Right-wing Takeover = Terrorist Attack?
In the six articles and editorials included in today’s web log for the sake of their historical importance, this writer disagrees with only one statement: Froma Harrop states “The right-wing takeover of this sensible country has been stopped.”
It is this writer’s belief, along with other, more prominent writers, that the current takeover of our country has been in process for the past thirty years and the real puppet masters of this cabal are buried deeply under cover of benign wealth.
Therefore, it would seem that now the “right-wing takeover” is being outed on an almost daily basis we should exercise even more caution as only an event of great magnitude with the label “terrorist attack” would serve to make this country and her citizens back down and allow the Bush regime to continue with that takeover.
It only makes sense.
The attack on America using passenger jets as flying bombs was proffered as a potential scenario long before the actual occurrences of September 11, 2001, and given that ECHELON was firmly in place, along with the magic spy apparatus used by the NSA and available to ‘elected’ officials who could have prevented the attack on America, common sense would dictate that somebody somewhere knew about the very real potential for terrorists attacking America in this way.
Several people in positions of trust and prominence brought events prior to September 11, 2001 to the attention of right wingers in power and those whistle-blowers were either ignored or discredited.
That all but one of the attackers of The World Trade Center and The Pentagon were Saudis—and with the long-term friendly relations between the Bush family and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia—one is remiss if one does not speculate on potential scenarios for these particular relationships.
After all, September 11, 2001 resulted in what can only be called an advantageous series of events for the closing of the right-wing trap on American freedoms—the Final Solution for the demise of democracy.
Yes: we know a lot more now than we did then about the Bush cabal and that is all the more reason to bring to light any possible indications of malfeasance and any connections to events which would destroy America and bring her ideals into submission to the whims of those who would destroy our country.
_________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, December 27, 2005 - 12:00 AM
Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist
A bad week for blowhards
The right-wing takeover of this sensible country has been stopped. With this pleasant thought, we enter 2006.
In one golden week, three things happened that bore a common thread. In each case, mainstream positions won out over the bluster of blowhards. People of principle stared down charges that they were unpatriotic, loved Osama or hated religion. The results were gratifying — not only to liberals, but to moderates and a good number of self-described conservatives, who have distanced themselves from their leaders' excesses.
For starters, the Senate said "no" to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. It has saved the refuge before, but this time the Republican oilmen turned the vote into a game of chicken. The drilling provision was first stuck to the budget bill. When lawmakers balked, it was unstuck and attached to the defense-spending bill. Once there, the gamesters figured they could smear anyone voting against it as uncaring about the troops.
The defenders of the wildlife refuge, which included several Republicans, did not cave. Sen. Maria Cantwell, Democrat from Washington, accurately called the bill "legislative blackmail." Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut announced that the defense bill was not going anywhere with drilling in it. The Democrat had just returned from a grand tour of conservative talk shows, where the hosts covered him with praise for supporting the Iraq war. Any charges of not backing American forces bounced right off his armor.
The pro-environment senators easily ignored the latest tantrum by Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican obsessed with developing the refuge. And then they turned the tables on the opposition: Some questioned the patriotism of those who would load the "must-pass" defense bill with extraneous special interests.
In another vote, the Senate temporarily extended the USA Patriot Act past its Dec. 31 expiration date. President Bush wanted the anti-terrorism law renewed, but that wasn't going to happen without a frank conversation on his recently revealed surveillance activities.
Not long ago, anyone who wanted to contain the president's powers was smothered by accusations of leaving America open to attack.
It's true that after Sept. 11, 2001, many of us agreed that the government needed more powerful tools to track the bad guys. That the rules had to change, however, didn't mean there should be no rules.
The citizens have not signed on to giving Bush the right to wiretap Americans making international calls without a warrant — especially since he already can do it in an emergency and ask permission later. The president says he may act as he pleases.
Vice President Dick Cheney bared his teeth and warned that politicians who criticize these policies will pay a heavy political price. Sen. Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, coolly responded, "My oath is to the Constitution, not to a vice president, a president or a political party." Expect to hear that kind of thing more often.
