The Stepford People
Bush, Saying U.S. Is Winning, Asks Patience on Iraq
Published: December 19, 2005
***Excerpted from article***
The president's address, his fifth major speech on Iraq in 19 days, was the culmination of an intense campaign by the White House to try to stop a slide in support for the war that began last summer and intensified this fall. Mr. Bush delivered his remarks as he has come under new criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for ordering the National Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States without first obtaining warrants.
The disclosure of that program, reported Friday in The New York Times, has overshadowed some of the good news of the Iraq election, and has frustrated a White House that was hoping to use the high turnout and relative calm of the vote as a positive end to the president's series of speeches. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, seemed to give voice to that frustration when she told CNN in an interview broadcast Sunday that questions about criticism of administration policy were "really wrongheaded" and that the Iraqi vote was more important.
"Now, that's the story from this week, and that's what I think we should focus on," Mrs. Cheney said.
***
The president closed with words from "Christmas Bells," a carol written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the Civil War that is known for its tone of desperation about the conflict. But rather than repeating the words from one particularly dark verse - "And in despair I bowed my head; 'There is no peace on earth,' I said" - Mr. Bush chose to end with the carol's closing lines, "God is not dead, nor does he sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
_____________________________________________________________
Oh, for cryin’ out loud—remind the Christian Right that you’re out there doin’ “God’s Work”, George, but all the religion in America won’t make you the dictator you want to be, or change your felonies into misdemeanors. Looks like the Big House instead of the White House for you, Mr Bush.
If fellatio got a president impeached, what’s appropriate for a president who ignores the Constitution and The Bill of Rights and deliberately commits breaches of trust that undermine the foundations of America freedom—and won’t stop when the Congress of the United States of America tells him to?
In an attempt to combat recent rumors, Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne denies being a Stepford wife. “She just gets paid to sound like one”, according to Tom DeLay’s wife, Christine.
_________________________________________________________________
No apologies for U.S. eavesdropping
By Brian Knowlton
International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2005
WASHINGTON The Bush administration mounted a broad defense Sunday, both of the war in Iraq and of the president's tactics in the domestic fight against terrorists that Democrats said might be illegal.
"We simply can't be in a situation in which the president is not responding to this different kind of war on terrorism," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, reflecting President George W. Bush's unapologetic defense a day earlier of eavesdropping without warrants in the United States.
As Vice President Dick Cheney flew Sunday to Iraq to congratulate voters on their elections last week, Bush prepared a rare Oval Office address to celebrate those elections and to talk to Americans about "what we've accomplished and where we're headed," said his spokesman, Scott McClellan. It was Bush's first speech from that office since he announced in March 2003 that he had ordered the invasion of Iraq, and his fourth speech on security matters in six days.
The White House has begun an unusually intense campaign in recent weeks to reassure Americans, whose confidence in Bush's war leadership has declined, and to try to halt a disputatious new approach by Congress to the war and to certain tools the administration has used to fight terrorism.
With doubts mounting, said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, Bush needed to explain that "we have a lot of obstacles ahead of us; it is a long, difficult process for any nation to be able to become a democracy." He said on ABC-TV that the president again should acknowledge errors in Iraq while assuring that "we can and will prevail."
Rice appeared on television talk shows to defend the newly disclosed government program of spying on suspects in the United States. The 2001 attacks injected a "certain urgency" into the need for timely surveillance, she said, and she insisted that Bush had acted with full legal authority.
But two Democratic senators, Carl Levin of Michigan and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, said they believed that Bush might have broken the law.
"The issue here is whether the president of the United States is putting himself above the law," Feingold, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on CNN, "and I believe he has done so here." Levin, on NBC-TV, called the program "extremely dangerous."
The Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who on Friday had called the surveillance "a violation of our law beyond any question," moderated his tone Sunday, saying, "Whether it was legal, I think, is a matter that has to be examined." But he said he would hold Senate hearings to look into the issue.
Rice spoke a day after Bush acknowledged having ordered the National Security Agency to go beyond its core mission of intercepting foreign electronic communications and to eavesdrop inside the United States.
Bush has had a difficult time keeping public attention focused on the historic nature of the Iraqi elections. Such news has had to compete for attention with recent congressional challenges to the administration, apparently engendering frustration at the White House and perhaps provoking the decision for Bush to speak live Saturday and again Sunday.
