Blue Hearts

Hello Blue Hearts,

It's been a couple of months since I last wrote. Did you miss me? I know this is a long blog but you've had a lot of time off and there's a lot going on, so please try to get through the whole thing. I especially recommend Bill Moyer's article.

The good thing about taking so long in between blogs is that I have a lot of funny stuff in the humor section. And, just as a reminder and for those of you who are new to the Blue Hearts Blog, Humor leads us off, then general interest, and, finally, local (KC) stuff.

Happy reading!!!!
Kristin


HUMOR
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Excellent! For those who don't get Comedy Central, check this video clip!

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Cheney-Shotg.mov

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hilarious

http://www.toonedin.com/cheney.html

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http://www.wimp.com/bushcomedy/

If you have trouble, just go to www.wimp.com and search for bushcomedy - it's video.

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Just wanted to let you know the New Homeland Security Bill has passed. Things will be different now and Internet surfing as you know it will be tracked by what the FBI calls a "non-intrusive method." The FBI says you will not notice anything different.

For a demonstration, click on the link below:

Homeland Security
http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/

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Barbara Walters of 20/20 did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan, several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that the women customarily walked 5 paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands. From Ms. Walters vantage point, despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women now seem to walk even further back behind their husbands and are happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked "Why do you now seem happy with the old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?"

The women looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes and without hesitation, said "Land mines."

Moral: Behind every man is a smart woman

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Entries from the Republican-English Dictionary

In case you've been having trouble recently in deciphering speeches and news reports:
*alternative energy sources/ n./* New locations to drill for gas and oil.
*bankruptcy/ n./* A means of escaping debt available to corporations but not to poor people.
*"burning bush"/ n./* A biblical allusion to the response of the President of the United States, when asked a question by a journalist who has not been paid to inquire.
*Cheney, Dick/ n./* The greater of two evils.
*class warfare/ n./* Any attempt to raise the minimum wage.
*climate change/ n./* Progress toward the blessed day when the blue states are swallowed by the oceans.
*compassionate conservatism/ n./* Poignant concern for the very wealthy
*creation science/ n./* Pseudoscience that claims George W. Bush's resemblance to a chimpanzee is totally coincidental
*DeLay, Tom/ n./* Past tense of De Lie
*extraordinary rendition/ n./* Outsourcing torture
*faith/ n./* The belief that the Beatitudes include "Blessed are the rich" and "Blessed are the warmakers."
*free markets/ n./* Halliburton no-bid contracts at taxpayer expense
*girly-men/ n./* Males who do neglect opportunities to grope unwilling women
*God/ n./* Senior presidential adviser
*growth/ n./*
1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich.
2. What happens to the national debt when policy is made according to Definition 1.
*healthy forest/ n./* No tree left behind
*honesty/ n./* Lies told in simple declarative sentences, e.g., "Freedom is on the march."
*House of Representatives/ n./* Exclusive club; entry fee $1 million to $5 million (See Senate)
*laziness/ n./* When the poor are not working
*leisure time/ n./* When the wealthy are not working
*liberal(s)/ n./* Followers of the Antichrist
*No Child Left Behind/ riff/.*
1. There are always jobs in the military
2. The rapture
*ownership society/ n./*
1. A civilization where 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth
2. A political system in which all power is in the hands of the owners
*Patriot Act/ n./*
1. Pre-emptive strike on American freedoms to prevent the terrorists from destroying them first
2. The elimination of one of the reasons why they hate us
*pro-life/ adj./* Valuing human life up until birth
*Senate/ n./* Exclusive club; entry fee $10 million to $30 million
*simplify/ v./* To cut the taxes of Republican donors
*staying the course interj./ Slang/.* Continuing to perform the same actions and expecting different results. (See: insanity.)
*stuff happens interj./ Slang./* I don't have to live in Baghdad.
*voter fraud/ n./* A significant minority turnout
*woman/ n./*
1. Person who can be trusted to raise a child but can't be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have a child.
2. Person who must have all decisions regarding her reproductive functions made by men with whom she wouldn't want to have sex in the first place

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GENERAL INTEREST
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It would be great if Blue Hearts could organize in each of our communities...

Dat: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:30:28 -0500
Frm: The Democratic Party

Are you ready to make history?

Thanks to the overwhelming support from thousands of Democrats, who donated to get the literature for the canvass printed and shipped, we're on schedule and gearing up for the unprecedented Neighbor-to-Neighbor Organizing Day on April 29th.

On that Saturday, thousands of volunteers will recruit hundreds of thousands more Americans committed to changing the status quo this year during door-knocking events in communities across America.

Democrats have a clear vision for America, and we're going to get the word out by making personal contact with our neighbors. And along the way we will build new relationships among volunteers on the ground, a network that will have an impact beyond a single day.

Whether you've never volunteered or you're a seasoned door-knocking veteran, it is crucial that you take part in this historic organizing push.

Please RSVP for an event near you:

http://www.democrats.org/50statecanvass/find

In many states, Democratic Party staff on the ground have already put together staging areas for massive voter contact events on the 29th. Thanks to donations from people like you, hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature are being printed and shipping in bulk to those locations right now.

If there isn't an event near you, don't worry. Some state parties will have canvassing events on alternate dates, or have other important events planned for that weekend.

You can still plan your own canvass in your community. Our online tool makes the planning process easy, and if you create your event before April 10th, we will get doorhangers to you in time for your canvass on the 29th.

You can create your own event here: http://www.democrats.org/50statecanvass/create

Whether you're attending an event or hosting your own, we have also put together materials on the web to help you make your canvass as effective as possible.

The online package includes tips on canvassing, a suggested script for when you get to the door, and the doorhanger itself in various formats for you to print extras on your own.

Here is the online resource center: http://www.democrats.org/50statecanvass

Two-thirds of Americans reject this president and the Republican leadership -- and they are waiting to hear from us. We are all members of one American community and it's up to us to make sure that our country has a government as good as its people.

Democrats have a big task in November. We will only win if every one of us takes responsibility for the outcome of the election now -- while there is still time to build our operation.

Thank you for being a part of this extraordinary grassroots push.

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.
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March 24, 2006
Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats
By ROBIN TONER

NARBERTH, Pa. — If the Democrats have their way, the 2006 Congressional elections will be the revenge of the mommy party.
Democratic women are running major campaigns in nearly half of the two dozen most competitive House races where their party hopes to pick up enough Republican seats to regain control of the House. Democratic strategists are betting that the voters' unrest and hunger for change — reflected consistently in public opinion polls — create the perfect conditions for their party's female candidates this year.

"In an environment where people are disgusted with politics in general, who represents clean and change?" asks Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "Women."
Republicans, who have prospered in recent elections by running as the guardians of national security and clearly hope to do so again, dismiss this theory. But it will ultimately be tested in places like this Philadelphia suburb, where Lois Murphy, a 43-year-old lawyer and Democratic activist, lost a Congressional campaign in 2004 by just two percentage points.

This time, as she challenges the same Republican incumbent, Representative Jim Gerlach, Ms. Murphy said in an interview in her campaign headquarters in Narberth, she senses an electorate that is "really, really" ready for change, tired of the ethics scandals, and convinced "that their government has been letting them down." On whether her sex is a particular asset this year, Ms. Murphy replied, "I leave that to the political experts, which I am not." But Ms. Murphy said that her agenda — ethics reform, fiscal responsibility, affordable health care, more sensitivity to the environment — was connecting with moderates in both political parties.

In another high-profile race, an open seat in Illinois's Sixth District in the Chicago suburbs, L. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, locked up the Democratic nomination in a narrow primary victory on Tuesday — over another woman. "It's about change on so many levels," said Ms. Duckworth of her campaign, which she said would focus heavily on the need to improve and expand health care. "If being a woman underscores that, makes it clear that I'm going to be an effective agent of change, that's great."

By the time it is over, this midterm election may offer some hints on the kind of climate that awaits Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York if she runs for president in 2008. At a time when voters have grown accustomed to women as secretary of state, House minority leader, governor (there are currently eight) and the like, this year's campaign could provide insight into the power of gender stereotypes that have been charted by scholars and political experts over many years. In the 435-seat House of Representatives, there are 67 women, 43 of them Democrats, 24 Republicans. The seats for which Democratic women are running this year are among the 24 held by Republicans that are classified by the Cook Political Report, an independent analyst, as either "tossups" or "lean Republican" — a key measure of competitiveness. That is a fluid list this early in the campaign; many candidates have yet to make it through their primaries, and many races are still in a state of flux.

But Amy Walter, who tracks House races for Cook, said, "If you look at the top Republican targets this year, the success of Democratic women candidates will be very important in determining the number of Democratic pickups." A net shift of 15 seats to Democrats from Republicans would turn over control of the House. For all the enthusiasm on the Democratic side, experts say this will not be another 1992-style "year of the woman," the breakthrough year when the number of women in the House and Senate jumped by more than half. There simply are not enough competitive or open seats to make that kind of change likely.

But the Center for American Women and Politics, at Rutgers, says early data suggests an increase in the number of women running for open seats this year, fueled by the Democrats, although several of these women still face contested primaries. It is far easier for challengers to win an open seat than to oust an incumbent. "It's not about how many women are running," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of Emily's List, the Democratic women's fund-raising organization. "It's about how many women are running where they have real opportunities to win."

Moreover, Democratic strategists hope to frame these midterm races as a classic change-versus-status-quo election — which, they say, makes women, running as outsiders against a "culture of corruption," the perfect messengers. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster working for three female House candidates this year, said, "If you want to communicate change, honesty, cleaning up Washington, not the same old good old boys in Washington, women are very good at communicating that."

Officials at the Democratic campaign committee said that along with Emily's List and other women's groups, they had made a point of encouraging and recruiting women as candidates this year. "This didn't just happen," Mr. Emanuel said. Republicans profess to be unworried about the new wave of female candidates for what is often described, sometimes disparagingly, as the "mommy party." (Supposedly, in the shorthand of political positioning, Democrats are more concerned with nurturing, caring and domestic policy, while the Republicans care more about security.) "I'm as worried about Rahm Emanuel's women as I am about Rahm Emanuel's vets," said Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, referring dismissively to another group of candidates Democrats have focused on this year.

Mr. Forti argued that "in our strategy every race is local, based on local issues," and he added, "It doesn't matter whether the candidate is man, woman, green, purple, orange, red, whatever." That approach is echoed by Mark Campbell, political director of the Gerlach campaign in Pennsylvania, who said of his race, "It will be a competitive campaign, and Jim Gerlach will ultimately win because his position on important issues more closely reflects the voters of the Sixth District than Ms. Murphy's." As for her sex, Mr. Campbell said, "I think anyone who would vote for Lois Murphy because she's a woman would vote for her just because she's the Democrat running."

