Martin Luther King, Jr., "I've Been to the Mountaintop"

You Just Can't Believe Anyone Anymore... and pssst: THIS IS YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!

MSNBC - Columnist dropped by syndicate over payments

Happy Merry Everything

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Echo Chamber

Bush's Echo Chamber
By BOB HERBERT

olin Powell, who urged the president to think more deeply about the consequences of invading Iraq, is being shoved toward the exit. And Condoleezza Rice, who blithely told America, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," is being ushered in to take his place.

Competence has never been highly regarded by the fantasists of the George W. Bush administration. In the Bush circle, no less than in your average youth gang, loyalty is everything. The big difference, of course, is that the administration is far more dangerous than any gang. History will show that the Bush crowd of incompetents brought tremendous amounts of suffering to enormous numbers of people. The amount of blood being shed is sickening, and there is no end to the grief in sight.

Ironically, Ms. Rice was supposed to be the epitome of competence. She was the charming former provost of Stanford University, an expert on Soviet and East European affairs who was also an accomplished pianist, ice skater and tennis player, and the presidential candidate George W. Bush's tutor on foreign policy.

She was superwoman. They didn't come more accomplished.

She and Mr. Bush developed a remarkable bond, and he made her his national security adviser. Which was a problem. Because all the evidence shows she wasn't very good at the job.

Ms. Rice's domain was the filter through which an awful lot of mangled and misshapen intelligence made its way to the president and the American people. She either believed the nonsense she was spouting about mushroom clouds, or she deliberately misled her president and the nation on matters that would eventually lead to the deaths of thousands.

Secretary Powell's close friend and deputy at the State Department, Richard Armitage, viewed Ms. Rice's operation with contempt. In his book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward said Mr. Armitage "believed that the foreign-policy-making system that was supposed to be coordinated by Rice was essentially dysfunctional."

In October 2003, the president, frustrated by setbacks in Iraq, put Ms. Rice in charge of his Iraq Stabilization Group, which gave her the responsibility for overseeing the effort to quell the violence and begin the reconstruction in Iraq.

We see from recent headlines how well that has worked out.

A crucial mentor for Ms. Rice was Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser for the first President Bush. He appointed her to the National Security Council in 1989. Ms. Rice and the nation would have benefited if she had sought out and followed Mr. Scowcroft's counsel on Iraq.

Mr. Scowcroft's view, widely expressed before the war, was that the U.S. should exercise extreme caution. He did not believe the planned invasion was wise or necessary. In an article in The Wall Street Journal in August 2002, he wrote:

"There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them."

Ms. Rice exhibited as little interest in Mr. Scowcroft's opinion as George W. Bush did in his father's. (When Bob Woodward asked Mr. Bush if he had consulted with the former president about the decision to invade Iraq, he replied, "There is a higher father that I appeal to.")

As I watch the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies unfold - not just in Iraq, but here at home as well - I am struck by the immaturity of this administration, whatever the ages of the officials involved. It's as if the children have taken over and sent the adults packing. The counsel of wiser heads, like George H. W. Bush, or Brent Scowcroft, or Colin Powell, is not needed and not wanted.

Some of the world's most important decisions - often, decisions of life and death - have been left to those who are less competent and less experienced, to men and women who are deficient in such qualities as risk perception and comprehension of future consequences, who are reckless and dangerously susceptible to magical thinking and the ideological pressure of their peers.

I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone.


E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

LAME DUCK A L'BUSH

HE WON. LIVE WITH IT, FOR NOW.
In no time at all, Bush will be the lamest of ducks.

November 9, 2004 -- It's time to get over it.

We've had our week of mourning, and there is no shame in losing a presidential election by .001 of the national electorate -- the equivalent of 136,483 misguided Ohioans. More important, there is no room for a crippling depression on the part of Democrats while the nation remains in irresponsible hands for another four years.

The good news is that unless George W. Bush is hoping to provoke Armageddon, life will go on. In fact, there is another national election a mere two years from now. By then, some of the far right now chortling about the possibility of flat taxes, repealing Roe vs. Wade and privatizing Social Security will have found that winning control of a nation on the skids isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

After all, at some point the Bush White House will have to stop blaming the Clinton administration for its own mistakes. If the Republicans running all three branches of our government continue to pile up outrageous debt, shackle scientific progress with religious fundamentalism, erode civil liberties and thrash about uselessly abroad, the responsibility will be all theirs.

The GOP has met its old bugaboo, incompetent Big Government, and it is them. No doubt Rush Limbaugh and friends will continue to blame us liberals for everything that goes wrong, but that old scapegoating game won't fly with the American public forever.

As we family-values folks like to tell our children when they qualify for their driver's licenses, with power comes responsibility. "Watch where you're going" is the main advice I would offer the president, reminding him that during the last four years his steering has been erratic and his vision blurry. We don't need any more bloody wrecks like Iraq.

That John Kerry didn't make this case more clearly was the one glaring mistake of his campaign. But I don't want to get down on Kerry, an honorable and thoughtful man who eventually got around to making a strong critique of Bush's handling of Iraq. I don't think any candidate would have had a much easier time cutting through the pseudo-patriotic blather that Bush has exploited since the 9/11 tragedy.

The reality is that most Americans believe we are in an epic war that compares to those fought by generations past. History tells us that sitting presidents in those circumstances have something akin to political immunity. Bush also cynically put the tab for this war on the nation's credit card so he could buy votes among the wealthy with his regressive tax cuts -- take voters who make more than $100,000 out of the equation and Kerry wins, according to CNN exit polls.

Taken in this light, the fact that the somewhat phlegmatic Kerry secured almost half the vote doesn't look so bad. And since when is it shocking news that an incumbent president can get away with massive lying during wartime? Or that bold strides forward for human rights, like the gay marriage initiatives, initially produce intolerant reactions?

Don't get me wrong: With an ideologically radical party in control of all three branches of government, the capacity for mischief -- and misery -- during the next few years is frightening. If Bush can place more ideologues like justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, things could be very ugly. The religious hucksters who skirted the limits of federal law with partisan political proselytizing believe that they now own this president and will want changes -- beginning with overturning Roe vs. Wade -- in return.

But, as we've learned from science, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Because exit polls showed that a solid majority of voters part ways with the religious right on choice and some form of legal recognition of same sex unions, victory on the social wedge issues will backfire on the Republicans. Abortion, for instance, may work as a divisive electoral strategy to energize the base, but party insiders know the GOP will suffer long-term damage if we return to the days of illegal, back-alley abortions. The same applies to attempts to wreck Social Security and other progressive programs, while driving up the deficit.

Barring another major terrorist attack of the sort that saved his first term, I would predict that in an amazingly short time Bush will be quacking like the lamest of ducks.

Copyright 2004 Robert Scheer

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Rove's Revenge

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Rove's Revenge

November 7, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Rove's Revenge
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — Just how much did Karl Rove hate not being one of the cool guys in high school in the 60's? Enough to hatch schemes to marshal the forces of darkness to take over the country?

Oh, yeah.

A supporter of Nixon against Kennedy at 9, the teenage Karl was, in his description, "a big nerd," a small guy with a pocket protector, briefcase, and glasses almost as big as his head.

Even as a high school debater in Salt Lake City, "Rove didn't just want to win; he wanted the opponents destroyed," write James Moore and Wayne Slater in "Bush's Brain." "He would defeat them, slaughter them and humiliate them."

The Boy Genius, as W. calls him, the "architect" who helped him get the second term he dearly wanted to surpass his father, is happy to crush the liberal elites inspired by Kennedy's New Frontier under the steamroller of 19th-century family values.

Like the president, vice president and defense secretary, General Karl wanted to wipe out the gray, if-it-feels-good-do-it, blame-America-first, doused-in-Vietnam-guilt 60's and turn the clock back to the black-and-white Manichaean values of the 50's.

W. and Karl played up western movie stereotypes. After 9/11, the rugged frontier myth, the hunter/Indian-fighter hero in a war of civilization against savagery worked better than ever. But this White House's frontier is not a place of infinite progress and expansion, stretching society's boundaries. It doesn't battle primitivism; it courts primitivism.

