cwsox

Easter 6 Sermon

2010-05-11T10:23:00.001-07:00

Power and blessing and wisdom and strength be to the Lamb forever,
and blessings to those who bring glory and honor
to the Lamb
as we worship at the throne and table of our God.
Alleluia and Amen.
+++++++++++

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

When Paul was given the vision to go to Macedonia,
Paul went.

Paul went with
at minimum
Silas and Timothy.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy went to Macedonia
because there was a vision that said:
‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’

There was no feasibility study done first;
there was no long-range financial forecast
with projections of income and expenses,
no five-year strategic plan to see if it was cost-effective,
if there would be sufficient pay-back,
no concern if there was a prudent financial return on investment for expenditure of capital and labor;

no committee to put the project on hold
while they examined a budget
worried that this mission to Macedonia
would put the early Church over budget
because if it were over budget
it would be postponed until some possible future date
because we all know
that God values adherence to a human-created budget
more than God values adherence to Christ’s mission.
Or not.

No.

None of these things.

Paul had a vision:
"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Paul had a vision.

A vision!
Not even an actual invitation,
not a written proposal in proper grant form,
with suitable attachments and schedules
approved by the appropriate sub-committee
before it went to the board for formal action in accordance with the accepted protocol for initiating a new activity deemed subject to existing policy per the prior approved plan of action.

No.

Paul had a vision.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

And so Paul, Silas, and Timothy went to Macedonia.

Vision.

President Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting
the King James rendering of Proverbs 29.18:
‘where there is no vision, the people perish.’

If we as the Church operate without vision,
without vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then we do perish.

If we as a congregation operate with vision,
vision that we are given to see and embrace by the power of the Holy Spirit,
then we are living in the call of the Risen Christ.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

That was a revolutionary, radical vision.
It was a vision that led to profound –
dare I say it –
profound change.

Now today I want to kill once and forever the power of the “c” word,
I want to eradicate permanently the pejorative power of the word “change,”
a word that is used to attempt to intimidate others,
a word that that is intended to have a nasty, negative meaning.

Change is life
and life is change;
without change we would not be human,
without change we’d be one-celled amoebas dying a certain death.
because in fact we would not even survive as a single celled amoeba;
the very process of life involves ever-constant change,
be it respiration, ingestion, digestion, metabolism, elimination, reproduction.
When change ceases, the organism dies.

When change ceases, the living organism dies.
This is how God structured life.

A definition of death is when an organism ceases to process change.

A simple Mother’s day illustration:
a task of the mother
and father and all who love the baby
is to change the baby;

an unchanged baby is not a pleasant thing

a baby that is not changed will soon lie in a pile of its own waste,
a classic definition of abuse,
which will lead to the baby’s inevitable death.

A mother
and all who love the infant
consistently measure its health by change:
ounces and pounds gained,
inches grown,
new skills developed.

And what is school but the community’s attempt to promote particular guided and intentional changes in the knowledge, values, and skill sets of a child.
Teachers are change-agents;
a teacher who fails to change the lives of students is (to say the least) not an effective teacher.

And in the church,
so it is with those who are pastors
and lay people with vision.
A pastor who allows a congregation to be unchanged is useless and a travesty to the calling of ordained ministry,
and an accomplice to the death of that congregation.

When change ceases, a body dies.

Never again let the word “change” be used as a weapon to cudgel and badger,
never again let the word “change” be used as a club to obstruct the vision of the Spirit,
to block the ministry of the Gospel
and the life and work of the church.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Jesus was an agent of revolutionary change,
the Risen Savior is the most profoundly transcendent Change in human history,
the Spirit at Pentecost calls us into community to be the on-going dynamic force for change in the world,
we are called to be transformers of the world with our witness to the Gospel.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

That vision changed your life and mine.

More precisely,
because Paul, Silas, and Timothy acted on the vision,
they totally and completely changed our lives.

Today’s account is written in the 16th chapter of the book of the Acts of the Apostles
which is a record of one revolutionary change after another
in the lives of the people who were called by the Spirit to be the first generation of Church in the world.

Last week’s First Lesson was from the 11th chapter of Acts,
the vision of Peter,
a vision of change,
a call to open the doors of the Church to everyone.

Peter’s vision was that no longer would there be an a church of the insiders
that kept its door closed to the outsiders,
closed to those from not around here,
closed to those not of our kind,
closed to those that were “different.”

Peter’s vision was totally revolutionary,
a mind blowing portent of enormous and irretractable change,
of openness and inclusion for which there was no going back.

No longer “us” and “them”
but only “all of us as God’s children.”
Peter’s vision was that no matter who you were
or where you were on life’s journey,
you were welcome in the Church as one of Christ’s own people.

Peter’s vision of inclusiveness of all of God’s people being welcomed in Christ’s Church
was so revolutionary
that by Acts chapter 15 we have the first great Church Council where the very issue of openness was put before the whole Church.

By the power of the Spirit,
Peter’s God-given vision
prevailed,
a tremendous change in the Church.

Now in Acts chapter 16 comes the next step in the revolutionary sea changes that made the Church:

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Up until this moment,
where we are at today in Acts chapter 16,
the Gospel was geographically confined
to what we know today as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel.

When Paul received his vision, he was in Troas,
on the northwest seacoast of Turkey.

Macedonia,
from where Alexander the Great came forth to rule the world,
is just north of Greece,
in Europe.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy sailed across the Aegean Sea from Troas to Samothrace to Neapolis to Philippi.

That journey is somewhat of a reversal of the Trojan War,
Troas from where Paul sailed being the 1st century name for Troy;
in our story from Acts instead of Europe bringing war to Asia Minor,
it is Asia Minor importing into Europe the Gospel of Peace.

This trip across the Aegean Sea changed history,
and even more,
it changed the course of Christianity.

Paul, Silas, and Timothy brought Christianity to Europe,
where all of our ancestors were worshipping idols and trees.

The author of Acts notes that Philippi was a Roman colony;
thus in this account we have both Macedonia, representative of Greece, the center of eastern Christianity, the Orthodox Church,
and Rome as Rome, center of western Christianity for the first fifteen centuries of the Church’s experience.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Obeying that vision changed your life and mine,
because Christianity came to our ancestors;

because our ancestors communicated the faith to the generations that came after them,
we received the gift of the Gospel
which we are called upon to convey to the generations that come after us.

We are the heirs of that journey that Paul, Silas, and Timothy made in response to the vision,
"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

++++++++++

What is our vision today?

Right here
right now
in Spencerville, Ohio
at Spencerville United Church of Christ,
what is our vision?

Do we exist as just kind of a community center
where people can have their showers and receptions
and from where people can borrow chairs and tables?

Are we here as a closed community,
where any new or differing thought is treated as an insult,
where anyone who is not from here is an outsider (if not a threat),
where we gather only to reinforce our self-images worshipping a god that we ourselves created,
a god made in our same self-image who never challenges us,
who never makes any claim on us,
who never asks of us anything other than what we have already decided?

Or do we have the Spirit’s vision?

Are we open to the Spirit’s vision?

What and where is our Macedonia?

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

What calls us to get up and come over,
to move,
to make a journey across whatever sea lies between us and the place where God is calling us to be?
What is our vision?

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’

If we as the Church operate without vision,
without vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then we do perish.

If we as a congregation operate with vision,
with a vision given by the Holy Spirit,
then our ministry thrives.

We have so many good and faithful people in this congregation,
people who inspire and bless us by their love for our God,
by their placing the Gospel first and foremost in their lives.

And we have the promise of these words of Jesus from today’s Gospel lesson:
The Advocate, that is, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

In one week we will gather at 5:00 pm to share in a meal
and discuss values for this congregation,
with special attention to the word “acceptance.”

“Acceptance” is perhaps something that we can name as our first value that comes from our now four-month long and continuing discussion on our values.

Determining our values is part of the Visioning process,
the conversation whereby together we seek discernment as to where the Spirit envisions that we go as a congregation into God’s future.

In two weeks we celebrate the festival of Pentecost,
the day on which the Spirit, the Advocate,
gathers us together to be the Church,
creates and re-creates us,
renews and empowers us again to be the Church
in this time and place.

Whatever the values are that we discern by the Spirit’s guidance,
if they be Christ’s values,
they will be values that involve our care for and service to others.

Our values will not be about ourselves.

Our values in Christ cannot be about taking care of ourselves and serving ourselves and reinforcing ourselves and thinking about our needs.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Paul, Silas, and Timothy did not place their needs first;
it was the needs of the other,
of the other person,
the need of others,
that came first.

