Texas Democrat Chris Bell will challenge incumbent Republican Rick Perry in the 2006 Gubernatorial race. Bell has been a longtime whistle-blower that has notified the public about ethically-challenged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who also is from the state of Texas. In a report in the Associated Press, the Democratic challenger discussed what drives him to this opportunity ():
"Rick Perry is an inspiring leader. In fact, he's inspired me to run for governor."
I know you might be thinking that any Democrat would not stand a chance in the Lone Star State. Although, when you look at Governor Perry's approval rating, last taken two months ago by Survey USA, Bell looks like he has a good shot ():
"Do you approve or disapprove of the job Rick Perry is doing as Governor?" (Margin of Sampling Error for this question = ± 4.1%)
Approve - 38% Disapprove - 48% Unsure - 14%
If a whistle-blower like Bell could influence a large turnout to the polls in on the progressive side in 2006, that might also help the Democrat who is challenging Tom DeLay in the district outside Houston.
Most Americans would agree that our country is more vulnerable when it comes to mass transit protection than in the case of airport security. The attacks of 3/11 (Spain) and 7/7 (London) showed that while our skies may be more secure than ever, our buses and railways need to be taken just as seriously.
Sadly, the Bush Administration is turning a blind eye to this growing concern regarding mass transit. Even our own Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was against a Democratic Party proposal that would have raised funding for railways, buses, ports, and bridges by hundreds of millions of dollars. Defending his boss, President Bush, Chertoff said that mass transit has enough funding ():
"Obviously we're concerned about the possibility of a copycat attack. [But] I think our transit systems are safe."
But Senator Kerry took issue with Chertoff's soft assessment, and believes that the London-style attacks are a lessen that we need to take mass transit security more seriously ():
"To me, that says we've got some serious holes that need to be plugged, and fast. It's unfathomable to me that this administration actually believes they're doing enough to protect subways and trains here at home."
Even if the President's own Secretary of Homeland Security agreed with the Democrats on higher funding levels for mass transit the Senate would never go along with it. It does not take a political scientist to figure out that the U.S. Senate is weighted disproportionately in the favor of rural states. Each state has two Senators -- meaning, for example, that the two individuals that represent the state of North Dakota have the exact same voting power as the two Senators that represent the more populated state of California. Because rural states do not deal with mass transit, they care much less about that and much more about an issue that impacts them, like farm subsidies. Rural states control the Senate. Just for instance, compare the party leaders in the Senate with those in the House. The Senate leaders represent the relatively small (in population) states of Nevada (Harry Reid) and Tennessee (Bill Frist). The House, which actually bases the number representatives per state on population, has their party leaders from much larger states like Texas (Tom DeLay) and California (Nancy Pelosi). With the Senate being the largest chamber of Congress and pretty much in charge when it comes to allocating homeland security funding, they obviously follow true to their form. Each state regardless of size or population . Only the Senate, not the House, would allow something like this to happen. Of course, larger cities such as New York City are given extra funding. But overall when it comes to per capita funding, Wisconsin is receiving a much chunkier piece of the pie when it comes to mass transit funding than a more populated state like Florida.
That is why local communities are unable to guard their mass transit systems, ports and bridges without being squeezed on a financial level to dip into their own budgets. The undemocratic institution known as the Senate, or at least less-democratic than the House, is sending a boatload of federal money to guard Fargo, North Dakota, while at the same time supplying unfunded mandates to local governments that run New York, Miami and Los Angeles where we need security the most.
Don't like it? Well, welcome to the GOP-controlled Senate, where your dreams will come true -- that is if you are from a small state.
Most Republicans and some Democrats are celebrating the passage of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) through the House of Representatives by a slim margin of 217 to 215. The trade agreement now will head to the Senate where it is expected to pass. This was a huge victory for the politicians in Washington whose campaign contributions come from some of the same wealthy companies that stand to benefit the most from CAFTA.
