Shame on Bush & Co.

Why isn't our administration taking better care of our men and women in uniform? Why are they so slow in getting more armor-plating for the Humvees and other vehicles? Why do they send our military over there without adequate protection, and without enough supplies? This to me borders on criminal, and the adsurd.

Our troops have to contend with back-to-back call-ups, not enough R&R time, and the list is almost endless. And if our brave men and women get injured, then they are a liability to Bush & Co. We have read reports where our troops are being charged for their meals in the hospitals where they are recuperating, many who have lost an arm or a leg have long waiting periods till they can get a prosthetsis. This is simply ridiculous! And now we are hearing through the news that now the administration doesn't want to grant long-term disability payments to those brave men and women that were severly injured. What the hell is going on here? Is it any wonder that the military is having such a hard time recruiting?

I think it is high time that the American people start sending a message to Bush & Co. We must ask the tough questions like.......where is all the money that is supposedly going to fund the war...where is it going? Why isn't there enough armor plating on all vehicles over there in Iraq? Out of that $82 billion that Congress just delivered to Bush & Co. for the war in Iraq, is it really going to where it is really needed? Is it being spent for the equipment and supplies that are desperately needed there? How much of that money is really going to companies like Halliburton, who routinely overcharges us for their services?

It's time that we start taking to the streets and protest! Where are all the protest rallies? Where are the public cries for accountability? Come on people, we have to send a message to this administration. We have to tell them they can't get away with these despicable acts of callous disregard for the safety and well-being of our brave men and women who are over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our voices must rise up and be heard!

Our Voluteer Army

May 30, 2005
Too Few, Yet Too Many
By PAUL KRUGMAN

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Iraq war has been President Bush's repeated insistence that his generals tell him they have enough troops. Even more bizarrely, it may be true - I mean, that his generals tell him that they have enough troops, not that they actually have enough. An article in yesterday's Baltimore Sun explains why.

The article tells the tale of John Riggs, a former Army commander, who "publicly contradicted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld by arguing that the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan" - then abruptly found himself forced into retirement at a reduced rank, which normally only happens as a result of a major scandal.

The truth, of course, is that there aren't nearly enough troops. "Basically, we've got all the toys, but not enough boys," a Marine major in Anbar Province told The Los Angeles Times.

Yet it's also true, in a different sense, that we have too many troops in Iraq.

Back in September 2003 a report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the size of the U.S. force in Iraq would have to start shrinking rapidly in the spring of 2004 if the Army wanted to "maintain training and readiness levels, limit family separation and involuntary mobilization, and retain high-quality personnel."

Let me put that in plainer English: our all-volunteer military is based on an implicit promise that those who serve their country in times of danger will also be able to get on with their lives. Full-time soldiers expect to spend enough time at home base to keep their marriages alive and see their children growing up. Reservists expect to be called up infrequently enough, and for short enough tours of duty, that they can hold on to their civilian jobs.

To keep that promise, the Army has learned that it needs to follow certain rules, such as not deploying more than a third of the full-time forces overseas except during emergencies. The budget office analysis was based on those rules.

But the Bush administration, which was ready neither to look for a way out of Iraq nor to admit that staying there would require a much bigger army, simply threw out the rulebook. Regular soldiers are spending a lot more than a third of their time overseas, and many reservists are finding their civilian lives destroyed by repeated, long-term call-ups.

Two things make the burden of repeated deployments even harder to bear. One is the intensity of the conflict. In Slate, Phillip Carter and Owen West, who adjusted casualty figures to take account of force size and improvements in battlefield medicine (which allow more of the severely wounded to survive), concluded that "infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966."

The other is the way in which the administration cuts corners when it comes to supporting the troops. From their foot-dragging on armoring Humvees to their apparent policy of denying long-term disability payments to as many of the wounded as possible, officials seem almost pathologically determined to nickel-and-dime those who put their lives on the line for their country.

Now, predictably, the supply of volunteers is drying up.

Most reporting has focused on the problems of recruiting, which has fallen far short of goals over the past few months. Serious as it is, however, the recruiting shortfall could be only a temporary problem. If and when we get out of Iraq - I know, a big if and a big when - it shouldn't be too hard to find enough volunteers to maintain the Army's manpower.

Much more serious, because it would be irreversible, would be a mass exodus of mid-career military professionals. "That's essentially how we broke the professional Army we took into Vietnam," one officer told the National Journal. "At some point, people decided they could no longer weather the back-to-back deployments."

And we're already seeing stories about how young officers, facing the prospect of repeated harrowing tours of duty in a war whose end is hard to imagine, are reconsidering whether they really want to stay in the military.