The third victory for rational thinking took place in central Pennsylvania. There, a federal judge ruled that "intelligent design" — a crypto-creationist challenge to the theory of evolution — is religion, and forcing it on science classes in Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.
Judge John E. Jones, a Bush appointee, called intelligent design "relabeled creationism." He accused its backers of lying about their true intentions, which was to promote religion in a science class. And before the intelligent-design sponsors could utter the words "activist judge," Jones told them to get lost.
Actually, the tide first turned against the intelligent-design boosters in November. That's when the Dover voters removed School Board members pushing the scientific-sounding doctrine.
As far as I can tell, there's hardly a liberal in this story. The judge is a Republican. The voters who kicked out their school board come from a staunchly conservative community. It appears that the movement to sneak religion into science class — which has commanded a national debate — is the work of a noisy few.
All these events, one after another, suggest that the newfound courage of moderates is not a fluke. There never was this big groundswell to develop a wildlife refuge, make Bush king or teach creationism in the schools. The nation has begun to march in the other direction from the right-wing majorettes. May the parade grow long in 2006.
Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCERhttp://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/253471_powelled.asp
Secret Surveillance: Balance of power
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
The weekend provided yet another reminder of how much the reasoned voice of former Secretary of State Colin Powell is missed in the government.
Powell was asked about the Bush administration's decision to sidestep the law barring warrentless surveillance of U.S. phone and Internet communications. "It didn't seem to me," Powell replied, "that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."
The law provides for that.
But executive ego apparently does not.
The separation-of-powers issue at stake is not between the executive and legislative branches but between the executive and the judicial.
The purpose of a warrant is to provide for review of law-enforcement by requiring some level of proof that suspicions about a suspect are, well, warranted.
The president could have done precisely what Powell suggests: Make the case for surveillance to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The administration justifies the civil liberties shortcutting with the terrorism menace. And in the 1950s and '60s the communism menace was the justification for abuses of privacy and power.
Some Americans may feel secure by assurances that the mounds of data gathered without warrants will be used solely in the battle against terrorism. Other, more prudent Americans will be uneasy over the other, less noble, uses for which this data might be used.
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
__________________________________________________________________
December 27, 2005
Editorial
Phantom Voters, Thanks to the Census
The first Constitution took for granted that enslaved people could not vote, but counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This inflated the voting power of slaveholders and gave them much more influence in legislative matters than their actual numbers warranted.
No American would knowingly tolerate such an arrangement today. But a glitch in the census that inflates the populations of some state legislative districts - thus exaggerating their voting power - has led to a contemporary version of that problem. It involves counting prison inmates in the district where they are confined rather than where they actually live. The Census Bureau could fix this problem in a heartbeat, so it needs to get a move on.
The culprit is a provision in the census that counts prison inmates as "residents" of the institutions where they are held, often for relatively short periods of time. Denied the right to vote in all but 2 of the 50 states, the inmates are nonetheless treated as voters when the State Legislatures draw up legislative districts. This practice mattered little 30 years ago, when the prison population was tiny. But with about 1.4 million people in prison today, it can be used to shift political power from one part of the state to another.
A startling analysis by Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative found seven upstate New York Senate districts meeting the population requirements only because inmates were included in the count. The Republican Party in New York relies on its large upstate delegation for its majority in the State Senate - and for its political power statewide. New York is not alone. The Prison Policy Initiative's researchers found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of so-called residents lived behind bars.
By counting these nonvoting inmates as residents, the prison counties offend the principle of one person one vote, while siphoning off political power from the home districts to which the inmates will return as soon as they are released. Since inmates are jobless, their presence also allows prison districts to lower their per capita incomes, unfairly increasing their share of federal funds earmarked for the poor. Congress, which has just caught on to this, recently gave the Census Bureau 90 days to file a report on the feasibility of counting inmates at their homes of record rather than in prison.