Many among the GOP tried to paint CAFTA as an agreement that was specifically designed to promote free trade in Central America. Republican Rep. from California Bill Thomas agreed ():
"These freely elected presidents came to us and said, 'Help us.' We help them by voting yes on CAFTA."
Although, when you deafen yourself from all the White House spin about free trade, just about any logical person would come to the conclusion that CAFTA was about much more. Thursday morning's column in the Seattle Post Intelligencer underscored the fact that it has more to do with secretive laissez-faire agreements that only benefit the richest corporations, which in turn will continue to ship our jobs out of the country ():
At 2,400 pages, the Central America Free Trade Agreement isn't really about trade. Frankly, you don't need 2,400 pages to eliminate tariffs and regulations on exports and imports. But you might need 2,400 pages to smuggle through a new set of transnational corporate rights disguised by complicated legalese. I wonder how many in Congress will even bother to read this trade tome before voting?
I recall in 1994 that only one senator, Republican Hank Brown of Colorado, accepted Ralph Nader's challenge to win $10,000 for charity by taking a simple 10-question quiz on the World Trade Organization agreement. After studying the agreement, Brown announced to the media: "I am a Republican, pro-business and a proponent of the free market economy ... I am here to speak out against the WTO. For when you read this text ... you will understand that the WTO is fundamentally undemocratic."
Any naïve Congress member who thinks CAFTA is merely about free trade should look carefully at its provisions on government contracts and corporate lawsuits.
Government contracts. For any purchases of more than $117,000 (eventually to be lowered to $58,000), CAFTA forces governments to open bidding to transnational corporations. That means that states will no longer be able to give preference to home-based businesses, and so mom-and-pop stores in Central America and the United States will suddenly be competing with the Bechtels and the Halliburtons of the world.
Corporate lawsuits against governments. Perhaps CAFTA's most worrisome provision expands the rights that corporations received under NAFTA to challenge any laws they perceive as barriers to trade and foreign investment. For instance, when California banned a carcinogenic gasoline additive called MTBE because it was seeping into the state's drinking water, the chemical manufacturer, Methanex, sued California for infringing on its trade rights under NAFTA and demanded $970 million in compensation. Such suits are a direct threat to democracy because they prioritize the profits of foreign corporations over a country's own environmental, social and labor laws.
Already corporations are planning more such lawsuits. If CAFTA passes, a subsidiary of Harken Energy (on whose board George W. Bush once served) has said it will demand $58 billion from Costa Rica (whose entire GDP is only $37 billion) in compensation for hypothetical future lost profits, if the company is not allowed to drill offshore in Costa Rica's protected Talamanca region -- one of the planet's richest marine ecosystems.
CAFTA also encourages privatization, especially for government services in health, water, energy and social security. In agriculture, it will allow transnational agribusiness cartels to dump food commodities at below-market prices. It will forbid the public health sector from buying life-saving generic drugs for such diseases as AIDS.
Far from a free trade agreement, CAFTA is rather a corporate trade agreement that transforms foreign investment from a privilege to an inalienable right.
It's like having a house guest who cleans out your refrigerator, claims your nicest bed, takes exclusive control of the television remote control and then -- like Paris Hilton -- demands that you pay for the pleasure of her company and writes you off as a business expense.
It is absurd that CAFTA passed the House so quietly without both the mainstream media and the blogosphere making a true effort to publicize the legislation. The cold shoulder on the part of the media is almost a carbon copy of what happened when the Clinton Administration pushed NAFTA through without any resistance -- which was a badly-written piece of legislation.
More importantly, progressives need to stop letting right-wingers use the "free trade" argument to justify any bill aimed at giving corporate tax breaks. When you couple the rate of immigration with the rate of jobs being shipped out of the country, you realize that an unrestrained economic mindset is hurting our economy. Capitalism is about opportunity, not rewarding those that already are at the top.