For a generation Americans have depended on a superb volunteer Army to keep us safe - both from our enemies, and from the prospect of a draft. What will we do once that Army is broken?

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Virginity or Death!

Virginity Or Death!
May 19, 2005


This column was written by Katha Pollitt.Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000.

Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV -- and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer -- goes poof.

Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid these days. No matter what the consequences of sex -- pregnancy, disease, death -- abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the installment plan.

Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally -- why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms.

With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their daughters -- but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.


What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone -- even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in Florida. I would really like to hear the persuasive argument that this middle-schooler with no home and no family would have been better off giving birth against her will, and that the State of Florida, which totally failed to keep her safe, should have been allowed, against its own laws, to compel this child to bear a child. She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion -- but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion. Ah, Christian compassion! Christian sadism, more likely. It was the courts that showed humanity when they let the girl terminate her pregnancy.

As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why anti-choicers will never answer the call of pro-choicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses -- it's in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they'd be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don't tell rape victims about the existence of EC. David Hager (see Ayelish McGarvey's stunning exposé, and keep in mind that unlike godless me she is a churchgoing evangelical Christian) would never use his position with the FDA to impose his personal views of sexual morality on women in crisis. Instead of blocking nonprescription status for emergency contraception on the specious grounds that it will encourage teen promiscuity, he would take note of the six studies, three including teens, that show no relation between sexual activity and access to EC. He would be calling the loudest for Plan B to be stocked with the toothpaste in every drugstore in the land. How sexist is denial of Plan B? Anti-choicers may pooh-pooh the effectiveness of condoms, but they aren't calling to restrict their sale in order to keep boys chaste.

While the FDA dithers, the case against selling EC over the counter weakens by the day. Besides the now exploded argument that it will let teens run wild, opponents argue that it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg -- which would make it an "abortifacient" if you believe that pregnancy begins when sperm and egg unite. However, new research by the Population Council shows that EC doesn't work by blocking implantation; it only prevents ovulation. True, it's not possible to say it never blocks implantation, James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, told me, and to anti-choice hard-liners once in a thousand times is enough. But then, many things can block implantation, including breast-feeding. Are the reverends going to come out for formula-feeding now?

"It all comes down to the evils of sex," says Trussell. "That's an ideological position impervious to empirical evidence."


"Subject to Debate" columnist Katha Pollitt has written for The Nation since 1980.




By Katha Pollitt
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.

Black Texas legislator rips homophobes

Black Texas legislator rips homophobes: Anti-black prejudice is the same thing as anti-gay prejudice
by John in DC - 5/25/2005 10:24:00 PM

UPDATE: You can thank the legislator here.

You go girl! Damn good speech, via the wonderful Molly Ivins.

And anti-gay prejudice IS the same thing an anti-black prejudice which is the same thing as anti-Jewish prejudice and on and on and on. Bigotry is bigotry is bigotry, and anybody who can't handle that truth can go Cheney themselves. It's high time we stopped pussy-footing around, being afraid to offend people by equating the two (or three). I am not afraid of some bigot who thinks their suffering is greater, or more important, or more worthy than someone else's.

And now, the wonderful Ms. Ivins and the wonderful state legislator (note that this is only an excerpt below, read the entire story):

Rarely are the words of one state legislator worth national attention, but when Senfronia Thompson, a black representative from Houston, stalks to the back mike with a certain "get-out-of-my-way" look in her eye, it's, Katie, bar the door. Here is Thompson speaking against the Legislature's recent folly of putting a superfluous anti-gay marriage measure into the state constitution:

"Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination... When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about 'protecting the institution of marriage' as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree... Fifty years ago, white folks thought interracial marriages were 'a threat to the institution of marriage.'....

"I have served in this body a lot of years, and I have seen a lot of promises broken... So... now that blacks and women have equal rights, you turn your hatred to homosexuals, and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag -- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?....

"Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids -- sweet little vulnerable kids -- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting.

"I have listened to the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap... I want you to know that this amendment [is] blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry."

W.Va. Minister fired for pro-gay column he wrote

Pro-Gay Newspaper Column Costs W.Va. Minister His Pulpit

By E&P Staff

Published: May 26, 2005 2:10 PM ET

NEW YORK The congregation of Davis Memorial Presbyterian Church in Elkins, W.Va., has voted to fire its minister after he wrote a column for the local daily, the Inter-Mountain, supporting gay rights.

"Gay and lesbian Christians are no different than the rest of us," the Rev. Jeff Falter wrote in a Feb. 26 article. "They deserve full equality in the church and in society, for they are my brothers and sisters, people for whom Christ died."

The newspaper has a daily circulation of almost 12,000.

That message led members to vote 100-72 on Sunday to request that the Presbytery of West Virginia dismiss Falter effective next Wednesday.