At the same time, a committee overseen by the National Academy of Sciences has been studying the residency issue and is expected to make its final report this spring. But why does the bureau need another study to decide whether it wants to uphold the one-person-one-vote principle? The bureau should get to work immediately on procedures that would allow it to count inmates where they actually live - and get those procedures locked in place by the 2010 census.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
___________________________________________________________________
SEASICKENING
By GEOFF EARLE
EXCLUSIVE
WASHINGTON — A federal anti-terror program to beef up security at the nation's ports has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to luxury dinner-cruise boats and the Circle Line, The Post has learned.
Premiere Yachts Inc., which operates elegant dinner cruises along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., got a $45,000 grant for "access controls" around the ship, records show.
The company received a $123,000 grant for its Chicago cruise and $39,000 for its Boston operation.
New York lawmakers and port officials were fuming over the badly needed funds' going to dinner-cruise lines at a time when New York City has been pleading with Washington for more money to safeguard its ports.
"We thought it was a little ridiculous," Susan Monteverde of the American Association of Port Authorities said of the dinner-cruise dollars.
The Circle Line, which operates a ferry to the Statue of Liberty and other sight-seeing boats, collected a $231,000 grant for "physical enhancements," including security screening.
Officials from Premiere and the Circle Line did not return calls for comment.
Word of the grants comes after Post reports that Dunkin' Donuts shops received low-cost government loans following 9/11 and at a time when the Homeland Security Department is already under fire.
A harsh report by Homeland Security's inspector general concluded that Washington gave more to private companies than to public facilities in one round of grants.
This included awards to private projects that "appeared to be for a purpose other than security against an act of terrorism" and "were required as a normal course of business."
Homeland Security has since started requiring private companies to match half of the costs of security upgrades to get federal port grants.
Federal bureaucrats doled out millions in private grants at a time when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has gotten far less money than it requested for high-tech security improvements.
The Post reported earlier this month that New York/ New Jersey got only $7.5 million, or 5 percent, of port-security grants in the latest round while Texas got $54 million, or 38 percent.
That includes $3 million awarded directly to private Texas oil and gas companies.
"Big oil companies and luxury dinner-cruise ships should not be the first in line for millions of dollars in port-security grants — the port of New York and other large ports should be," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Major oil and gas companies — which posted record profits last year — have been among the program's biggest recipients.
geoff.earle@nypost.com
Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc.
__________________________________________________________________
When the Cutting Is Corrupted
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; A25
With indicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff reportedly ready to cooperate with prosecutors and his partner, Michael Scanlon, already singing, 2006 is expected to be the year of congressional scandals.
Lord knows, a housecleaning in the Capitol is definitely in order. But the Abramoff scandal is just part of the corruption of our political system. There is another level of special-interest influence that cannot be handled by prosecutors: Only the voters can render a judgment on a politics of favoritism that has created a new Gilded Age. It's clear that the national government has placed itself squarely on the side of the wealthy, the privileged and the connected.
Rarely does a single action by Congress serve as so powerful an example of how the system is working. The recent budget bill, which squeaked through the House and Senate just before Christmas, is a road map of insider dealing. It shows that when choices have to be made, the interests of the poor and the middle class fall before the wishes of interest groups with powerful lobbies and awesome piles of campaign money to distribute.
Republican majorities in the Senate and House insisted that they wanted to cut the federal budget. But the Senate and House offered competing plans for achieving savings. When it came time to meld the two proposals, almost every choice congressional leaders made favored the interest groups.
Consider federal health programs. The House bill proposed substantial cuts for Medicaid beneficiaries, but the Senate bill -- partly because of pressure from moderate Republicans -- did not include those cuts. Instead, the Senate proposed to save taxpayer money by eliminating a $10 billion fund to encourage regional preferred-provider organizations, known as PPOs, to participate in the Medicare program. It also sought more rebates to the federal government from drug manufacturers participating in Medicaid.