The administration's latest legislative setback came Friday - hours after The New York Times revealed the secret surveillance program - when Democratic senators and a handful of Republicans blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the legislation passed in late 2001 that expanded presidential powers to conduct surveillance with warrants.
A day earlier, Bush had been forced to accept an amendment sponsored by McCain to limit the interrogation techniques that CIA officers and other nonmilitary personnel can use.
These developments left Rice on the defensive Sunday, particularly over the decision to allow secret domestic surveillance.
Critics of such monitoring note that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows secret surveillance when approved by a special court that operates inside the Justice Department. This court has rarely rejected administration requests.
But Rice asserted that the 1978 act had not anticipated anything like the 2001 terror attacks and that more aggressive surveillance might have helped prevent them. "We don't ever want to be caught again in a situation in which we were before 9/11," Rice said on Fox-TV.
Bush said Saturday that as a result of the revelation, "our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."
He called the eavesdropping program "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists" and defended it as being "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities."
Rice said that congressional leaders of both parties had been briefed at the program's inception. But Democrats bridled Sunday at what they said was a White House effort to spread responsibility.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, acknowledged having been briefed on the program this year, but added on Fox: "The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his program. He's commander in chief."
McCain, the Republican whose unbending stance on torture demonstrated his willingness to take on the administration, carefully avoided criticizing the surveillance program Sunday when he was asked about it.
He reminded a questioner that "September 11, as we know, changed everything."
Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
_______________________________________________________________
GOP leaders back budget cuts, drilling in Arctic
By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — House and Senate GOP leaders agreed Sunday to a five-year budget plan for cutting spending for Medicaid and other entitlement programs by $41.6 billion and a separate measure to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
The authority to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration — long sought by President Bush, energy companies and Republican leaders — will be attached to a separate fiscal 2006 defense-spending bill that has widespread support in both parties because of its funding for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rushing to get out of town for the holidays, the House moved toward early-morning votes on both bills.
The Senate could act today on the budget bill and as early as Wednesday on defense spending.
Republican leaders hailed the agreements as proof that they were finally getting a handle on the federal budget after a five-year binge of spending and tax cuts that turned record budget surpluses into a stream of massive deficits.
The budget accord would cut less than 0.5 percent from a projected $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. And depending on the outcome of negotiations over as much as $60 billion in tax cuts, the savings in spending could vanish.
However, it is the first time in more than a decade that Congress has tried to slow the growth of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"House Republicans promised the American people that we would restrain federal spending and reform government programs," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "This bill is a good first step."
Democrats were furious about the drilling maneuver on the defense bill, engineered by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who for years has sought federal approval for tapping ANWR's oil reserves. Blocking ANWR drilling is a priority for environmental groups, and Democrats said they would attempt to strike it using procedural tactics.
Democrats and liberal economic analysts also said the budget deal, although less dramatic than an earlier, House-passed version, would still allow states to impose significant new costs on health care for the poor, cut child-support enforcement and foster-care aid, and impose new work requirements on welfare recipients.
Stevens' gambit on oil drilling is that Democratic and moderate Republican opponents of the measure will be unwilling to hold up legislation that funds U.S. troops. As he emerged late Sunday from a final negotiating session, Stevens said he could not predict the outcome.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., protested the "absolute cynicism" of daring senators to vote against a defense bill, accusing Republicans of violating a Senate rule that bars unrelated provisions from being added during final negotiations on legislation.
The $453 billion defense bill includes $50 billion for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a provision to bar cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of military prisoners that was authored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and agreed to reluctantly by President Bush. It also includes a carefully crafted compromise that would rein in detainee access to federal courts.
The legislation includes numerous other high-priority measures, including $3.8 billion to fund flu-pandemic prevention and $2 billion for low-income heating assistance. The package includes a 1 percent across-the-board cut in discretionary spending, with an exception for veterans benefits.
Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, accused Stevens of luring support for ANWR drilling from Gulf Coast lawmakers by including "an offer they can't refuse" on hurricane-relief funding. The package would provide $29 billion for Mississippi and Louisiana and create a Gulf Coast Recovery Fund.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would receive nearly $3 billion in levee-restoration funding to accelerate completion of New Orleans levee projects, repair hurricane damage and increase hurricane protection for Category 5 storms.
