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers thus influence which topics intelligence agencies address but not the conclusions that they reach. The intelligence community, meanwhile, limits its judgments to what is happening or what might happen overseas, avoiding policy judgments about what the United States should do in response.

In practice, this distinction is often blurred, especially because analytic projections may have policy implications even if they are not explicitly stated. But the distinction is still important. National security abounds with problems that are clearer than the solutions to them; the case of Iraq is hardly a unique example of how similar perceptions of a threat can lead people to recommend very different policy responses. Accordingly, it is critical that the intelligence community not advocate policy, especially not openly. If it does, it loses the most important basis for its credibility and its claims to objectivity. When intelligence analysts critique one another's work, they use the phrase "policy prescriptive" as a pejorative, and rightly so.

The Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq did not just blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. (The military made extensive use of intelligence in its war planning, although much of it was of a more tactical nature.) Congress, not the administration, asked for the now-infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, although few members of Congress actually read it. (According to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary.) As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war.

Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war. On the issue that mattered most, the intelligence community judged that Iraq probably was several years away from developing a nuclear weapon. The October 2002 NIE also judged that Saddam was unlikely to use WMD against the United States unless his regime was placed in mortal danger.

Before the war, on its own initiative, the intelligence community considered the principal challenges that any postinvasion authority in Iraq would be likely to face. It presented a picture of a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold a long, difficult, and turbulent transition. It projected that a Marshall Plan-type effort would be required to restore the Iraqi economy, despite Iraq's abundant oil resources. It forecast that in a deeply divided Iraqi society, with Sunnis resentful over the loss of their dominant position and Shiites seeking power commensurate with their majority status, there was a significant chance that the groups would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it. And it anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks -- including by guerrilla warfare -- unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam.

In addition, the intelligence community offered its assessment of the likely regional repercussions of ousting Saddam. It argued that any value Iraq might have as a democratic exemplar would be minimal and would depend on the stability of a new Iraqi government and the extent to which democracy in Iraq was seen as developing from within rather than being imposed by an outside power. More likely, war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives -- and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East.

STANDARD DEVIATIONS

The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- "cherry-picking" -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and noted how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had been to developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His conclusion -- at odds with that of the intelligence community -- was that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."

In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy that prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected pieces of raw intelligence to use in its public case for war, leaving the intelligence community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable. The best-known example was the assertion by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore in Africa. U.S. intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly. But the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it as information from British sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching for the intelligence.

The reexamination of prewar public statements is a necessary part of understanding the process that led to the Iraq war. But a narrow focus on rhetorical details tends to overlook more fundamental problems in the intelligence-policy relationship. Any time policymakers, rather than intelligence agencies, take the lead in selecting which bits of raw intelligence to present, there is -- regardless of the issue -- a bias. The resulting public statements ostensibly reflect intelligence, but they do not reflect intelligence analysis, which is an essential part of determining what the pieces of raw reporting mean. The policymaker acts with an eye not to what is indicative of a larger pattern or underlying truth, but to what supports his case.

Another problem is that on Iraq, the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in an intelligence-laden presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council a month before the war began. It was also true in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.

But the greatest discrepancy between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD (there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the "war on terror" and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood.

The issue of possible ties between Saddam and al Qaeda was especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a public case for war. In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be "linked" to almost anyone else if enough effort is made to find evidence of casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the same breath, or indications of common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a "relationship," ignoring the important question of whether a given regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather than cooperative.

The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet it was drawn into a public effort to support that notion. To be fair, Secretary Powell's presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the presentation was clearly meant to create the impression that one existed. To the extent that the intelligence community was a party to such efforts, it crossed the line into policy advocacy -- and did so in a way that fostered public misconceptions contrary to the intelligence community's own judgments.