Note the difference: Instead of imposing cuts on the poor, the Senate sought savings from corporate interests. Surprise, surprise: The final bill dropped the $10 billion cut to the PPOs and most of the rebate demands on drug manufacturers. Instead, the agreement hammered Medicaid recipients with $16 billion in gross cuts over the next decade. (The net cuts are lower because of new Medicaid spending, partly to help cover the scattered victims of Hurricane Katrina.)
The Medicaid cuts include increased co-payments and premiums on low-income Americans, and the budget assumes savings because fewer poor people will visit the doctor. As Kevin Freking of the Associated Press reported: "The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that such increases would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all -- contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years."
Ah, say their defenders, but these cuts will be good for poor people. According to the New York Times, Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.), an architect of the Medicaid proposals, said the higher co-payments were needed to "encourage personal responsibility" among low-income people. Spoken like a congressman who never has to worry about his taxpayer-provided health coverage.
And that is just one instance among many of corporate interests being shielded from cuts, while child support enforcement and foster care programs were sliced. Shortly before the bill went to the House floor, Republican leaders, at the insistence of a group of GOP lawmakers from Ohio, dropped a $1.9 billion cut that would have changed Medicare payments to oxygen equipment manufacturers. The main beneficiary of this change was Invacare Corp. of Elyria, Ohio.
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) opposed the original, milder Senate budget bill but turned around and voted for the final, harsher bill. According to Congress Daily, Coleman backed the final budget "after negotiators took out cuts affecting his state's sugar beet growers." Coleman told the paper: "Karl Rove called me and asked what I wanted. A few hours later it was out of the bill."
The good news is that this budget is not law yet. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) used a clever procedural maneuver to force it back to the House for one more vote next year.
When this 774-page behemoth hit the House floor shortly after 1 a.m. on Dec. 19, many members were not fully aware of what was in it. Now that they know, maybe some of the moderate Republicans who caved to their leadership and voted for it will save their party's honor by killing this special-interest mess. If I may borrow from Mr. Barton, doing so would definitely "encourage personal responsibility" among Republican leaders.
postchat@aol.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
_________________________________________________________________
Power That Bush Can't Just Take
By Eugene RobinsonTuesday, December 27, 2005; A25
Since the holiday season is a time of generosity and goodwill toward all -- even those who torture the Constitution and hoodwink the nation into ill-advised wars -- let's do a little thought experiment.
Let's assume that George W. Bush's claim of virtually unfettered presidential power is not just an exercise in reclaiming executive perks that Dick Cheney believes were wrongly surrendered after Watergate.
Let's assume that Bush genuinely believes he needs the right to blanket the nation with electronic surveillance, detain indefinitely anyone he considers a terrorist suspect, make those detainees disappear into secret, CIA-run prisons, and subject them to "waterboarding" and other degradations. Let's assume for the moment that the president's only desperate motivation is to prevent another day like Sept. 11, 2001.
Let's go even further and assume he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason. Even in a thought experiment, we can't forgive the way he snowed the country into believing there was some connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks; nor can we forget the way he hyped the flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction -- we're being generous here, not stupid.
But let's assume that however calculated and cynical the machinations, and however wrongheaded the decision to go to war, the underlying motive was purely to avoid another catastrophic terrorist attack.
All right: Given these overly kind assumptions, can this administration's usurpation of power somehow be justified?
Every time I work it through, the answer I come up with is no. The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance.
The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War?
That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted.
Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks "suspicious" to questioning and a search? That's what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country.
In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?
The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.
If you go along with my experiment and assume that the president has the best of motives, then the problem is that he wants to protect the American people but doesn't trust us.
There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.
The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom.
These are not tactical decisions about where a tank division should cross the Rhone. They are fundamental questions that go to the nature of this union, and the president is required to trust the American people to decide them.
End of experiment. Please return your rose-colored safety glasses to the front of the class.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
It is this writer’s belief, along with other, more prominent writers, that the current takeover of our country has been in process for the past thirty years and the real puppet masters of this cabal are buried deeply under cover of benign wealth.