Falter said he could not make any public comment yet. Several other parishioners also declined to comment.

The termination agreement allows Falter and his family to live in the manse next to the church until Dec. 31. Falter will continue to receive his full salary until the end of the year.

Religious Right vows payback on filibuster deal

Religious right vows payback for brokers of filibuster pact
By Eric Gorski
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com

This week's compromise over Senate filibusters greatly disappointed Focus on the Family and its allies, who believed November election victories would help fulfill their long-held wish for a conservative makeover of the federal judiciary.

But representatives from conservative Christian groups who made the filibuster their signature issue suggest a severe price might be paid by the 14 Democrats and Republicans who brokered the last-minute deal.

"Any of them who have White House aspirations should get used to living in the doghouse," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America.

James C. Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs-based Focus, urged supporters to flood the Senate switchboard with calls to do away with the filibuster.

"We share the disappointment, outrage and sense of abandonment felt by millions of conservative Americans who helped put Republicans in power last November," Dobson said in a statement. "I am certain that these voters will remember both Democrats and Republicans who betrayed their trust."

For many evangelical Christians, the courts have become a battleground in the wake of rulings on school prayer, abortion and gay marriage. The desire to do away with the filibuster - a prolonged debate that prevents votes on nominees - was motivated by the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies during President Bush's second term.

The fact that seven maverick Republicans crossed party lines to keep the filibuster alive angers social conservatives who for years supported GOP candidates, even those not strong on moral issues, said Mark Rozell, a public-policy professor at James Madison University.

"This is a real defeat for the religious conservative groups," said Rozell, who studies evangelical politics. "They went all out on this issue. They didn't frame it as procedural issue but as a moral-values one. They did a significant amount of work to rally their activists to press GOP senators not to compromise."

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., said social conservatives are indeed frustrated by the actions of breakaway Republican senators.

"You would think to the victors go the spoils," he said.

He said social conservatives would target the compromisers, but admitted it might not affect senators who are years away from campaigning again.

Three Republicans who brokered the compromise are up for re-election in 2006: Mike De Wine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Three of the Democrats will run again next year: Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

One member of the coalition not up for re-election until 2010 is Ken Salazar, the Colorado Democrat who has clashed with Focus over the filibuster.

Salazar agitated ministry leadership again Tuesday by saying Dobson and other Christian conservatives are pushing the country to become a "theocracy."

"I don't want us to become another Saudi Arabia or another Iraq, and I think that people who are part of that radical right would have our country go in that direction," Salazar said in an interview with MSNBC.

Focus said Salazar's comments went "way overboard."

"They're insulting to many thousands of Coloradans who are constituents of ours at Focus on the Family," said Tom Minnery, vice president for public policy.

Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-820-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.

New Quinnipiac Poll

In the polls

Connecticut's Quinnipiac University released a new poll this morning surveying Americans' attitudes on abortion, the filibuster fight, and the Bush presidency. The numbers don't look great for the right wing or the White House.

By 63 to 33 percent, Americans support the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, with men supporting it at a higher rate (68 to 28 percent) than women (58 to 37 percent).

For all the rhetoric from the religious right about "outrage" over the filibuster compromise, the poll revealed that opinions about the nuclear option divided along party lines, with Republicans against the filibuster 48 to 39 percent, and Democrats supporting its use by 70 to 23 percent. Independent voters, meanwhile, backed the use of the filibuster by a margin of 54 to 39 percent.

"While the filibuster fight ended in a truce, most American voters were backing the Democrats on this one," said Maurice Carroll, Director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in a statement. "If this fight were really about Roe v. Wade, Quinnipiac University polls have shown a consistent 2 -1 support for this historic ruling, with more support from men."

The poll saves its worst news for the president, with 50 percent of Americans disapproving of Bush's job performance. This confirms other recent polls that found the president's job approval at an all-time low.

-- Julia Scott

[13:47 EDT, May 25, 2005]

Bush the Despot

Bush the despot
The Senate's compromise on the filibuster won't stop the president's quest for absolute power.

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By Sidney Blumenthal

May 26, 2005 | President Bush's drive for absolute power has momentarily stalled. In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the Supreme Court, with lock-step ideologues. Sheer force would prevail. But just as his blitzkrieg reached the outskirts of his objective he was struck by a mutiny. Within a span of 24 hours he lost control not only of the Senate but, temporarily, of the House of Representatives, which was supposed to be regimented by unquestioned loyalty. Now he prepares to launch a counterattack -- against the dissident elements of his own party.

Bush's wonder weapon for total victory was a device called the "nuclear option." Once triggered, it would obliterate a 200-year-old tradition of the Senate. The threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate of Bush's appointments to the federal bench would set the doomsday sequence in motion. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, would call for a change in the rule, and a simple majority would vote to abolish the filibuster. Bush's nominees would then sail through.