"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

In Christ it is never about helping our own selves;
Christ will take care of us.
In Christ it is always
always
always
about helping others.

Mother’s Day.
You cannot be a parent without a child.
You cannot be a Christian and have it be about yourself.
You are only a Christian when there is love towards others.

What for us is Macedonia?
What for us is service to all of God’s people?
What is our vision to serve others
in our community,
in our region,
our nation,
in the world?
How do we discern our call to serve others
which is how we serve Christ?
What is our vision?

These are questions that I cannot answer alone.
These are things which together we discern as community.

Join us next Sunday at 5 as we share a meal and together discuss our values and the Spirit’s vision.
Join us next Sunday and every Sunday at 10 am as we gather as Christ’s family to worship and encounter our God.
Join us in two weeks at 10 am as we celebrate Pentecost, God’s creation of the Church and tthus he re-creation of our congregation,
join us every Sunday as we come to be strengthened by the Spirit to live out the Spirit’s vision:
Come to Macedonia, and help us.

As your pastor I have authority to promise you this:
as we serve Christ by serving others,
as we live out the vision that the Spirit gives to us,
we will never have to worry about our own situation and needs.

Go to Macedonia, and help them.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

Prayers of the People, Easter 6

2010-05-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

One: I invite you to pray for all people according to their needs.

One: As a mother hen gathers its brood under its wings, so has Jesus yearned to gather us to protect and keep us from all harm. Give us the vision to make Christ’s love real to those who live under the scourge of war, terror, violence, poverty, and injustice. Holy God, Loving God,
Many: hear our prayers.

One: Mary mother of our Savior was ever willing to serve the cause of the Gospel; create in us clean hearts and renew right spirits within us so that we may follow Mary’s example. Grant that as individuals and a congregation, we will have the vision to serve others which is true service to you. Holy God, Loving God,
Many: hear our prayers.

One: Isaiah tells us that you, O God, shall never forget us, just as a mother never forgets the child of her womb, as a mother never forgets her nursing child. Nourish us; feed us; gather us as your children around your table to celebrate your feast of victory. Holy God, Loving God,
Many: hear our prayers.

One: Isaiah also teaches us that a mother comforts her child, so you will comfort us. We pray for your comfort on for Ralph at St. Ritas, Ben at Auglaize Acres; Mick & Jeanie and Mike & Dawn as Mick and Mike do battle with cancer; for Tony in prison; for Ned and Mary far away from us, and all who call upon you. Holy God, Loving God,
Many: hear our prayers.

One: Into your hands we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ our Savior.
Many: Amen.

sermon 7-22-07 Proper 11

2007-07-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Grace to you and peace from the still speaking God.
Amen.

Actually, grace and peace seem to be concepts at odd
with what God says to us in our readings this morning.

What is up with those readings?

God is, how can one say, a bit angry.

The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,
says the Lord God…
Hear this, you that trample on the needy,
and bring to ruin the poor of the land…

The time is surely coming, says the Lord God,
when I will send a famine on the land;
not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD.

They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD,
but they shall not find it.

That’s from Amos.

Then there is today’s psalm.

You love evil more than good,
and lying more than speaking the truth.

God will break you down forever;
God will snatch and tear you from your tent;
God will uproot you from the land of the living.

God is still speaking.

God just is not saying very easy things.

We want God to confirm us in our comfortableness.

We want God to be a good old boy
who tells us that we just can slide with being good old boys too.

There are some places where one can hear sermons
about this easy sort of god.

But not here.

God is still speaking.

God is still speaking in this church.

++++++++++

Now when I say “this church”

does the phrase “this church”
refer to our United Church of Christ,
which just celebrated its 50th anniversary at General Synod 26
in Hartford, Connecticut,

or does the phrase “this church”
refer to
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ of Muskegon,
or to
Congregational United Church of Christ of Armada,
or Emmanuel United Church of Christ of Manchester,
Phoenix Community Church, United Church of Christ of Kalamazoo,
perhaps the Congregational Church of Birmingham, United Church of Christ –

No matter where we are from, we are all one church.

We are all connected.

No matter who we were
or where we have been on life's journey,
we have become United Church of Christ.

And that is a good thing.

Of the UCC,
we have come to a place for which our parents sighed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In the narthex,
on either side of the doors
there are two plaques,
two plaques that honor by consensus the two pastors
regarded as the greatest pastors
in the 148 year history of this congregation:
the Rev. Archibald Hadden
and
the Rev. Samuel Oliver.

Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver
wrote some very important words from their hearts
73 years ago,
in 1934
for the 75th anniversary of this congregation.

(Those doing the math fast:
yes, in two years
we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of this congregation.)

Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver wrote
what they felt was vital for this congregation to be about
as it moved from its first 75 years of ministry into its future.

What Drs. Hadden and Oliver said was this:
this church must be about the business of economic justice,
this church must be about the business of racial justice,
and this church must never again bless another war.

That is a most remarkable forshawdowing
of the five historic commitments of the UCC –

perhaps not a foreshawdowing at all
but the foundation of what called the UCC into being
and what our purpose is about today –

the five historic commitments that we reflected upon
earlier in our worship,
the five historic commitments which are:

1. We are a united and uniting church.
2. We are a multiracial and multicultural church.
3. We are a church accessible to all.
4. We are an open and affirming church.
5. We are a peace with justice church.

Now to some people that sounds “liberal.”

That is the usual thing said about the UCC
when someone is trying to insult us:
They say we are “liberal.”

To me,
they sound like the words of Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver
of 73 years ago.

1. We are united and uniting.

Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver wrote that
we at First did not worship one denominational past;
they said
“the sources from which [our] membership came
discloses a wide range of denominational background
with various shades of belief and christian practice.”

And because of that,
Drs. Hadden and Oliver contiuned,
we were and are positioned to be ecumenical,
harmonious with others,
to be united and uniting in Christ
rather than in any divisive thing.

2. We are a multiracial and multicultural church.

Drs. Hadden and Oliver observed
a historic diversity of this congregation’s membership,
noting that we are not
“limited to a racial or denominational background.”

Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver observed
our unity at First was
“to Christian principles rather than to race, doctrine, or denomination.”

Now we all know that we have a long way to go
for this congregation to grow into
the multiracial and multicultural expression
to which we in the UCC are committed;
we must strive mightily and intentionally
to be multiracial and multicultural
in fulfillment of the vision of Drs. Hadden and Oliver
and the UCC.

Let it be also said
that those attended General Synod 26
noted well that the UCC,
our national church, our membership, and our leadership,
clergy and lay,
is profoundly
and intentionally
multicultural and multiracial.

3. We are a church accessible to all.

This is an area that Drs. Hadden and Oliver did not address;
they could not anticipate everything,
and I presume their blessings
on what has been done here
for accessibility
and for what we will continue to do.

4. We are an opening and affirming church.

This is also an area that Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver
did not address
and here I will not presume their thoughts
but everything they wrote 73 years ago
speaks of a witness to love, acceptance, inclusivity.

We are an open and affirming church.

We have a history in the UCC and our predecessor church bodies:

-- in 1785 we were the first Protestants to ordain an African American to the pastoral office,
Lemuel Haynes,

-- in 1853 we were the first in the church since the ancient church
to ordain a woman to the pastoral office,
Antoinette Brown,

-- in 1972 we were the first church body
in recorded church history
to ordain an openly gay person,
Bill Johnson.

The UCC is all about being open and affirming.

For some people this seems to be an issue
but the UCC is clear on this:
we are open and affirming.

The kids get it –
at confirmation camp last month we were taking turns
saying why we loved our church;
one confirmation student got a big smile on this face
and said with great conviction,
“I love my church because I am accepted there.”

Truth be told, people,
I live my life for moments like that.

At confirmation camp and at General Synod 26
there were the little giggles and twitters
when mention was first made of sexuality issues,
as you might expect with adolescents and teens,
or perhaps even with adults,

but once the question was put out there,
the question:
should our church be open and affirming to everyone,
the answer was always a definitive yes.

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

In the UCC we mean those words.

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

We in the UCC intentionally proclaim those words of welcome.
Someone in the Church has to say it and mean it
and right now there is no one else
in America on a national level
besides us.

If not us, who?

It should be us,
it must be us,
it must be the UCC,
because God is still speaking to us
and we have a long history of being early truth tellers.

If we don’t live out,
that the light of the world is Jesus,
then who will?

We all know the rejection and the pain
that people of certain sexual orientations have suffered
from the church and society;

for those of us who live in Muskegon,
last Sunday’s front page stories in the Chronicle
were another painful reminder
on how families and individuals
in this very day, right now,
are treated badly, devastated
by the actions of religious communities
because they or a family member is gay –

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

As with so many other things
we in the UCC are called to lead.