VARIETIES OF POLITICIZATION

In its report on prewar intelligence concerning Iraqi WMD, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said it found no evidence that analysts had altered or shaped their judgments in response to political pressure. The Silberman-Robb commission reached the same conclusion, although it conceded that analysts worked in an "environment" affected by "intense" policymaker interest. But the method of investigation used by the panels -- essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted -- would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization. Such attempts are rare and, when they do occur (as with former Undersecretary of State John Bolton's attempts to get the intelligence community to sign on to his judgments about Cuba and Syria), are almost always unsuccessful. Moreover, it is unlikely that analysts would ever acknowledge that their own judgments have been politicized, since that would be far more damning than admitting more mundane types of analytic error.

The actual politicization of intelligence occurs subtly and can take many forms. Context is all-important. Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts -- for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success -- felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

On the issue of Iraqi WMD, dozens of analysts throughout the intelligence community were making many judgments on many different issues based on fragmentary and ambiguous evidence. The differences between sound intelligence analysis (bearing in mind the gaps in information) and the flawed analysis that actually was produced had to do mainly with matters of caveat, nuance, and word choice. The opportunities for bias were numerous. It may not be possible to point to one key instance of such bending or to measure the cumulative effect of such pressure. But the effect was probably significant.

A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of analysis: reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time making it through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones that do not. (Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the judgments of the analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also the concurrence of those who cover related topics and the review, editing, and remanding of it by several levels of supervisors, from branch chiefs to senior executives.) The Silberman-Robb commission noted such inconsistencies in the Iraq case but chalked it up to bad management. The commission failed to address exactly why managers were inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of laying unwelcome analysis on a policymaker's desk.

Another form of politicization with a similar cause is the sugarcoating of what otherwise would be an unpalatable message. Even the mostly prescient analysis about the problems likely to be encountered in postwar Iraq included some observations that served as sugar, added in the hope that policymakers would not throw the report directly into the burn bag, but damaging the clarity of the analysis in the process.

But the principal way that the intelligence community's work on Iraq was politicized concerned the specific questions to which the community devoted its energies. As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer. In the case of Iraq, there was also the matter of sheer quantity of output -- not just what the intelligence community said, but how many times it said it. On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.

That is what happened when the Bush administration repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war. The Bush team approached the community again and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam-al Qaeda relationship -- calling on analysts not only to turn over additional Iraqi rocks, but also to turn over ones already examined and to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after all. The result was an intelligence output that -- because the question being investigated was never put in context -- obscured rather than enhanced understanding of al Qaeda's actual sources of strength and support.

This process represented a radical departure from the textbook model of the relationship between intelligence and policy, in which an intelligence service responds to policymaker interest in certain subjects (such as "security threats from Iraq" or "al Qaeda's supporters") and explores them in whatever direction the evidence leads. The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of argument -- that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda -- which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision.

One possible consequence of such politicization is policymaker self-deception. A policymaker can easily forget that he is hearing so much about a particular angle in briefings because he and his fellow policymakers have urged the intelligence community to focus on it. A more certain consequence is the skewed application of the intelligence community's resources. Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials. It is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a result.

The issue became even more time-consuming as the conflict between intelligence officials and policymakers escalated into a battle, with the intelligence community struggling to maintain its objectivity even as policymakers pressed the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al Qaeda, and its briefings accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.

For the most part, the intelligence community's own substantive judgments do not appear to have been compromised. (A possible important exception was the construing of an ambiguous, and ultimately recanted, statement from a detainee as indicating that Saddam's Iraq provided jihadists with chemical or biological training.) But although the charge of faulty analysis was never directly conveyed to the intelligence community itself, enough of the charges leaked out to create a public perception of rancor between the administration and the intelligence community, which in turn encouraged some administration supporters to charge intelligence officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the president's policies. This poisonous atmosphere reinforced the disinclination within the intelligence community to challenge the consensus view about Iraqi WMD programs; any such challenge would have served merely to reaffirm the presumptions of the accusers.