In recent weeks, the Gerlach and the Murphy campaigns have been pushing competing ethics plans and trading accusations over who is truly committed to the cause. Linda DiVall, a longtime Republican pollster who has worked for many female candidates, also notes that sex stereotypes cut both ways among voters. For example, female candidates are often seen as vulnerable on national security, Ms. DiVall said, which could be a problem in a post-Sept. 11 world. Ms. Lake, the Democratic pollster, said the sex advantages (like honesty) and disadvantages (competence on foreign policy) have grown more marginal.
"They're not as new as they used to be," Ms. Lake said of women in politics.

Republicans have some high-profile women running for Congress this year, notably Martha Rainville, who stepped aside as adjutant general of the Vermont National Guard to seek her state's lone House seat. But this year's candidates are disproportionately Democrats, part of a longstanding trend, said Kathleen Dolan, political scientist and author of "Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates Women Candidates."

Among the most closely watched Democratic women this year are Diane Farrell, challenging Representative Christopher Shays in Connecticut; Gabrielle Giffords and Patty Weiss, vying for the Democratic nomination for an open seat representing the Tucson area; Patricia Madrid, the New Mexico attorney general challenging Representative Heather A. Wilson; Ms. Duckworth, the Iraqi war veteran, seeking the open seat outside Chicago; Francine Busby, running for the California seat left vacant by the bribery conviction of former Representative Randy Cunningham, and Ms. Murphy, challenging Mr. Gerlach in Pennsylvania.

Emily's List, which essentially recommends female candidates who support abortion rights to its 100,000 members, reports a much heavier roster of House races than it carried two years ago. Getting recommended by Emily's List, whose members were responsible for $10 million in donations in 2004, is a major help to a campaign, candidates say.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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March 27, 2006
In an Election Year, a Shift in Public Opinion on the War

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ADAM NAGOURNEY
ALBUQUERQUE, March 25 — Neil Mondragon watched with approval at an auto repair shop recently as Representative Heather A. Wilson, a New Mexico Republican visiting her district, dropped into the pit and drained the oil from a car. Afterward, Mr. Mondragon recalled how he had backed Ms. Wilson, a supporter of the Iraq war, in her race for Congress two years ago. He, too, supported the war. But now, Mr. Mondragon said, it is time to bring the troops home. And he is leaning toward voting for Ms. Wilson's opponent, Patricia Madrid, who has called for pulling the troops out of Iraq by the end of the year.

"The way I see the situation is, we have done what we had to," said Mr. Mondragon, 27, whose brother fought in the war and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder. "I don't see the point of having so many guys over there right now. We can't just stay there and baby-sit forever." Mr. Mondragon is far from alone in reassessing his view of the war that has come to define George W. Bush's presidency. Mr. Bush is pressing ahead with an intensified effort to shore up support for the war, but an increasingly skeptical and pessimistic public is putting pressure on Congress about the wisdom behind it, testing the political support for the White House's determination to remain in Iraq. The results have been on display over the past week as members of Congress returned home and heard first-hand what public opinion polls have been indicating.

"We have been there now for three years, and we have suffered more losses than I think most people thought we would see," Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican from a relatively conservative district near Cincinnati, said in an interview on Friday. "You may have the president or others now who say we always knew this would be a long slog, but I think most people did not expect it to be as hard as it has been."

In Connecticut, Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican who is one of the Democrats' top targets this year in the midterm elections, has distanced himself from the White House even as he has emphasized his support for the war, saying the administration has made "huge mistakes" by allowing looting, disbanding the Iraqi army and failing to have enough troops on the ground Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican who is also facing a tough re-election challenge, said that "people are not optimistic about what they see." Even Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who has made her support for the war a centerpiece of her campaign, said the public seemed "to be losing patience" with the war.

Interviews with voters, elected officials and candidates around the country suggest a deepening and hardening opposition to the war. Historians and analysts said this might mark a turning point in public perception. "I'm less optimistic because I see the fatalities every day," said Angela Kirby, 32, a lawyer from St. Louis who initially supported the war. "And the longer it goes on, the less optimistic I am."

Here in New Mexico, Dollie Shoun, 67, said she had gone from being an ardent supporter of the war and the president to a fierce critic of both. "There has been too many deaths, and it is time for them to come back home," Ms. Shoun said. Speaking of Mr. Bush, she added: "I was very much for him, but I don't trust him at this point in time."

Polls have found that support for the war and expectations about its outcome have reached their lowest level since the invasion. A Pew Research Center poll this week found that 66 percent of respondents said the United States was losing ground in preventing a civil war in Iraq, a jump of 18 percent since January. The Pew poll also found that 49 percent now believed that the United States would succeed in Iraq, compared with 60 percent last July. A CBS News poll completed two weeks ago found that a majority (54 percent) believed Iraq would never become a stable democracy.

Richard B. Wirthlin, who was the pollster for President Ronald Reagan, says he sees the beginning of a decisive turn in public opinion against the war. "It is hard for me to imagine any set of circumstances that would lead to an enhancement of the public support that we have seen," he said. "It is more likely to go down, and the question is how far and how fast." Even more problematic for the administration, pollsters have found, is that Americans who have soured on the war include many independent voters and some self-described Republicans.

William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, argued that views on the war remained fluid and that the White House could still rally support for the effort if Americans "are convinced we can win." A perception of progress on the ground could help turn public opinion back toward Mr. Bush's way, some analysts said. As it is, a significant number of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want Mr. Bush to continue the war. "Bush is right in being optimistic," said Susan Knapp, 64, a Florida Republican. "I listened to the news this morning and there are people who think he's out of touch with reality, but in fact I think he knows better than most of us about what is going on, and he does know the situation."

And in interviews, some respondents said they agreed with Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that journalists were exaggerating the bad news. "I have quite a few friends who have served over there and they come back with a different story than the media portrays," said Jerry Brown, a Republican in Fairfield County, Conn.

For Mr. Bush today, as it was for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon decades ago, the question is how long can he continue fighting an unpopular war without it crippling his presidency by eroding trust in his judgment and credibility.
"Once the public loses confidence in a president's leadership at a time of war, once they don't trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?" said Robert Dallek, a historian who has written biographies of Johnson and Nixon.

The anxiety about the war could be seen in contested districts around the country. In recent weeks, Representative Wilson of New Mexico has been sharply critical of the administration on issues like domestic surveillance and its public projections about the war. Ms. Wilson said she worried that public opinion could turn decisively against the war in Iraq as it did during the Vietnam War. "Wasn't it Kissinger who said the acid test of foreign policy is public support?" she said.

In Connecticut, Diane Farrell, a Democrat challenging Mr. Shays, said she had consistently run into voters who drew comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. "People are throwing up their hands between the civil unrest, the number of deaths and the cost to taxpayers," Ms. Farrell said. "People feel worn out by the war, and they don't see an end. "

At the Capitol recently, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who was the secretary of the Navy during part of the Vietnam War, was introduced to a visiting Iraqi. Mr. Warner proceeded to lecture her about the need for Iraqis to form a new government, and fast. "The American people have a mind of their own," he told her, recalling how he watched during the Vietnam War as public opinion turned against the conflict — and inevitably Congress followed. In a later conversation, Mr. Warner said that such a moment had not been reached yet, but he warned that he sensed a "certain degree of impatience" in the country and around the world.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Albuquerque, N.M., for this article, and Adam Nagourney from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Coke Ellington in Alabama, Ellen F. Harris in St. Louis, Stacey Stowe in Connecticut, and Andrea Zarate in Miami.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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Restoring The Public Trust
Bill Moyers
(This is long but very informative. Please stick with it! Kristin)
February 24, 2006

Bill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. This is the prepared text of his remarks on an 8-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.

I will leave to Jon Stewart the rich threads of humor to pluck from the hunting incident in Texas. All of us are relieved that the Vice President’s friend has survived. I can accept Dick Cheney’s word that the accident was one of the worst moments of his life. What intrigues me as a journalist now is the rare glimpse we have serendipitously been offered into the tightly knit world of the elites who govern today.

The Vice President was hunting on a 50-thousand acre ranch owned by a lobbyist friend who is the heiress to a family fortune of land, cattle, banking and oil (ah, yes, the quickest and surest way to the American dream remains to choose your parents well).

The circumstances of the hunt and the identity of the hunters provoked a lament from The Economist. The most influential pro-business magazine in the world is concerned that hunting in America is becoming a matter of class: the rich are doing more, the working stiffs, less. The annual loss of 1.5 million acres of wildlife habitat and 1 million acres of farm and ranchland to development and sprawl has come “at the expense of ‘The Deer Hunter’ crowd in the small towns of the north-east, the rednecks of the south and the cowboys of the west.” Their places, says The Economist, are being taken by the affluent who pay plenty for such conveniences as being driven to where the covey cooperatively awaits. The magazine (hardly a Marxist rag, remember) describes Mr. Cheney’s own expedition as “a lot closer to ‘Gosford Park’ than ‘The Deer Hunter’ – a group of fat old toffs waiting for wildlife to be flushed towards them at huge expense.”

At the heart of this story is a metaphor of power. The Vice President turned his host, the lobbyist who is also the ranch owner, into his de facto news manager. She would disclose the shooting only when Cheney was ready and only on his terms. Sure enough, nothing was made public for almost 20 hours until she finally leaked the authorized version to the local newspaper. Ms. Armstrong suggested the blame lay with the victim, who, she indicated, had failed to inform the Vice President of his whereabouts and walked into a hail of friendly fire. Three days later Cheney revised the story and apologized. Don’t you wonder what went back and forth with the White House that long night of trying to agree on the official line?

We do know someone from the hunting party was in touch with Karl Rove at the White House. For certain Rove’s the kind of fellow you want on the other end of the line when great concoctions are being hatched, especially if you wish the victim to hang for the crime committed against him.

Watching these people work is a study of the inner circle at the top of American politics. The journalist Sidney Blumenthal, writing on Salon.com, reminds us of the relationship between the Armstrong dynasty and the Bush family and its retainers. Armstrong’s father invested in Rove’s political consulting firm that managed George W. Bush’s election as governor of Texas and as president. Her mother, Anne Armstrong, is a longtime Republican activist and donor. Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board after her tenure as Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Ford, whose chief of staff was a young Dick Cheney. Anne Armstrong served on the board of directors of Halliburton that hired Cheney to run the company. Her daughter, Katherine Armstrong, host of the hunting party, was once a lobbyist for the powerful Houston law firm founded by the family of James A. Baker III, who was chief of staff to Reagan, Secretary of State under the first George Bush, and the man designated by the Bush family to make sure the younger Bush was named President in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. According to Blumenthal, one of her more recent lobbying jobs was with a large construction firm with contracts in Iraq.