The UCC and its predecessor bodies
pioneered higher education in this country,
today 15 seminaries and 47 colleges are related to the UCC,
the UCC and its predecessor bodies
established the first printing press in the United States,
held the mettings that led to the Boston Tea Party,
saved the Liberty Bell from the British,
gave America the first published African American author,
were the earliest truth tellers
in the American abolitionist movement,
supported against much opposition those who were held in slavery on the Amistad,
gave American its first united church body in 1840,
pioneered the liturgical, eucharistic consciousness of Mercursburg Theology a hundred years before the rest of
American Protestantism got involved,
founded six of the historic African American colleges,
pioneered the Social Gospel movement,
gave the world the brilliant and church shaking theologicans
H. Richard Neibuhr, Reinhold Neibuhr, and Paul Tillich,
the Neibuhrs being from Michigan,
gave us Dr Hadden and Dr Oliver in 1934 speaking for racial and economic justice and stating
“this church must never again bless another war,”
was on record calling for an end to the Viet Nam war in 1965,
long before any other American institution took that stand,
supported the United Farm Workers,
supported the Wilmington 10 of the civil rights movement
gave Martin Luther King his first honorary degree in the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott,
gave American the first African American president of an integrated church body,
gave the church its first inclusive language hymnal
and book of worship,

whether we have been afraid or not,
those who came before us in the UCC
and its predecessor church bodies
have been from earliest colonial days
in the fore front of where ever the action was,
those who have before us have been early truth tellers,

God has called us to be in the forefront,

so should anyone be surprised the UCC has been and is
a consistent early truth teller
in being an open and affirming church body.

The only surprise would be in if we didn’t take the lead.

Someone is still bound to say that we should not talk
of sexuality issues in the church.

God created us as sexual beings,
the Biblical book Song of Songs (Song of Solomon)
celebrates God’s gift of sexuality,
the Scriptures have much to say
about the covenant of faithfulness in these regards,
one of the 10 commandments is about adultery
so therefore we must discuss it,
circumcision is a Biblical issue and issues of circumcision and non-circumcision are crucial to the Christian Biblical writers,
we make much of the virgin Mary;

as long as we have a commandment about adultery
we are required by the God and the Scriptures
to discuss issues of sexuality with our youth
in Christian Education and especially in confirmation,
and sometimes from the pulpit;

it is good,
every good transcending,
that as our youth come into their own
as the human beings that God created them to be,
that they know the very words of the UCC’s Gospel welcome:

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

Our witness to Christ is deeply enhanced
because we hear the still speaking God
telling us to extravagantly welcome all people,
not casting on others our own biases
but welcoming all people as God created them to be.

In fact the younger ones among us get it
a lot better than some of us in older generations.

It is unfathomable why some seem to obsess about
the uniqueness and gifts of each individual as created by God,
rather than grasp that the still speaking God
created us each with our own orientations;
the important issue is
covenantal living in faithfulness to one another.

And thus the UCC is an open and affirming church.

That leads me to the last historic affirmation of the UCC:

5. We are a peace with justice church.

Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers.”

When did peacemaking
become a prisoner to our political biases?

The still speaking God did not call us to be Republicans
or Democrats.

The still speaking God did not in Christ say
Blessed are the liberals
nor
Blessed are the conservatives.

The still speaking God in the words of Jesus said
Blessed are the peacemakers.

34 years ago Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver
in an address to this church said these words:

“This church can never again bless another war…
the spirit of war and the spirit of Christ can never be reconciled.”

That is hardly news nor hardly new.

We are the United Church of Christ,
Christ is the head of our church,
not a political leader and not a political party,
not a political ideology or partisan beliefs
no matter how emotionally we may hold them.

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

There must be no confusion about peacemaking.

To say that we cannot bless a war –
Dr. Hadden’s words and Dr. Oliver’s words,
not mine,
but I like those words,
how can we ever invoke God’s or the church’s blessings on war,

but is not to be thought of as anti our country
or anti this or anti that
and especially not anti our troops.

We don’t all agree.
Some among us feel that the current wars are wrong in every conceivable way.

Others
feel the current military actions are necessary and supportable.

And there are many feelings between those poles.

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here.

A great moment at General Synod 26
was when we all were in conversation
with our UCC military chaplains.

A view on the war is a matter of supporting
or not supporting our troops.

A supporting our troops issue can be vieed as
how much money are we as a congregation
giving to the UCC to do the work of the church
which includes the funding of our UCC military chaplains;

out there in the midst of war
there is not a person who needs to have our opinions
but they do need the love and support we can give
through our military chaplains.

In fact we all ought to be demanding
of our finance committees and our governing boards
that we give ever increasing support to the UCC
to do the work of the church,
to fund our chaplains and our educational institutions
and fund our global ministries and our national ministries,

to fund all the work of the church because it is not about us,
it is about what we do for others:

in the end
the still speaking God will judge the UCC and us
not on whether we were conservative or liberal
but on whether we were faithful.

Our lessons today:
the Scriptures are filled with God’s call for justice.

The Scriptures are filled with the call to love,
not to judge or condemn but to love others as God has loved us:

read the lesson from Amos and all of Amos
and all of the prophets
that Jesus constantly quoted,
that Jesus self-identified as the reason the God dwells among us,
the psalms and all of the Scriptures
which call us to the very things
that Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver put before us 73 years ago,
that have been the historic commitments of the UCC
and its predecessor bodies;

this call of Jesus is hard to hear sometimes;
it is why Martha hid from Jesus to avoid hearing the difficult words of Christ
that take us out of comfort zones into the challenges of living
as God’s faithful people in a world that ever more
needs to experience the love, peace, and justice of God
that we need to give
as God’s people.

In the end
the still speaking God will judge the UCC and us
not on whether we were conservative or liberal
but on whether we were faithful.

The UCC is not perfect.

But as Dr. Hadden and Dr. Oliver
speak to us across our own history
to live out the historic commitments of the UCC,
I can only conclude:
Thank God for the UCC.

against the militarization of the presidency

2007-01-27T05:52:00.000-08:00

At Ease, Mr. President

By GARRY WILLS
Published: January 27, 2007
NY Times

Evanston, Ill.

WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”

But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.

I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the “Saturday Night Massacre” (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox’s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.

What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, “You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it.” This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig’s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that “Constitutionally ... I’m in control.”

President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus’s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

There has never been an executive branch more fetishistic about secrecy than the Bush-Cheney one. The secrecy has been used to throw a veil over detentions, “renditions,” suspension of the Geneva Conventions and of habeas corpus, torture and warrantless wiretaps. We hear again the refrain so common in the other wars — If you knew what we know, you would see how justified all our actions are.

But we can never know what they know. We do not have sufficient clearance.

When Adm. William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the gulf war under the first President Bush, Secretary of State James Baker said that the admiral was not qualified to speak on the matter since he no longer had the clearance to read classified reports. If he is not qualified, then no ordinary citizen is. We must simply trust our lords and obey the commander in chief.

The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines.

That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket).

We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient last book, “Secrecy,” traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that it strikes at the very essence of democracy — accountability of representatives to the people. How can the people hold their representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the secrecy. The representative is accountable to citizens. Soldiers are accountable to their officer. The dynamics are different, and to blend them is to undermine the basic principles of our Constitution.

Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.”

Atlanta Lutheran Pastor's story

2007-01-19T06:34:00.000-08:00

Converted critic
Gay pastor who could be expelled supported by former opponent

By JOHN BLAKE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/17/07

James Mayer is a 70-year-old truck driver from South Carolina who calls himself a "tough Lutheran."

But when he talks about what's happened to him during the past six years, his eyes well up. He swallows hard and sighs. Then the tears come.

"Look at me," he says with a sheepish smile. "This is who I am. I'm not ashamed of it."

Six years ago, Mayer was an angry man. St. John's Lutheran Church had elected the Rev. Bradley Schmeling, an openly gay man, as its new pastor. Only six people out of the then 250-member congregation voted against Schmeling. Mayer and his wife were two of them. He vowed not to return.

This is the worst thing that could have happened to the church, Mayer thought. They're probably going to close the doors.

St. John's doors remain open — but Schmeling's future is now in doubt.

Bishop Ronald B. Warren of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America filed charges in August against Schmeling after the pastor told him that he had entered into a relationship with another man. ELCA policy permits gay clergy — only if they're celibate. Schmeling's trial starts in Atlanta on Friday. He could be expelled from the ELCA.