Instead of the New Frontier, Karl and W. offer the New Backtier.

Even as a child, I could feel the rush of J.F.K.'s presidency racing forward, opening up a thrilling world of possibilities and modernity. We were going to the moon. We were confronting racial intolerance. We were paying any price and bearing any burden for freedom. We were respecting faith but keeping it out of politics. Our president was inspiring much of the world. Our first lady was setting the pace in style and culture.

W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.

America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.

Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.

When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.

The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.

Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.

Back in 1994, Newt Gingrich said he wanted the government to mold the moral character of Americans and wipe out remnants of the "counterculture McGoverniks." He got derailed, but now he and his pious friends are back in full cry, messing with our psyches and excluding themselves from the rules they demand others follow. They'll eventually do themselves in, but will they do us in first?

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: O.K., Folks: Back to Work

November 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
O.K., Folks: Back to Work
By BOB HERBERT

An iron rule of life is to be careful what you wish for.

President Bush can take his re-election victory to the bank, and his political portfolio has been bolstered by enhanced Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. That's the good news for the president. Nearly all the other news is bad.

A story in the business section of yesterday's Times noted, "Even as President Bush was celebrating his election victory on Wednesday, his Treasury Department provided an ominous reminder about the economic challenges ahead."

With budget deficits exploding, the government will have to borrow $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, a quarterly record. But the record won't stand for long. The government is hemorrhaging money, and the nation has a war to pay for. A new record is almost sure to be set before the year is out.

Managing money is not one of this president's strong points. Plus and minus signs mean nothing to him. If he were actually writing checks, they'd be bouncing to the moon. The federal government's revenue was $100 billion lower this year than when Mr. Bush took office, and spending is $400 billion higher.

Yesterday, at his press conference, the president made it clear that his campaign promise of more - not fewer - tax cuts for the wealthy is at the top of his second-term agenda.

Much has been made of the support Mr. Bush has gotten from religious people. He's going to need all of their prayers that some miracle happens to suspend the laws of simple arithmetic and keep his fiscal house of cards from collapsing.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq, overshadowed by the election, is as grim as ever. Insurgents blew up a critical oil pipeline on Tuesday, the latest severe blow to efforts to get the Iraq economy on track. Three British soldiers were killed in an attack yesterday. The assassinations, kidnappings and car bombings continued. The humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders announced that it would cease operations in Iraq because of the unrelenting danger. And Hungary became the latest U.S. coalition partner to announce that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq.

In other words, nothing has changed. Mr. Bush's victory on Tuesday was not based on his demonstrated competence in office or on a litany of perceived successes. For all the talk about values that we're hearing, the president ran a campaign that appealed above all to voters' fears and prejudices. He didn't say he'd made life better for the average American over the past four years. He didn't say he had transformed the schools, or made college more affordable, or brought jobs to the unemployed or health care to the sick and vulnerable.

He said, essentially, be very afraid. Be frightened of terrorism, and of those dangerous gay marriages, and of those in this pluralistic society who may have thoughts and beliefs and values that differ from your own.

As usual, he turned reality upside down. A quintessential American value is tolerance for ideas other than one's own. Tuesday's election was a dismaying sprint toward intolerance, sparked by a smiling president who is a master at appealing to the baser aspects of our natures.

Which brings me to the Democrats - the ordinary voters, not the politicians - and where they go from here. I have been struck by the extraordinary demoralization, even dark despair, among a lot of voters who desperately wanted John Kerry to defeat Mr. Bush. "We did all we could," one woman told me, "and we still lost."

Here's my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression - now, get over it. The election's been lost but there's still a country to save, and with the current leadership that won't be easy. Crucial matters that have been taken for granted too long - like the Supreme Court and Social Security - are at risk. Caving in to depression and a sense of helplessness should not be an option when the country is speeding toward an abyss.

Roll up your sleeves and do what you can. Talk to your neighbors. Call or write your elected officials. Volunteer to help in political campaigns. Circulate petitions. Attend meetings. Protest. Run for office. Support good candidates who are running for office. Register people to vote. Reach out to the young and the apathetic. Raise money. Stay informed. And vote, vote, vote - every chance you get.

Democracy is a breeze during good times. It's when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there's a hell of a wind blowing right now.


E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

washingtonpost.com: 'It's a Victory for People Like Us'

washingtonpost.com: 'It's a Victory for People Like Us': "

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE LESLIES.... read it and weep but this is America Today
-Pamela



washingtonpost.com
'It's a Victory for People Like Us'
Bush Emphasis on Values Drew Ohio Evangelicals
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 5, 2004; Page A03


SHEFFIELD LAKE, Ohio -- Here on Redwood Drive, in the little house with the white picket fence, these first days after the election are good days, happy days, blessed days.

"Dear Lord," Cary Leslie is saying for the sixth time since waking up at 3:45 a.m. to go to work. He has prayed for strength not to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock. He has prayed for a safe day for his wife and three children. He has prayed for patience with the foul-tempered customers he deals with at the car-rental counter. He has prayed for a job that will pay enough for a struggling family of five to keep up with the bills. He has prayed for a quick resolution to the presidential election. And now, with the election decided, he is thanking God for listening to his prayers.

Tara Leslie, Cary's wife, has been praying for President Bush, too, and now she is saying, "I think it's so important to have a society of moral absolutes."

"It's really good to know our country had a decision to make, and there are so many people who feel this way," Cary says. "It's a victory for people like us."

The Leslies: They are George W. Bush votes come to life. The millions of voters who describe themselves as "white evangelicals," 77 percent of whom voted for Bush? That's the Leslies. The voters who said "moral values" was the single issue that mattered most to them, 80 percent of whom voted for Bush? That's the Leslies, too.

They are precisely the people the Bush campaign built its reelection strategy on -- people who would put faith-based moral values above every other consideration when it came time to vote, including the war in Iraq, terrorism, the economy and, in the Leslies' case, a life that has been in financial peril since Sept. 11, 2001.

He is 29. She is 27. They have a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 6-month-old, and they are thinking of having one more. They oppose abortion, favor a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being between a man and a woman, and want more Supreme Court justices like Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas. They eat at home and shop at Wal-Mart. They home-school their 5-year-old and are members of the nondenominational Church on the Rise, which is "committed to helping families hold down the family fort in the 21st Century," according to its literature, and where the senior pastor says 90 percent of the 1,200 congregants voted for Bush.

"Religious kooks," Cary says, imagining how some people might think of them. His own description: "We're pretty boring people. Normal people."

Normal people who, as this week has progressed, have found themselves increasingly happy about the state of America.

"We're definitely going to celebrate," Tara says of Bush's victory, but what that means is constrained by the changes in their lives that occurred during Bush's first administration.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Cary was earning about $55,000 a year. On Sept. 12, the decline began. No one was flying. No one was renting cars. Down went the commissions Cary gets when customers sign up for insurance coverage. "Maybe $35,000," he says of what he earns now, and that includes income from a second job he took a year ago, delivering pizzas on Friday and Saturday nights.

Forty hours a week at the car-rental counter, 12 hours a week running pizzas, the pinch of gasoline at $2 a gallon, savings drained, the realization that he and Tara are "kind of the working poor" -- and still it was moral concerns, rather than economic ones, that guided both of them on Election Day.

"I don't blame President Bush for anything that's happened with my income," Cary says. Rather, he looks at Bush as someone who believes in "personal responsibility," which Cary believes in as well. Don't complain. Solve. "There are jobs out there," he says, and as tired as he might be on Saturday night as he drives the streets of northern Ohio, he can use that time to listen to worship tapes, to think, to pray and to remind himself of what the priorities of a good life should be.

"Jobs will come and go. But your character -- you have to hang on to that," he says. "It's what you're defined by."

"It's been rough. Very rough. I mean scraping by," Tara says. But "to us, the biggest things were the moral things."