It is a Dick Cheney world out there – a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests.

II

Two years ago, in a report entitled Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality, the American Political Science Association concluded that progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy “may have stalled, and even, in some areas, reversed.” Privileged Americans “roar with a clarity and consistency that public officials readily hear and routinely follow” while citizens “with lower or moderate incomes are speaking with a whisper.”

The following year, on the eve of President George W. Bush’s second inauguration, the editors of The Economist, reporting on inequality in America, concluded that the United States “risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society.”

As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’ share of U.S. income over the past half century.” Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top one percent have gained the most of all – “more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.”

No wonder working men and women and their families are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and public transportation – all of which have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. The recent book, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity , describes how “thirty zipcodes in America have become fabulously wealthy” while “whole urban and rural communities are languishing in unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, growing insecurity, and fear.”

This is a profound transformation in a country whose DNA contains the inherent promise of an equal opportunity at “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and whose collective memory resonates with the hallowed idea – hallowed by blood – of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The great progressive struggles in our history have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Yet today the public may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a secure retirement, and clean air and water, but there is no government “of, by, and for the people” to deliver on those aspirations. Instead, our elections are bought out from under us and our public officials do the bidding of mercenaries. Money is choking democracy to death. So powerfully has wealth shaped our political agenda that we cannot say America is working for all of America.

In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices: “You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both.”

III

Some simple facts:

The cost of running for public office is skyrocketing. In 1996, $1.6 billion was spent on the Congressional and Presidential elections. Eight years later, that total had more than doubled, to $3.9 billion.

Thanks to our system of privately financed campaigns, millions of regular Americans are being priced out of any meaningful participation in democracy. Less than one half of one percent of all Americans made a political contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. When the average cost of running and winning a seat in the House of Representatives has topped one million dollars, we can no longer refer to that August chamber as “The People’s House.” If you were thinking of running for Congress, do you have any idea where you would get the money to be a viable candidate?

At the same time that the cost of getting elected is exploding beyond the reach of ordinary people, the business of gaining access to and influence with our elected Representatives has become a growth industry. Six years ago, in his first campaign for President, George W. Bush promised he would “restore honor and integrity” to the government. Repeatedly, during his first campaign for President, he would raise his right hand and, as if taking an oath, tell voters that he would change how things were done in the nation’s capitol. “It’s time to clean up the toxic environment in Washington, DC,” he would say. His administration would ask ”not only what is legal but what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves.”

Hardly.

Since Bush was elected the number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has more than doubled. That’s 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of Congress.

The amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by nearly 100% in that same period, according to The Washington Post, going up to anything from $20,000 to $40,000 a month. Starting salaries have risen to nearly $300,000 a year for the best-connected people, those leaving Congress or the administration.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month .

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. There has been a qualitative change as well. With pro-corporate business officials running both the executive and legislative branches, lobbying that was once reactive has gone on the offense, seeking huge windfalls from public policy and public monies.

One example cited by The Washington Post: Hewlett-Packard, the California computer maker. The company nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists in 2004 and took on an elite lobbying firm as its Washington arm. Its goal was to pass Republican-backed legislation that would enable the company to bring back to the United States, at a dramatically lowered tax rate, as much as $14.5 billion in profit from foreign subsidiaries. The extra lobbying paid off. The legislation passed and Hewlett Packard can now reduce its share of the social contract. The company’s director of government affairs was quite candid: “We’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House.” Whatever the company paid for the lobbying, the investment returned enormous dividends.

I want to point out here that I believe in equal opportunity muckraking. When I left Washington for journalism I did not leave behind my conviction that government should see to it that we have a more level playing field with one set of rules for everyone, but I did leave behind my partisan affections. Anyone who saw the documentary my team and I produced a few years ago on the illegal fund raising for Bill Clinton’s re-election, knows I am no fan of the Democratic money machine that helped tear the party away from whatever roots it once had in the daily lives and struggles of working people, turning it into a junior partner of the Chamber of Commerce. I mean people like California’s Congressman Tony Coelho, who in the 1980s realized that Congressional Democrats could milk the business community for money if they promised to “pay for play.” I mean people like Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, who gave Bill Clinton the idea of renting the Lincoln bedroom out to donors, and who did such a good job raising big money for the Democrats that by the end of his reign, Democrats had fewer small donors than the Republicans and more fat cats writing them million-dollar checks.

But let’s be realistic here. When the notorious Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he answered, “Because there is where the money is.” If I seem to be singling out the Republicans, it’s for one reason: that’s where the power is. They own the government lock, stock, and barrel. Once they gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994, their self-proclaimed revolution has gone into overdrive with their taking of the White House in 2000 and the Senate in 2002. Their revolution soon became a cash cow and Washington a one party state ruled by money.

Look back at the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past decade: an energy bill which gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 in profits in 2005 and our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high; a bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe; the deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price gouging and an undermining of news coverage; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs; and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a PO Box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman islands.

In every case the pursuit of this legislation was driven by big money. Our public representatives, the holders of our trust, need huge sums to finance their campaigns, especially to pay for television advertising, and men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of that weakness in our democracy to systematically sell it off to the highest bidders.

Let’s start with the “K Street Project.” K Street is the Wall Street of lobbying, the address of many of Washington’s biggest lobbying firms. The K Street Project was the brainchild of Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, the right wing strategist who famously said that his goal is to shrink government so that it can be “drowned in a bathtub.” This, of course, would render it impotent to defend ordinary people against the large economic forces – the so-called free market – that Norquist and his pals believe should be running America.

Tom DeLay, meanwhile, was a small businessman from Sugar Land, Texas, who ran a pest extermination business before he entered politics. He hated the government regulators who dared to tell him that some of the pesticides he used were dangerous – as, in fact, they were. He got himself elected to the Texas legislature at a time the Republicans were becoming the majority in the once-solid Democratic south, and his reputation for joining in the wild parties around the state capital in Austin earned him the nickname “Hot Tub Tom.” But early in his political career, and with exquisite timing and the help of some videos from the right wing political evangelist, James Dobson, Tom DeLay found Jesus and became a full-fledged born again Christian. He would later humbly acknowledge that God had chosen him to restore America to its biblical worldview. “God,” said Tom DeLay, “has been walking me through an incredible journey…God is using me, all the time, everywhere…God is training me. God is working with me….”

Yes, indeed: God does work in mysterious ways.

In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay also discovered a secular ally to serve his ambitions. He found out the power of money to power his career. “Money is not the root of all evil in politics,” DeLay once said. “In fact, money is the lifeblood of politics.” By raising more than 2 million dollars from lobbyists and business groups and distributing the money to dozens of Republican candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshmen legislators and got himself elected Majority Whip, the number three man in Newt Gingrich’s “Gang of Seven” who ran the House.

Here’s how they ran it: On the day before the Republicans formally took control of Congress on January 3, 1995, DeLay met in his office with a coterie of lobbyists from some of the biggest companies in America. The journalists Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss report that “the session inaugurated an unambiguous collaboration of political and commercial interests, certainly not uncommon in Washington but remarkable this time for the ease and eagerness with which these allies combined.”

DeLay virtually invited them to write the Republican agenda. What they wanted first was “Project Relief” -- a wide-ranging moratorium on regulations that had originally been put into place for the health and safety of the public. For starters, they wanted “relief” from labor standards that protected workers from the physical injuries of repetitive work. They wanted “relief’ from tougher rules on meat inspection. And they wanted “relief” from effective monitoring of hazardous air pollutants. Scores of companies were soon gorging on Tom DeLay’s generosity, adding one juicy and expensive tid-bit after another to the bill. According to Weisskopf and Maraniss, on the eve of the debate 20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that “this was a key vote, one that would be considered in future campaign contributions.” On the day of the vote lobbyists on Capitol Hill were still writing amendments on their laptops and forwarding them to House leaders.

The Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, famously told the lobbyists: “If you are going to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” Tom DeLay became his enforcer.

The rules were simple and blunt. Contribute to Republicans only. Hire Republicans only. When the electronics industry ignored the warning and chose a Democratic Member of Congress to run its trade association, DeLay played so rough – pulling from the calendar a bill that the industry had worked on two years, aimed at bringing most of the world in alignment with U.S. copyright law – that even the House Ethics Committee, the watchdog that seldom barks and rarely bites, stirred itself to rebuke him – privately, of course.

DeLay wasn’t fazed. Not only did he continue to make sure the lobbying jobs went to Republicans, he also saw to it that his own people got a lion’s share of the best jobs. At least 29 of his former employees landed major lobbying positions – the most of any Congressional office. The journalist John Judis found that together ex-DeLay people represent around 350 firms, including thirteen of the biggest trade associations, most of the energy companies, the giants in finance and technology, the airlines, auto makers, tobacco companies, and the largest health care and pharmaceutical companies. When tobacco companies wanted to block the FDA from regulating cigarettes, they hired DeLay’s man. When the pharmaceutical companies – Big Pharma – wanted to make sure companies wouldn’t be forced to negotiate cheaper prices for drugs, they hired six of Tom DeLay’s team, including his former chief of staff. The machine became a blitzkrieg, oiled by campaign contributions that poured in like a gusher.

Watching as DeLay, with the approval of the House leadership, become the virtual dictator of Capitol Hill, I was reminded of the card shark in Texas who said to his prey, “Now play the cards fair, Reuben, I know what I dealt you.” Tom DeLay and his cronies were stacking the deck.

They centralized in their own hands the power to write legislation. Drastic revisions to major bills were often written at night, with lobbyists hovering over them, then rushed through as “emergency measures,” giving members as little as half an hour to consider what they may be voting on.

The Democratic minority was locked out of conference committees where the House and Senate are supposed to iron out their differences with both parties in the loop. The Republican bosses even took upon themselves the power to rewrite a bill in secrecy and move it directly to a vote without any other hearings or public review.

Sometimes this meant overruling what the majority of House members really wanted. Consider what happened with the bill to provide Medicare prescription drug coverage, as analyzed by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect. As the measure was coming to a vote, a majority of the full House was sympathetic to allowing cheaper imports from Canada and to giving the government the power to negotiate wholesale drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. But DeLay and his cronies were working on behalf of the big pharmaceutical companies and would have none of it. So they made sure there would be no amendments on the floor. They held off the final roll call a full three hours – well after midnight – in order to strong-arm members who wanted to vote against the bill.