The Midtown church has since rallied around Schmeling — and so has Mayer. He has not only returned to the church but contributed money to Schmeling's legal defense. He tears up at the prospect that "Pastor Brad" may no longer lead his church.

"If you had told me six years ago that I was going to give money to Brad's defense," he says, "I would have told you, 'You've lost your mind.' "

Middle-ground position

Over the past three decades, most mainline Protestant denominations have become more accepting of gays. Some, like the United Church of Christ, even support the rights of gays to marry.

The ELCA has not gone that far. It won't allow any "practicing" gays in sexual relationships with people of the same gender to be ordained as clergy.

Those guidelines have been adopted by some other Protestant denominations. It's viewed as a middle ground, a way to avoid schism. Yet inevitably a congregation will violate these rules, deeming the celibacy requirements as outmoded interpretation of Scripture.

St. John's is such a church. When it called Schmeling for interviews in 2000, he told them he was gay. But it wasn't an issue, says Laura Crawley, the congregation's president.

"At the time, the bishop approved him," she says. "We were not breaking any sort of rules in calling him."

Crawley says the church's call committee was drawn to Schmeling's ability. His way of translating ancient Scriptures into plain language. His habit of not just using children as cute backdrops in service but treating them as adults. His flair for creative worship.

They knew, though, that he might break church rules someday if he met someone. Many actually hoped that he would.

"When your job is giving 24 hours a day, you need someone in your life who is devoted to giving to you," she says.

The church may have become more accepting of gay pastors, but Mayer didn't get the memo. He didn't change his views of gays. He was more concerned with survival.

"The church was barely hanging on when he came," Mayer says.

'Gay was bad'

So was the ELCA. Like many other Protestant denominations, the organization's membership has been declining for at least 20 years.

Some say most Protestant denominations are dying because they're diluting the Bible. Others say it's because they're not inclusive.

When both sides clash publicly, they typically follow a formula. Clergy cite dueling biblical verses, pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit and parse the meaning of convoluted church policy phrases.

Mayer doesn't cite biblical scholars or the Holy Spirit to explain his change. A reserved man, he doesn't even like talking about the subject.

"I'm only here because of Pastor Brad," he says as he unfolds his lanky frame in a chair at a St. John's Sunday school room. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't even be talking to you."

He says he never talked about homosexuality growing up on a farm in Prosperity, S.C.

There was no theological debate; the issue was settled.

"I came up with very little knowledge of gayness," he says. "The only thing I ever heard about gay was bad. This is all I knew: He's gay. He's bad."

That didn't change when St. John's called Schmeling, a seminary student at Emory University who was completing his doctorate.

When the church selected Schmeling after a congregational vote, Mayer started thinking about other churches. But they had to be Lutheran. Mayer was a devoted Lutheran who once broke up with a girlfriend because she was a Baptist. He can trace his Lutheran ancestors back to the 17th century. And though he had attended St. John's with his wife, Irene, for 47 years, he was prepared to move.

"I figured it was going under," he says. "I might as well hunt somewhere else."

Schmeling drew him back home, though.

First, he reached the person Mayer calls "the most important person in my life" — his wife, Irene.

The two will celebrate their 48th wedding anniversary this month. Schmeling called Irene at their Forest Park home to introduce himself.

"The word 'gay' didn't really come up in my conversation," Irene Mayer recalls. "He was calling with concern about myself and my family."

Schmeling kept calling her.

"Over a period of time, he won her over," Mayer says. "She just started loving him."

Church revival

Mayer also noticed that his church wasn't dying anymore. In six years, St. John's membership grew from 250 to about 350. More children and young adults joined. Once, Mayer knew all the members — but he has since lost track.

"I'm the old person right now," he says with a smile.

Then Schmeling touched another important person in Mayer's life — his 47-year-old daughter. He won't divulge the details but says that his daughter was experiencing some significant personal problems. She wasn't a member at St. John's, but Schmeling met with her and helped pull her out of her crisis. "Every time I ever said, 'I need you,' that's all I had to say, [and] he was there," Mayer says.

Finally, Schmeling evoked memories of another important person — Mayer's father, Enoch, a turkey farmer. "My mother preached the Bible; Daddy lived the Bible," he says. "If I said I needed help, he was there. The words 'I love you" weren't part of his vocabulary. It was just something I knew."

Mayer says he saw the same quality in Schmeling. He somehow made people know that he cared for them. He made time to help. Made time to meet complete strangers. Made time to make everyone welcome.

By the time Mayer learned that Schmeling had a partner, he says it was "irrelevant" to him.

"I wasn't surprised," he says. "If you find someone like Pastor Brad that everyone likes, you know that he was going to run into someone who was gay and who felt the same way the rest of us do."

When asked about biblical verses that condemned

homosexuality, though, Mayer's posture stiffens. He says: "I don't go there.

"That's between Pastor Brad and God," he says. "None of us are perfect. We're all going to answer for our sin."

When asked about ELCA guidelines, he grasps for the right words.

Finally, he says after sighing, "I don't know everything in the world. I don't understand how we all couldn't be born perfectly.

"It's just that over a period of time, I came to realize Pastor Brad wasn't the person I thought he was. He was still gay. But the knowledge that I had of gay people wasn't who he was.

"He was just like everybody else."

Torture and Methodists

2006-10-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

U.S. Takes Low Road
October 3, 2006
GARRISON KEILLOR

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. We have suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state," and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these "enemy combatants"stand naked in cold rooms for a couple days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. They have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 - Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright - and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, LIEBERMAN, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church. It was spooky. I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie- talkies, and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics. I was there on a book tour for "Homegrown Democrat," but they thought it better if I didn't mention it. So I tried to make light of it: I told the audience, "I don't need to talk politics. I have no need even to be interested in politics - I'm a citizen, I have plenty of money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for military service." And the audience applauded! Those were their sentiments exactly. We've got ours, and who cares?

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why should they worry? It's only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine. If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country. This piece was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

The View From Guantánamo

2006-09-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

The View From Guantánamo

By ABU BAKKER QASSIM

Published: September 17, 2006

Tirana, Albania

I HAVE been greatly saddened to hear that the Congress of the United States, a country I deeply admire, is considering new laws that would deny prisoners at Guantánamo Bay the right to challenge their detentions in federal court.

I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America’s war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantánamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country’s centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right — or began to. In May, on the eve of a court hearing in my case, the military relented, and I was sent to Albania along with four other Uighurs. But 12 of my Uighur brothers remain in Guantánamo today. Will they be stranded there forever?

Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name — and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantánamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well.

I am from East Turkestan on the northwest edge of China. Communist China cynically calls my homeland “Xinjiang,” which means “new dominion” or “new frontier.” My people want only to be treated with respect and dignity. But China uses the American war on terrorism as a pretext to punish those who peacefully dissent from its oppressive policies. They brand as “terrorism” all political opposition from the Uighurs.

Amnesty International reports that East Turkistan is the only province in China where people may face the death penalty for political offenses. Chinese leaders brag about the number of Uighur political prisoners shot in the head. I was punished for speaking against China’s unjust policies, and I left because of the threat to my life. My search for work and refuge took me from Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I heard about the Sept. 11 attacks for the first time in Guantánamo. I was not aware of their magnitude until after my release, when a reporter showed me images online at an Internet cafe in Tirana. It was a terrible thing. But I too was its victim. I would never have experienced the ordeal and humiliation of Guantánamo if this horrific event had not taken place.

I feel great sadness for the families who lost their loved ones on that horrible day five years ago. And I would be sadder still to see the freedom-loving American people walk away from their respect for the rule of law. I want America to be a strong and respected nation in the world. Only then can it continue to be the source of hope for the hopeless — like my people.

Abu Bakker Qassim was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2002 to May. This article was translated from the Uighur by Nury Turael.

Let their voices be heard

2006-08-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Let their voices be heard

by Garrison Keillor

Why shouldn't we let their voices be heard?

Published August 23, 2006

It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed, "Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices, what they went through.

Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear people in anguish in their last minutes constitutes invasion of privacy. The truth is that the callers had no interest in privacy, they were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to protect them in the first place.

They were people like us, we might have sat near them in a theater or restaurant, asked them for directions on the street. They went to work that fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves facing the abyss, and the first thing we thought, seeing the burning buildings on TV, was: "What is it like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.

Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring Themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance, and the media were glad to focus on the martial moment, the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America United, and the anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the people who fell from high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media averted its eyes from the reality of Sept. 11, 2001, and started looking for the Message.

The best book on the subject, by the way, is "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a plain narrative out of thousands of stories that took place in the time between the first strike and the collapse of the second tower. You read it, you're there.

Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firefighters who died in the towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the center, when it was shown clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by radio. Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.

In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor was real. Our countrymen died real deaths on a warm September morning, and then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In our hearts, we know we're on the wrong road, the road to unreality, but the man says to stay the course. And now as November nears, congressmen who have supported the war, no questions asked, find it convenient to admit to having "questions" about it. "We are facing a difficult situation," they say. They are "troubled."

The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than troubled. She saw death. It is indecent for New York to stifle the voices of the people in the towers. The congressmen who deal so casually with life and death ought to sit down and listen to those phone calls.

----------

Garrison Keillor is an author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Note to Republicans: The party's over

2006-06-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

Clarence Page: Note to Republicans: The party's over

Will hot-buttons issues be able to save Bush & Co.?

Published June 7, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Stop the presses! Never mind Iraq, Iran, Social Security, health care, immigration, high gas prices, outsourced jobs or the No Child Left Behind Act. If the White House and congressional leaders are to be believed, the most urgent threat to the Republic is "activist judges" out to destroy marriage by allowing gay people to get hitched.

"Activist courts have left our nation no other choice," Bush said in a Monday event attended by prominent evangelical Christian activists. Criticizing judges who have overturned state laws that ban gay marriages, Bush called once again for the U.S. Constitution to be amended to define marriage as a "union between one man and one woman."

The passage of time has only made the president's alarm sound less justified. Gay marriage has been legal for the past two years in Massachusetts, yet my marriage, just to name one, has remained remarkably intact and unthreatened. If activist judges are coming to get us, they're certainly taking their time.

Yet Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is sticking by a pledge he made months ago to bring up the proposed amendment for debate even though it does not appear to have the two-thirds majority required in both houses of Congress to send it to the states, three-quarters of which would then have to ratify it.

According to Frist, "The institution of marriage is under attack today." If so, marriage-seeking homosexuals pose much less of a threat than out-of-wedlock births, which have risen sharply since the 1960s. The proposed constitutional ban on gay marriages would not turn that sad situation around.

In fact, if protecting marriage is all that Bush & Co. are worried about, they should be encouraging, not alienating, a group that is eager to join the institution. Instead, their marriage-protection talk sounds like thinly veiled code for pushing homosexuals back into the closet.

But with midterm elections approaching, Iraq woes mounting and approval ratings sinking for the Republican-controlled White House and Congress, a hot-button issue like gay marriage offers a tantalizing opportunity to whip up the base with what the late New York Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan used to call "boob bait for the Bubbas."

And there's more bait to come. After gay marriage, Republican proposals to repeal the estate tax and amend the Constitution to ban flag burning make up a triple crown of conservative red meat for the rubes: Wave the flag, bash the gays and, while you're at it, slip in yet another tax break for the rich that's disguised as a family-friendly bill.

Republicans call the estate tax a "death tax" because that label plays better in the polls. "Estate" sounds like something that applies only to rich people, while "death" is something we all face. But be not deceived. The so-called death tax touches only about one estate in 200. That's the superrich.

A flag-burning ban has wider appeal, even though its effect, if passed, is likely to be quite the opposite of its intent. Even before the 1988 presidential campaign, when flag protection burned as a national issue, flag desecration had faded as a popular form of protest. But rest assured, it will return with great passion if the government bans it. Forbidden fruit always seems more tempting, especially when it means bigger headlines for publicity seekers.

Like the gay marriage amendment, the flag desecration measure is expected to fall short of passage. But it will serve its political purposes if it puts Democrats on the defensive, distracts the public from truly serious problems and provides something for its proponents to brag about back home.

Yes, that aroma you smell hovering around these issues is an air of desperation. The party that took control of the White House and Congress pledging to cut taxes, cut spending, sweep out corruption and shrink government has accomplished only the tax cuts. Without cuts in spending, "tax relief" has led to record deficits and growing frustration for Bush's base of fiscal conservatives.

Team Bush has lost support because it has ducked tough fights on spending, ethics, border protection and other core issues for which it was sent to Washington.

Instead, Bush, Frist and others find themselves speaking out forcefully on gay marriage, among other problems that don't sound like much of a problem. Then they offer solutions that are not likely to do much but create more problems.

Enough Already

2006-04-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

Had enough?

Enough Already

By TIM ROEMER

Published: April 29, 2006

Washington

AMERICANS have clearly had enough of the Bush administration's record: 7 in 10 say the nation is headed in the wrong direction. But with the 2006 Congressional elections fast approaching, Democrats must not get so irrationally exuberant that they lapse into old, bad habits.

In January, President Bush's adviser Karl Rove outlined the issues he believes will lead Republican candidates to victory in November: national security, the economy and taxes, and the courts. Democrats cannot allow Republicans to define the terms of the debate. Instead, they should take a page from history and from a different Karl.

In 1946, Karl Frost, an advertising executive, suggested a simple slogan to the Massachusetts Republican Committee: "Had Enough? Vote Republican!" Frost recognized that these simple words could unite his national party and blame its opponents, who controlled Congress, for causing or failing to solve the many problems facing the country, including meat shortages, economic difficulties and labor unrest. The strategy worked: in 1946, both houses of Congress flipped.

Sixty years later, Democrats would be smart to turn Karl Frost's slogan on Karl Rove's strategy.

"Had Enough? Vote Democratic!" is a slogan that spotlights the many mistakes in Iraq, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and the mangling of fiscal responsibility with "bridges to nowhere." Indeed, you can see and hear Democratic candidates rallying their voters at Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners with a passionate and rhythmic chorus:

"The administration said Iraqis would greet us with roses as liberators, yet our soldiers are attacked with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Had Enough? Vote Democratic.

"The administration said it was prepared for a hurricane in New Orleans, yet our government's feeble response prompted Bangladesh to offer us $1 million in aid. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!

"The administration said it would bring competency to our federal budget, yet our nation faces catastrophic deficits. Had Enough? Vote Democratic!"

And if you want to fire up the base, you can string together references to Jack Abramoff, Abu Ghraib and the Dubai ports deal. "Had Enough?" works well on classic campaign materials like buttons and bumper stickers while its simplicity makes it a cinch to "go viral" on the Internet.

"Had enough?" will speak to both Democrats and disillusioned Republicans. Liberals can use "Had Enough?" to reach out to voters enraged over the incompetent management of Iraq. Moderates might use "Had Enough?" to persuade swing voters on fiscal issues. And the implicit rejection of neoconservative politics will appeal to all voters who seek to spurn tainted Republican candidates.

"Had Enough?" also pre-empts Democrats' worst habits. Too often we've made campaigns complicated and policy-heavy. We love to unveil 40-page position papers and wonky diagrams. "Had Enough?" clears a broad path through such minutiae. "Public sentiment is everything," Abraham Lincoln said 150 years ago. "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Karl Frost's simple words can serve as the cavalry charge to help win the coming electoral battles — something Democrats are in an incredibly strong position to do. But make no mistake: new ideas matter. Democrats will also need the artillery of a disciplined, focused set of core proposals to complement their criticism of Republican excesses.

As we head into the midterm elections, Democrats should finally understand, as Lincoln and Frost did before, that you must win the majority before you can make public policy.

Tim Roemer is a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.

cwsox

2006-04-21T00:29:00.000-07:00

Go Blue!

[Use this link if you are unable to view the images below]

cwsox

2006-02-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ex-Gay Cowboys

By DAN SAVAGE

Published: February 10, 2006

Seattle

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Forum: Gay Rights

FIRST, a little of that full disclosure stuff: I have not actually seen "Brokeback Mountain" or "End of the Spear," both of which I'm going to discuss here.

But since when did not seeing a film prevent anyone from sharing his or her strong opinions about it? Before the posters for "Brokeback Mountain" were even printed, everyone from the blogger Mickey Kaus to the Concerned Women for America to gay men all over the country had already said a lot about the film. (Their opinions were, respectively, con, con and pro.)

So, let's get to it: Remember when straight actors who played gay were the ones taking a professional risk? Those days are over. Shortly after Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, both straight, received Oscar nominations for playing gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," conservative Christians were upset when they learned that a gay actor, Chad Allen, was playing a straight missionary in "End of the Spear."

"End of the Spear" tells what happened after five American missionaries were murdered in 1956 by a tribe in Ecuador. Instead of seeking retribution, the missionaries' families reached out to the tribe, forgave the killers and eventually converted them to Christianity. An evangelical film company, Every Tribe Entertainment, brought the story to the screen. In a glowing review, Marcus Yoars, a film critic for Focus on the Family, noted that the "martyrdom" of the slain missionaries has "inspired thousands if not millions of Christians." But after conservatives took a closer look at the cast list, the protests began. Many felt Chad Allen's presence in the film negated any positive message.