The final budget deal envisions more than $10 billion in savings over 10 years by allowing states to raise co-payments and deductibles for many recipients of Medicaid, the state and federal health program for the poor. Another $6.1 billion in savings would come from health-benefit reductions, according to Congressional Budget Office documents.
Negotiators bowed to White House pressure and dropped a Senate-passed provision that would have saved billions of dollars by eliminating a fund set up to encourage private insurance companies to take part in the Medicare prescription-drug program.
The final deal would shave $1.5 billion over five years from child-support-enforcement aid to local governments, down from the House-passed $3.8 billion level.
Stringent new-work requirements for welfare recipients could shift considerable costs onto state governments. The Congressional Budget Office estimates state governments might have to spend $8.4 billion over the next five years to finance welfare-to-work programs to meet the new requirements.
And in one of the most controversial provisions, the agreement would shave $12.7 billion out of the federal student-loan program by locking in interest rates often at a higher level than the current variable rates.
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
_________________________________________________________________
December 19, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dangerous Territory
By BOB HERBERT
There has been some encouraging news lately for those who cherish freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
No, I'm not talking about last week's election in Iraq. I mean the recent developments here at home, in the United States.
President Bush, who bloodied John McCain in the brutal Republican primary in South Carolina in 2000, had to cry uncle last Thursday and accept Senator McCain's demand that the U.S. ban cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.
It was an embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which, in its high-handed approach to governing, has shown no qualms about trampling the fundamental tenets of a free, open and democratic society.
But worse was to come for the president. On Thursday night, The New York Times disclosed that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."
Warrants? Why bother with warrants?
The Times article reminded me of the famous scene from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in which the character played by Humphrey Bogart asks to see the badges of a group of Mexican bandits posing as government officials.
Incredulous, one of the bandits says: "We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."
Mr. Bush apparently feels the same way about warrants. He said over the weekend that he had no intention of changing his eavesdropping policy.
Stubbornness is a well-known trait of this president. But increasing numbers of Americans are objecting to the administration's contemptuous attitude toward liberty and the law. On Friday, the Senate blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act because of its dangerous intrusions on privacy and threats to civil liberties.
The domestic eavesdropping authorized by President Bush was an important and at times emotional part of the floor debate over the Patriot Act. "You want to talk about abuses?" said Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat. "I can't imagine a more shocking example of an abuse of power, to eavesdrop on American citizens without first getting a court order based on some evidence that they are possibly criminals, terrorists or spies."
Mr. Feingold worried that we were playing into the hands of terrorists by giving up such quintessentially American values as "freedom, justice and privacy."
The Bush version of American values, as least with regard to the so-called war on terror, has been a throwback to the Middle Ages. Detainees were herded like animals into the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where many were abused and denied the right to challenge - or even hear - the charges against them. Whether they were innocent or guilty made no difference. How's that for an American value?
Others were swept up in that peculiar form of justice called extraordinary rendition. That's when someone is abducted by Americans and sent off to a regime skilled in the art of torture. I spent a little time in Ottawa with Maher Arar, a family man from Canada who was kidnapped at Kennedy Airport and taken to Syria.
He wasn't a terrorist and he hadn't done anything wrong, but that was no defense against the sweeping madness of the Bush antiterror policies.
"It was so scary," Mr. Arar told me. "After a while I became like an animal."
Another blow to America's self- proclaimed standing as a pillar of moral values was the revelation that the C.I.A. has been operating a super-secret network of prisons overseas, presumably for terror suspects. If someone who is innocent gets caught in that particular hell, too bad. The inmates have been deprived of all rights.
This is dangerous territory, indeed. Nightmarish territory. These secret prisons are the dungeons of the 21st century.
The voices against the serial outrages of the Bush administration are growing steadily louder, and that's good news. It's widely understood now that the Bush crowd has gone much too far. When Americans cover their hearts and pledge allegiance, this is not the kind of behavior from their government they usually have in mind. This is not what the American flag is supposed to represent.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
_______________________________________________________________
December 19, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Tankers on the Take
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.
Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."
Now, I never had any illusions about intellectual integrity in the world of right-wing think tanks. It has been clear for a long time that so-called analysts at many of these think tanks are, in effect, paid to support selected policies and politicians. But it never occurred to me that the pay-for-play schemes were so blatant.