It was not a pretty sight out there on the floor of the House. At one point DeLay marched over to one reluctant Republican – Representative Nick Smith – who opposed the Medicare bill – and attempted to change his mind. Smith, who was serving his final term in office, later alleged that he was offered a bribe – $100,000 for his son’s campaign to succeed him. When he subsequently retracted his accusation, the House Ethics Committee looked into the charges and countercharges and wound up admonishing both Smith and DeLay, who admitted that he had offered to endorse Smith’s son in exchange for Smith’s support but that no money or bribe were involved. Timothy Noah of Slate.com has mused about what DeLay’s endorsement would nonetheless have meant in later campaign contributions if Smith had gone along. While the report of the ethics committee never did find out the true story, Noah asks: “Who did whisper ‘$100,000’ in Smith’s ear? The report is full of plausible suspects, including DeLay himself, but it lacks any evidence on this crucial finding. You get the feeling the authors would prefer to forget this mystery ever existed.”

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The price of corruption is passed on to you. What came of all these shenanigans was a bill that gave industry what it wanted and gave taxpayers the shaft. The bill covers only a small share of drug expenses. It has a major gap in coverage – the so-called ‘donut hole.’ It explicitly forbids beneficiaries from purchasing private coverage to fill in the gap and explicitly forbids the federal government from bargaining for lower drug prices. More than one consumer organization has estimated that most seniors could end up paying even more for prescription drugs than before the bill passed.

Furthermore, despite these large flaws the cost of the bill is horrendous – between 500 billion and 1 trillion dollars in its first ten years. The chief actuary for Medicare calculated a realistic estimate of what the bill would cost, but he later testified before Congress that he was forbidden from releasing the information by his boss, Thomas Scully, the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who was then negotiating for a lucrative job with the health care industry. Sure enough, hardly had the prescription drug bill become law than Scully went to work for the largest private equity investor in health care and at a powerful law firm focusing on health care and regulatory matters.

One is reminded of Senator Boies Penrose. Back in the first Gilded Age, Penrose was a United States senator from Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: “I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money… and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.”

Gilded Ages – then and now – have one thing in common: Audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke.

Tom DeLay was elected to Congress by the ordinary people of Sugar Land, Texas. They had the right to expect him to represent them. This expectation is the very soul of democracy. We can’t all govern – not even tiny, homogenous Switzerland practices pure democracy. So we Americans came to believe our best chance of responsible government lies in obtaining the considered judgments of those we elect to represent us. Having cast our ballots in the sanctity of the voting booth with its assurance of political equality, we go about our daily lives expecting the people we put in office to weigh the competing interests and decide to the best of their ability what is right.

Instead, they have given the American people reason to believe the conservative journalist P.J. O’Rourke was right when he described Congress as “a parliament of whores.”

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 70% of Americans believe lobbyists bribing members of Congress is the way things work. Fifty seven percent think at least half of the members of Congress accept bribes or gifts that affect their votes. A Fox News poll reported that 65% believe most elected officials in Washington make policy decisions or take actions on the basis of campaign contributions. Findings like these underscore the fact that ordinary people believe their bonds with democracy are not only stretched but sundered.

You see the breach clearly with Tom DeLay. As he became the king of campaign fundraising, the Associated Press writes, “He began to live a lifestyle his constituents back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining.” Big corporations such as R.J. Reynolds, Phillip Morris, Reliant, El Paso and Dynegy provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most Americans have never seen – places with “dazzling views, warm golden sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms and balconies overlooking the ocean.” The AP reports that various organizations – campaign committees, political action committees, even a children’s charity established by DeLay – paid over $1 million on hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets in DeLay’s behalf: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts (the Ritz Carlton in Jamaica, the Prince Hotel in Hawaii, the Michelangelo in New York, the Phoenician in Scottsdale, the El Conquistador in Puerto Rico, where villas average $1,300 a night); 100 flights aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists; and 500 meals at fancy restaurants, some averaging $200 for a dinner for two. There was even a $2,896 shopping spree at a boutique on Florida’s Amelia Island offering “gourmet cookware, sabbatier cutlery and gadgets for your every need.”

DeLay was a man on the move and on the take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a fellow right wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff personifies the Republican money machine of which DeLay with the blessing of the House leadership was the major domo. It was Abramoff who helped DeLay raise those millions of dollars from campaign donors that bought the support of other politicians and became the base for an empire of corruption. DeLay praised Abramoff as “one of my closest friends.” Abramoff, in turn, told a convention of college Republicans, “Thank God Tom DeLay is majority leader of the house. Tom DeLay is who all of us want to be when we grow up.”

Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials, a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as Chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the Far Right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. “Our job,” Abramoff, then 22 years old, wrote after his first visit to the Reagan White House, “is to remove liberals from power permanently [from] student newspaper and radio stations, student governments, and academia.” Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff’s campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket.

They reeked piety. Like DeLay, who had proclaimed himself God’s messenger, Ralph Reed found Jesus, was born again, and wound up running Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, landing on the cover of Time as “the Right Hand of God.” Reportedly after seeing “Fiddler on the Roof” Abramoff became an Orthodox religious Jew who finagled fake awards as “Scholar of Biblical and American History,” “Distinguished Bible Scholar” (from an apparently non-existent organization), the “Biblical Mercantile Award” allegedly from the Cascadian Business Institute through which money was funded for DeLay’s famous visit to a plush Scottish golf club, and the national order of merit from the USA Foundation, whose chairman was … Jack Abramoff.

It is impossible to treat all the schemes and scams this crowd concocted to subvert democracy in the name of God and greed. But thanks to some superb reporting from, The Associated Press, and Knight-Ridder, among others, we can touch on a few.

Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a dozen Indian tribes who hired them to protect their tribal gambling interests from competition. What they had to offer, of course, was their well-known connections to the Republican power structure, including members of Congress, friends at the White House (Abramoff’s personal assistant became Karl Rove’s personal assistant), Christian Right activists like Ralph Reed, and right wing ideologues like Grover Norquist (according to The Texas Observer, two lobbying clients of Abramoff paid $25,000 to Norquist’s organization – Americans for Tax Reform – for a lunch date and meeting with President Bush in May 2001.)

Abramoff and Scanlon came up with one scheme they called “Gimme Five”: Abramoff would refer tribes to Scanlon for grassroots public relations work, and Scanlon would then kick back about 50% to Abramoff, all without the tribes’ knowledge. Before it was over the tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff’s and Scanlon’s pockets. And that doesn’t count the thousands more that Abramoff directed the tribes to pay out in campaign contributions.

Some of the money found its way into an outfit called the Council of Republicans for Environment Advocacy (CREA), founded by Gale Norton before she became Interior Secretary, the cabinet position most responsible for Indian gaming rights (as well as oil and gas issues, public lands and parks, and something else we’ll get to in a moment).

Some of the money went to so-called charities set up by Abramoff and DeLay that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and their staff, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and DeLay’s pet projects.

And some of the money found its way to the righteous folks of the Christian Right. One who had his hand out was Ralph Reed, the religious right’s poster boy against gambling. “We believe gambling is a cancer on the American body politic,” Reed had said. “It is stealing food from the mouths of children … (and) turning wives into widows.” When he resigned from the Christian Coalition (just as it was coming under federal investigation and slipping into financial arrears), Reed sought a cut of the lucre flowing to Abramoff and Scanlon. He sent Abramoff an email: “Now that I am leaving electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts … I’m counting of you to help me with some contacts.”

Abramoff came through. According to Susan Schmidt and R. Jeffrey Smith, he and Scanlon paid Reed some $4 million to whip up Christian opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of Jack Abramoff’s clients. Reed called in some of the brightest stars in the Christian firmament – Pat Robertson, Jerry Fawell, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly – to participate in what became a ruse in Abramoff’s behalf: They would oppose gambling on religious and moral grounds in strategic places (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama) at decisive moments when competitive challenges threatened Abramoff’s. Bogus Christian fronts were part of the strategy. Baptist preachers in Texas rallied to Reed’s appeals. Unsuspecting folks in Louisiana heard the voice of God on radio – with Jerry Fawell and Pat Robertson doing the honors – thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme, which one of Abramoff’s clients feared would undermine its advantage. Reed even got James Dobson, whose nationwide radio “ministry” reaches millions of people, to deluge phone lines at the Interior Department and White House with calls from indignant Christians.

In 1999 Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi Choctaws, who were trying to stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1 million to Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the money along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another anti-gambling group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear how much these Christian soldiers, “marching as to war,” knew about the true purpose of their crusade, but Ralph Reed knew all along that his money was coming from Abramoff. The emails between the two men read like Elmer Gantry.

It gets worse.

Some of Abramoff’s money from lobbying went to start a non-profit organization called the U.S. Family Network. Nice name, yes? An uplifting all-American name, like so many others that fly the conservative banner in Washington. Tom DeLay wrote a fundraising letter in which he described the U.S. Family Network as “a powerful nationwide organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizen control.” Fund raising appeals warned that the American family “is being attacked from all sides: crime, drugs, pornography… and gambling.” So help me, I’m not making this up. You can read R. Jeffrey’s Smith mind-boggling account of it on the Washington Post website, where he writes that the organization did no discernable grassroots organizing and its money came from business groups with no demonstrated interest in the “moral fitness” agenda that was the network’s professed aim.

Let’s call it what it was: a scam – one more cog in the money-laundering machine controlled by DeLay and Abramoff. A former top assistant founded the organization. It bought a townhouse just three blocks from DeLay’s Congressional quarters and provided him with fancy free office space where he would go to raise money. DeLay’s wife also got a sizeable salary. But that’s the least of it.

Working with Abramoff through a now-defunct law firm in London and an obscure off-shore company in the Bahamas, Russian oil and gas executives were using the U.S. Family Network to funnel money to influence the majority leader of the House of Representatives – yes, that chamber of American government once known as “The People’s House.”

Our witness for this is the Christian pastor who served as the titular president of the U.S. Family Network, the Reverend Christopher Geeslin. He told The Washington Post that the founder of the organization, the former DeLay aide, told him that a million dollars was passed through from sources in Russia who wanted DeLay’s support for legislation enabling the International Monetary Fund to bail out the faltering Russian economy without demanding the country raise taxes on its energy industry. As Molly Ivins pointed out in a recent column, right on cue, DeLay found his way onto Fox News Sunday to argue the Russian position. That same titular head of the U.S. Family Network, the Christian pastor, said DeLay’s former chief of staff also told him, “This is the way things work in Washington.”