Because of this, Tuesday came with what they both say was "a sense of urgency." They voted for Bush. They voted for a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Cary went to bed toward midnight, when the outcome was not yet clear. Tara stayed up till 2:30, too nervous to sleep, mostly watching Fox News. An hour later, the alarm went off for the first time, and while Tara slept, Cary did what he always does -- tiptoe out, dress down the hall, eat a bowl of Wheaties, drive to the airport, fiddle with the radio, pray.

By 7:30, when Tara awakened, Cary was already dealing with a number of customers wearing Kerry buttons, one of whom approached the counter singing a song about saving the world.

"We did that yesterday," Cary said to him. "What do you mean?" the man asked. "With the vote," Cary said, and as the customers kept coming, fleeing Ohio now that the election was settled, Tara was home-schooling the 5-year-old, and dressing the 3-year-old, and feeding the 6-month-old, and preparing the house so that when Cary walked in the front door after eight hours of whatever, he would know "that he's wanted. That he's home."

He walked in smiling, as he always tries to do, just as John F. Kerry was conceding defeat in faraway Boston, and an hour later, when Bush was declaring victory, he and Tara are in the thick of a day that would be the same no matter who won the election. A crying child with a bump on her head who needs a prayer. A neighbor who wants to borrow the minivan. A diaper that needs changing. A chair that the 5-year-old is trying to turn into a balance beam.

A typical day -- except with a particular hum to it that wasn't there the day before. The day before, they were the margins. Now they are the majority. "To know that he prays," Tara says of Bush, "and I really believe he does, that's a huge thing." The sanctity of marriage will be fine. The Supreme Court will be fine. The war on terror will be fine. The economy will be fine.

"It's not like a major euphoric outbreak," Cary says. "It's more like satisfaction."

"Validation," Tara says.

"I'm just kind of hopeful," Cary says.

"Definitely," Tara says.

A celebration, then, for two Bush votes as the next four years begin.

"Dear Lord," they say, one more time.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Mourning

Not capable of writing right now. Still hurting.
Listening to beautiful music and seeking respite in the way it seeps into my skin.
Letting the days slip by in silence until I feel ready to talk again.

She Wore Blue Velvet

From the New York Times
November 4, 2004
A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America
By JOSEPH BERGER

Striking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of step with the rest of the country.
"Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?" she said. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe."
Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center.
"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "
City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with characteristic New York bluntness.
Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."
Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.
Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened - or sleepy - enough to ask parents if they could stay home. But even grownups were unnerved.
"To paraphrase our current president, I'm in shock and awe," said Keithe Sales, a 58-year-old former publishing administrator walking a dog near Central Park. He said he and friends shared a feeling of "disempowerment" as a result of the country's choice of President Bush. "There is a feeling of 'What do I have to do to get this man out of office?'''
In downtown Brooklyn, J. J. Murphy, 34, a teacher, said that Mr. Kerry's loss underscored the geographic divide between the Northeast and the rest of the country. He harked back to Reconstruction to help explain his point.
"One thing Clinton and Gore had going for them was they were from the South," he said. "There's a lot of resentment toward the Northeast carpetbagger stereotype, and Kerry fit right in to that."
Mr. Murphy said he understood why Mr. Bush appealed to Southerners in a way that he did not appeal to New Yorkers.
"Even though Bush isn't one of them - he's a son of privilege - he comes off as just a good old boy," Mr. Murphy said.
Pondering the disparity, Bret Adams, a 33-year-old computer network administrator in Rego Park, Queens, said, "I think a lot of the country sees New York as a wild and crazy place, where these things like the war protests happen."
Ms. Camhe, the film producer, frequents Elaine's restaurant with friends and spends many mornings on a bench in Central Park talking politics with homeless people with whom she's become acquainted. She spent part of Tuesday knocking on doors in Pennsylvania to rustle up Kerry votes then returned to Manhattan to attend an election-night party thrown by Miramax's chairman, Harvey Weinstein, at The Palm. Ms. Camhe was also up much of the night talking to a son in California who was depressed at the election results.
When it became clear yesterday morning that the outlook for a Kerry squeaker was a mirage, she was unable to eat breakfast. Her doorman on Central Park West gave her a consoling hug. Then a friend buying coffee along with her said she had just heard a report on television that Mr. Kerry had conceded and tears welled in Ms. Camhe's eyes.
Ms. Camhe explained the habits and beliefs of those dwelling in the heartland like an anthropologist.
"What's different about New York City is it tends to bring people together and so we can't ignore each others' dreams and values and it creates a much more inclusive consciousness," she said. "When you're in a more isolated environment, you're more susceptible to some ideology that's imposed on you."
As an example, Ms. Camhe offered the different attitudes New Yorkers may have about social issues like gay marriage.
"We live in this marvelous diversity where we actually have gay neighbors," she said. "They're not some vilified unknown. They're our neighbors."
But she said that a dichotomy of outlooks was bad for the country.
"If the heartland feels so alienated from us, then it behooves us to wrap our arms around the heartland," she said. "We need to bring our way of life, which is honoring diversity and having compassion for people with different lifestyles, on a trip around the country."
Michael Brick and Brian McDonald contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

I cannot fathom how others in similarly melancholy moods operated and survived this day. Sleep deprivation and the blues are a lethal combination. I now know why others are driven to irrational acts. Locking the doors and keeping silent, I suppressed the urge to unleash my venom. Is this the difference between man, woman (me) and... Bush?

Thanks, Senator Kerry. Thanks for giving us hope that we are not alone.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Two Nations Under God

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Two Nations Under God

SPRINGSTEEN'S POLITICAL POETRY

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1030-22.htm



Published on Saturday, October 30, 2004 by The Nation
Springsteen's Political Poetry
by John Nichols

The art of political speechmaking is now so lost to the dark machinations of the spin doctors, pollsters and pundits that most Americans have never heard a live campaign speech of any particular consequence. Perhaps that is why the crowd of 80,000 people who rallied for John Kerry on Thursday in Madison, Wisconsin, fell so completely silent a few minutes into what turned out to be the most poignant and powerful election address of 2004.
The speaker was not a candidate. Rather, the words that cut through the rhetorical fog were those of a guitar player from New Jersey.
"As a songwriter, I've written about America for 30 years," explained Bruce Springsteen, after he finished playing the appropriately chosen song, "Promised Land."
"I've tried to write about who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for," he continued. "I believe that these essential ideals of American identity are what's at stake on November 2."
Springsteen's voice did not rise with the false drama of electioneering.
His words mingled so smoothly with the soft strumming of his guitar that it was easy to imagine that the singer might let those few spoken words be his message.
But there was a lot more to it.
With a nod to Tom Paine and a kiss for Walt Whitman, Springsteen reviewed the crisis and then called voters to be guided not by their fears but by the better angels of our nature. Lincoln spoke this way, Bobby Kennedy did, and so did Paul Wellstone. But, as this campaign closes, that rare mixture of politics and poetry is coming not from politicians but from a man who until Thursday had never appeared on the stage of a presidential campaign rally.
The response in Madison, and a few hours later in Columbus, Ohio, where the Kerry-Springsteen tour stopped next, was more than merely campaign-stop enthusiastic.
When the shouting stopped, the tens upon tens of thousands of people who filled the streets in front of him began to listen. Really listen.
Springsteen detailed the subjects that mattered to him: "the human principles of economic justice, healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don't have to go out and break their backs and still not be able to make ends meet" and "the protection of the environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy, civil rights and the protection and safeguarding of our precious democracy here at home."
Now, the crowd that stretched for block after block up a hill to the state Capitol began to settle. Something was being said here, and these people -- who just moments before had been rocking along with Springsteen -- were suddenly listening as the singer ran through his litany of progressive passions.
"I believe that John Kerry honors these ideals. He has lived their history over the past 50 years and formed an adult view of America and its people," Springsteen told the voters of Wisconsin, a battleground state that could well tip the electoral-college balance of this year's presidential contest. "He's had the life experience; I think he understands that we as humans are not infallible and that, as Senator (John) Edwards said during the Democratic National Convention, that struggle and heartbreak will always be with us. That's why 'united we stand,' 'one nation, indivisible,' aren't just slogans. They need to remain guiding principles of our public lives."
With autumn leaves drifting slowly from the trees that lined the street, Springsteen described the Democratic nominee for president in terms that made Kerry's resume read a good deal more lyrically than it has during this ugly campaign of Swift Boat vet charges and FOX-TV sneer fests. "He's shown us, starting as a young man, that by facing America's hard truths, both the good and the bad, that's where we find a deeper patriotism. That's where we find a complete view of who we are. That's where we find a more authentic experience as citizens, and that's where we find the power that is embedded only in truth to make our world a better and safer place."
Springsteen paused and then invoked the name of Wellstone, the late Minnesota senator who is an iconic figure among progressives in the neighboring state of Wisconsin.
"Paul Wellstone," the singer repeated, as the tension broke and the crowd began cheering. "He said the future is for the passionate and those who are willing to fight and work hard for it. Well, the future is now. And it's time to let your passions loose." Now, the applause was swelling. "Let's roll up our sleeves," Springsteen shouted above the roar of approval. "That's why I'm here today -- to stand alongside Senator Kerry and to tell you that the country we carry in our hearts is waiting, and together we can move America towards her deepest ideals."
Springsteen pulled his black guitar up and, referencing the musical instruments preferred by former President Bill Clinton and Kerry, said, "Besides, we had a sax player in the house. We need a guitar player in the White House." As the crowd roared its approval once more, the singer quietly continued, "Alright, this for John. This is for you, John." Then he launched into "No Surrender," a song that has been adopted as the Kerry campaign's anthem. Stripped down and slowed down, the song's words resonated even more clearly with crowd, especially the line, "I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies."
When Springsteen finished, he introduced Kerry, who bounded to the stage and announced, "I may be running for president of the United States, but we all know who the boss is."
Energized by the crowd and the company on stage, Kerry delivered a muscular, well-received address. And, surely, the throngs belonged as much or more to him as they did to Springsteen. Yet, when the day was done, it was the singer, not the candidate, who had delivered the most meaningful political address.
There are often debates about the extent to which serious attention should be granted to the political musings of singers, actors and other celebrities. The quality and character of Springsteen's addresses in Madison and Columbus on Thursday, and the responses to them, suggests that this issue may finally be settled. In a year when so many meaningless words have been spilled along the campaign trail, Bruce Springsteen is saying something that matters.
© 2004 The Nation