Unlike the House, the Senate was constructed by the constitutional framers as an unrepresentative body, with each state, regardless of population, allotted two senators. (Currently, Republicans have 55 senators who represent only 45 percent of the country.) The Senate creates its own rules, and the filibuster can be stopped only by a super-majority of 60 votes. Historically, it was used by Southern senators to block civil rights legislation. In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, Republicans deployed 48 filibusters, more than in the entire previous history of the Senate, to make the new Democratic chief executive appear feckless. The strategy was instrumental in the Republican capture of Congress in 1994. By depriving Democrats of the filibuster, Bush intended to transform the Senate into his rubber stamp.

For many senators the fate of the filibuster was only superficially about an arcane rule change. And shameless hypocrisy was the least of the problem. (Frist, like most Republicans in favor of the nuclear option, had enthusiastically filibustered against Clinton's court nominees, 65 of which were blocked from 1995 to 2000.) If Bush had succeeded he would have effectively removed the Senate's "advice and consent" on executive appointments, drastically reducing its power.

Over the weekend, two elders, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., together privately pored over the Federalist Papers, written by the constitutional framers, to refresh their thinking about the inviolability of the Senate. On Monday, seven Republicans and seven Democrats signed a pact that preserved the filibuster under "extraordinary" circumstances and allowed several of Bush's appointments to be voted on.

The mutiny is broader than is apparent. More than the seven Republican signatories supported the accord, but they let the others take a public stance without revealing themselves. Bush's radicalism offended their conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower (or even Bush I), not Bush, is their preferred model for a Republican president. These Republican senators are the equivalent of the Republicans on the Supreme Court -- Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy -- who are conservative but operate without ideology, and hold the balance against the aggressive right-wing justices.

The day after Bush was frustrated by Republicans in the Senate, 50 Republicans in the House deserted him on the issue of stem cell research. His policy limiting scientific work that might cure many diseases is a sop to the religious right, which views the stem cell question as an extension of abortion. (Historians will discover that in early August 2001 Bush was immersed in delivering a nationally televised speech on stem cells while ignoring the CIA memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.") Debate in the House was marshaled by Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who argued that Bush's policy must be supported because "Jesus of Nazareth" began life as an embryo. (DeLay was apparently oblivious to his heresy on the doctrine of Immaculate Conception.) Bush promised to veto the stem cell bill passed with massive Republican defections, the irony of his opposition to the filibuster going unmentioned.

The compromise pact in the Senate on the filibuster hardly postpones the coming storms. The White House intends to push judicial nominees whom Democrats are almost certain to filibuster. With the elimination of the nuclear option, the filibuster may also be used against Bush's Supreme Court appointments. What's more, leaders of the evangelical religious right have denounced Republican senators as sellouts. One of the most influential, James Dobson, cursed one of the silent supporters of the compromise, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the former majority leader, as a Judas, and Lott in reply called Dobson "quite un-Christian."

Meanwhile, the conflict has highlighted the Republican presidential succession of 2008, pitting Frist, positioning himself as the darling of the right, against the cantankerous McCain, one of the Republicans' magnificent seven. Within the GOP, metal is scraping on metal. But the greater the resistance, the more Bush presses forward. His unilateralism abroad has been brought home with a vengeance to his partisan wars.

In Federalist Paper No. 69 (which may have been reread by Byrd and Warner), Alexander Hamilton concludes his disquisition on the difference between the "qualified" powers of the American presidency and the "absolute" powers of the king of Great Britain: "The one has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the other is the supreme head and governor of the national church! What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism."

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About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

This is absolutely shocking!

May 26, 2005
A Lawmaker Works, Oddly Enough, to Keep His Voters' Backyards Dangerous
By ADAM COHEN

Dallas

It is no surprise, given the close ties between industry and regulators in Washington these days, that Joe Barton is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mr. Barton, a Texas Republican, is such an energy industry loyalist - and so soft on air pollution - that his hometown paper dubbed him "Smokey Joe." He has regularly helped his industry friends by weakening environmental laws and handing out tax breaks. But now he seems poised to do something far more disturbing: block legislation to secure chemical plants against terrorist attacks.

Chemical plants are probably the nation's greatest vulnerability. President Bush's former deputy homeland security adviser, Richard Falkenrath, told Congress last month that they stand "alone as uniquely deadly, pervasive and susceptible to terrorist attack." The death toll from a chemical plant attack could easily outstrip 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security has warned that a single chlorine tank explosion could kill 17,500 people.