This is the way things work in Washington.

Twenty five years ago Grover Norquist had said that “What Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs in Washington. Then this will be a different town.”

Well, they got what they needed, and the arc of the conservative takeover of government has now been completed. As Abramoff had once said his goal was to banish liberals from college campuses, and later that “All of my political work is driven by philosophical interests, not by the desire to gain wealth,” now his intentions, as he admitted to Michael Crowley of The New York Times, were “to push the Republicans on K Street to be more helpful to the conservative movement.” Money, politics, and ideology became one and the same in a juggernaut of power that crushed everything in sight, including core conservative principles.

Here we come to the heart of darkness.

One of Abramoff’s first big lobbying clients was the Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S. Government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. We should all remember that thousands of Marines died there, fighting for our way of life and our freedoms. Today, these islands are a haven for tourists – first-class hotels, beautiful beaches, championship golf course. But there is a dark side. The islands were exempted from U.S. labor and immigration laws, and over the years tens of thousands of people, primarily Chinese, mostly women, were brought there as garment workers. These so-called “guest workers” found themselves living in crowded barracks in miserable conditions. The main island, Saipan, became known as America’s biggest sweatshop.

In 1998 a government report found workers there living in substandard conditions, suffering severe malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of violence. Many had signed “shadow contracts” which required them to pay up to $7000 just to get the job. They also had to renounce their claim to basic human rights, including political and religious activities, socializing and marrying. If they protested, they could be summarily deported. As Greg Mcdonald wrote in The Houston Chronicle, the garments produced on Saipan were manufactured for American companies from tariff-free Asian cloth and shipped duty- and quota-free – to the United States. Some of the biggest names in the retail clothing industry – Levi Strauss, The Gap, J. Crew, Eddie Bauer, Reebok, Polo, Tommy Helfiger, Nordstrom’s, Lord and Taylor, Jones New York, and Liz Claiborne – had been able to slap a “made in the USA” label on the clothes and import them to America, while paying the workers practically nothing.

When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff’s team arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets. Conservative intellectuals and journalists, for hire at rates considerably above what the women on the islands were making, also signed up for expense-free trips to the Marianas. They flew first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as “a true free market success story” and “a laboratory of liberty.”

Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically swooned. He said the Marianas “represented what is best about America.” He called them “my Galapagos” – “a perfect petri dish of capitalism.”

These fellow travelers – conservative members of Congress, their staffs and their lapdogs in the rightwing press and think tanks – became a solid phalanx against any and all attempts to provide the workers on the islands with a living wage and decent living conditions. For instance, when a liberal California Democrat, George Miller, and a conservative Alaskan Senator, Frank Murkowski, indignant at the “appalling conditions,” wanted to enact a bill to raise minimum wages on the islands and at least prevent summary deportation of the workers, DeLay and Abramoff stopped them cold. As Representative Miller told it, “They killed my reform bill year after year. And even when an immigration reform bill by Senator Frank Murkowski, a Republican, was approved by the full Senate, they blocked it repeatedly in the House.”

After the 2000 election, when the spoils of victory were being divided up, Abramoff got himself named to the Bush transition team for the Interior Department. He wanted to make sure the right people wound up overseeing his clients, the Marianas. He enlisted Reed, who said he would raise the matter with Rove, to stop at least one appointment to Interior that might prove troublesome. Small wonder that about this time Reed wrote an email to Enron’s top lobbyist touting his pal Abramoff as “arguably the most influential and effective gop lobbyist in congress. I share several clients with him and have yet to see him lose a battle. He also is very close to DeLay and could help enormously on that front. raised $ for bush…he [sic] assistant is Susan Ralston [who would become Rove’s assistant.]”

For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10 million dollars, including the fees he charged for booking his guests on the golf courses and providing them copies of Newt Gingrich’s book. One of the sweatshop moguls with whom Abramoff was particularly close contributed half a million dollars to – you guessed it - the U. S. Family Network that laundered money from Russian oligarchs to Tom DeLay.

To this day, workers on the Marianas are still denied the federal minimum wage while working long hours for subsistence income in their little “petri dish of capitalism” – “America at its best.”

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were now in sync. George W. Bush had created his own version of the K Street Project. Remember how he emerged from the crowded field of Republican candidates in early 1999 and literally blew several of them out of the water? He did so by drowning his opponents with money. In just his first six months of fundraising, Bush collected some $36 million – nine times more than his nearest opponent, John McCain. The money came from the titans of America business and lobbying who understood their contributions would be rewarded. You’ve heard of the Pioneers and Rangers – people who raised at least $100,000 and $200,000 for Bush. Among them were people like Tom DeLay’s brother, also a lobbyist; the CEO of Enron, Kenneth (“Kenny Boy”) Lay; and hundreds of executives from the country’s banks, investment houses, oil and gas companies, electric utilities, and other companies.

While Tom DeLay kept a ledger on K Street, ranking lobbyists as friendly and unfriendly, the Bush campaign gave every one of his Pioneers and Rangers a tracking number, making sure to know who was bringing in the bucks and where they were coming from. In May of 1999 the trade association for the electric utility industry sent a letter to potential contributors on Bush campaign stationery. He told his colleagues that Bush’s campaign managers “have stressed the importance of having our industry incorporate the tracking number in your fundraising efforts…it does ensure that our industry is credited and that your progress is listed…”

The bounty was waiting. A score of Pioneers and Rangers were paid off with ambassadorships. At least 37 were named to post-election transition teams, where they had a major say in selecting political appointees at key regulatory positions across the government. Remember the California energy crisis, when Enron traders boasted of gouging grandmothers to drive up the prices for energy? Well, Enron’s Kenneth Lay had been Bush’s biggest campaign funder over the years and what he asked now as a pay-off was appointment to the Energy Department transition team. This is how Enron’s boss got to name two of the five members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who looked the other way while Enron rigged California’s energy prices and looted billions right out from the pockets and pocketbooks of California’s citizens.

There are, as I said, no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to you. When the government of the United States falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get squashed.

This week I visited for the first time the Museum of the Presidio in San Francisco. From there American troops shipped out to combat in the Pacific. Many never came back. On the walls of one corridor are photographs of some of those troops, a long way from home. Looking at them, I wondered: Is this what those Marines died for on the Marianas – for sweatshops, the plunder of our public trust, the corruption of democracy? Government of the Abramoffs, by the DeLays, and for the people who bribe them?

I don’t think so.

But this crowd in charge has a vision sharply at odds with the American people. They would arrange Washington and the world for the convenience of themselves and the transnational corporations that pay for their elections. In the words of Al Meyeroff, the Los Angeles attorney who led a successful class action suit for the workers on Saipan, the people who now control the U.S. Government today want “a society run by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of any oversight, enjoying a cozy relationship with government, and thriving on crony capitalism.”

America as their petri dish – the Marianas, many times over.

This is an old story and a continuing struggle. A century ago Theodore Roosevelt said the central fact of his time was that corporations had become so dominant they would chew up democracy and spit it out. His cousin Franklin Roosevelt warned that a government of money was as much to be feared as a government by mob. One was a progressive Republican, the other a liberal Democrat. Their sentiments were echoed by an icon of the conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, in 1987:

"The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of Constitutional liberty, an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people…representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups who speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community."

IV

I have painted a bleak picture of democracy today. I believe it is a true picture. But it is not a hopeless picture. Something can be done about it. Organized people have always had to take on organized money. If they had not, blacks would still be three-fifths of a person, women wouldn’t have the vote, workers couldn’t organize, and children would still be working in the mines. Our democracy today is more real and more inclusive than existed in the days of the Founders because time and again, the people have organized themselves to insist that America become “a more perfect union.”

It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It’s not their government, it’s your government. They work for you. They’re public employees – and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired. That goes for the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the President of the United States.

They would have you believe this is just “a lobbying scandal.” They would have you think that if they pass a few nominal reforms, put a little more distance between the politician and the lobbyist, you will think everything is okay and they can go back to business as usual.

They’re trying it now. Just look at Congressman John Boehner, elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. Today he speaks the language of reform, but ten years ago Boehner was handing out checks from the tobacco executives on the floor of the House. He’s been a full player in the K Street Project and DeLay’s money machine, holding weekly meetings with some of the most powerful lobbyists in the Speaker’s suite at the Capitol. He has thought nothing of hopping on corporate jets or cruising Caribbean during winter breaks with high-powered lobbyists. Moreover, the man Boehner beat to succeed DeLay – Congressman Roy Blunt – has been elected to DeLay’s first job as Majority Whip despite being deeply compromised by millions upon millions of dollars raised from the same interests that bought off DeLay.

And what now of DeLay? He’s under indictment for money laundering inTexas and had to resign as Majority Leader. But the other day the party bosses in Congress gave him a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee where big contributors get their rewards. And – are you ready for this? – they put him on the subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department which is investigating the Abramoff scandal, including Abramoff’s connections to DeLay.

Business as usual. The usual rot. The power of arrogance.

You may say, see? These forces can’t be defeated. They’re too rich, they’re too powerful, they’re too entrenched.

But look at what has happened in Connecticut, one of the most corrupt states in the union. Rocked by multiple scandals that brought down a state treasurer, a state senator, and the governor himself with convictions of bribery, tax evasion, and worse, the people finally had enough. Although many of the parties had to be forced, kicking and screaming to do it, last December the legislature passed clean money reform and the new governor signed it into law. The bill bans campaign contributions from lobbyists and state contractors and makes Connecticut the very first state in the nation where the legislature and governor approved full public funding for their own races.

Connecticut isn’t the only place where the link between public officials and private campaign contributions has been broken. Both Arizona and Maine offer full public financing of statewide and legislative races. New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Vermont have clean money systems for some races. The cities of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico recently approved full public financing for citywide races.

In these places, candidates for public office – executive, legislative, and in some cases judicial – have the option of running on a limited and equal grant of full public funding, provided they take little or no private contributions. To qualify they have to pass a threshold by raising a large number of small contributions from voters in their district. The system allows candidates to run competitive campaigns for office even if they do not have ties to well-heeled donors or big money lobbyists, a near impossibility when public elections are privately funded.