Statement of John Kerry: TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971

Statement of John Kerry:

VIETNAM WAR VETERAN JOHN KERRY'S TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971
Editorial Notes by Dr. Ernest Bolt, University of Richmond

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?


VIETNAM WAR VETERAN JOHN KERRY'S TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971


Editorial Notes by Dr. Ernest Bolt, University of Richmond



By April 1971, with at least seven legislative proposals relating to the Vietnam war under consideration, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator William Fulbright (Democrat-Arkansas) began to hear testimony. On the third day of hearings, six members of the committee heard comments by John Kerry, a leader of the major veterans organization opposing continuation of the war. Kerry was the only representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) who testified on April 22, but others in VVAW were in the audience and at times supported his remarks with applause.

The committee began the hearing April 20 and continued to receive testimony for four days in April and for seven days throughout May, 1971. The full testimony heard by the committee, including that of Kerry, is in Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session (April-May 1971), Washington: Government Printing Office, 1971. Subject breaks in Kerry's testimony were provided by the Senate staff in the form of subtitles, which in some cases are retained below. Additional editorial notes are provided by Professor Bolt. Excerpts from Kerry's testimony are from pages 180, 181-183, 184, 185, 195, 204, and 208.





Statement of Mr. John Kerry

...I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony....


WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.


FEELINGS OF MEN COMING BACK FROM VIETNAM

...In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart....


WHAT WAS FOUND AND LEARNED IN VIETNAM

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone on peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many others.


VIETNAMIZATION

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese....

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doen'st have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:

But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.

But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now....


REQUEST FOR ACTION BY CONGRESS

We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.

We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now....


WHERE IS THE LEADERSHIP?

We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.

The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching begin them in the sun in this country....



Editorial Note: Concluding his formal statement, Kerry commented about administration attempts to disown veterans and looked forward thirty years (to 2001) when the nation could look back proudly to a time when it turned from this war and the hate and fears driving us in Vietnam.

Following his formal testimony, the committee members questioned him during their discussion of some of the legislative proposals under consideration. In the course of this discussion, Kerry spoke with considerable familiarity and understanding about disengagement and withdrawal proposals being considered. In response to a question from Senator Aiken, Kerry endorsed "extensive reparations to the people of Indochina" as a "very definite obligation" of the U.S. (p. 191).
Kerry also commented on growth of American opposition to the war, the actions of Lt. Calley at My Lai, and strategic implications of the war.



...It is my opinion that the United States is still reacting in very much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles which was responsible for the created of the SEATO treaty, which was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so-called Communist monolith. And I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which are no longer applicable.

I say that because so long as we have the kind of strike force we have, and I am not party to the secret statistics which you gentlemen have here, but as long as we have the ones which we of the public know we have, I think we have a strike force of such capability and I think we have a strike force simply in our Polaris submarines, in the 62 or some Polaris submarines, which are constantly roaming around under the sea. And I know as a Navy man that underwater detection is the hardest kind in the world, and they have not perfected it, that we have the ability to destroy the human race. Why do we have to, therefore, consider and keep considering threats?

At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia t this question of peace and the people taking over the world. I think if were are ever going to get down to the question of dropping those bombs most of us in my generation simply don't want to be alive afterwards because of the kind of world that it would be with mutations and the genetic probabilities of freaks and everything else.

Therefore, I think it is ridiculous to assume we have to play this power game based on total warfare. I think there will be guerrilla wars and I think we must have a capability to fight those. And we may have to fight them somewhere based on legitimate threats, but we must learn, in this country, how to define those threats and that is what I would say to the question of world peace. I think it is bogus, totally artificial. There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take over our McDonald hamburger stands. [Laughter.]...



Editorial Note: Kerry's exchange with the senators consumed two complete hours, ranging from earlier French experiences in Indochina to the status of the war in 1971. Kerry faulted the electronic press for failure to report a recent antiwar conference because of its lack of "visual" appeal and entertainment value. He also cited the "exorbitant" power of the Executive, faulting Congress.

In response to Senator Symington's inquiry about American men and women still in Vietnam and their attitude toward opposition to the war within Congress, Kerry offered the following comments.



...I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read. It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80 letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of these letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you -- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of here." "You are the only hope he have got." "You have got to get us back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.

I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us, right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the people who want to try to get them out as a help.

However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel is they did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that problem....


Editorial Note: Kerry returned to the theme of the mood of troops in Vietnam and back home as he concluded his testimony.


...You see the mind is changing over there and a search and destroy mission is a search and avoid mission, and troops don't -- you know, like that revolt that took place that was mentioned in the New York Times when they refused to go in after a piece of dead machinery, because it doesn't have any value. They are making their own judgments.

There is a GI movement in this country now as well as over there, and soon these people, these men, who are prescribing wars for these young men to fight are going to find out they are going to have to find some other men to fight them because we are going to change prescriptions. They are going to have to change doctors, because we are not going to fight for them. that is what they are going to realize. There is now a more militant attitude even within the military itself....



Editorial Note: Later as Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry joined 61 others in favor of a nonbinding resolution to lift the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam. The original embargo began against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1964 and extended to the united Socialist Republic of Vietnam in April 1975. Following the nonbinding senate resolution, President Clinton repealed the embargo 4 February 1994.

Republicans see the tape as OSAMA'S GIFT?

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
See tape as boost for Prez
By Thomas M. DeFrank
Saturday, October 30th, 2004

With his typical flair for drama, Osama Bin Laden inserted himself directly into the presidential election yesterday, and both parties believed it would boost President Bush's reelection hopes.
Bin Laden popping up like a malignant jack-in-the-box four days before the balloting may bolster John Kerry's argument that Bush should have finished wiping out Al Qaeda before turning his attention to Iraq.