I usually don't post any newspaper articles in their entirety. But Bob Herbert's column in Thursday's New York Times about the Iraq war was pretty powerful ():
It is now generally understood that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has become a debacle. Nevertheless, Iraqis are supposed to have their constitution ratified and a permanent government elected by the end of the year. It's a logical escape hatch for George W. Bush. He could declare victory, as a senator once suggested to Lyndon Johnson in the early years of Vietnam, and bring the troops home as quickly as possible.
His mantra would be: There's a government in place. We won. We're out of there.
But don't count on it. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.
A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and, one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.
All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.
It's the oil, stupid.
What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.
Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.
The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As , an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.
Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.
The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.
His article came at the same time as as early as next spring. But if I may use a line from the GOP, that sounds like 'cutting and running' to me. We can't just pull our troops out without fully training all of Iraq's security forces. It will be a very long process. It actually surprises me that Rumsfeld would suggest our quick departure will come anytime soon, especially after he concluded on that the insurgency might last until 2017. That sounds like a flip-flop to me!
It all makes perfect sense though. By withdrawing troops next year before the 2006 midterm elections, Bush will once again declare mission accomplished in an effort to fire up his base heading into the big Congressional vote. Is it just me, or does it seem like Karl Rove was behind that idea?
New York's Republican Governor George Pataki will probably run for president in 2008. He has been out campaigning and raising money in key primary states such as Iowa. But his latest move, his announcement that he will not run for reelection in 2006, sends the signal that he will throw his hat into the race for the Republican nomination in 2008.
Here is part of a report from :
It had been widely expected that Pataki, now the nation's longest serving governor, would sidestep a potent challenge from state Attorney General Eliot Sptizer, and instead focus on a possible presidential bid in 2008.
"I will follow a new path, find new challenges," Pataki told supporters in the state Capitol yesterday.
In his remarks, Pataki made no explicit mention of a White House run. But he alluded to one during a private dinner Tuesday night with more than two dozen of his closest advisers and confidants at the governor's mansion.
One ally who attended said the governor flirted with the possibility. "You may have heard that I was in Iowa the other day," the insider, who did not want to be named, recalled Pataki saying. "I kind of liked Iowa." Then the governor laughed.
Two weeks ago Pataki visited the state, home of the first presidential contest, for a National Governors Association meeting. He also toured the area, playing the part of the presidential candidate as he mingled with locals.
Pataki's decision not to run for governor, some political analysts said, is part of a strategy to distance himself from the political scene in New York and then reshape himself as a national figure. If he runs for president, Pataki, 60, is betting that voters will embrace a moderate who favors both abortion and gay rights, but is tough on crime.
"He needs to be a national candidate who is from New York, not a New York candidate," said Gerald Benjamin, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY New Paltz. "The New York Republican Party is out of sync with the Republican party nationally."
Pataki made his decision a week ago, aides said, but it was kept secret until the dinner, which included Conservative Party chairman Michael Long, Republican State Committee chairman Stephen Minarik and Pataki fund-raiser Cathy Blaney.
I would actually like to see Pataki run. By being a moderate Republican, just as pretty much every New York Republican is, he will certainly help cancel out any moderate GOP support from presumable 2008 presidential candidate John McCain. Democrats should hope for McCain to lose the nomination to a right-wing conservative like Bill Frist, Rick Santorum or George Allen. That way pretty much any Democrat that is nominated would coast easily against the hard-right GOP nominee. But if McCain or Pataki win the nomination, expect the GOP to win easily.
Ideally, John Roberts' alleged clean track record as a judge throughout his career would indicate the possibility that his Senate confirmation process will end up being a cakewalk. For more than one week since President Bush nominated Roberts to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Democrats put any objections on hold in an effort to tone down the angry judicial rhetoric from opposite interest groups. Just as with any judicial nominee, the Senate is asking the White House to turn over the records of judge Roberts. But the White House is only allowing some of the documents to be turned over -- a move that is only asking for a major confrontation over the President's nominee.