In places where clean elections are law, we see more competition for legislative seats and a more diverse group of people running for office. In David Sirota’s words, they “are encouraged to run on their ideas, their convictions and their integrity instead of on how effectively they can shake down the big money.” And there are policy results as well. In Arizona, one of the first acts of Governor Janet Napolitano, elected under the state’s public financing program, was to institute reforms establishing low-cost prescription drug subsidies for seniors. Compare that to the Medicare debacle going on at the national level. In Maine, where clean elections has been in place since 2000, there have also been advances in providing low cost pharmaceutical drugs for residents, and in making sure that every state resident has medical coverage.

Why? Because the politicians can do what’s right, not what they’re paid to do by big donors. They, not the lobbyists, write the legislation. As one blogger put it this past weekend, instead of dialing for dollars, they might have time even to read bills like ‘The Patriot Act’ and find the small print establishing a secret police.

California may soon follow Connecticut. Calling for the political equivalent of electroshock therapy, the Los Angeles Times recently urged Californians: “Forget half-measures. The cure is voluntary public financing of election campaigns.” Already the Clean Money and Fair Elections Bill has passed the state assembly and is headed for the senate. Check it out at www.caclean.org.

Think about this: Californians could buy back their elected representatives at a cost of about $5 or $6 per California resident. Nationally we could buy back our Congress and the White House with full public financing for about $10 per taxpayer per year. You can check this out on the website Public Campaign. [www.publicampaign.org]

Public funding won’t solve all the problems. There’s no way to legislate truly immoral people from abusing our trust. But it would go a long way to breaking the link between big donors and public officials and to restoring democracy to the people. Until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns – “clean,” disinterested, accountable public money – the selling of America will go on. From scandal to scandal.

The people out across the country on the front lines of this fight have brought the message down to earth, in plain language and clear metaphors. If a player sliding into home plate reached into his pocket and handed the umpire $1000 before he made the call, what would we call that? A bribe. And if a lawyer handed a judge $1000 before he issued a ruling, what do we call that? A bribe. But when a lobbyist or CEO sidles up to a member of Congress at a fundraiser or in a skybox and hands him a check for $1000, what do we call that? A campaign contribution.

Representative Barney Frank likes to say of Congress: “We are the only people in the world required by law to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on our behavior.”

What law is he talking about? The unwritten law that says your Congressman has to raise $2000 per day from the day he or she is sworn in to the next election days – weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas Eve and the Fourth of July. As long as elected officials need that constant stream of cash, someone will run our country but it won’t be you.

Even some business lobbyists are having second thoughts. One of them, Stanton Anderson, was recently quoted in Business Week: “As a conservative, I’ve always opposed government involvement. But it seems to me the real answer is federal financing of Congressional elections.”

Mr. Anderson understand this isn’t about a “few bad apples.” This is about the system. We can change the system. But we have to believe democracy is worth fighting for.

Listen to what Theodore Roosevelt said one hundred years ago when he took on the political bosses and big money of his time for committing “treason to the people.”

"We are standing for the great fundamental rights upon which all successful free government must be based. We are standing for elementary decency in politics. We are fighting for honesty against naked robbery. It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure."

We need that fighting spirit today – the tough, outraged and resilient spirit that knows we have been delivered a great and precious legacy, you and I – “government of, by and for the people” – and, by God we’re going to pass it on.

Bill Moyers' long-time editorial colleague, Rebecca Wharton; assistant, Karen Kimball; and Public Campaign’s Micah Sifry and Nancy Walzman contributed to this speech. Bill Moyers is the president of The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support to TomPaine.com.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/keillor/print.html

Impeach Bush

The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever -- and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him.
By Garrison Keillor

Mar. 01, 2006 | These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.

The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt -- it's you.

But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders -- pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.

The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)

-- By Garrison Keillor

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/keillor/print.html
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Day of Reckoning for the Current Occupant
By Garrison Keillor
The Chicago Tribune
Wednesday 15 March 2006

Spring arrived in New York last week for previews, a sunny day with chill in the air, but you could smell mud, and with a little
imagination you could sort of smell grass. I put on a gray jacket, instead of black, and went to the opera and saw Verdi's "Luisa Miller," a Republican opera in which love is crushed by the perfidiousness of government. A helpful lesson for these times. I am referring to the Current Occupant.

The Republican Revolution has gone the way of all flesh. It took over Congress and the White House, horns blew, church bells rang, sailors kissed each other, and what happened? The Republicans led us into a reckless foreign war and steered the economy toward receivership and wielded power as if there were no rules. Democrats are accused of having no new ideas, but Republicans are making some of the old ideas look awfully good, such as constitutional checks and balances, fiscal
responsibility, and the notion of realism in foreign affairs and taking actions that serve the national interest. What one might call "conservatism."

The head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, Lt. Gen. William Odom, writes on the Web site
NiemanWatchdog.org that he sees clear parallels between Vietnam and Iraq: "The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on US power that Iraq is already having." He draws the parallels in three stages and says that staying the course will only make the damage to US power greater. It's a chilling analysis, and one that isn't
going to come from the Democratic Party. It's starting to come from Republicans, and they are the ones who must rescue the country from themselves.

I ran into a gray eminence from the Bush I era the other day in an airport, and he said that what most offended him about Bush II is the naked incompetence. "You may disagree with Republicans, but you always had to recognize that they knew what they were doing," he said. "I keep going back to that intelligence memo of August 2001, that said that terrorists had plans to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. The president read it, and he didn't even call a staff meeting to discuss it. That is lack of attention of a high order."

Over the course of time, the Chief Occupant has been cruelly exposed over and over. He sat and was briefed on the danger of a hurricane wiping out a major American city, and without asking a single question, he got up from the table and walked away and resumed his vacation. He played guitar as New Orleans was flooded. It took him four days to realize his responsibility to do something. When the tsunami killed 100,000 people in Southeast Asia, he was on vacation and it
took him 72 hours to issue a statement of sympathy.

The Republicans tied their wagon to him and, as a result, their revolution is bankrupt. He has played the terrorism card for all it is worth and campaigned successfully against Adam and Steve and co-opted whole vast flocks of Christians, but he is done now, kaput, out of gas, for one simple reason. He doesn't represent the best that is our country. Not even close.

He openly, brazenly, countenanced crimes of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. He engaged in illegal surveillance, authorized the arrest of people without charge and "disappeared" them to foreign jails. And he finagled this war, which, after three years of violence, does not look to be heading toward a happy ending. And now it's up to Republicans to put their country first and call the gentleman to account.

The Current Occupant is smart about handling a political mess. The best strategy is to cut and run and change the subject. You defend the Dubai ports deal in manly terms until you lose a vote in a House committee and then you retreat - actually, you get the Dubai people to do it for you - and that's it, End of Story.

Harriet Miers was fully qualified one day and gone the next. Social Security was going to be overhauled to give us the Ownership Society, and then the stock market went in the toilet and Republicans got nervous, and suddenly it was Never Mind and on to the next new thing.

Let's bring the boys home. Otherwise, let's send this man back to Texas and see what sort of work he is capable of and let him start making a contribution to the world.
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March 30, 2006
G.O.P. Risking Hispanic Votes on Immigration

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, March 29 — The battle among Republicans over immigration policy and border security is threatening to undercut a decade-long effort by President Bush and his party to court Hispanic voters, just as both parties are gearing up for the 2006 elections. "I believe the Republican Party has hurt itself already," said the Rev. Luis Cortes, a Philadelphia pastor close to President Bush and the leader of a national organization of Hispanic Protestant clergy members, saying he delivered that message to the president last week in a meeting at the White House. To underscore the contested allegiance of Hispanic voters, Mr. Cortes said, he also took a delegation of Hispanic ministers to meet with the leaders of both parties last week, including what he called a productive discussion with Howard Dean, the Democratic chairman.

The immigration and security debate, which has sparked huge demonstrations in recent days by Hispanic residents of cities around the country, comes at a crucial moment for both parties. Over the last three national elections, persistent appeals by Mr. Bush and other Republican leaders have helped double their party's share of the Hispanic vote, to more than 40 percent in 2004 from about 20 percent in 1996. As a result, Democrats can no longer rely on the country's 42 million Hispanic residents as a natural part of their base.

In a lunch meeting of Senate Republicans this week, Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, the only Hispanic Republican in the Senate, gave his colleagues a stern warning. "This is the first issue that, in my mind, has absolutely galvanized the Latino community in America like no other," Mr. Martinez said he told them. The anger among Hispanics has continued even as the Senate Judiciary Committee proposed a bill this week that would allow illegal immigrants a way to become citizens. The backlash was aggravated, Mr. Martinez said in an interview, by a Republican plan to crack down on illegal immigrants that the House approved last year.

The outcome remains to be seen. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said on Wednesday that he recognized the need for a guest-worker program, opening the door to a possible compromise on fiercely debated immigration legislation. Democrats see an opportunity to "show Hispanics who their real friends are," as Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, put it. But the issue is a delicate matter for Democrats as well. Polls show large majorities of the public both support tighter borders as a matter of national security, and oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants. Many working-class Democrats resent what they see as a continuing influx of cheap labor.

The stakes are enormous because Hispanics now account for one of every eight United States residents, and for about half the recent growth in the country's population. Although Hispanics cast just 6 percent of the votes in the 2004 elections, birth rates promise an imminent explosion in the number of eligible voters. "There is a big demographic wave of Hispanic kids who are native born who will be turning 18 in even greater numbers over the next three, four and five election cycles," Roberto Suro, director of the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center, said.

Nowhere is the immigration debate more heated than Arizona, where about 28 percent of the population is Hispanic and where Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican sponsor of an immigration bill, faces what could be a difficult race for re-election. Both Mr. Kyl and his Democratic challenger, Jim Pederson, have hired Hispanics or Hispanic-dominated firms to manage their campaigns. A mostly Hispanic crowd of about 20,000 gathered outside Mr. Kyl's office last weekend to protest criminal penalties against illegal immigrants that were in the House Republican bill, even though Mr. Kyl's proposal does not include the measure.

Mario E. Diaz, the campaign manager for Mr. Pederson, faulted Mr. Kyl's proposal, which would require illegal immigrants or future temporary workers to return to their countries before becoming eligible for legal status in the United States. "Speaking the language that Kyl does, which is round them up and deport them, is offensive and disgusting to the Latino community," Mr. Diaz said. Mr. Kyl, for his part, accused Democrats of race-baiting by painting all Republicans as anti-Hispanic, a practice he said most Hispanics resent. But the senator also acknowledged some fears that the immigration debate could repel Hispanic voters. He added, "I would hope that some of our colleagues who don't have much of a Hispanic population in their states would at least defer to those of us who do."