But it also refocused the nation on terrorism, which polls show helps Bush. And it reminds voters of their horror on Sept. 11 and Bush's well-received response, as well as obliterating the recent flood of bad news for Bush.

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Kerry has accused Bush of "letting Bin Laden escape" when he was cornered at Tora Bora by "outsourcing" the job to unreliable Afghan warlords instead of using U.S. troops. And he has mocked Bush for never mentioning the Al Qaeda leader after pledging to get Bin Laden "dead or alive."

But the new tape - which is so nakedly political that it should end with the words "I'm Osama Bin Laden and I approved this message" - makes it difficult for Kerry to keep hammering Bush on the subject without appearing to be capitalizing on terror. Kerry eliminated those lines from his speeches yesterday evening.

"If Kerry had been making this a bigger issue, as he should have been, it would definitely translate to his benefit," said a Democratic strategist with ties to the Kerry camp.

Kerry's staff looked somber.

"It's very important for us to move forward. We're going ahead and doing our events as we would," said spokesman Mike McCurry.

------------------------------------------

WAKE UP AMERICA.

OBL is alive and well and tells the truth more than our own present Bush-Cheney-Rove Administration. One does not know whether to laugh or cry. Or both.

The only thing we have to fear is four more years of lies and murder at the hands of Bush and Company.

But I'm not nervous. Not at all.

Swear.

t r u t h o u t - Eyewitness to Looting of al Qaqaa Explosives Cache

t r u t h o u t - Eyewitness to Looting of al Qaqaa Explosives Cache: "



Editor's Note | Some passages from this article are taken verbatim from Sara Daniel's original November 13, 2003 reporting With the Anti-American Guerilla. This issue was reported long ago and never addressed. - ljt

The Explosives Depot was Looted a Year Ago
By Sara Daniel
Le Nouvel Observateur

Friday 29 October 2004

It's a city of explosives, the insurgents' paradise. The al Qaqaa site, from which 350 tons of explosives disappeared according to the IAEA, served long after the regime's fall to supply Iraqi insurgent groups. While I was working on guerilla cells that gravitated around Lattifiya in November 2003, I followed the group that a few days after our visit to al Qaqaa was to perpetrate the attack against the DHL flight. Abu Abdallah and his brothers in arms had come to steal TNT and explosives. The spectacle offered by this city of bombs, an Ali Baba's cave for terrorists that stretched over dozens of kilometers, was stupefying. To get there, the group that was to attack DHL knew all the possible passages, the little unpaved roads that American soldiers never took because they were too dangerous. To hear the guerilla, after the fall of the regime, they moved weapons and stocks of TNT by the truckload, thinking that the Americans would close off this too tempting weapons reservoir. They showed us their arsenal.

Rocket launchers, grenades rigged up as helicopter missiles, buried in fields of zucchini. However they very quickly realized that the Americans would have had to mobilize an entire army to guard the former weapons factory at al Qaqaa. Then they no longer bothered to bury the TNT in their farm gardens. All they needed to do was help themselves in the gigantic earth-covered hangars, burial mounds for explosives. Thanks to the precious red powder, the Abu Abdallah group assured me, they had been able to blow up a convoy on the road between al Asoua and the Basra highway.

Little Surveillance

While the guerillas drove their car towards the al Qaqaa munitions depot, they were intercepted by an American patrol. On a tank, a young soldier pointed his automatic weapon at the group. Abdallah got out of the car smiling and was able to get away after joking in Arabic with the American officer of Jordanian origin who questioned him. At the end of three minutes, the Americans let them go. When we arrived at the factory, no one denied access to it.

The few Iraqi armed guards that we met didn't even ask what we were doing there. Bewildered by the ease of access, we were able to walk around this city of bombs, shells, and explosives. The whole military history of Iraq was sheltered there. At the regime's fall, many looters killed one another as they fought over the shells that littered the floor. It was impossible to understand why the place was not better guarded. The next day at one of the parties given by an American agency at the Palace, I asked one of the generals in charge of training the new Iraqi army why al Qaqaa was not guarded. He had never heard of this once largest explosives and bomb-making factory in the Middle East...

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
-------

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: It's Not Just Al Qaqaa

Krugman does it again, with eloquence and intelligence. Something that has been missing in the White House for four years.

Bush talks about a "complete disregard for the facts." Has this man spoken to a psychiatrist lately?

The truth hurts, doesn't it?



E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

____________________________________

Just in case, the right is already explaining away President Bush's defeat: it's all the fault of the "liberal media," particularly The New York Times, which, so the conspiracy theory goes, deliberately timed its report on the looted Al Qaqaa explosives - a report all the more dastardly because it was true - for the week before the election.

It's remarkable that the right-wingers who dominate cable news and talk radio are still complaining about a liberal stranglehold over the media. But, that absurdity aside, they're missing a crucial point: Al Qaqaa is hardly the only tale of incompetence and mendacity to break to the surface in the last few days. Here's a quick look at some of the others:

Letting Osama get away Just before the story about Al Qaqaa broke, the Bush-Cheney campaign was frantically trying to debunk John Kerry's statement that Mr. Bush let Osama bin Laden get away when he was cornered at Tora Bora. That getaway, Mr. Kerry asserts, was possible because the administration "outsourced" the job of closing off escape routes to local Afghan warlords.

In response, Gen. Tommy Franks claimed that we don't know that Osama was at Tora Bora, and, anyway, we didn't outsource the work of catching him. Dick Cheney called Mr. Kerry's claims "absolute garbage." But multiple reports from 2001 and early 2002 confirm Mr. Kerry's version. As Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert, writes, Mr. Kerry's charge is "an accurate reflection of the historical record."

Letting Zarqawi get away On Monday The Wall Street Journal confirmed an earlier report that in 2002 the military drew up plans for a strike on the base of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an area of Iraq not under Saddam's control. But civilian officials vetoed the attack - probably because they thought it might undermine political support for the war against Saddam. So Mr. Zarqawi, like Osama, was given the chance to kill another day.

The situation in Iraq Dick Cheney is telling supporters that Iraq is a "remarkable success story." But the news from Iraq just keeps getting worse. After 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits were killed, execution style, even Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister - who usually acts as a de facto spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign - accused coalition forces of "gross negligence." It's now clear that the insurgency is much larger than U.S. officials initially acknowledged, and that Iraqi security forces have been heavily infiltrated.

$70 billion more Earlier this week The Washington Post reported that administration officials were planning to seek an additional $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan after the election. Whatever the precise number, it has long been obvious to knowledgeable observers that this was coming, but the news will come as a shock to many people who still don't realize how deep a quagmire Mr. Bush has gotten us into.

All of these stories would be getting more play right now if it weren't for the Al Qaqaa mess. Still, one can understand why the right is so upset.

After all, Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush's national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn't have spared enough troops to guard the site, they're admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat.

The story of Al Qaqaa has brought out the worst in a campaign dedicated to the proposition that the president is infallible - and that it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong. Here's what Rudy Giuliani said yesterday: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Support the troops!

But worst of all from the right's point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign's media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of "global test" moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that's very bad news for Mr. Bush.


E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Los Angeles Times: Springsteen Drops In at Kerry Rally

Los Angeles Times: Springsteen Drops In at Kerry Rally: "

From the IT SHOULD ONLY HAPPEN TO ME department:
Springsteen Drops In at Kerry Rally


By Matea Gold
Times Staff Writer


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Springsteen Drops In at Kerry Rally
By Matea Gold
Times Staff Writer

3:30 PM PDT, October 28, 2004

MADISON, Wis. — The residents of 508 West Washington Ave. were already psyched when they realized that a massive rally with Sen. John F. Kerry and Bruce Springsteen would take place on their street this afternoon.

When the rock star's trailer parked right in front of their house, Danya Bader-Natal — one of the seven University of Wisconsin seniors who live in the gray wooden house-scrawled a message in green marker on a flattened box and hung it from their second-story balcony: "Bruce come up for a beer."

"We thought he might see it and laugh, but we definitely didn't think he'd actually come over," said roommate Vivian Intermont.