In fact, most deals between lobbyists and conservative intellectuals probably aren't that blatant. For the most part, people employed by right-wing think tanks don't have to be specifically paid to support certain positions, because they understand that supporting those positions comes with the job. Senior fellows at Cato don't decide, after reconsidering the issue, that Social Security shouldn't be privatized. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation don't take another look at the data and realize that farmers and small-business owners have nothing to gain from estate tax repeal.
But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit payments for punditry. In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Bandow and Mr. Ferrara wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana Islands.
BusinessWeek Online doesn't mention it, but earlier this year an article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic titled "Writers' Bloc," which tracked Mr. Abramoff's remarkable ability to get his clients favorable treatment on op-ed pages, pointed out that Mr. Ferrara endorsed another odd cause: U.S. friendship with Malaysia. (I've checked, and Mr. Bandow did the same.) I was particularly interested in that one, since a couple of years ago right-wingers accused me of having been a paid agent of the Malaysian regime. I wasn't, but Mr. Abramoff reportedly was.
Mr. Bandow has confessed to a "lapse of judgment" and resigned from Cato. But neither Mr. Ferrara nor his employer believe that he did anything wrong. The president of Mr. Ferrara's institute told BusinessWeek Online that "I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements." Alas, he's probably right.
Let's hope that journalists set out to track down those people with "similar arrangements," and that as they do, they don't fall into two ever-present temptations.
First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. (I'm getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I'm sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear "balanced." They should resist the temptation. If this is overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks, as I believe it is - there isn't any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff - that's what the public deserves to be told.
Second, there will be the temptation to ignore the backstory - to treat Mr. Abramoff as a rogue, unrepresentative actor. In fact, before his indictment, Mr. Abramoff wasn't off on his own. He wasn't even a lobbyist in the traditional sense; he's better described as a bag man, running a slush fund for Tom DeLay and other Republican leaders. The point is that there really isn't much difference between Mr. Abramoff's paying Mr. Ferrara to praise the sweatshops of the Marianas and the Department of Education's paying Armstrong Williams to praise No Child Left Behind. In both cases, the ultimate paymaster was the Republican political machine.
And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? Or has the culture of corruption spread so far that the question is, Who isn't?
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
Published: December 19, 2005
***Excerpted from article***
The president's address, his fifth major speech on Iraq in 19 days, was the culmination of an intense campaign by the White House to try to stop a slide in support for the war that began last summer and intensified this fall. Mr. Bush delivered his remarks as he has come under new criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for ordering the National Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States without first obtaining warrants.
The disclosure of that program, reported Friday in The New York Times, has overshadowed some of the good news of the Iraq election, and has frustrated a White House that was hoping to use the high turnout and relative calm of the vote as a positive end to the president's series of speeches. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, seemed to give voice to that frustration when she told CNN in an interview broadcast Sunday that questions about criticism of administration policy were "really wrongheaded" and that the Iraqi vote was more important.
"Now, that's the story from this week, and that's what I think we should focus on," Mrs. Cheney said.
***
The president closed with words from "Christmas Bells," a carol written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the Civil War that is known for its tone of desperation about the conflict. But rather than repeating the words from one particularly dark verse - "And in despair I bowed my head; 'There is no peace on earth,' I said" - Mr. Bush chose to end with the carol's closing lines, "God is not dead, nor does he sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
_____________________________________________________________
Oh, for cryin’ out loud—remind the Christian Right that you’re out there doin’ “God’s Work”, George, but all the religion in America won’t make you the dictator you want to be, or change your felonies into misdemeanors. Looks like the Big House instead of the White House for you, Mr Bush.
If fellatio got a president impeached, what’s appropriate for a president who ignores the Constitution and The Bill of Rights and deliberately commits breaches of trust that undermine the foundations of America freedom—and won’t stop when the Congress of the United States of America tells him to?
In an attempt to combat recent rumors, Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne denies being a Stepford wife. “She just gets paid to sound like one”, according to Tom DeLay’s wife, Christine.
_________________________________________________________________
No apologies for U.S. eavesdropping
By Brian Knowlton
International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2005
WASHINGTON The Bush administration mounted a broad defense Sunday, both of the war in Iraq and of the president's tactics in the domestic fight against terrorists that Democrats said might be illegal.