PARTIAL REPAIRS

Although the Iraq war has provided a particularly stark illustration of the problems in the intelligence-policy relationship, such problems are not confined to this one issue or this specific administration. Four decades ago, the misuse of intelligence about an ambiguous encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin figured prominently in the Johnson administration's justification for escalating the military effort in Vietnam. Over a century ago, the possible misinterpretation of an explosion on a U.S. warship in Havana harbor helped set off the chain of events that led to a war of choice against Spain. The Iraq case needs further examination and reflection on its own. But public discussion of how to foster a better relationship between intelligence officials and policymakers and how to ensure better use of intelligence on future issues is also necessary.

Intelligence affects the nation's interests through its effect on policy. No matter how much the process of intelligence gathering itself is fixed, the changes will do no good if the role of intelligence in the policymaking process is not also addressed. Unfortunately, there is no single clear fix to the sort of problem that arose in the case of Iraq. The current ill will may not be reparable, and the perception of the intelligence community on the part of some policymakers -- that Langley is enemy territory -- is unlikely to change. But a few steps, based on the recognition that the intelligence-policy relationship is indeed broken, could reduce the likelihood that such a breakdown will recur.

On this point, the United States should emulate the United Kingdom, where discussion of this issue has been more forthright, by declaring once and for all that its intelligence services should not be part of public advocacy of policies still under debate. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions that intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such exercises as the publication of the "dodgy dossier," the British counterpart to the United States' Iraqi WMD white paper, and that in the future there should be a clear delineation between intelligence and policy. An American declaration should take the form of a congressional resolution and be seconded by a statement from the White House. Although it would not have legal force, such a statement would discourage future administrations from attempting to pull the intelligence community into policy advocacy. It would also give some leverage to intelligence officers in resisting any such future attempts.

A more effective way of identifying and exposing improprieties in the relationship is also needed. The CIA has a "politicization ombudsman," but his informally defined functions mostly involve serving as a sympathetic ear for analysts disturbed by evidence of politicization and then summarizing what he hears for senior agency officials. The intelligence oversight committees in Congress have an important role, but the heightened partisanship that has bedeviled so much other work on Capitol Hill has had an especially inhibiting effect in this area. A promised effort by the Senate Intelligence Committee to examine the Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq got stuck in the partisan mud. The House committee has not even attempted to address the subject.

The legislative branch is the appropriate place for monitoring the intelligence-policy relationship. But the oversight should be conducted by a nonpartisan office modeled on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Such an office would have a staff, smaller than that of the GAO or the CBO, of officers experienced in intelligence and with the necessary clearances and access to examine questions about both the politicization of classified intelligence work and the public use of intelligence. As with the GAO, this office could conduct inquiries at the request of members of Congress. It would make its results public as much as possible, consistent with security requirements, and it would avoid duplicating the many other functions of intelligence oversight, which would remain the responsibility of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Beyond these steps, there is the more difficult issue of what place the intelligence community should occupy within the executive branch. The reorganization that created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is barely a year old, and yet another reorganization at this time would compound the disruption. But the flaws in the narrowly conceived and hastily considered reorganization legislation of December 2004 -- such as ambiguities in the DNI's authority -- will make it necessary to reopen the issues it addressed. Any new legislation should also tackle something the 2004 legislation did not: the problem of having the leaders of the intelligence community, which is supposed to produce objective and unvarnished analysis, serve at the pleasure of the president.

The organizational issue is also difficult because of a dilemma that intelligence officers have long discussed and debated among themselves: that although distance from policymakers may be needed for objectivity, closeness is needed for influence. For most of the past quarter century, intelligence officials have striven for greater closeness, in a perpetual quest for policymakers' ears. The lesson of the Iraq episode, however, is that the supposed dilemma has been incorrectly conceived. Closeness in this case did not buy influence, even on momentous issues of war and peace; it bought only the disadvantages of politicization.

The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.

These measures would reduce both the politicization of the intelligence community's own work and the public misuse of intelligence by policymakers. It would not directly affect how much attention policymakers give to intelligence, which they would continue to be entitled to ignore. But the greater likelihood of being called to public account for discrepancies between a case for a certain policy and an intelligence judgment would have the indirect effect of forcing policymakers to pay more attention to those judgments in the first place.