Therefore, it would seem that now the “right-wing takeover” is being outed on an almost daily basis we should exercise even more caution as only an event of great magnitude with the label “terrorist attack” would serve to make this country and her citizens back down and allow the Bush regime to continue with that takeover.
It only makes sense.
The attack on America using passenger jets as flying bombs was proffered as a potential scenario long before the actual occurrences of September 11, 2001, and given that ECHELON was firmly in place, along with the magic spy apparatus used by the NSA and available to ‘elected’ officials who could have prevented the attack on America, common sense would dictate that somebody somewhere knew about the very real potential for terrorists attacking America in this way.
Several people in positions of trust and prominence brought events prior to September 11, 2001 to the attention of right wingers in power and those whistle-blowers were either ignored or discredited.
That all but one of the attackers of The World Trade Center and The Pentagon were Saudis—and with the long-term friendly relations between the Bush family and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia—one is remiss if one does not speculate on potential scenarios for these particular relationships.
After all, September 11, 2001 resulted in what can only be called an advantageous series of events for the closing of the right-wing trap on American freedoms—the Final Solution for the demise of democracy.
Yes: we know a lot more now than we did then about the Bush cabal and that is all the more reason to bring to light any possible indications of malfeasance and any connections to events which would destroy America and bring her ideals into submission to the whims of those who would destroy our country.
_________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, December 27, 2005 - 12:00 AM
Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist
A bad week for blowhards
The right-wing takeover of this sensible country has been stopped. With this pleasant thought, we enter 2006.
In one golden week, three things happened that bore a common thread. In each case, mainstream positions won out over the bluster of blowhards. People of principle stared down charges that they were unpatriotic, loved Osama or hated religion. The results were gratifying — not only to liberals, but to moderates and a good number of self-described conservatives, who have distanced themselves from their leaders' excesses.
For starters, the Senate said "no" to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. It has saved the refuge before, but this time the Republican oilmen turned the vote into a game of chicken. The drilling provision was first stuck to the budget bill. When lawmakers balked, it was unstuck and attached to the defense-spending bill. Once there, the gamesters figured they could smear anyone voting against it as uncaring about the troops.
The defenders of the wildlife refuge, which included several Republicans, did not cave. Sen. Maria Cantwell, Democrat from Washington, accurately called the bill "legislative blackmail." Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut announced that the defense bill was not going anywhere with drilling in it. The Democrat had just returned from a grand tour of conservative talk shows, where the hosts covered him with praise for supporting the Iraq war. Any charges of not backing American forces bounced right off his armor.
The pro-environment senators easily ignored the latest tantrum by Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican obsessed with developing the refuge. And then they turned the tables on the opposition: Some questioned the patriotism of those who would load the "must-pass" defense bill with extraneous special interests.
In another vote, the Senate temporarily extended the USA Patriot Act past its Dec. 31 expiration date. President Bush wanted the anti-terrorism law renewed, but that wasn't going to happen without a frank conversation on his recently revealed surveillance activities.
Not long ago, anyone who wanted to contain the president's powers was smothered by accusations of leaving America open to attack.
It's true that after Sept. 11, 2001, many of us agreed that the government needed more powerful tools to track the bad guys. That the rules had to change, however, didn't mean there should be no rules.
The citizens have not signed on to giving Bush the right to wiretap Americans making international calls without a warrant — especially since he already can do it in an emergency and ask permission later. The president says he may act as he pleases.
Vice President Dick Cheney bared his teeth and warned that politicians who criticize these policies will pay a heavy political price. Sen. Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, coolly responded, "My oath is to the Constitution, not to a vice president, a president or a political party." Expect to hear that kind of thing more often.
The third victory for rational thinking took place in central Pennsylvania. There, a federal judge ruled that "intelligent design" — a crypto-creationist challenge to the theory of evolution — is religion, and forcing it on science classes in Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.