Two of the country's most dangerous chemical facilities, which threaten more than one million people, are in Dallas, just outside Mr. Barton's district. There is also toxic waste being transported through his district on rail lines and highways. Mr. Barton's committee chairmanship is likely to give him an enormous say in whether chemical plant security legislation passes this year.

That decision pits the interests of his energy industry supporters against the well-being of his constituents who live or work inside the kill zone. Unfortunately, so far Mr. Barton has tilted in favor of industry.

If corporations were allowed to pick congressmen, Mr. Barton is probably just the one the chemical industry would choose. Before his election, he was a consultant for Atlantic Richfield Oil and Gas Company, and he has accepted more than $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the energy and chemical industries. In Congress, his causes have been an energy and chemical industry wish list. He has fought to weaken air quality standards that apply to Ellis County, Texas, his home county, which has three enormous cement plants that spew large amounts of toxins. And he has pushed to exempt makers of MTBE, a fuel additive that has spilled into bodies of water across the country, from paying to clean it up.

Even for congressmen used to giving the energy and chemical industries what they want, chemical plant security is a sensitive subject. Individual members are often reluctant to take a public stand against strengthening security, for fear of appearing soft on terrorism or because they do not want to be blamed if there is a successful attack. Senator Jon Corzine's chemical plant bill was unanimously voted out of committee, where senators had to record their votes, but then was quietly blocked when it got to the Senate floor.

Mr. Barton, however, is one of the few congressmen who have spoken out publicly against chemical plant security legislation. In 2003, when there was a serious push to pass a bill, he said he did not see a need for a tough new law. "If there are enough terrorists who are dedicated enough and equipped well enough," he told The National Journal, "they're going to overwhelm everything that you put up short of some sort of Fort Knox - which doesn't make much sense, given the cost and the relatively remote possibility that any specific site is going to be targeted."

The notion that unless chemical plants are as secure as Fort Knox they do not need any security at all is ridiculous. The unfortunate truth is that chemical facilities, including the most dangerous, are so unprotected that they are vulnerable to attack not just by Al Qaeda, but also by much smaller and less sophisticated groups who might be deterred by armed guards and concrete barriers.

I recently visited two plants near Mr. Barton's district, both of which were on the list of the 123 most potentially deadly facilities in the country, and found what appeared to be shocking vulnerability.

At Petra Chemicals, which has large amounts of deadly chlorine on hand, there was a no trespassing sign, but security on the perimeter was minimal. An environmental expert and I parked outside and walked around for more than a half-hour without being stopped. We had no problem walking up to a large railroad car just outside the plant that had a skull and crossbones, and markings indicating that it held up to 90 tons of chlorine. At Harcros Chemicals, another chlorine facility, the fencing was somewhat better. But again, we saw no guards, and no one stopped us when we parked and walked along the plant perimeter, looking as suspicious as we could.

In his much-cited book "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Thomas Frank laments that conservatives have succeeded in getting red-state voters to vote against their own interests on important issues. The Republican Congressional leadership's opposition to a serious chemical plant security bill could test the limits of this phenomenon. If Mr. Barton - or Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is leading the fight in the Senate - sides with industry against his own constituents on averting a Sept. 11 in their own backyard, he could hand his opponents an issue that resonates powerfully with ordinary voters.

That is the narrowly self-interested reason why Mr. Barton, and every other member of Congress, should want to get a strong chemical plant bill through Congress this year. But there is also the test by which all homeland security initiatives should be measured: whether, if there were another terrorist attack, they would feel they had done everything they should have to keep Americans safe.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

McCarthy-ism Returns!

"Fair and balanced" -- the McCarthy way
CPB head Kenneth Tomlinson, who is leading a jihad against "liberal bias" in public broadcasting, and one of his two new ombudsmen both worked for the late Fulton Lewis, a reactionary radio personality associated with Sen. Joe McCarthy.

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By Eric Boehlert

May 26, 2005 | As the debate over fairness and balance in public broadcasting rages on, there's a curious historical connection to be found between two men at the forefront of the current conservative crusade and a famous radio broadcaster from 50 years ago. How the three crossed paths -- and the way they practiced journalism -- put some of the debate into sharper focus.

A main figure in the roiling controversy is Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who insists that public radio and television suffer from a liberal bias and that actions -- such as adding conservative-leaning programs to the lineup -- must be taken to counterbalance it. Tomlinson recently singled out the weekly news program "Now," once hosted by liberal Bill Moyers, as the cause for his concern about bias.

Tomlinson's conviction is so strong he once suggested to the CPB board that Fox News anchor Brit Hume be invited to "talk to public broadcasting officials about how to create balanced news programming," according to a report broadcast May 20 on National Public Radio.