These changes alone will not fix the intelligence-policy relationship. But if Congress and the American people are serious about "fixing intelligence," they should not just do what is easy and politically convenient. At stake are the soundness of U.S. foreign-policy making and the right of Americans to know the basis for decisions taken in the name of their security.

And while we are on the subject of people in OUR America, these poor beleaguered LOW-HANGING FRUITS, as it were, being picked on and singled out for unfair prosecution merely because they are REPUBLICANS ...

And friends of George W. Bush ...

Like Kenny "BOY" Lay, for example ...

Who is certainly being discriminated against because he is one of George W. Bush's friends ....

We have ....

"Three More Lawmakers Linked to Abramoff"

By TONI LOCY and PETE YOST, Associated Press Writers

8 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Three members of Congress have been linked to efforts by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a former General Services Administration official to secure leases of government property for Abramoff's clients, according to court filings by federal prosecutors on Friday.

The filings in U.S. District Court do not allege any wrongdoing by the elected officials but list them in documents portraying David Safavian, a former GSA chief of staff, as an active adviser to Abramoff, giving the lobbyists tips on how to use members of Congress to navigate the agency's bureaucracy.

Abramoff is cooperating with federal investigators in a wide-ranging probe of corruption on Capitol Hill that threatens several powerful members of Congress and their staff members.

Last month, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud.

Safavian is charged with lying to a GSA ethics officer when he said Abramoff was not seeking business with the agency at the time the lobbyist paid for Safavian and several others to go on a golf outing to Scotland in August 2002.

At the time of the trip, prosecutors said, Abramoff was trying to get GSA approval for leases of the Old Post Office Pavilion in Washington for an Indian tribe to develop and for federal property in Silver Spring, Md., for use by a Jewish school.

Two of the elected officials referred to in Friday's filings have been identified in published reports as Reps. Steven LaTourette, R-Ohio, and Don Young, R-Alaska.

According to Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, the two representatives wrote to the GSA in September 2002, urging the agency to give preferential treatment to groups such as Indian tribes when evaluating development proposals for the Old Post Office.

LaTourette maintains he did nothing improper by advocating special opportunities for certain small businesses in areas known as HUBzones, or Historically Underutilized Business zones.

His spokeswoman, Deborah Setliff, said that the letter was reviewed by Young's chief of staff and counsel and that it did not advocate any particular business over another.

A spokesman for Young did not return telephone calls.

Friday's filings by prosecutors refer to a third member of Congress, Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, R-W.Va.

Her name appears in e-mails that suggest she was trying to help Abramoff secure a GSA lease for land in Silver Spring for a religious school.

Capito claims to know nothing about the effort.

"The action taken by her former chief of staff was done without her knowledge, approval or consent," said her spokesman, Joel Brubaker.

"She was not aware of any contact with GSA of any type on this matter."

Mark Johnson, Capito's former chief of staff, said he did not bring the issue to Capito's attention.

He said he was contacted by Neil Volz, a colleague of Abramoff's and a former chief of staff for Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio.

Johnson said Volz asked him to check on the status of a project involving the GSA.

Johnson said he believes he called a friend at the GSA but doesn't recall the outcome.

Prosecutors included the e-mails in documents filed in response to a request by Safavian's lawyers to dismiss the indictment against him.

Safavian's lawyers want a federal judge to throw out the charges on grounds there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

In their filing, prosecutors laid out a series of contacts between Abramoff and Safavian that show the former GSA official gave inside information and advice to the lobbyist.

Safavian used his personal e-mail during business hours to communicate with Abramoff several times, according to prosecutors.

He also edited the draft of a letter that was probably sent under LaTourette and Young's names.

And Safavian advised Abramoff to tell his wife to use her maiden name during a meeting with GSA officials so she wouldn't draw attention to her politically connected husband's involvement in the project.

In a July 23, 2002, e-mail to a GSA official, Safavian discussed getting information about the Silver Spring site to Capito's office.