Judge John E. Jones, a Bush appointee, called intelligent design "relabeled creationism." He accused its backers of lying about their true intentions, which was to promote religion in a science class. And before the intelligent-design sponsors could utter the words "activist judge," Jones told them to get lost.
Actually, the tide first turned against the intelligent-design boosters in November. That's when the Dover voters removed School Board members pushing the scientific-sounding doctrine.
As far as I can tell, there's hardly a liberal in this story. The judge is a Republican. The voters who kicked out their school board come from a staunchly conservative community. It appears that the movement to sneak religion into science class — which has commanded a national debate — is the work of a noisy few.
All these events, one after another, suggest that the newfound courage of moderates is not a fluke. There never was this big groundswell to develop a wildlife refuge, make Bush king or teach creationism in the schools. The nation has begun to march in the other direction from the right-wing majorettes. May the parade grow long in 2006.
Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCERhttp://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/253471_powelled.asp
Secret Surveillance: Balance of power
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
The weekend provided yet another reminder of how much the reasoned voice of former Secretary of State Colin Powell is missed in the government.
Powell was asked about the Bush administration's decision to sidestep the law barring warrentless surveillance of U.S. phone and Internet communications. "It didn't seem to me," Powell replied, "that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."
The law provides for that.
But executive ego apparently does not.
The separation-of-powers issue at stake is not between the executive and legislative branches but between the executive and the judicial.
The purpose of a warrant is to provide for review of law-enforcement by requiring some level of proof that suspicions about a suspect are, well, warranted.
The president could have done precisely what Powell suggests: Make the case for surveillance to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The administration justifies the civil liberties shortcutting with the terrorism menace. And in the 1950s and '60s the communism menace was the justification for abuses of privacy and power.
Some Americans may feel secure by assurances that the mounds of data gathered without warrants will be used solely in the battle against terrorism. Other, more prudent Americans will be uneasy over the other, less noble, uses for which this data might be used.
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
__________________________________________________________________
December 27, 2005
Editorial
Phantom Voters, Thanks to the Census
The first Constitution took for granted that enslaved people could not vote, but counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This inflated the voting power of slaveholders and gave them much more influence in legislative matters than their actual numbers warranted.
No American would knowingly tolerate such an arrangement today. But a glitch in the census that inflates the populations of some state legislative districts - thus exaggerating their voting power - has led to a contemporary version of that problem. It involves counting prison inmates in the district where they are confined rather than where they actually live. The Census Bureau could fix this problem in a heartbeat, so it needs to get a move on.
The culprit is a provision in the census that counts prison inmates as "residents" of the institutions where they are held, often for relatively short periods of time. Denied the right to vote in all but 2 of the 50 states, the inmates are nonetheless treated as voters when the State Legislatures draw up legislative districts. This practice mattered little 30 years ago, when the prison population was tiny. But with about 1.4 million people in prison today, it can be used to shift political power from one part of the state to another.
A startling analysis by Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative found seven upstate New York Senate districts meeting the population requirements only because inmates were included in the count. The Republican Party in New York relies on its large upstate delegation for its majority in the State Senate - and for its political power statewide. New York is not alone. The Prison Policy Initiative's researchers found 21 counties nationally where at least 21 percent of so-called residents lived behind bars.
By counting these nonvoting inmates as residents, the prison counties offend the principle of one person one vote, while siphoning off political power from the home districts to which the inmates will return as soon as they are released. Since inmates are jobless, their presence also allows prison districts to lower their per capita incomes, unfairly increasing their share of federal funds earmarked for the poor. Congress, which has just caught on to this, recently gave the Census Bureau 90 days to file a report on the feasibility of counting inmates at their homes of record rather than in prison.
At the same time, a committee overseen by the National Academy of Sciences has been studying the residency issue and is expected to make its final report this spring. But why does the bureau need another study to decide whether it wants to uphold the one-person-one-vote principle? The bureau should get to work immediately on procedures that would allow it to count inmates where they actually live - and get those procedures locked in place by the 2010 census.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
___________________________________________________________________
SEASICKENING
By GEOFF EARLE
EXCLUSIVE
WASHINGTON — A federal anti-terror program to beef up security at the nation's ports has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to luxury dinner-cruise boats and the Circle Line, The Post has learned.