Pollsters from each party say Hispanics, like other groups, typically rank immigration lower in importance than other issues, especially education. But they respond strongly when they believe the rhetoric surrounding the debate demonizes immigrants or Hispanics, as they did when Gov. Pete Wilson of California, a Republican, backed a 1994 initiative to exclude illegal immigrants from public schools and services. Many analysts say the backlash from Hispanics wrecked the California Republican party for a decade.

As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush opposed such measures, and pushed Republicans to woo Hispanics.

Last week, Sergio Bendixen, a pollster for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, released a rare multilingual poll in which 76 percent of legal Latin American immigrants said they believed anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise. A majority of immigrants said they believed the immigration debate was unfair and misinformed. But Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, dismissed such concerns. Mr. Mehlman said the party's image was defined by President Bush, who supports a temporary-worker program and has repeatedly urged Republicans to avoid inflammatory rhetoric.
"In an emotional debate like this," Mr. Mehlman said, "people need to lower their energy and remember that ultimately the goal is something that is consistent with being a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants."

Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican Party, said it had pushed ahead on recruitment of Hispanic candidates and voters. He noted that Mr. Mehlman had appeared frequently at events with Hispanic groups, hitting classic Republican themes about lower taxes and traditional values. A particular focus has been Hispanic churchgoers and pastors like Mr. Cortes, who receives money from Mr. Bush's religion-based social services initiative.

Democrats say that Mr. Bush's success with Hispanics has not gone unnoticed. Democratic leaders in Congress have expanded their Spanish-language communications, and after 2004 the Democratic Party vowed to stop relying on payments to Hispanic groups and organizations to help turn out Hispanic voters. "How can you spend your money on get-out-the-vote when you are beginning to lose your market share?" Mr. Bendixen said. "But Democrats had no experience in campaigning for the hearts and minds of Hispanic voters. They treated them like black voters who they just needed to get out to the polls."
Still, both sides say it is the tenor and ultimate outcome of the immigration debate that may give the Democrats their best opportunity to attract Hispanic voters.

Senator Martinez, a Cuban immigrant who delivered part of a Senate speech in Spanish a few months ago, alluded to the nervousness among Hispanics when he was asked whether he would do the same again in the deb! ate on immigration. "I am about to be sent back as it is," he said, joking. "I better be careful."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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Through a Rapist's Eyes (No Joke)

This is important information for females of ALL ages . Guys - please forward to the female members of your family and all your female friends and associates.

A group of rapists and date rapists in prison were interviewed on what they look for in a potential victim and here are some interesting facts :

1) The first thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed . They are also likely to go after a woman with long hair . Women with short hair are not common targets.

2) The second thing men look for is clothing They will look for women who's clothing is easy to remove quickly . Many of them carry scissors around specifically to cut clothing.

3) They also look for women on their cell phone , searching through their purse or doing other activities while walki! ng because they are off guard and can be easily overpowered.

4) Men are most likely to attack & rape in the early morning, between 5: 00a.m. and 8:30a.m.

5) The number one place women are abducted from/attacked is grocery store parking lots Number two is office parking lots/garages Number three is public restrooms

6) The thing about these men is that they are looking to grab a woman and quickly move her to another location where they don't have to worry about getting caught.

7) Only 2% said they carried weapons because rape carries a 3-5 year sentence but rape with a weapon is 15-20 years

8) If you put up any kind of a fight at all, they get discouraged because it only takes a minute or two for them to realize that going after you isn't worth it because it will be time-consuming.

9) These men said they would not pick on women who have umbrellas, or other similar objects that can be used from a distance, in their hands. Keys are not a deterrent because you have to get really close to the attacker to use them as a weapon. So, the idea is to convince these guys you're not worth it.

10) Several defense mechanisms he taught us are: If someone is following behind you on a street or in a garage or with you in! an elevator or stairwell, look them in the face and ask them a question , like what time is it, or make general small talk: "I can't believe it is so cold out here", "we're in for a bad winter." Now you've seen their face and could identify them in a line-up; you lose appeal as a target.

11) If someone is coming toward you , hold out your hands in front of you and yell STOP or STAY BACK ! Most of the rapists this man talked to said they'd leave a woman alone if she yelled or showed that she would not be afraid to fight back. Again, they are looking for an EASY target.

12) If you carry pepper spray (this instructor was a huge advocate of it and carries it with him wherever he goes,) yell I HAVE PEPPER SPRAY and holding it out will be a deterrent.

13) If someone grabs you , you can't beat them with strength but you can by outsmart ing them If you are grabbed around the waist from behind, pinch the attacker either under the arm (between the elbow and armpit) OR in the upper inner thigh VERY VERY HARD One woman in a class this guy taught told him she used the underarm pinch on a guy who was trying to date rape her and was so upset she broke through the skin and tore out muscle strands - the guy needed stitches.

Try pinching yourself in those places as hard as you can stand it; it hurts.

14) After the initial hit, always GO for the GROIN . I know from a particularly unfortunate experience that if you slap a guy's parts it is extremely painful. You might think that you'll anger the guy and make him want to hurt you more, but the thing these rapists told our instructor is that they want a woman who will not cause a lot of trouble. Start causing trouble, and he's out of there.

15) When the guy puts his hands up to you , grab his first two fingers and bend them back as far as possible with as much pressure pushing down on them as possible . The instructor did it to me without using much pressure, and! I ended up on my knees and both knuckles cracked audibly.

16) Of course the things we always hear still apply. Always be aware of your surroundings , take someone with you if you can and if you see any odd behavior, don't dismiss it, go with your instincts!!!

You may feel a little silly at the time, but you'd feel much worse if the guy really was trouble.

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Blue Hearts, I'm forwarding this on because Costco is a "blue" store. So, you can feel very good about all the $ you spend there. I double-checked this on snopes.com and it said "true" as well.

Let's hear it for COSTCO!! (This is just mind-boggling!) Make sure you read all the way past the list of the drugs. Please peruse to the bottom. This is outrageous. Someone should be prosecuted for this. The woman that signed below is a Budget Analyst out of federal Washington , DC offices.

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active Ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries. In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America .

The data below speaks for itself.

Celebrex: 100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $ 0.60
Percent markup: 21,712%

Claritin: 1 0 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
Percent markup: 30,306%

Keflex: 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.88
Percent markup: 8,372%

Lipitor: 20 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80
Percent markup: 4,696%

Norvasc: 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14
Percent markup: 134,493%

Paxil: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60
Percent markup: 2,898%

Prevacid: 30 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01
Percent markup: 34,136%

Prilosec : 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97
Cost of general active ingredients $0.52
Percent markup: 69,417%

Prozac: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11
Percent markup: 224,973%

Tenormin: 50 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.13
Percent markup: 80,362%

Vasotec: 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $102.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.20
Percent markup: 51,185%

Xanax: 1 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024
Percent markup: 569,958%

Zestril: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) $89.89
Cost of general active ingredients $3.20
Percent markup: 2,809

Zithromax: 600 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $1,482.19
Cost of general active ingredients: $18.78
Percent markup: 7,892%

Zocor: 40 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63
Percent markup: 4,059%

Zoloft: 50 mg
Consumer price: $206.87
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75
Percent markup: 11,821%


It pays to shop around. This helps to solve the mystery as to why they can afford to put a Walgreen's on every corner. On Monday night, Steve Wilson, an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News in Detroit , did a story on generic drug price gouging by pharmacies. He found in his investigation, that some of these generic drugs were marked up as much as 3,000% or more. Yes, that's not a typo.....three thousand percent! So often, we blame the drug companies for the high cost of drugs, and usually rightfully so. But in this case, the fault clearly lies with the pharmacies themselves. For example, if you had to buy a prescription drug, and bought the name brand, you might pay $100 for 100 pills. The pharmacist might tell you that if you get the generic equivalent, they would only cost $80, making you think you are "saving" $20. What the pharmacist is not telling you is that those 100 generic pills may have only cost him $10!

At the end of the report, one of the anchors asked Mr. Wilson whether or not there were any pharmacies tha t did not adhere to this practice, and he said that Costco consistently charged little over their cost for the generic drugs.

I went to the Costco site, where you can look up any drug, and get its online price. It says that the in-store prices are consistent with the online prices. I was appalled. Just to give you one example from my own experience, I had to use the drug, Compazine, which helps prevent nausea in chemo patients.

I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for 60 pills at CVS. I checked the price at Costco, and I could have bought 100 pills for $19.89. For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $72.57. I could have got 150 at Costco for $28.08.

I would like to mention, that although Costco is a "membership" type store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there, as it is a federally regulated substance. You just tell them at the door that you wish to use the pharmacy, and they will let you in. (this is true)

I went there this past Thursday and asked them. I am asking each of you to please help me by copying this letter, and passing it into your own e-mail, and send it to everyone you know with an e-mail address.


Sharon L. Davis
Budget Analyst
U.S . Department of Commerce
Room 6839
Office Ph: 202-482-4458
Office Fax: 202-482-5480
E-mail Address: sdavis@doc.gov
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Anne Lamott: Christian feminist had to speak out on abortion rights

E verything was going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two priests with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is a liberal and a Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree -- the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president's war in Iraq. Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and everyone just lost his or her mind. Or, at any rate, I did.

Maybe it was the way in which the man couched the question, which was about how we should reconcile our progressive stances on peace and justice with the "murder of a million babies every year in America." The man who asked the question was soft-spoken, neatly and casually dressed.

First Richard, a Franciscan priest, answered that this is indeed a painful issue but that it is not the only "pro-life" issue that progressives -- even Catholics -- should concern themselves with during elections. There are also the matters of capital punishment and the war in Iraq, and of HIV. Then Jim, an evangelical, spoke about the need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and the need to defuse abortion as a political issue, by welcoming prochoice and prolife supporters to the discussion, with equal respect for their positions. He spoke gently about how "morally ambiguous" the issue is.

I sat there simmering, like a samovar; nice Jesusy me. The moderator turned to me and asked quietly if I would like to respond. I did: I wanted to respond by pushing over our table.

Instead, I shook my head. I love and respect the Franciscan and the evangelical, and agree with them 90-plus percent of the time. So I did not say anything, at first.

Then, when I was asked to answer the next question, I paused, and returned to the topic of abortion. There was a loud buzzing in my head, the voice of reason that says, "You have the right to remain silent," but the voice of my conscience was insistent. I wanted to express calmly, eloquently, that prochoice people understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion -- one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus) -- but that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right.