On his way back to his trailer after playing a short set before a crowd of 80,000 people, the singer pointed at the sign with a grin. And, much to their shock, he took the students up on their invitation.

Along with his wife, Patti Scialfa, Springsteen clambered up the stairs, tripping over a jumble of computer cords stretched across a doorway, and joined the roommates and their friends on a balcony cluttered with beach chairs and boxes of artichoke pizza. The stunned students handed the rock legend a bottle of Capitol Amber and for the next 20 minutes, he hung out with them as the Democratic candidate spoke on stage down the street.

"We were trying not to act too star-struck," said Jen Garfield, a creative writing and environmental studies major from Chicago.

"I didn't know who to look at: The Boss or Kerry," said Erin Prendergast, a forest management major from Milwaukee.

Springsteen spent most of the time leaning on the balcony railing, listening intently to Kerry's speech, but before he departed, he posed for photos and signed several "Kerry-Edwards" signs.

"I'm going to remember this the rest of my life," swore Emily Fischer, 21, who had just finished a French test on campus when she heard about the surprise guest. She ran all the way back, and caught the last five minutes of his visit.

The roommates, all devout Kerry supporters, insisted that their encounter with Springsteen did not let them lose sight of the day's broader message.

"This is really for Kerry," Garfield said. "This is for politics, and this is to take our country back."

And while they professed admiration for the Boss, the college seniors are not exactly the rock star's most fervent fans. When asked to name their favorite Springsteen song, the young women looked at each other blankly and dissolved into embarrassed laughter.

Finally, Prendergast saved the day. "Well, everybody knows, 'Born, in the U-S-A," she began singing.

"He's like a wise old guy that our parents listen to," Intermont added. "I called my mom already. She was like, 'I don't believe it!'"


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

Welcome to WorkingForChange

Welcome to WorkingForChange




Bush can't evade this unpleasant truth
Joe Conason - The New York Observer

10.27.04 - As he storms the swing states in the campaign's closing days, George W. Bush assures us that the invasion of Iraq has made America safer. We are still in grave danger, of course, so the President warns that only he and his incomparable team can protect our future security. His swaggering certainty only seems to increase as each day brings fresh evidence of his administration's awful mismanagement of the war.

At this late hour nobody expects Mr. Bush to confess error, or to honestly confront the perils created by his administration's boggling mistakes. For those of us in the "reality-based" world, however, the disappearance of hundreds of tons of high explosives from Al Qaqaa -- an enormous and notorious weapons complex south of Baghdad -- again raises grave doubts about the competence of the President and his "war cabinet."

We already knew that the nation's most experienced military and diplomatic professionals advised Mr. Bush to prepare carefully for the war and its aftermath. We knew that those capable people warned repeatedly that the consequences of invasion would include widespread chaos and armed resistance -- and urged the administration to deploy sufficient forces to pacify the country and restore order.

Now we know that the U.N. inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Authority provided ample information about the most dangerous sites that should have been guarded. And we are learning the consequences of the administration's decision to ignore that sound advice.

Specifically, the IAEA turned over to the Pentagon a list of sites that should be guarded by the invasion forces, including the Al Qaqaa complex. The IAEA had monitored that site for more than a decade and placed its contents under seal, because the same HMX and RDX explosives so useful in making car bombs and roadside mines are also ideal for triggering a nuclear weapon.

Explaining how persons unknown could have absconded with 40 truckloads of exceptionally dangerous munitions in the midst of an American invasion is a challenge even for this White House.

The Pentagon's spokesman has tried to suggest that the explosives vanished sometime between March 8, 2003, when the IAEA inspectors last visited the Al Qaqaa complex, and April 9, when the U.S. forces seized the Iraqi capital, 30 miles north of the complex. During that period, and for many months earlier, that suspect site had been under heavy surveillance by American satellites and aircraft. Could the Iraqis actually have loaded a convoy of trucks and departed carrying such deadly cargo without detection?

Available evidence doesn't support that implausible theory. According to the Iraqi interim government, which reported this incident to the IAEA two weeks ago, the theft of the explosives occurred after American forces entered Baghdad on April 9, during the orgy of looting of "government installations due to lack of security."

Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, a supporter of the war who was selected by the President to find those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, also discounts the Pentagon's theory. He told the Los Angeles Times that when he visited the Al Qaqaa complex in May 2003, it already had been "heavily looted... The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi [munitions] sites."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan uttered a few additional excuses, including a ridiculous attempt to deflect responsibility onto the Iraqi authorities. He acknowledged that in the invasion's aftermath, Al Qaqaa just wasn't a high priority compared to the oil fields.

What neither Mr. Bush nor his aides can deny is that the U.S. received timely information from the IAEA, which had inspected these places for years. We know they disregarded the agency's pleas because they failed to guard not only Al Qaqaa, but the equally obvious nuclear waste site at Al Tuwaitha, where looters last year carried away uranium, cobalt and cesium. Those radioactive materials are the essential components of a primitive "dirty bomb," like the weapon that alleged terrorist Jose Padilla was accused of planning to detonate in an American city.

Asked this week by an Australian journalist whether the IAEA had urged U.S. officials not to leave Al Qaqaa unguarded, the agency's spokeswoman in Vienna confirmed the warning. "Yes, a couple of times we did," recalled Melissa Fleming. "First of all, it's important to note that it was a well-known site... It was of concern directly after the invasion, when it was clear that the main nuclear site, Tuwaitha, was being looted. And so this was a site that we did alert the U.S. to as one important to protect."

The IAEA never received any response from U.S. officials, Ms. Fleming added.

Our officials were very busy, of course, advancing photo ops on aircraft carriers and dispatching Republican operatives to the "Green Zone" in Baghdad. They weren't inclined to pay much attention to international meddlers at the U.N. or the IAEA. Why would they listen to anyone else when they never make a mistake?

COPYRIGHT (c) 2004 THE NEW YORK OBSERVER


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17975

Book Blog -- ReadersRead.com

Book Blog -- ReadersRead.com

This could be addicting. Or as Bush would say it: "A-ddicccccc--ting."

:{

Predicted Final Results

Predicted Final Results

From your mouth to the world's ears

Faith will be rewarded. (Thanks, Bruce.) Not Blind Faith. Just faith... and hopes and dreams.

FIVE NIGHTS TO ROCK, FIVE NIGHTS TO ROLL

CBC News: Bruce Springsteen joins John Kerry on the stump

and from NBC'S FIRST READ:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3626796


But "revving up" is exactly what Kerry will do today, as Springsteen plays a song or two at Kerry's second and third events in Madison, WI and Columbus, OH. Kerry aides say they don't know which songs the Boss will play, and they were mum about the possibility of Kerry playing guitar alongside him. MSNBC's Becky Diamond says aides also weren't sure yesterday if Springsteen will actually travel on the campaign plane between events or not. He also will perform at Kerry's Monday night rally in Cleveland.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A Hole in the Heart

To start your day: brain exercises
Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfield, Ms. Rice, Mr. Rove:
HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT?
What have you done to our country?
Will someone make them answer a g-ddamn question?
Will someone tell them to their faces what they have done to destroy the only world we will ever know?
This is our one life to live.
How did this happen?


Thank you, Mr. Friedman, for saying out loud what so many of us are screaming to a deaf audience.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A Hole in the Heart: "


October 28, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Hole in the Heart
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When you read polls showing a significant number of Americans feel our country is on the wrong track, what do you think is bothering people? I think it's a deep worry that there is a hole in the heart of the world - the moderate center seems to be getting torn asunder. That has many people worried. And they are right to be worried.

American politics is so polarized today that there is no center, only sides. Israeli politics has become divided nearly to the point of civil war. In the Arab-Muslim world, where the moderate center was always a fragile flower, the political moderates are on the defensive everywhere, and moderate Muslim spiritual leaders seem almost nonexistent.

Europe, for its part, has gone so crazy over the Bush administration that the normally thoughtful Guardian newspaper completely lost its mind last week and published a column that openly hoped for the assassination of President Bush, saying: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. - where are you now that we need you?" (The writer apologized later.) Meanwhile, French and German leaders seem to be competing over who can say more categorically that they will never send troops to help out in Iraq - even though the help needed now is to organize the first U.N.-supervised democratic election in that country.