"We simply can't be in a situation in which the president is not responding to this different kind of war on terrorism," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, reflecting President George W. Bush's unapologetic defense a day earlier of eavesdropping without warrants in the United States.
As Vice President Dick Cheney flew Sunday to Iraq to congratulate voters on their elections last week, Bush prepared a rare Oval Office address to celebrate those elections and to talk to Americans about "what we've accomplished and where we're headed," said his spokesman, Scott McClellan. It was Bush's first speech from that office since he announced in March 2003 that he had ordered the invasion of Iraq, and his fourth speech on security matters in six days.
The White House has begun an unusually intense campaign in recent weeks to reassure Americans, whose confidence in Bush's war leadership has declined, and to try to halt a disputatious new approach by Congress to the war and to certain tools the administration has used to fight terrorism.
With doubts mounting, said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, Bush needed to explain that "we have a lot of obstacles ahead of us; it is a long, difficult process for any nation to be able to become a democracy." He said on ABC-TV that the president again should acknowledge errors in Iraq while assuring that "we can and will prevail."
Rice appeared on television talk shows to defend the newly disclosed government program of spying on suspects in the United States. The 2001 attacks injected a "certain urgency" into the need for timely surveillance, she said, and she insisted that Bush had acted with full legal authority.
But two Democratic senators, Carl Levin of Michigan and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, said they believed that Bush might have broken the law.
"The issue here is whether the president of the United States is putting himself above the law," Feingold, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on CNN, "and I believe he has done so here." Levin, on NBC-TV, called the program "extremely dangerous."
The Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who on Friday had called the surveillance "a violation of our law beyond any question," moderated his tone Sunday, saying, "Whether it was legal, I think, is a matter that has to be examined." But he said he would hold Senate hearings to look into the issue.
Rice spoke a day after Bush acknowledged having ordered the National Security Agency to go beyond its core mission of intercepting foreign electronic communications and to eavesdrop inside the United States.
Bush has had a difficult time keeping public attention focused on the historic nature of the Iraqi elections. Such news has had to compete for attention with recent congressional challenges to the administration, apparently engendering frustration at the White House and perhaps provoking the decision for Bush to speak live Saturday and again Sunday.
The administration's latest legislative setback came Friday - hours after The New York Times revealed the secret surveillance program - when Democratic senators and a handful of Republicans blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the legislation passed in late 2001 that expanded presidential powers to conduct surveillance with warrants.
A day earlier, Bush had been forced to accept an amendment sponsored by McCain to limit the interrogation techniques that CIA officers and other nonmilitary personnel can use.
These developments left Rice on the defensive Sunday, particularly over the decision to allow secret domestic surveillance.
Critics of such monitoring note that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows secret surveillance when approved by a special court that operates inside the Justice Department. This court has rarely rejected administration requests.
But Rice asserted that the 1978 act had not anticipated anything like the 2001 terror attacks and that more aggressive surveillance might have helped prevent them. "We don't ever want to be caught again in a situation in which we were before 9/11," Rice said on Fox-TV.
Bush said Saturday that as a result of the revelation, "our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."
He called the eavesdropping program "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists" and defended it as being "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities."
Rice said that congressional leaders of both parties had been briefed at the program's inception. But Democrats bridled Sunday at what they said was a White House effort to spread responsibility.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, acknowledged having been briefed on the program this year, but added on Fox: "The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his program. He's commander in chief."
McCain, the Republican whose unbending stance on torture demonstrated his willingness to take on the administration, carefully avoided criticizing the surveillance program Sunday when he was asked about it.
He reminded a questioner that "September 11, as we know, changed everything."
Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
_______________________________________________________________
GOP leaders back budget cuts, drilling in Arctic
By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — House and Senate GOP leaders agreed Sunday to a five-year budget plan for cutting spending for Medicaid and other entitlement programs by $41.6 billion and a separate measure to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
The authority to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration — long sought by President Bush, energy companies and Republican leaders — will be attached to a separate fiscal 2006 defense-spending bill that has widespread support in both parties because of its funding for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rushing to get out of town for the holidays, the House moved toward early-morning votes on both bills.
The Senate could act today on the budget bill and as early as Wednesday on defense spending.
Republican leaders hailed the agreements as proof that they were finally getting a handle on the federal budget after a five-year binge of spending and tax cuts that turned record budget surpluses into a stream of massive deficits.