But Volz discovered a complication the next day.

Volz told Abramoff that someone at the GSA wanted the congresswoman to put her request in writing.

"We can't ask the most vulnerable Republican incumbent member of Congress in the House to put something in writing that can be made public," Volz wrote.

"The congresswoman's office has already put the request in and you would think that would be enough!!!"
___

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

And there we are, Snuffysmith ....

Way back, when this was still the John Kerry forum, before the election, I had a thread running where I posted an article dealing with this exact subject ....

And jeffmoskin is continually talking about it in here as well ....

This battle between the EURO and the DOLLAR ....

But it is too complicated for people to understand ...

Is what I think, anyway ...

As an engineer with a license, I was required to take a course in engineering economics ...

And to take and pass a question on that subject on the licensing exam ...

And still ...

Some of this stuff is esoteric to me ....

Because economics is concepts ...

And not actualities ....

The real point that people need to consider, and they usually don't, or won't ....

Is that while America may not be easy to defeat militarily ...

Because we are in fact isolated from the rest of the world by two oceans ....

When it comes to isolating us economically ....

That can be done in a relative heartbeat ...

By computers ...

And there is doodly-squat we can do about it ....

Economic blockades have been a viable tactic of warfare between nations ...

Since time immemorial, in all likelihood ....

And they are still viable today ....

EXCEPT ....

The stupid, ignorant BUSHCOS believe that they are invincible ...

And so ....

The "DAME SNOW JEOPARDY" .....

As it is called up here, anyway ....

A lawyer's trick of where you start with the conclusion that you want to support ....

And then ...

You start stacking up the "evidence" to support that conclusion ....

And it is an old, old trick ....

Probably being used before Jesus was born ....

This is quite a thought-provoking article, Snuffysmith ....

BUT ...

I wonder about context ....

This article assumes that nothing has changed in OUR America with the ascension of George W. Bush to the THRONE here in OUR America ...

Coupled with the stranglehold the REPUBLICAN PARTY now has on OUR government ....

This article assumes that the REPUBLICAN PARTY has the best interests of OUR America at stake ...

And I don't believe that for one instant ....

Rather, what I believe is that we have "slid" through a transition here .....

So that the America of before ...

Is no longer the America of after ....

And this BID-NESS of IRAQINAM was a catalyzing event ....

To cause that transition to happen ...

Which is one of the prime reasons that I started this particular thread just after the 2004 presidential elections ....

To track this matter along ...

After Karl Rove made public statements about making and keeping the REPUBLICAN PARTY in power as the DOMINANT PARTY here in OUR America ...

For as long as he could keep it that way ...

SO ...

A COUP ....

And nobody even noticed ....

Which is the brilliance of Karl Rove ....

I can always count on you Liv for a refreshing interpretation of the scheme of things. I forwarded this article to a long time personal colleague from the Ford White House Days and he sent me back a reply to the effect that he thought this guy was terribly dishonorable. Regardless, this article is the most damming critique in Washington since Richard Clarke's expose.

Well ....

We're just simple country folk up here in the hinterlands of civilization, Snuffysmith ....

And so ...

We have to see things as they are ....

Rather than how we might wish them to be ....

And so ....

I see no DISHONOR here at all ...

At least on the part of this guy who wrote the article ....

And I don't know rightly if it is a damning critique ....

But I do know that it is to the point ...

And so, should be read by every American .....

Because it is OUR country ...

And by OUR silence ...

It is being taken away from us ...

Lock, stock and barrel ....

I wonder at how this former colleague of yours can get all the way over to dishonor ....

But that is really immaterial ....

Since everyone is entitled to their own thoughts on these subjects ....

But to me ....

This guy has stood up ...

And he has demanded that he be counted ...

And in my opinion ...

He is what I would want in my government .....

As opposed to all these lick-spittles and toadies and such who are concerned about THEIR retirement checks, and nothing else in between ..

And so ..

They are willing to sell out anyone and anything ....

Just to get that check in the mail ....

At the end of their government service ....