Premiere Yachts Inc., which operates elegant dinner cruises along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., got a $45,000 grant for "access controls" around the ship, records show.
The company received a $123,000 grant for its Chicago cruise and $39,000 for its Boston operation.
New York lawmakers and port officials were fuming over the badly needed funds' going to dinner-cruise lines at a time when New York City has been pleading with Washington for more money to safeguard its ports.
"We thought it was a little ridiculous," Susan Monteverde of the American Association of Port Authorities said of the dinner-cruise dollars.
The Circle Line, which operates a ferry to the Statue of Liberty and other sight-seeing boats, collected a $231,000 grant for "physical enhancements," including security screening.
Officials from Premiere and the Circle Line did not return calls for comment.
Word of the grants comes after Post reports that Dunkin' Donuts shops received low-cost government loans following 9/11 and at a time when the Homeland Security Department is already under fire.
A harsh report by Homeland Security's inspector general concluded that Washington gave more to private companies than to public facilities in one round of grants.
This included awards to private projects that "appeared to be for a purpose other than security against an act of terrorism" and "were required as a normal course of business."
Homeland Security has since started requiring private companies to match half of the costs of security upgrades to get federal port grants.
Federal bureaucrats doled out millions in private grants at a time when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has gotten far less money than it requested for high-tech security improvements.
The Post reported earlier this month that New York/ New Jersey got only $7.5 million, or 5 percent, of port-security grants in the latest round while Texas got $54 million, or 38 percent.
That includes $3 million awarded directly to private Texas oil and gas companies.
"Big oil companies and luxury dinner-cruise ships should not be the first in line for millions of dollars in port-security grants — the port of New York and other large ports should be," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Major oil and gas companies — which posted record profits last year — have been among the program's biggest recipients.
geoff.earle@nypost.com
Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc.
__________________________________________________________________
When the Cutting Is Corrupted
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; A25
With indicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff reportedly ready to cooperate with prosecutors and his partner, Michael Scanlon, already singing, 2006 is expected to be the year of congressional scandals.
Lord knows, a housecleaning in the Capitol is definitely in order. But the Abramoff scandal is just part of the corruption of our political system. There is another level of special-interest influence that cannot be handled by prosecutors: Only the voters can render a judgment on a politics of favoritism that has created a new Gilded Age. It's clear that the national government has placed itself squarely on the side of the wealthy, the privileged and the connected.
Rarely does a single action by Congress serve as so powerful an example of how the system is working. The recent budget bill, which squeaked through the House and Senate just before Christmas, is a road map of insider dealing. It shows that when choices have to be made, the interests of the poor and the middle class fall before the wishes of interest groups with powerful lobbies and awesome piles of campaign money to distribute.
Republican majorities in the Senate and House insisted that they wanted to cut the federal budget. But the Senate and House offered competing plans for achieving savings. When it came time to meld the two proposals, almost every choice congressional leaders made favored the interest groups.
Consider federal health programs. The House bill proposed substantial cuts for Medicaid beneficiaries, but the Senate bill -- partly because of pressure from moderate Republicans -- did not include those cuts. Instead, the Senate proposed to save taxpayer money by eliminating a $10 billion fund to encourage regional preferred-provider organizations, known as PPOs, to participate in the Medicare program. It also sought more rebates to the federal government from drug manufacturers participating in Medicaid.
Note the difference: Instead of imposing cuts on the poor, the Senate sought savings from corporate interests. Surprise, surprise: The final bill dropped the $10 billion cut to the PPOs and most of the rebate demands on drug manufacturers. Instead, the agreement hammered Medicaid recipients with $16 billion in gross cuts over the next decade. (The net cuts are lower because of new Medicaid spending, partly to help cover the scattered victims of Hurricane Katrina.)