Tomlinson's charge of liberal bias runs counter to two nationwide polls conducted by the CPB in 2002 and 2003, which found little concern among Americans about bias in public broadcasting. The CPB is a federally funded agency that serves as an umbrella organization for public radio and television. Created by Congress, its purpose is both to help raise money and awareness for public broadcasting and to protect it from political pressure. But now the CPB itself has become the source of such pressure.

Tomlinson's attempt to push back the so-called liberal media is not surprising given his journalistic past -- which is where Fulton Lewis Jr., the broadcaster with the intriguing, albeit distant, connection to the ongoing debate, comes in. A prominent radio broadcaster in the '40s, '50s and '60s, Lewis was known for his complete lack of objectivity. At his commercial peak he was heard on more than 500 radio stations and boasted a weekly audience of 16 million listeners. An erstwhile Rush Limbaugh, Lewis was the master of the partisan smear who rarely strayed from GOP talking points. In 1948, New York Herald Tribune radio columnist John Crosby suggested that Lewis "ought to be recognized as a campaigner, not as a commentator, and his national air time be paid for and so listed by the Republican National Committee."

In 1949 the New Republic noted that Lewis' "wild charges were part of his campaign over many years to smear in every way possible the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and everybody not in accord with the most reactionary political beliefs."

In a 1996 interview, poet Allen Ginsberg recalled how Lewis in the '50s held special disdain for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage for the Soviets and executed. "There was one commentator on the air, called Fulton Lewis, who said that they smelt bad and therefore should die. There was an element of anti-Semitism in it," Ginsberg said.

Lewis did not simply target liberal Democrats but also went after Republicans who strayed from the far-right agenda. In 1958 Caspar Weinberger, who later served as President Reagan's secretary of defense, ran for attorney general in California as a moderate Republican against an arch-conservative Republican who was a close ally of Richard Nixon's. Lewis, a Nixon acolyte, derided Weinberger during the campaign as "the People's World candidate," referring to a communist newspaper.

Hunting communists became a full-time job for Lewis. According to a flattering 1954 biography of the broadcaster, "Praised and Damned: The Story of Fulton Lewis, Jr.," Lewis was "as close to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy as any other man in the national scene." Look magazine agreed, calling Lewis one of McCarthy's "masterminds."

In "Praised and Damned" Lewis describes his loyalty to McCarthy this way: "When you know an individual to be attempting to do a public service, a patriotic service, and you see him maligned by groups which are not thinking in the public interest, you have a tendency to be a little over-generous with the guy."

Even after McCarthy was revealed as a phony who could not document his claims that hundreds of communists had infiltrated the federal government, Lewis remained loyal. Over time, the broadcaster's reputation faded, and today he's a largely forgotten figure (although in 1987 the Washington Post remembered Lewis as "one of the most unprincipled journalists ever to practice the trade").

What's interesting about Lewis now is that two men at the forefront of the effort to rid public broadcasting of its presumed liberal bias both learned journalism at his knee. One, CPB chief Tomlinson, worked as an intern for Lewis. The other, William Schulz, whom Tomlinson recently named as one of the CPB's two ombudsmen, was a writer for Lewis.

To some, the idea that these two are in charge of promoting objective journalism in public broadcasting is appalling. "It's shocking and disgraceful," says former New York Times columnist and reporter Anthony Lewis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage during the McCarthy era. "If both men wrote for Fulton Lewis it means they were dedicated to an extreme-right position that should disqualify them from determining somebody's objectivity."

While there is no mention on Tomlinson's official CPB bio of his association with Lewis, an Oct. 16, 2002, NewsMax.com article reported: "Tomlinson's résumé also includes an internship with the late Fulton Lewis Jr., a conservative network commentator in the 'pre-Rush' days of AM radio."

Likewise, the bio of Schulz that the CPB posted online after he was named one of its ombudsmen fails to mention his connection with Lewis. But in a 1997 interview, Schulz recalled, "I went to Antioch College in Ohio, and they had a work-study program, and I got a couple of newspaper jobs, and then I worked for Human Events. Then I went to work for Fulton Lewis Jr., who was a radio commentator and columnist."

Both Tomlinson and Schulz declined to comment for this article. Lewis died in 1966.

After working for Lewis, both men went on to long, successful careers as writers and editors at another conservative media bastion, the Reader's Digest, which the National Review recently dubbed "the quintessential magazine of 'red-state' America." The type of journalism practiced at Reader's Digest also raises questions about whether Tomlinson and Schulz are the best people to police for broadcasting bias.

Says Moyers of Tomlinson, "He seems happiest only in the circles of people who dis liberals."