The pastors claim they're worried about what will happen when their children rush home from the movies, Google Chad Allen's name, and discover that he's a "gay activist." ("Gay activist" is a term evangelicals apply to any homosexual who isn't a gay doormat.) They needn't be too concerned. Straight boys who have unsupervised access to the Internet aren't Googling the names of middle-aged male actors gay or straight — not when Paris Hilton's sex tapes are still out there.

Frankly, I can't help but be perplexed by the criticisms of Mr. Allen from the Christian right. After all, isn't playing straight what evangelicals have been urging gay men to do?

That's precisely what Jack and Ennis attempt to do in "Brokeback Mountain" — at least, according to people I know who have actually seen the film. These gay cowboys try, as best they can, to quit one another. They marry women, start families. But their wives are crushed when they realize their husbands don't, and can't, ever really love them. "Brokeback Mountain" makes clear that it would have been better for all concerned if Jack and Ennis had lived in a world where they could simply be together.

That world didn't exist when Jack and Ennis were pitching tents together, but it does now — even in the American West. Today, the tiny and stable percentage of men who are gay are free to live openly, and those who want to settle down and start families can do so without having to deceive some poor, unsuspecting woman.

Straight audiences are watching and loving "Brokeback Mountain" — that's troubling to evangelical Christians who have invested a decade and millions of dollars promoting the notion that gay men can be converted to heterosexuality, or become "ex-gay." It is, they insist, an ex-gay movement, although I've never met a gay man who was moved to join it.

This "movement" demands more from gay men than simply playing straight. Once a man can really pass as ex-gay — once he's got some Dockers, an expired gym membership and a bad haircut — he's supposed to become, in effect, an ex-gay missionary, reaching out to the hostile gay tribes in such inhospitable places as Chelsea and West Hollywood.

What should really trouble evangelicals, however, is this: even if every gay man became ex-gay tomorrow, there still wouldn't be an ex-lesbian tomboy out there for every ex-gay cowboy. Instead, millions of straight women would wake up one morning to discover that they had married a Jack or an Ennis. Restaurant hostesses and receptionists at hair salons would be especially vulnerable.

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.

If anything, supporters of traditional marriage should want gay men out of the heterosexual marriage market entirely. And the best way to do that is to see that we're safely married off — to each other, not to your daughters. Let gay actors like Chad Allen only play it straight in the movies.

Dan Savage is the editor of The Stranger, a Seattle newsweekly.

cwsox

2006-02-10T18:49:00.000-08:00

Ex-Cheney Aide Testified Leak Was Ordered, Prosecutor Says

By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: February 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq's weapons capability in June and July 2003, according to a document filed by a federal prosecutor.

The document shows that Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was actively engaged in the Bush administration's public relations effort to rebut complaints that there was little evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed or sought weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The document is part of the prosecutors' case against Mr. Libby, who has been indicted on charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative to journalists.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said in a letter to Mr. Libby's lawyers last month that Mr. Libby had testified before the grand jury that "he had contacts with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate ('NIE')," that discussed Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. "We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

Mr. Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice last October in what Mr. Fitzgerald has charged was a willful misleading of investigators about his role in exposing Valerie Wilson as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Wilson is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from the government of Niger.

Ms. Wilson's identity was first disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, just after Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed column in The New York Times saying he had investigated the Niger claim and found little evidence to support it. Mr. Wilson charged that destroying his wife's undercover status was a way to discredit him and his assertions.

The prosecutor's note of Jan. 23 does not, however, make any reference to Mr. Libby's involvement in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity. It seems, rather, to be part of an effort by the prosecutor to demonstrate that Mr. Libby was engaged in using secret information to press the administration's case at the same time that Ms. Wilson's identity was leaked to reporters.

The letter was first reported Thursday by the National Journal, which said its sources had identified that one of the superiors was Mr. Cheney.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which was done in October 2002, said that Iraq "will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," but it included some dissenting views. The report was classified.

But amid doubts about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq some of which were attributable to Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article, the administration declassified the report on July 18.

Mr. Fitzgerald said in his letter that Mr. Libby discussed the contents of the classified report in a July 8 meeting — 10 days before it was declassified — with Judith Miller, then a reporter at The Times. Ms. Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify in the leak case, has told the grand jury that Mr. Libby told her about Ms. Wilson at the same meeting.

Mr. Fitzgerald said that Mr. Libby's testimony showed how Ms. Wilson's status was disclosed. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring, 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," he wrote.

Mr. Libby's lawyers have already suggested they will mount a defense in which they will not challenge the charge that he made misstatements about how he learned of Ms. Wilson's identity and whether he shared that information with reporters. They have said that any statements he made to investigators that might have been untrue were the result of his preoccupation with many serious matters of national security at the time.

NY Times editorial on Cheney

2005-12-23T05:56:00.000-08:00

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency

Published: December 23, 2005

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contactors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.

Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and rushing to make it permanent.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said the presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically requires such warrants.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.

cwsox

2005-12-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

from Forbes - the troops are not taken in by Cheney

Update 1: Cheney Fields Tough Questions From Troops
12.18.2005, 03:18 PM
http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/ap/2005/12/18/ap2400133.html

Facing tough questions from battle-weary troops, Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday cited signs of progress in Iraq and signaled that force changes could come in 2006.

Cheney rode the wave of last week's parliamentary elections during a 10-hour surprise visit to Iraq that aimed to highlight progress at a time when Americans question the mission. Military commanders and top government officials offered glowing reports, but the rank-and-file troops Cheney met did not seem to share their enthusiasm.

"From our perspective, we don't see much as far as gains," said Marine Cpl. Bradley Warren, the first to question Cheney in a round-table discussion with about 30 military members. "We're looking at small-picture stuff, not many gains. I was wondering what it looks like from the big side of the mountain - how Iraq's looking."

Cheney replied that remarkable progress has been made in the last year and a half.

"I think when we look back from 10 years hence, we'll see that the year '05 was in fact a watershed year here in Iraq," the vice president said. "We're getting the job done. It's hard to tell that from watching the news. But I guess we don't pay that much attention to the news."

Another Marine, Cpl. R.P. Zapella, asked, "Sir, what are the benefits of doing all this work to get Iraq on its feet?"

Cheney said the result could be a democratically elected Iraq that is unified, capable of defending itself and no longer a base for terrorists or a threat to its neighbors. "We believe all that's possible," he said.

Although he said that any decision about troop levels will be made by military commanders, Cheney told the troops, "I think you will see changes in our deployment patterns probably within this next year."

About 160,000 troops are in Iraq. The administration has said that troop levels are expected to return to a baseline of 138,000 after the elections, but critics of the war have called for a significant drawdown.

More than 2,100 troops have died in Iraq since the U.S. invaded in March 2003.

The round-table with the vice president came after hundreds of troops had gathered in an aircraft hangar to hear from a mystery guest. When Cheney emerged at the podium, he drew laughs when he deadpanned, "I'm not Jessica Simpson."

Shouts of "hooah!" from the audience interrupted Cheney a few times, but mostly the service members listened intently. When he delivered the applause line, "We're in this fight to win. These colors don't run," the only sound was a lone whistle.

The skepticism that Cheney faced reflects opinions back home, where most Americans say they do not approve of President Bush's handling of the war. It was unique coming from a military audience, which typically receives administration officials more enthusiastically.

Cheney became the highest-ranking administration official to visit the country since Bush's trip on Thanksgiving Day 2003. It was his first visit to Iraq since March 1991, when he was defense secretary for President George H.W. Bush.

The tour came on the same day that President Bush was giving a prime-time Oval Office address on Iraq. Cheney's aides said the timing was a coincidence, yet the two events combined in a public-relations blitz aimed at capitalizing on the elections to rebuild support for the unpopular war.

The daylong tour of Iraq was so shrouded in secrecy that even Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and President Jalal Talabani were kept in the dark. The prime minister said he was surprised when he showed up for what he thought was a meeting with the U.S. ambassador and saw Cheney.

Talabani, his finger still stained purple as proof that he had voted three days earlier, was clearly delighted. He thanked Cheney profusely for coming and called him "one of the heroes of liberating Iraq."

Cheney had an hourlong briefing on the election from Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, top U.S. commander Gen. George Casey and Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. He emerged saying he was encouraged by preliminary results showing high turnout about Sunni Muslims, who make up the backbone of the insurgency.

His next visit was to Taji Air Base, where he saw tanks that Iraqis had rebuilt and watched while they practiced a vehicle sweep at a security checkpoint.