Most of the desired reports that the Senate Democrats want are Roberts' tax returns, which would indicate any money trail to some of the very large businesses that he will be ruling on if he is confirmed. According to a Wednesday column in the Washington Post, this breaks the understood precedent of full disclosure of all records of Supreme Court nominees ():
Although nominees to the high court in recent decades were required to provide their three most recent annual tax forms, the administration will neither collect such documents from Roberts nor share them with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the officials said. Instead, the Internal Revenue Service will produce a one-page summary.
The White House yesterday began releasing the first of 75,000 pages of documents stemming from Roberts's service as a lawyer in President Ronald Reagan's administration two decades ago but refused to release papers from his time as deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993. These papers, Bush aides said, concern internal executive branch deliberations that remain privileged.
Senate Democrats and liberal interest groups immediately assailed the decision to withhold the more recent files, sharpening a dispute over the nominee's record.
"A blanket statement that entire groups of documents are off limits is both premature and ill advised," eight Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee, led by ranking minority member Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), wrote in a letter to President Bush. The senators attached a list of 35 topics they want to see documents related to, including abortion, civil rights, Bob Jones University, death-squad investigations and school prayer.
It is almost as if the White House is trying to provoke the Democrats into opposing John Roberts. In fact, the White House would benefit extensively from Democratic opposition. With issues like Iraq, John Bolton, Social Security and the Karl Rove investigation sidetracking both the policy and the rhetoric coming from the Bush political machine, GOP strategists are salivating at the opportunity to use any hint of Democratic Party obstructionism as a much-needed talking point just more than one year out from the 2006 midterm elections.
The GOP.com web site is already jumping on any available chance to correlate any pressure from Democrats towards the White House to release Roberts' tax returns with the theme of minority party obstructionism. The GOP said in a that "some Democrats insist on continuing their quest for dirt on the nominee." This signals the start of the Republican-led smear campaign against anyone, even moderates within their own party, that stop to ask any question about Roberts that might put his confirmation in jeopardy. The first test, the GOP response to any Senate Democrat that asks for John Roberts' tax returns, is already under way.
In the past, the Democrats would just sit around and play dead in the face of any threatened majority party-led smear campaign against the opposition -- such as during the run-up to the war in Iraq, siding with the GOP in voting for following 9/11 (often involving the Vice President's former company) and the lack of response to the misleading swift boat attack group. In 2002 and 2004 we learned the sad truth about what happens when a party plays dead. In this case, the Democrats serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- Pat Leahy, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, Herbert Kohl, Dianne Feinstein, Russ Feingold, Charles Schumer, and Dick Durbin -- need a backbone if they are to successfully get all the information they can about Roberts. They must learn from the instances of past softness and refuse to back down to any White House smears. Overall, polls indicate that a majority of the American people are dissatisfied with how both the Congress and the Bush Administration are handling their jobs. If the Democrats emerge as the party that sides with the American people by challenging the status quo and promoting government reform, then expect most of those battle ground states that Kerry narrowly lost in 2004 to swing towards the Democratic column in 2006.
It will start with how Patrick Leahy and the rest of the Democrats that serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee conduct themselves on the John Roberts confirmation hearings. Voting against or filibustering Roberts is much less of an issue than it is about how the Democrats need to hold the White House and the GOP accountable for hiding any facts. Confirmed or not, the American people deserve to witness hearings that get to the bottom of the truth about who will serve on the most powerful court in the world.
The days of fiscal conservatism are gone, and actually have been nonexistent for the last thirty-plus years. The last Republican president to balance the budget was Richard Nixon. Today, President Bush has pledged to reduce the budget deficit in half, a pledge that he intends on taking credit for even though we had a yearly budget surplus heading into the first year of his Administration. But even reducing his self-created deficit looks unlikely because of a report from the Detroit News that indicates the war budgets in Iraq and Afghanistan alone could cost American taxpayers upwards of $700 billion.
Read an excerpt from this story ():
That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.
"Osama (bin Laden) doesn't have to win; he will just bleed us to death," said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. "He's well on his way to doing it."
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.
Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.
One of the most vocal Republican critics has been Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who said the costs of the war -- many multiples greater than what the White House had estimated in 2003 -- are throwing U.S. fiscal priorities out of balance.