During an interview with NPR that aired last week, Tomlinson defended his move to add more conservative programs to public broadcasting's lineup, stressing, "It's important to have voices in journalism coming from different directions." He added, "The reason why we view [PBS's] Jim Lehrer as such a balanced and fair journalist is because he gives no apparent indication of bringing a political point of view to the table."

Tomlinson's hunger for newsroom diversity and straight-down-the-middle objectivity appears to be a newfound one, because there certainly was none of either on the Lewis broadcast or during Tomlinson's time at Reader's Digest, a magazine famous for its undiluted Republican voice.

"The magazine spent half a century advocating a strong Republican line," says John Heidenry, who wrote the definitive history of the publication, "Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest." He notes that during the '50s, '60s and '70s, Reader's Digest's advocacy brand of pro-government journalism served as a dependable platform for the FBI as well as the CIA.

In the '70s, an internal attempt to broaden the magazine's political perspective from far right to moderately conservative sparked a civil war between the magazine's two fiefdoms -- or, as Heidenry puts it, "between the moderately conservative Pleasantville [N.Y.] office and the very right-wing, loose-cannon Washington bureau."

At the time, Schulz was running the D.C. bureau. As Heidenry describes it in his book, "Though cynical about the Digest's grind-it-out conservatism, he kept an autographed photograph of Joe McCarthy in his home and claimed that the Wisconsin senator was a very misunderstood man."

According to Heidenry, Schulz's D.C. bureau routinely tried to kill articles that strayed from the magazine's traditional far-right agenda. Additionally, the bureau, anxious to play up Cold War fears, interviewed defectors from Russia but sometimes fabricated the details of their tales. "So the whole concept of fact checking was moot," Heidenry told Salon in an interview. "They created their own facts. The Washington bureau certainly did not practice an objective type of journalism."

Tomlinson and Schulz's overseeing a drive to correct partisan journalism in public broadcasting, Heidenry says, is "the pot calling the kettle black."

According to the Ombudsman Association's code of ethics, an ombudsman is a "designated neutral" who "strives for objectivity and impartiality." Yet much of Schulz's work for Reader's Digest was precisely the type of loaded, often alarmist and partisan reporting that he's now supposed to stamp out at PBS and National Public Radio.

In early 1968, Schulz previewed a planned march on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. The article, leaning heavily on unsourced quotes from Republican government officials, painted a bleak picture of the demonstration, all but predicting violence in the streets. Schulz appeared to be mostly concerned about America's image overseas, writing, "One thing is certain: whether or not all of the protesters' plans materialize, the nation faces international humiliation as a result of the Washington campaign. Communism's worldwide propaganda apparatus is set for a field day." (Schulz's article on King appeared in the Digest's April 1968 issue, the same month King was assassinated.)

Later that year, in the August issue, Schulz, attacking welfare, charged that in California "able-bodied hippies were financing communes with welfare checks." And in a 1969 article, he sounded a similar alarm over student protesters, insisting they "posed a major threat to the continued existence of our democratic system."

Luckily for Schulz and Tomlinson, neither Reader's Digest nor Fulton Lewis ever employed an ombudsman to check for fairness and balance.

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

About the writer
Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.

Bad News indeed!

GOP Tilting Balance Of Power to the Right

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 26, 2005; A01

As Democrats tell it, this week's compromise on judges was about much more than the federal courts. If President Bush and congressional allies had prevailed, they say, the balance of power would have been forever altered.

Yet, amid the partisan rhetoric, a little-noticed fact about modern politics has been lost: Republicans have already changed how the business of government gets done, in ways both profound and lasting.

The campaign to prevent the Senate filibuster of the president's judicial nominations was simply the latest and most public example of similar transformations in Congress and the executive branch stretching back a decade. The common theme is to consolidate influence in a small circle of Republicans and to marginalize dissenting voices that would try to impede a conservative agenda.

House Republicans, for instance, discarded the seniority system and limited the independence and prerogatives of committee chairmen. The result is a chamber effectively run by a handful of GOP leaders. At the White House, Bush has tightened the reins on Cabinet members, centralizing the most important decisions among a tight group of West Wing loyalists. With the strong encouragement of Vice President Cheney, he has also moved to expand the amount of executive branch information that can be legally shielded from Congress, the courts and the public.

Now, the White House and Congress are setting their sights on how to make the judiciary more deferential to the conservative cause -- as illustrated by the filibuster debate and recent threats by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and others to more vigorously oversee the courts.

"I think we have used the legislative and executive branch as well as anybody to achieve our policy aims," said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). "It is a remarkable governing instrument."

The transformation started in the House in the 1990s and intensified with Bush's 2000 election. The result has been a stronger president working with a compliant and streamlined Congress to push the country, and the courts, in a more conservative direction, according to historians, government scholars, and current and former federal officials.