How do we begin to repair this jagged hole? There is no cure-all, but three big things would help. One is a different U.S. approach to the world. The Bush-Cheney team bears a big responsibility for this hole because it nakedly exploited 9/11 to push a far-right Republican agenda, domestically and globally, for which it had no mandate. When U.S. policy makes such a profound lurch to the right, when we start exporting fear instead of hope, the whole center of gravity of the world is affected. Countries reposition themselves in relation to us.

Had the administration been more competent in pursuing its policies in Iraq - which can still turn out decently - the hole in the heart of the world might not have gotten so large and jagged.

I have been struck by how many foreign dignitaries have begged me lately for news that Bush will lose. This Bush team has made itself so radioactive it glows in the dark. When the world liked Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, America had more power in the world. When much of the world detests George Bush, America has less power. People do not want to be seen standing next to us. It doesn't mean we should run our foreign policy as a popularity contest, but it does mean that leading is not just about making decisions - it's also the ability to communicate, follow through and persuade.

If the Bush team wins re-election, unless it undergoes a policy lobotomy and changes course and tone, the breach between America and the rest of the world will only get larger. But all Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney have told us during this campaign is that they have made no mistakes and see no reason to change.

The second thing that is necessary to heal the hole in the world is a decent Iraqi election. If such an election can be brought off, the Europeans, the Arabs and the American left will have to rethink their positions. I know what I am for in Iraq: a real election and a decent government. The Europeans, the Arabs and the American left know what they are against in Iraq: George Bush and his policies. But if there is an elected Iraqi government, it could be the magnet to begin pulling the moderate center of the world back together, because a duly elected Iraqi government is something everyone should want to help.

The real question is, What if we get a new Iraqi government but the same old Bush team incompetence? That would be a problem. Even an elected Iraqi government will see its legitimacy wane if we cannot help it provide basic security and jobs.

Last, we need to hope that Ariel Sharon's hugely important effort to withdraw Israel from Gaza will pave the way for a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. When there is no peace in the Holy Land, and when America has no diplomacy going on there, the world is always more polarized.

I am no Sharon fan, but I am impressed. Mr. Sharon's willingness to look his own ideology and his own political base in the eye, conclude that pandering to both of them is no longer in his country's national interest, and then risk his life and political career to change course is an example of leadership you just don't see much of any more in democracies.

I wonder what Karl Rove thinks of it?

DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2004?

DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2004?: "CAROLINE KENNEDY TO BUSH: STOP INVOKING MY FATHER
Wed Oct 27 2004 15:19:01 ET

WASHINGTON, DC *In response to George W. Bush's invocation of prominent Democrats including President John F. Kennedy, Kennedy's daughter Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg issued this statement. 'It's hard for me to listen to President Bush invoking my father's memory to attack John Kerry. Senator Kerry has demonstrated his courage and commitment to a stronger America throughout his entire career. President Kennedy inspired and united the country and so will John Kerry. President Bush is doing just the opposite. All of us who revere the strength and resolve of President Kennedy will be supporting John Kerry on Election Day.' "

I know a little something or two about John F. Kennedy and George Bush, you are no John Kennedy. You're not even allowed to invoke his name in passing. You are a nothing.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 24, 2004 - October 30, 2004 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 24, 2004 - October 30, 2004 Archives:

G.W. Bush said on October 27, 2004 (said as in read words fed to him, not said as in came up with any thoughts of his own):
"...a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not the person you want as the Commander-in-Chief. "

Talk about putting your big foot in your big mouth again. Jumping to conclusions? You mean like deceiving the American people about WMDs in IRAQ? You mean like consciously and deliberately deceiving the American people to confuse Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein? You mean like throwing dust and smoke and lies as fast and furious as you can ...
and using the blood and guts of the 3000 dead souls from 9/11/01 to perpetrate your neocon fantasy to take over the Middle East?

FACTS? What would BUSH know about FACTS?

And hence the reason YOU, Bush, are NOT THE PERSON WE ELECTED OR WANT AS OUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.

Go home. Go away. Let us live again.

Where I'm Calling From, 5 AM Wednesday morning

The Unfeeling President

The Words

The Unfeeling President
by E.L. Doctorow

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war making, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E. L. Doctorow is an American novelist. His works are noted for their mingling of American history and literary imagination through the interaction of fictional and real-life characters.

Copyright © 2004 East Hampton Star

Music Saved Me

"Music...
This is the Favorite Passion of My Soul"
(Thomas Jefferson)

The Poet Like an Acrobat

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Title Poem (15), A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958

(from Random House Webster's Quotationary)

The New York Times > Washington > C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report

OPEN DEMAND TO BUSH AND FRIENDS:
FREE THE INFORMATION. NOW.

The New York Times > Washington > C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report: "




October 27, 2004
C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report
By DOUGLAS JEHL

ASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - The Central Intelligence Agency has blocked, at least temporarily, the distribution of a draft internal report that identifies individual officers by name in discussing whether anyone should be held accountable for intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of Congress from both parties said.

The delays began in July, at the direction of John E. McLaughlin, then the acting director of central intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss took over as the intelligence chief last month, members of Congress said. The delays have postponed the next step in the process, which calls for the draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.

It is not known who is named in the report, conducted by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent internal investigator. The review was sought in December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee that investigated intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said, should be to determine "whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable'' for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to disrupt the attacks.

In a Sept. 23 letter to Mr. McLaughlin, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Jane Harman of California, said they were "concerned that the C.I.A. is unwilling to hold its officers accountable for failures to meet the professional standards we know C.I.A stands for.'' On Tuesday, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, wrote separately to Mr. Goss, expressing concern "about the appearance that the inspector general's independence is being infringed.''

Neither letter has been made public, but copies were obtained Tuesday by The New York Times. In both letters, the members of Congress cited as evidence of the delays identical letters sent to the intelligence committees on Aug. 31 by John Helgerson, the C.I.A. inspector general. The members of Congress described the delays as a departure from normal procedure.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about the status of the report. An intelligence official said that Mr. Goss had asked to review the draft himself before it was distributed further. The official would not address the question of who might be named in the document but said, "No C.I.A. official, current or former, has been found accountable, because we're talking about a draft.''

Senator Pat Roberts, af Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not sign the letter that Mr. Rockefeller sent. A Republican Congressional official said that Mr. Roberts did not yet believe that the postponement of the report was a matter for concern and said the delay was "uncommon but not abnormal.''

Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for Mr. Roberts, said: "Senator Roberts is closely monitoring the progress of the C.I.A. inspector general's report on 9/11. Senator Roberts has already made it clear to the agency that he expects to see the report upon its completion."

That Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman had called on the C.I.A. to release the report had been previously disclosed, but not the contents of the letter. In it, Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman said that Mr. Helgerson had indicated that Mr. McLaughlin had broken with normal practice and directed him "not to distribute the sections of the report that identify individual officers by name.''

A spokesman for George J. Tenet, who stepped down in July after seven years as director of central intelligence, said that Mr. Tenet had not been interviewed for the draft report, had not been briefed on its contents and had not been asked to respond to it.

James L. Pavitt, who retired in August as the C.I.A.'s deputy director of operations, also said he had not seen the report and had not been asked to respond to it. Mr. Pavitt said in an e-mail message: "We failed to stop the 11 September attacks. It surely was not for lack of effort, lack of focus or lack of courage.''

"Given what we now know, in all the hindsight of the year 2004, I still do not believe we could have stopped the attacks,'' Mr. Pavitt added. "If there is to be blame, it belongs with me, not with the remarkable folks who worked the counterterrorism issue day in and day out."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

More than ever, it's clear that the minority vote is the missing link to why the polls do not reflect the truth. Those voters may find obstacles to the voting booth on Nov. 2nd. Do not let this happen. I am tired of shouting for the Nots to be heard.

And yes, I have been a Not my whole life.