The budget accord would cut less than 0.5 percent from a projected $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. And depending on the outcome of negotiations over as much as $60 billion in tax cuts, the savings in spending could vanish.
However, it is the first time in more than a decade that Congress has tried to slow the growth of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"House Republicans promised the American people that we would restrain federal spending and reform government programs," said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "This bill is a good first step."
Democrats were furious about the drilling maneuver on the defense bill, engineered by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who for years has sought federal approval for tapping ANWR's oil reserves. Blocking ANWR drilling is a priority for environmental groups, and Democrats said they would attempt to strike it using procedural tactics.
Democrats and liberal economic analysts also said the budget deal, although less dramatic than an earlier, House-passed version, would still allow states to impose significant new costs on health care for the poor, cut child-support enforcement and foster-care aid, and impose new work requirements on welfare recipients.
Stevens' gambit on oil drilling is that Democratic and moderate Republican opponents of the measure will be unwilling to hold up legislation that funds U.S. troops. As he emerged late Sunday from a final negotiating session, Stevens said he could not predict the outcome.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., protested the "absolute cynicism" of daring senators to vote against a defense bill, accusing Republicans of violating a Senate rule that bars unrelated provisions from being added during final negotiations on legislation.
The $453 billion defense bill includes $50 billion for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a provision to bar cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of military prisoners that was authored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and agreed to reluctantly by President Bush. It also includes a carefully crafted compromise that would rein in detainee access to federal courts.
The legislation includes numerous other high-priority measures, including $3.8 billion to fund flu-pandemic prevention and $2 billion for low-income heating assistance. The package includes a 1 percent across-the-board cut in discretionary spending, with an exception for veterans benefits.
Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, accused Stevens of luring support for ANWR drilling from Gulf Coast lawmakers by including "an offer they can't refuse" on hurricane-relief funding. The package would provide $29 billion for Mississippi and Louisiana and create a Gulf Coast Recovery Fund.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would receive nearly $3 billion in levee-restoration funding to accelerate completion of New Orleans levee projects, repair hurricane damage and increase hurricane protection for Category 5 storms.
The final budget deal envisions more than $10 billion in savings over 10 years by allowing states to raise co-payments and deductibles for many recipients of Medicaid, the state and federal health program for the poor. Another $6.1 billion in savings would come from health-benefit reductions, according to Congressional Budget Office documents.
Negotiators bowed to White House pressure and dropped a Senate-passed provision that would have saved billions of dollars by eliminating a fund set up to encourage private insurance companies to take part in the Medicare prescription-drug program.
The final deal would shave $1.5 billion over five years from child-support-enforcement aid to local governments, down from the House-passed $3.8 billion level.
Stringent new-work requirements for welfare recipients could shift considerable costs onto state governments. The Congressional Budget Office estimates state governments might have to spend $8.4 billion over the next five years to finance welfare-to-work programs to meet the new requirements.
And in one of the most controversial provisions, the agreement would shave $12.7 billion out of the federal student-loan program by locking in interest rates often at a higher level than the current variable rates.
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
_________________________________________________________________
December 19, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dangerous Territory
By BOB HERBERT
There has been some encouraging news lately for those who cherish freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
No, I'm not talking about last week's election in Iraq. I mean the recent developments here at home, in the United States.
President Bush, who bloodied John McCain in the brutal Republican primary in South Carolina in 2000, had to cry uncle last Thursday and accept Senator McCain's demand that the U.S. ban cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.
It was an embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which, in its high-handed approach to governing, has shown no qualms about trampling the fundamental tenets of a free, open and democratic society.
But worse was to come for the president. On Thursday night, The New York Times disclosed that Mr. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for terrorist activity "without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying."
Warrants? Why bother with warrants?
The Times article reminded me of the famous scene from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in which the character played by Humphrey Bogart asks to see the badges of a group of Mexican bandits posing as government officials.
Incredulous, one of the bandits says: "We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."
Mr. Bush apparently feels the same way about warrants. He said over the weekend that he had no intention of changing his eavesdropping policy.
Stubbornness is a well-known trait of this president. But increasing numbers of Americans are objecting to the administration's contemptuous attitude toward liberty and the law. On Friday, the Senate blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act because of its dangerous intrusions on privacy and threats to civil liberties.