The Medicaid cuts include increased co-payments and premiums on low-income Americans, and the budget assumes savings because fewer poor people will visit the doctor. As Kevin Freking of the Associated Press reported: "The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that such increases would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all -- contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years."
Ah, say their defenders, but these cuts will be good for poor people. According to the New York Times, Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.), an architect of the Medicaid proposals, said the higher co-payments were needed to "encourage personal responsibility" among low-income people. Spoken like a congressman who never has to worry about his taxpayer-provided health coverage.
And that is just one instance among many of corporate interests being shielded from cuts, while child support enforcement and foster care programs were sliced. Shortly before the bill went to the House floor, Republican leaders, at the insistence of a group of GOP lawmakers from Ohio, dropped a $1.9 billion cut that would have changed Medicare payments to oxygen equipment manufacturers. The main beneficiary of this change was Invacare Corp. of Elyria, Ohio.
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) opposed the original, milder Senate budget bill but turned around and voted for the final, harsher bill. According to Congress Daily, Coleman backed the final budget "after negotiators took out cuts affecting his state's sugar beet growers." Coleman told the paper: "Karl Rove called me and asked what I wanted. A few hours later it was out of the bill."
The good news is that this budget is not law yet. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) used a clever procedural maneuver to force it back to the House for one more vote next year.
When this 774-page behemoth hit the House floor shortly after 1 a.m. on Dec. 19, many members were not fully aware of what was in it. Now that they know, maybe some of the moderate Republicans who caved to their leadership and voted for it will save their party's honor by killing this special-interest mess. If I may borrow from Mr. Barton, doing so would definitely "encourage personal responsibility" among Republican leaders.
postchat@aol.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
_________________________________________________________________
Power That Bush Can't Just Take
By Eugene RobinsonTuesday, December 27, 2005; A25
Since the holiday season is a time of generosity and goodwill toward all -- even those who torture the Constitution and hoodwink the nation into ill-advised wars -- let's do a little thought experiment.
Let's assume that George W. Bush's claim of virtually unfettered presidential power is not just an exercise in reclaiming executive perks that Dick Cheney believes were wrongly surrendered after Watergate.
Let's assume that Bush genuinely believes he needs the right to blanket the nation with electronic surveillance, detain indefinitely anyone he considers a terrorist suspect, make those detainees disappear into secret, CIA-run prisons, and subject them to "waterboarding" and other degradations. Let's assume for the moment that the president's only desperate motivation is to prevent another day like Sept. 11, 2001.
Let's go even further and assume he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason. Even in a thought experiment, we can't forgive the way he snowed the country into believing there was some connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks; nor can we forget the way he hyped the flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction -- we're being generous here, not stupid.
But let's assume that however calculated and cynical the machinations, and however wrongheaded the decision to go to war, the underlying motive was purely to avoid another catastrophic terrorist attack.
All right: Given these overly kind assumptions, can this administration's usurpation of power somehow be justified?
Every time I work it through, the answer I come up with is no. The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance.
The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War?
That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted.
Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold?
Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks "suspicious" to questioning and a search? That's what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country.
In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them?
The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.
If you go along with my experiment and assume that the president has the best of motives, then the problem is that he wants to protect the American people but doesn't trust us.
There can be no freedom without some measure of risk. We guarantee freedom of the press, which means that newspapers sometimes print things the government doesn't want printed. We guarantee that defendants cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, which means that sometimes bad guys go free. We accept these risks as the price of liberty.
The president would probably respond that in an era of loose-knit terrorist groups and suitcase nukes, the risks are exponentially greater than those his predecessors faced. Even if you agree, the answer is not to act unilaterally but to go to Congress and the courts and ask them to redraw that line between state power and individual freedom.
These are not tactical decisions about where a tank division should cross the Rhone. They are fundamental questions that go to the nature of this union, and the president is required to trust the American people to decide them.
End of experiment. Please return your rose-colored safety glasses to the front of the class.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
posted by FancyRage at 11:21 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home