But NOT anymore.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

The Blogger of all Bloggers

SHORE FIRE MAKES IT OFFICIAL: BRUCE AND KERRY. TOGETHER AT LAST

http://www.shorefiremedia.com/

Bruce and Kerry in Columbus, Ohio.
It's worth the drive.

Hit the road, Pamela. ;>

http://brucespringsteen.net

http://johnkerry.com

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Allawi Says 'Major Neglect' by U.S. Troops Led to Ambush

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Allawi Says 'Major Neglect' by U.S. Troops Led to Ambush

Even our U.S.-installed hand puppets are dissing on Bush.

Everybody grab your hankies.

:>

The Official Kerry-Edwards Blog

The Official Kerry-Edwards Blog

You don't need a ticket to get on board.

Come on this train.
Come on this train.

……..V....I....C....T....O....R....Y......2....0....0. ...4
Kerry/Edwards 2004

New York Post Online Edition: entertainment

New York Post Online Edition: entertainment
Teen singer Ashlee Simp son says the embarassing snafu on "Saturday Night Live" that revealed at least some her vocals are pre-taped was all a misunderstanding.
Ashlee, younger sister of the pop singer Jessica Simpson, told "SNL" producers that only back-up vocals were contained on a track that was mistakenly played during the live show.
"She told us it was only back-up," a show official said yesterday

Uh-huh. And Bush doesn't exxxaaaggeerrrrate. It's "harrrrd worrrrk" to sing!


That nasty "L" word: Saturday Night Live? Or Lip Synch?
Posers of the world: go home.

If you can't sing, don't synch.

Stop giving air time to Liars. Like Simpson.
Like Bush.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Ignorance Isn't Strength

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Ignorance Isn't Strength


KRUGMAN. My kind of thinking man.

Bush and Company could use some of THIS sort of intelligence.

Welcome to WorkingForChange

Welcome to WorkingForChange

Just bumping this baby back to the future.

http://www.pamelaross.net

Come back.

A blunt and to the point post because I am too cold to think like an artist:

My house is freezing. There is no heat. I expect to see the Titanic swoop by for a visit any second. Celine Dion, that's your cue to start singing.

Frank lost his mother Saturday night. Her journey is done. I pray she went in peace. Frank was with her when she faded to black. He watched her last breaths and then... nothing. I feel bad that the girls were not there but Frank read their poetry to her as she lay dying. (I know, I know. Someone else wrote that book already.) It comforts me my daughters' words were with her as the lights went down.

Last but not least: Death to the person who invented potato chips.

I shall return.

The difference between a journal and this public log has become more apparent. This is performance art. I write without an editor screaming in my ear but I am semi-aware that Someone Out There might be reading my thoughts in front of my back.

You can stay. You can listen. You can laugh. You can walk away.
Do with me what you will. I won't pass around a hat at the end of the show.

A preview of the portion of T.S. Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS that will appear in the First Novel. Publication date TBA.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

LITTLE GIDDING
(No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot

What's Playing Now:

MEASURE OF A MAN

If one day you discover him
broken down he's lost everything
no cars, no fancy clothes to make him who he's not
the woman at his side is all that he has got

Why do you ask him move heaven and earth
To prove his love has worth
Would he walk on water
Would he run through fire
Would he stand before you
When it's down to the wire
Would he give his life up
To be all he can
Is that, is that, is that
How you measure a man

If by chance all he has to give you
Was three words wrapped around your finger
Would that be deep enough at the end of everyday
and how will you ever know if a man is what he says

Why do you ask him move heaven and earth
To prove his love has worth
Would he walk on water
Would he run through fire
Would he stand before you
When it's down to the wire
Would he give his life up
To be all he can
Is that, is that, is that
How you measure a man

He'd never give up
Let go of his dreams
his world goes around
for his one true belief
Is that how you know
Is that what it means

Heyeah...Would he walk on water
Would he run through fire
Would he stand before you
Will he be your anchor/anger when a dark unfolds
Will he always love you the best that he knows
Would he give his life up
To be all he can
Is that, is that, is that
How you measure a man

Would he walk on water
Would he run through fire
Would he stand before you
When it's down to the wire
Would he give his life up
To be all he can
Is that, is that, is that
How you measure... oh woaw
Is that, is that, is that
How you measure a man

A very public plug for my favorite bookstore
Go
See
Browse
Hand Over Your Money
Read

http://www.bookrevue.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

Night again. Or is it morning? Some people live by the clock. I choose to ignore the big hand and short hand method. To me, time is something I either have or I don't. I usually don't. Hours slip by and suddenly a perfectly good day is traditionally over. I am a 3 AM woman living in an 11:30 pm town. I wish I lived on the west coast, where psychologically it seems as if the residents there always have three more hours in a day than I do.

I should be doing something creative and important with these quiet After Dark hours. I will be. This New House shelters me and inspires me to do great things.

From the "One Who Should Know" department: My friend, Sue, blessed me with the Perfect Plaque to hang over my computer in my Perfect New Study: "Future Award-Winning Author At Work."



Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

The lights went out at 4:13 pm (of course, perfect time) and the east coast went dark. A strangely quiet, calm experience. I expected the worst in people. I expected the city to be torn apart by invisible hands, reaching for the stars and the dirt and all the suddenly free prizes in between. I am so glad I was wrong.

Not a good night for us to be shrouded. We are in the final moments of packing for the big move. We figured this was a perfect way to go. We came to this village in the midst of a hurricane. Twelve years later, it serves us right to walk the halls in darkness and say a faceless good bye to the ghosts of our past.

I heard from an agent via e-mail. The correspondence was long overdue but it is nice to know I was not forgotten. The letter left me puzzled. I choose not to address the letter now. I'll let the words hang mid-air and see where they land when I am ready to let them fall. I feel powerful.

I carry the voices of my mentors and they urge me on. I know what the future brings. How I get there is still to be determined. Oh if only AAA had a road map for me to follow. But what fun would that be?

The lights returned long after midnight. We cheered their return. Something tells me I would not have made a very good pioneer.

Long time no type. I don't deserve to be a web diarist. I am not worthy of the title. There is nothing I like better than recording the words of life, but I am afraid the last six months will have to remain a mystery forever more... to you, to me. I will start anew from this moment. I hope splices and clips from my recent history will emerge as I move forward. The future is never far from what one did the day before. Oh if only we could shake the past with the wave of a delete button. If only the negatives and woes and pains of life could be erased and tossed into the trash like a horrible first draft of a manuscript. But we go on and we live with where we've come from and what we've seen. We try to suppress the angst but, truthfully, a writer can never walk far away from the conflicts of her existence. We keep them as our secrets, only to find them re-enacted in the pages of our next draft. Where does life end and art begin?

And so... Tomorrow is today.

Our new house is waiting for our impending arrival. We're almost there. A few more boxes, a few more papers to sign, and off we go to a new home, sweet home. I cannot wait to open the door to the next act of my life. I shall roll out the red carpet and wave to all the dreams I've nurtured since I can't remember when... Applaud, hoot, stomp and shout my name. I'm home. Yes I'm home. I have yearned for this since I was a child. A place for me. A place where I belong. A place where I can walk outside and feel a part of the earth. A place where maybe all my books will finally fit. (Ah... stop me right there. That could never happen.)

I can't wait to return to my paper and pen and keyboard. I've missed writing. I've missed inhaling language. I've missed pulling words from the air and feeling a story emerge. Any other non-writing writer can understand the frustration I endure. I hope the prison guard isn't looking. I am about to escape.

See you on the outside.

Late night post. Website almost ready for the launch. What I am launching? I don't know. Me.
Vacation begins when school ends today. I think the kids are ready for a little down time. January and February have been frought with busy, cold days and nights. I'm looking forward to spending quiet time with them.
Really enjoyed last weekend's SCBWI conference. Met up with a lot of old friends and new. Was inspired by the keynote speech given my sweet friend Linda Sue Park. She spoke to the audience rather than talking about herself, her books, her life, her woes. She won the Newbery last year. Now there's my deam come true.
One day. {}

Building a website. Not that I know how.
Returned from the Kindling Words retreat Sunday night. The fire was lit within and I feel like a writer.