Some of the changes, such as a more powerful executive branch, less powerful rank-and-file members of Congress and more pro-Republican courts, are likely to outlast the current president and GOP majority, they say. The Republican bid to ban the filibustering of judges made it easier for Bush to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court and holds open the threat of future attempts to erode the most powerful tool available to the minority party in Congress.

"Every president grabs for more power. What's different it seems to me is the acquiescence of Congress," said former representative Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), a government scholar at the Aspen Institute.

When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, conservatives turned an institution run by Democrats and veteran chairmen into a top-down organization that looked in some ways like the flow chart of a Fortune 500 business. The idea was to put power in the hands of a few leaders and place conservative loyalists in the most important lower-level jobs to move legislation as quickly as possible through Congress, according to current and former lawmakers.

Those who cross party leaders often pay a price, usually by losing positions of influence. Most recently, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) lost the chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee after clashing with party leaders over spending and other issues. At the same time, loyalists are rewarded. The result, writes American University's James A. Thurber in a forthcoming book on Congress and the presidency, is less powerful representatives facing increased pressure to carry out their leadership's wishes.

The GOP unity has led to speedy passage this year of legislation to make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy and a budget plan that makes way for more tax cuts and oil drilling in Alaska wilderness.

With control over the House Rules Committee, which determines which bills make it the floor, how they will be debated and whether they can be amended, Republicans have made it much harder for Democrats to offer alternatives -- for example, a smaller tax cut than one Republicans advocate. Democrats also are increasingly shut out of the final negotiations on legislation between the House and the Senate before bills are sent to Bush for his signature.

Also moving in this direction is the Senate, where Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) seized control of selecting committee members after the 2004 elections increased his majority to 55 seats.

"Anybody with a brain knew once Republicans got their hand on the wheels . . . there was going to be punishment" because they felt silenced and slighted when Democrats were in control, said former senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.). "It's unfortunate."

Bush created a top-down system in the White House much like the one his colleagues have in Congress. He has constructed what many scholars said amounts to a virtual oligarchy with Cheney, Karl Rove, Andrew H. Card Jr., Joshua Bolton, himself and only a few others setting policy, while he looks to Congress and the agencies mostly to promote and institute his policies.

President Bill Clinton oversaw a transition of government away from strong agencies, which historically provided a greater variety of opinions in policymaking. "On the surface it looks like Bush is doing this better than Clinton, but there is much more going on," said Paul C. Light, an expert on the executive branch.

Light said Bush has essentially turned most of the agencies into political arms of the White House. "It's not just weakening agencies but strengthening political control of the agencies," he said.

Major policies such as Social Security are produced in the White House, while Cabinet heads and their staffs are tethered. After the 2004 election, the White House began requiring Cabinet members to spend as long as four hours a week working in an office near the West Wing.

"The fact they hold close their Cabinet members is a plus -- it makes for less freelancing," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush has demanded similar loyalty from GOP lawmakers -- and received it. Republicans have voted with the president, on average, about nine out of 10 times. Critics and some scholars charge that the Congress now seldom performs its constitutional duty of providing oversight of the executive branch through tough investigations and hearings.

This has coincided with a dramatic increase in overall government secrecy. In 1995, the government created about 3.6 million secrets. In 2004, there more than 15.5 million, according to the government's Information Security Oversight Office. The White House attributes the rise in information the public cannot see to the security threats in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.

But experts on government secrecy say it goes beyond protecting sensitive security documents, to creating new classes of information kept private and denying researchers access to documents from past presidents.

"We have never had this kind of control over information," said Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. "It means policy is being made by a small clique without much public scrutiny."

Now, the Republicans, with the support of the White House, are looking to reshape the courts in their image. The Senate's bipartisan compromise on judges will cost the president a few of his nominees to the appeals court but will require him to secure only 50 votes for future picks for the Supreme Court and other openings. If Democrats filibuster, Bush and Republican senators can move again to pull the trigger on the "nuclear option" and, if successful, prevent the minority party from ever again using the filibuster on judges. "I will not hesitate to use it if necessary," Frist said this week.

Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) has been assigned by GOP leaders to look for new ways to provide oversight of the federal courts and tougher discipline for judges. In a recent interview he said some judges have "deliberately decided to be in the face of the president and Congress." Senate Republicans are weighing legislation to limit court authority, as well.

"I think they are looking for an influence quotient," Bond said.

But Washington traditionalists -- veteran Republicans among them -- warn that the new breed of GOP leaders is trampling time-honored procedures designed to ensure that multiple voices have influence on the most important matters in government.

"I would remind my friends that you may one day be in the minority and you won't want to be [run] roughshod over," said former minority leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), who served in the House for 38 years, 14 as leader.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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