U.S. forces guarded Cheney with weapons at the ready while Iraqi soldiers, who had no weapons, held their arms out as if they were carrying imaginary guns.

"The Syrian border is back under Iraq control now," U.S. Lt. Gen. Marty Dempsey told the vice president, pointing to a map of Iraqi troop locations. "When people say, 'When will Iraq take control of its own security?' the answer truly is it already has."

Cheney lunched on lamb kebobs, hummus and rice with raisins along with U.S. and Iraqi soldiers who helped secure polling sites. Then he headed to his third and final stop in Iraq at al-Asad.

Cheney flew over Baghdad in a pack of eight fast-moving Blackhawk helicopters, following the airport road that has been the site of so many insurgent attacks and passing the courthouse where Saddam Hussein is being tried.

The unannounced stops in Iraq came at the beginning of a five-day tour aimed at strengthening support for the war on terror. Stops include Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Cheney's staff kept the Iraq portion secret from reporters, waiting to reveal the plans when Air Force Two was preparing to refuel in the United Kingdom. Once on the ground, the entourage transferred from his conspicuous white and blue 757 to an unmarked C-17 cargo plane that would fly overnight to Baghdad International Airport.

losing our freedoms

2005-12-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

The argument advanced that Congress has no power to limit the president's action is downright scary/

Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.
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Related
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts (December 16, 2005)

From the government's detention of Americans as "enemy combatants" to the just-disclosed eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, the administration has relied on an unusually expansive interpretation of the president's authority. That stance has given the administration leeway for decisive action, but it has come under severe criticism from some scholars and the courts.

With the strong support of Vice President Dick Cheney, legal theorists in the White House and Justice Department have argued that previous presidents unjustifiably gave up some of the legitimate power of their office. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made it especially critical that the full power of the executive be restored and exercised, they said.

The administration's legal experts, including David S. Addington, the vice president's former counsel and now his chief of staff, and John C. Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, have pointed to several sources of presidential authority.

The bedrock source is Article 2 of the Constitution, which describes the "executive power" of the president, including his authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Several landmark court decisions have elaborated the extent of the powers.

Another key recent document cited by the administration is the joint resolution passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for Sept. 11 in order to prevent further attacks.

Mr. Yoo, who is believed to have helped write a legal justification for the National Security Agency's secret domestic eavesdropping, first laid out the basis for the war on terror in a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum that said no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response."

That became the underlying justification for numerous actions apart from the eavesdropping program, disclosed by The New York Times on Thursday night. Those include the order to try accused terrorists before military tribunals; the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret overseas jails operated by the Central Intelligence Agency; the holding of two Americans, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, as enemy combatants; and the use of severe interrogation techniques, including some banned by international agreements, on Al Qaeda figures.

Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, declined to comment for this article. But Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate counsel to President Bush from 2001 to 2003, explained the logic behind the assertion of executive power.

"After 9/11 the president felt it was incumbent on him to use every ounce of authority available to him to protect the American people," Mr. Berenson said.

He said he was not familiar with the N.S.A. program, in which the intelligence agency, without warrants, has monitored international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of people inside the United States. He said that he could not comment on whether the program was justified, but that he believed intelligence gathering on an enemy was clearly part of the president's constitutional war powers.

"Any program like this would have been very carefully analyzed by administration lawyers," Mr. Berenson said. "It's easy, now that four years have passed without another attack, to forget the sense of urgency that pervaded the country when the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking."

But some legal experts outside the administration, including some who served previously in the intelligence agencies, said the administration had pushed the presidential-powers argument beyond what was legally justified or prudent. They say the N.S.A. domestic eavesdropping illustrates the flaws in Mr. Bush's assertion of his powers.

"Obviously we have to do things differently because of the terrorist threat," said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former general counsel of both N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency, who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. "But to do it without the participation of the Congress and the courts is unwise in the extreme."

Even if the administration believes the president has the authority to direct warrantless eavesdropping, she said, ordering it without seeking Congressional approval was politically wrongheaded. "We're just relearning the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate," said Ms. Parker, now dean of the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.
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Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts (December 16, 2005)

Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as C.I.A. general counsel in 1995 and 1996, said he was dismayed by the N.S.A. program, which he said was the latest instance of legal overreach by the administration.

"Clearly the president felt after 9/11 that he needed more powers than his predecessors had exercised," Mr. Smith said. "He chose to assert as much power as he thought he needed. Now the question is whether that was wise and consistent with our values."

William C. Banks, a widely respected authority on national security law at Syracuse University, said the N.S.A. revelation came as a shock, even given the administration's past assertions of presidential powers.

"I was frankly astonished by the story," he said. "My head is spinning."

Professor Banks said the president's power as commander in chief "is really limited to situations involving military force - anything needed to repel an attack. I don't think the commander in chief power allows" the warrantless eavesdropping, he said.

Mr. Berenson, the former White House associate counsel, said that in rare cases, the presidents' advisers may decide that an existing law violates the Constitution "by invading the president's executive powers as commander in chief."

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 typically requires warrants for the kind of eavesdropping carried out under the special N.S.A. program. Whether administration lawyers argued that that statute unconstitutionally infringed the president's powers is not known.

But Mr. Smith, formerly of the C.I.A., noted that when President Carter signed the act into law in 1978, he seemed to rule out any domestic eavesdropping without court approval.

"The bill requires, for the first time, a prior judicial warrant for all electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes in the United States" if an American's communications might be intercepted, President Carter said when he signed the act.

By asserting excessive powers, Mr. Smith said, President Bush may provoke a reaction from Congress and the courts that ultimately thwarts executive power.

"The president may wind up eroding the very powers he was seeking to exert," Mr. Smith said.

illegal Bushis activities

2005-10-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: New York Times October 1, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01educ.html?th&emc=th

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were "no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public."

The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to "procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition" in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.

The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as "stupid, wrong and ill-advised." She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps "to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again."

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.

The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams's company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.

In March, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position.

But the accountability office said on Friday: "The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing."

The office said Mr. Williams's work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush's education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.

The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to "convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government's behalf and in return for the payment of public funds," the G.A.O. said.

The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law.

Congress tried to clarify the ban on "covert propaganda" in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government's role is openly acknowledged.

A Wimp on Genocide

2005-09-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

A Wimp on Genocide

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 18, 2005

President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.

It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.

Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

I can't understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration "has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Incredibly, the Bush administration has even emerged as Sudan's little helper, threatening an antigenocide campaigner in an effort to keep him quiet. Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, served in Darfur as a military adviser - and grew heartsick at seeing corpses of children who'd been bludgeoned to death.

In March, I wrote a column about Mr. Steidle and separately published photos that he had taken of men, women and children hacked to death. Other photos were too wrenching to publish: one showed a pupil at the Suleia Girls School; she appeared to have been burned alive, probably after being raped, and her charred arms were still in handcuffs.

Mr. Steidle is an American hero for blowing the whistle on the genocide. But, according to Mr. Steidle, the State Department has ordered him on three occasions to stop showing the photos, for fear of complicating our relations with Sudan. Mr. Steidle has also been told that he has been blacklisted from all U.S. government jobs.

The State Department should be publicizing photos of atrocities to galvanize the international community against the genocide - not conspiring with Sudan to cover them up.

I'm a broken record on Darfur because I can't get out of my head the people I've met there. On my very first visit, 18 months ago, I met families who were hiding in the desert from the militias and soldiers. But the only place to get water was at the occasional well - where soldiers would wait to shoot the men who showed up, and rape the women. So anguished families sent their youngest children, 6 or 7 years old, to the wells with donkeys to fetch water - because they were least likely to be killed or raped. The parents hated themselves for doing this, but they had no choice - they had been abandoned by the world.

That's the cost of our passivity. Perhaps it's unfair to focus so much on Mr. Bush, for there are no neat solutions and he has done more than most leaders. He at least dispatched Condi Rice to Darfur this summer - which is more interest in genocide than the TV anchors have shown.

One group, www.beawitness.org, prepared a television commercial scolding the networks for neglecting the genocide - and affiliates of NBC, CBS and ABC all refused to run it.

Still, the failures of others do not excuse Mr. Bush's own unwillingness to speak out, to impose a no-fly zone, to appoint a presidential envoy or to build an international coalition to pressure Sudan. So, Mr. Bush, let me ask you just one question: Since you portray yourself as a bold leader, since you pride yourself on your willingness to use blunt terms like "evil" - then why is it that you're so wimpish on genocide?

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

A Fatal Incuriosity

2005-09-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

A Fatal Incuriosity

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 14, 2005

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.

Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.

At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.

Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.

As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."

President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Osama and Katrina

2005-09-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

Osama and Katrina

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 7, 2005

On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."

It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.

Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."

Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

Why Roberts must be defeated

2005-09-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/politics/politicsspecial1/04roberts.html

Old Memo From Roberts the Young Lawyer Shows a Caustic Side
NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: September 4, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - When he was a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1982, John G. Roberts Jr. wrote a memorandum that contained an unusually caustic assessment of a prominent black lobbying group called TransAfrica, according to documents released Saturday.

The documents written by Mr. Roberts, who now serves on a federal appeals court and has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush, were released by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The memorandum was written in response to a letter to the Justice Department in which TransAfrica's president at the time, Randall Robinson, said he would be providing a free subscription of the organization's policy journal.

TransAfrica was set up to lobby the government on behalf of American blacks on issues relating to Africa and the Caribbean. It had organized a series of successful demonstrations outside the South African Embassy before that country abandoned apartheid.

Mr. Roberts's superior, Kenneth W. Starr, asked him in a memorandum to draft a thank-you note to TransAfrica. Instead, Mr. Roberts wrote on Feb. 16, 1982, that no thank-you note should be sent. "Sometimes silence is golden," he wrote. "TransAfrica is the American lobby group supporting various Marxist takeover attempts in Africa, particularly Namibia."

At the time, the Reagan administration had adopted a policy of what it called "constructive engagement" with the white regime in South Africa, which also ruled Namibia, then known as South-West Africa.

Sylvia Hill, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia and the vice chairwoman of TransAfrica Forum, the current incarnation of the organization, said the remarks were troubling. "One has to be concerned that he essentially used the argument that our support for struggling people in countries who had oppressive legal and racist regimes meant support for Marxism, Communism or the Soviet Union," she said in an interview.

Professor Hill added that the significance of his comments "in today's context is that, despite the international and domestic documentation that the South African and Namibian regimes were committing horrific violations of human rights against their peoples, he viewed this as an ideologue opposed to Communism."

South African rule in Namibia was opposed by the South West Africa People's Organization, known as Swapo, which was avowedly Marxist. Since taking power, it has not put a Marxist regime in place. South Africa's main opposition group, the African National Congress, had ties to the Soviet Union, but since gaining power has not put a Marxist regime in place.

Mr. Roberts added in his note that the fact that Mr. Robinson was the brother of Max Robinson, then the anchor of ABC's evening news program, "does not legitimate the organization."

we have been abandoned by our own country

2005-09-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10121.htm

Kanye West: voice for all generations

2005-09-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

Chicago Tribune editorial

Kanye West's moment

Published August 30, 2005

Hip-hop has a new king, one who dresses for success, raps about his mom and makes a plea against homophobia. Even those who have never paid attention to rap may want to pay attention to Chicago's Kanye West.

This is his moment.

West has been on the cover of Time magazine and appeared in a Pepsi commercial, symbols of his newfound status as a star slipping into the mainstream of popular culture.

But those were sideshows to Tuesday's release of West's second CD, "Late Registration."

The follow-up to last year's Grammy Award-winning "The College Dropout," the new work proves that West has successfully skirted music's dreaded sophomore slump. Some critics have hailed "Late Registration" as an instant classic that breaks new ground in hip-hop with its combination of meaningful lyrics and soaring music. Not bad for an artist credited with taking the gangsta out of rap and writing about real-life people and situations. Be warned, though: Some of the lyrics are explicit.

"Here is someone who is rapping about things that many people consider uplifting, positive, informative, intelligent and interesting," said Craig Watkins, author of "Hip-Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement."

West raps about the diamond trade in Sierra Leone and the health-care system in America. In "Hey Mama," he raps an ode to his mother Donda West, an English professor. The first single, "Gold Digger," combines West's flat, mesmerizing voice with Jamie Foxx belting out the chorus like Ray Charles in his prime.

Those who don't know West may be put off by his brashness. But as he gains mainstream popularity, he'll probably tone down his act, which won't be such a bad thing since he looks and sounds like a star in for the long haul. Hollywood surely will come calling. He already has made the move west to California.

When it comes to social issues, the hope is that West will remain true to his values. In a recent interview with MTV, he took a stand against rap's penchant for gay-bashing. West said people called him a "mama's boy" and he became homophobic while growing up. But when he learned that a cousin was gay, West said, it was a turning point. "Yo, this is my cousin. I love him and I've been discriminating against gays." He urged other rappers to turn down the noise against gays. "Yo, stop it," he said.

West is on the rise, a voice for this or any other generation.

Katrina's assault on Washington

2005-09-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Katrina's Assault on Washington
New York Times

Published: September 3, 2005

Do not be misled by Congress's approval of $10.5 billion in relief for the Hurricane Katrina victims. That's prompted by the graphic shock of the news coverage from New Orleans and the region, where the devastation catapults daily, in heartbreaking contrast with the slo-mo bumblings of government.
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There are dozens of questions Americans will demand to have answered once this emergency has passed. If the Homeland Security Department was so ill prepared for a natural disaster that everyone knew was coming, how is it equipped to handle other kinds of crises? Has the war in Iraq drained the nation of resources that it needs for things like flood prevention? Is the National Guard ready to handle a disaster that might be even worse, like a biological or nuclear attack?

One thing is certain: if President Bush and his Republican Congressional leaders want to deal responsibly with a historic disaster of this scale, they must finally try the path of honestly shared national sacrifice. If they respond by passing a few emergency measures and then falling back on their plans to enact more tax cuts, America will have to confront the fact that it is stuck with leaders who neither know, nor care, how to lead.

The pre-Katrina plan for this Congressional season was to enact more upper-bracket tax cuts for the least needy, while cutting into the safety-net programs for sick and impoverished Americans. These are the very entitlement programs most needed by the sudden underclass of hundreds of thousands of hurricane refugees cast adrift like Dustbowl Okies. Will Congress dare to go forward with these retrogressive plans in the face of the suffering from Katrina? Its woeful track record suggests that, shockingly, the answer may be yes.

G.O.P. leaders are set to mandate billions in Medicaid and antipoverty cuts this month, while the Senate is poised to try again to repeal the estate tax, a monumental folly that will deprive the deficit-ridden government of an estimated $750 billion in vital revenue in the first decade. The theory is that over the long run, the missing money will "starve the beast" and force Washington to make huge cuts in federal programs. The public has never bought this, but as long as the economy held up, it was willing to ignore the long-term implications.

That can't be the case now, when those implications are sitting in filthy refugee centers, when the streets of New Orleans are under water and when the nation must take care of hundreds of thousands of homeless people. Yet President Bush has still managed to repeat his no-taxes mantra.

Senator Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat, is now fighting for every available dollar to restore her state. Republicans had been wooing Ms. Landrieu as a possible supporter of the estate tax repeal. Now, we presume, she has higher priorities.

Washington's inspiration must now be the individual rescuers in New Orleans, who have labored so bravely and selflessly, as well as the charitable deeds of local and state governments. Houston's offer of shelter at the Astrodome has put self-regarding national politicians to shame.

Congress and the president had better get the message: an extraordinary time is upon the nation. The annihilation in New Orleans is an irrefutable sign that the national tax-cut party is over. So is the idea that American voters cannot be required to accept sacrifice or inconvenience, no matter how great the crisis. This country is better than that.

United States of Shame

2005-09-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 3, 2005

Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

Fallujah floods the Superdome

2005-09-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

from today's NY Times and this is so worth reading

Falluja Floods the Superdome
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 4, 2005

AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.

After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."

This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.

Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.

The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."

But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.

You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.

A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.

THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.

On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.

Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.

The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.

beyond belief

2005-09-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

so six days later, relief finally reached the New Orleans Convention Center and several hospitals, six days of people trapped in incredible heat, no food, no water, no sanitation, no electricity, in a cesspool of rotting corpses and decay - and people died, especially at the hospitals, because they were not rescued in six days -

four days for the people on foot trapped on the highway, in the sun, no shelter, no restrooms, no sanitation, no food, no water

and the Navy said they were ready to go from the beginning but the White Sox did not give the order

the entire administration should be forced to spend a week in the convention center - I have never hated an administration more than I hate the worthless and stupid and callous and ignorant Bush and his band of doers of evil

A worthy appointment

2005-09-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

from the Michigan State Bar Association Probate Discussion List today:

"...the guy heading FEMA has no qualifications. What was he doing before getting pulled into FEMA by the Bush administration in 2003? He was an estate planning lawyer in Colorado and of counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association Legal Department. And yes, it is the same Michael D. Brown."

No comment.