"It's dangerously irresponsible," Hagel said in February of the war spending.
Democrats have also raised concerns about the apparent lack of an exit strategy and the fast-rising costs, particularly since President Bush has chosen to pay for the war with special supplemental appropriations outside the normal budget process.
The interesting part is that these war costs are undocumented . That is how things work in Washington today. If you want to cover something up -- even something like war costs -- then just simply remove them from the record.
Karl Rove is not out of the news yet. In the latest CNN/USA Today Poll taken between July 22-24, Mr. Rove's approval rating is 25% ():
"Next, we'd like to get your overall opinion of some people in the news. As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of these people -- or if you have never heard of them.How aboutpresidential adviser Karl Rove?"
Favorable - 25% Unfavorable - 34% Never Heard of - 25% Unsure - 16%
Actually, what is the most surprising about that poll is the fact that 25% of Americans have never even heard of Karl Rove. That fact is very discouraging.
Even though the White House is handing over at least some of the files on their Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, they have yet to cooperate with the demands coming from Senate Democrats to release all of the documents.
Here is part of a report in the :
WASHINGTON  Risking a showdown with Democrats, the White House said today it won't release documents that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts prepared while working on cases to argue on behalf of the first Bush administration before the high court.
Some documents from Roberts' work for two previous Republican presidents were being released today by the National Archives. At the urging of Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the White House was also asking the Reagan presidential library to expedite the review of other Roberts records to determine what can be released.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, had said earlier that material written in confidence while serving in an administration has been provided in the past  for instance by Reagan when he nominated William H. Rehnquist for chief justice.
"The Senate should see all relevant material related to Judge Roberts' nomination. We trust that members of the Judiciary Committee and the White House will work out a way for the Senate to review this material," said Rebecca Kirszner, spokeswoman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
But McClellan said that providing such documents would violate attorney-client privilege and have a chilling effect on the decision-making process in the solicitor general's office.
This reminds me of the Bolton nomination. Why are we going through this again? Obviously by not handing over the files there is something that the White House is trying to hide. The GOP should not expect an easy confirmation process without being fully cooperative. The pressure applied by Senate Democrats is nothing more than a service to the country so that the American people can fully educate themselves about a man that will serve on the most powerful court in the world.
The more I hear about John McCain, the more he reminds me of a true Lincoln Republican -- the wing of the GOP that has all but dispersed these last four years. John McCain and a select group of Republicans are attempting to pass legislation that will set specific standards regarding the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and other bases throughout the world. He went on record yesterday politely asking the Bush Administration not to veto the law, which the White House has threatened to do so if it is approved ():
"What we're trying to do here is make sure there are clear and exact standards set for interrogation of prisoners."
McCain is very passionate about the issue of prisoner interrogation, especially after being a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years.
But another Republican is attacking McCain for his mainstream belief that the U.S. should have set procedures for how they deal with prisoners. This was what Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions had to say ():
"I reject the idea that this Defense Department and our Army and our military is out of control, is confused about what their powers and duties and responsibilities are."
Obviously McCain was taken out of context. He never said the Defense Department was "out of control." They just have not been given a clear law to work with, and therefore have invented their own prisoner treatment procedures that were approved by Donald Rumsfeld -- such as this one ():
Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.
It is certainly not out of the mainstream to suggest that McCain was right to propose legislation that would prevent the Defense Department from making up its own interrogation laws, and be held accountable to the procedures approved by our representatives in Congress throughout the country. The terrorists that the U.S. holds in custody deserve to be treated like the criminal killers that they are, regardless of their disrespect for our legal system that is important to all of us. They need to have charges pressed against them. They need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent, and hopefully convicted.
But what should not happen is for our tax dollars to be used to fund a Pentagon-written interrogation policy that violates our own legs system by holding prisoners indefinitely and allowing sick and sometimes perverted tactics that actually help increase terrorist recruitment around the world. Lets be smart about this. Senator McCain seems to get the idea.
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