The domestic eavesdropping authorized by President Bush was an important and at times emotional part of the floor debate over the Patriot Act. "You want to talk about abuses?" said Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat. "I can't imagine a more shocking example of an abuse of power, to eavesdrop on American citizens without first getting a court order based on some evidence that they are possibly criminals, terrorists or spies."
Mr. Feingold worried that we were playing into the hands of terrorists by giving up such quintessentially American values as "freedom, justice and privacy."
The Bush version of American values, as least with regard to the so-called war on terror, has been a throwback to the Middle Ages. Detainees were herded like animals into the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where many were abused and denied the right to challenge - or even hear - the charges against them. Whether they were innocent or guilty made no difference. How's that for an American value?
Others were swept up in that peculiar form of justice called extraordinary rendition. That's when someone is abducted by Americans and sent off to a regime skilled in the art of torture. I spent a little time in Ottawa with Maher Arar, a family man from Canada who was kidnapped at Kennedy Airport and taken to Syria.
He wasn't a terrorist and he hadn't done anything wrong, but that was no defense against the sweeping madness of the Bush antiterror policies.
"It was so scary," Mr. Arar told me. "After a while I became like an animal."
Another blow to America's self- proclaimed standing as a pillar of moral values was the revelation that the C.I.A. has been operating a super-secret network of prisons overseas, presumably for terror suspects. If someone who is innocent gets caught in that particular hell, too bad. The inmates have been deprived of all rights.
This is dangerous territory, indeed. Nightmarish territory. These secret prisons are the dungeons of the 21st century.
The voices against the serial outrages of the Bush administration are growing steadily louder, and that's good news. It's widely understood now that the Bush crowd has gone much too far. When Americans cover their hearts and pledge allegiance, this is not the kind of behavior from their government they usually have in mind. This is not what the American flag is supposed to represent.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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December 19, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Tankers on the Take
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.
Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."
Now, I never had any illusions about intellectual integrity in the world of right-wing think tanks. It has been clear for a long time that so-called analysts at many of these think tanks are, in effect, paid to support selected policies and politicians. But it never occurred to me that the pay-for-play schemes were so blatant.
In fact, most deals between lobbyists and conservative intellectuals probably aren't that blatant. For the most part, people employed by right-wing think tanks don't have to be specifically paid to support certain positions, because they understand that supporting those positions comes with the job. Senior fellows at Cato don't decide, after reconsidering the issue, that Social Security shouldn't be privatized. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation don't take another look at the data and realize that farmers and small-business owners have nothing to gain from estate tax repeal.
But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit payments for punditry. In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Bandow and Mr. Ferrara wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana Islands.
BusinessWeek Online doesn't mention it, but earlier this year an article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic titled "Writers' Bloc," which tracked Mr. Abramoff's remarkable ability to get his clients favorable treatment on op-ed pages, pointed out that Mr. Ferrara endorsed another odd cause: U.S. friendship with Malaysia. (I've checked, and Mr. Bandow did the same.) I was particularly interested in that one, since a couple of years ago right-wingers accused me of having been a paid agent of the Malaysian regime. I wasn't, but Mr. Abramoff reportedly was.
Mr. Bandow has confessed to a "lapse of judgment" and resigned from Cato. But neither Mr. Ferrara nor his employer believe that he did anything wrong. The president of Mr. Ferrara's institute told BusinessWeek Online that "I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements." Alas, he's probably right.
Let's hope that journalists set out to track down those people with "similar arrangements," and that as they do, they don't fall into two ever-present temptations.
First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. (I'm getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I'm sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear "balanced." They should resist the temptation. If this is overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks, as I believe it is - there isn't any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff - that's what the public deserves to be told.
Second, there will be the temptation to ignore the backstory - to treat Mr. Abramoff as a rogue, unrepresentative actor. In fact, before his indictment, Mr. Abramoff wasn't off on his own. He wasn't even a lobbyist in the traditional sense; he's better described as a bag man, running a slush fund for Tom DeLay and other Republican leaders. The point is that there really isn't much difference between Mr. Abramoff's paying Mr. Ferrara to praise the sweatshops of the Marianas and the Department of Education's paying Armstrong Williams to praise No Child Left Behind. In both cases, the ultimate paymaster was the Republican political machine.
And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? Or has the culture of corruption spread so far that the question is, Who isn't?
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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