Also, I wanted to wave a gun around, to show what a real murder looks like. This tipped me off that I should hold my tongue, until further notice. And I tried.

But then I announced that I needed to speak out on behalf of the many women present in the crowd, including myself, who had had abortions, and the women whose daughters might need one in the not-too-distant future -- people who must know that teenage girls will have abortions, whether in clinics or dirty backrooms. Women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe vs. Wade. My answer was met with some applause but mostly a shocked silence.

Pall is a good word. And it did not feel good to be the cause of that pall. I knew what I was supposed to have said, as a progressive Christian: that it's all very complicated and painful, and that Jim was right in saying that the abortion rate in America is way too high for a caring and compassionate society.

But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor -- but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove.

I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls "snowflake babies," and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.

And somehow, as I was answering, I got louder and maybe even more emphatic than I actually felt, and said it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all. I said that fetuses are not babies yet; that there was actually a real difference between proabortion people, like me, and Klaus Barbie.

Then I said that a woman's right to choose was nobody else's god damn business. This got their attention.

A cloud of misery fell over the room and the stage. Finally, Jim said something unifying enough for us to proceed -- that liberals must not treat people with opposing opinions on abortion with contempt and exclusion, partly because it's tough material, and partly because it is so critical that we win these next big elections.

It was not until the reception that I finally realized part of the problem -- no one had told me that the crowd was made up largely of Catholics.

I had flown in at dawn on a red-eye, and, in my exhaustion, had somehow missed this one tiny bit of information. I was mortified: I had to eat my body weight in chocolate just to calm myself.

But then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn't it have been more useful and harder to dismiss me if I had sounded more reasonable, less -- what is the word -- spewy?

Maybe I could have presented my position in a less strident, divisive manner. But the questioner's use of the words "murder" and "babies" had put me on the defensive. Plus I am so confused about why we are still having to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about teeny weenie so-called babies -- some microscopic, some no bigger than the sea monkeys we used to send away for -- when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such short shrift from the current administration.

Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love -- and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.

But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

During the reception, an old woman came up to me, and said, "If you hadn't spoken out, I would have spit," and then she raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled together for a while, and ate M&M's to give us strength. It was a kind of communion, for those of us who still believe that civil rights and equality and even common sense will somehow be sovereign, some day.

Anne Lamott, a novelist and essayist, wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.
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March 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
What's Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
There's only one reason I continue to brave Washington's dreary formal press dinners, which are so calcified they're a bad cross between a zombie movie and those little Mexican Day of the Dead sculptures. I find it highly instructive to hear politicians make humor speeches. It's difficult, and few pols do it well.

It took Bill Clinton almost two terms to make a funny speech. He kept letting a petulant tone creep in. Even though W. would probably rather spend the night in Baghdad than go to a banquet, way past his bedtime, where he's getting lampooned by reporters still able to drink, he was a master right from the start.

Lynne Cheney is a practiced speaker, but a bit tone-deaf on humor. At the Gridiron dinner here on Saturday, she said of her husband: "He has a great sense of humor. Just the other day I asked him, 'Do you know how many terrorists it takes to paint a wall?' And he answered right back, 'It depends on how hard you throw them.' " People laughed, but it felt creepy, the kind of humor that makes more terrorists.

Everyone was curious to hear Barack Obama, the Democratic speaker. He arrived last year as a star, then lapsed into a cipher, even getting punk'd by John McCain last month. In the capital's version of "Dancing With the Stars," Senator Obama won, turning in a smooth, funny performance that lifted him from his tyro track. He tweaked fellow Democrats, telling the white-tie crowd: "Men in tails. Women in gowns. An orchestra playing, as folks reminisce about the good old days. Kind of like dinner at the Kerrys." He mocked the president's unauthorized snooping, saying he'd "asked my staff to conduct all phone conversations in the Kenyan dialect of Luo." He advised W. to "spy on the Weather Channel, and find out when big storms are coming." After saying he'd enjoyed the Olympic biathlon of shooting and skiing, he, deadpan, turned to Dick Cheney: "Probably not your sport, Mr. Vice President."

It may be true that Americans, as one Democrat told me, "will never elect a guy as president who has a name like a Middle East terrorist." And it may be true that Democrats are racing like lemmings toward a race where, as one moaned, "John McCain will dribble Hillary Clinton's head down the court like a basketball." But the clever, elegant performance by Mr. Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois who is intent on keeping his head down in the Senate until he, too, can be a tedious insider, underscored the Democratic vacuum.

Not only do the Democrats not stand for anything, as Mr. Obama semijoked, but they have no champion at a time when people are hungry for an exciting leader, when the party should be roaring and soaring against the Bushies' power-mad stumbles. They should groom an '08 star who can run on the pledge of doing what's right instead of only what's far right.
The Republicans won with Ronald Reagan and W. by taking guys with more likeability and sizzle than experience. They figure they'll win in a McCain-Hillary duel by running a conservative beloved by the media and many Democrats against a polarizing Northerner who can't win any red states despite pandering to conservatives.

The weak and pathetic Democrats seem to move inexorably toward candidates who turn a lot of people off. They should find someone captivating with an intensely American success story — someone like Senator Obama, Tom Brokaw or some innovative business mogul who's less crazy than Ross Perot — and shape the campaign around that leader. Barack Obama is 44. J.F.K., who had a reputation as a callow playboy and lawmaker who barely knew his way around the Hill, was 43 when he became president.

With seniority comes dullness. And unless you can draw on it in desperate times, promise is merely a curse. Democrats think that Senator Potential's experience does not match Senator Pothole's. Much of hers is as a first lady who bollixed up chunks of domestic policy. They also suspect she may be more macho. They fret that the Illinois senator would wilt against the Arizona senator's foreign policy experience — and he probably would. But Mr. McCain, a big hawk on Iraq, has talked about sending more troops, and his mentor was Henry Kissinger (these aren't recommendations).

W. had the foreign policy "dream team," and it shattered our foreign policy, ideals and self-image. Despite hundreds of years of combined experience, the Bushies rammed through schemes and cronies that were so destructive, it will take hundreds of years to straighten out their mistakes.

The Democrats should not dismiss a politically less experienced but personally more charismatic prospect as "an empty vessel." Maybe an empty vessel can fill the room.

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http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/04/02/feingold_gambit/print.html?source=newsletter

The Feingold gambit

Now that the New York Times has discovered that the Internet is changing politics, let us pause a moment to consider the censure strategy of Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. When he first raised the idea, in early March, the Democratic establishment in Washington reacted with revulsion. With no hope of actually passing Congress, Feingold's gambit was seen as a "selfish move." "It's an overreaching step by someone who is grandstanding and running for president at the expense of his own party and his own country," complained Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democrat. With the president's approval ratings in the 30s, the argument went, why remind Americans of Bush's best issue -- his muscular posture in the war on terror?

Even as the establishment fumed, liberal bloggers and online activists championed Feingold's move, reveling in the heavy coverage by the nation's newspapers, which have followed the debate closely. In the censure hearing on Friday, Feingold returned the praise, quoting the blogger Glenn Greenwald's comparison of Richard Nixon during Watergate and George W. Bush during the current warrantless wiretapping scandal. There is an overwhelming consensus among online liberals that any comparisons like this will eventually bring great rewards at the ballot box.

Republicans, meanwhile, think the Democratic base is walking off a cliff. For days, the Republican National Committee has been crowing about all of Feingold's press with the same enthusiasm as the liberal bloggers. The Republicans released a new Web advertisement on Friday. On Sunday, after Feingold appeared on Fox News, the GOP attack dogs sent out a press release that blared, "Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) Claims President's Use Of Terrorist Surveillance Program Worse Than Watergate."
The pollsters will tell us soon enough who is right. Can Feingold generate more skepticism of Bush among teetering independent voters? Or will Feingold only distract the country from the president's failures on just about every other public policy issue?

The answer could tell us a lot about the power of the liberal blogosphere. In 2004, the results for online activists at the polls were not so impressive. Internet campaigns for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark in 2004 fizzled. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga at Daily Kos went 0 for 13 in picking Democratic congressional candidates.

But times they are a'changing, with more Americans than ever going online for political news. As the Times reports today, "The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans."

I don't know the answer. On issues like censure, the bloggers may be right, and the Washington establishment wrong. But we will know soon enough. Feingold is forcing the issue. Come November, the moment of truth will be upon us.
-- Michael Scherer
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April 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
John and Jerry

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Well, I'll be damned. At least, that's what the Rev. Jerry Falwell says. Last month Mr. Falwell issued a statement explaining that, in his view, Jews can't go to heaven unless they convert to Christianity. And what Mr. Falwell says matters — maybe not in heaven, but here on earth. After all, he's a kingmaker in today's Republican Party.

Senator John McCain obviously believes that he can't get the Republican presidential nomination without Mr. Falwell's approval. During the 2000 campaign, Mr. McCain denounced Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." But next month Mr. McCain will be a commencement speaker at Liberty University, which Mr. Falwell founded.
On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Mr. McCain was asked to explain his apparent flip-flop. "I believe," he replied, "that the Christian right has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is because they're so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our party."

So what has happened since the 2000 campaign to convince Mr. McCain that Mr. Falwell is not, in fact, an agent of intolerance? Maybe it was Mr. Falwell's TV appearance with Mr. Robertson on Sept. 13, 2001, during which the two religious leaders agreed that the terrorist attack two days earlier was divine punishment for American immorality. "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," said Mr. Falwell, who also declared, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America! — I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

Or maybe it was Mr. Falwell's appearance on "60 Minutes" in October 2002, when he declared, "I think Muhammad was a terrorist." Muhammad, he said, was "a violent man" — unlike Mr. Falwell, I guess, who said of terrorists that we should "blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

After each of these incidents, by the way, Mr. Falwell issued what were described as "apologies." But they weren't apologies — they were statements along the lines of, "I'm sorry that some people were upset by what I said." It's clear that in each case Mr. Falwell's offensive remarks were not a slip of the tongue; they reflected his deeply held beliefs.

And that's why it's important to hold someone like Mr. McCain — who is still widely regarded as a moderate, in spite of his extremely conservative voting record — accountable when he cozies up to Mr. Falwell. Nobody thinks that Mr. McCain shares all of Mr. Falwell's views. But when Mr. McCain said that the Christian right had a right to be part of the Republican Party, he was in effect saying that Mr. Falwell's statements were within the realm of acceptable political discourse.

Just to be clear: this is a free country, and Mr. Falwell has a right to say what he thinks, even if his views include the belief that other people, by saying what they think, brought down God's wrath on America. By the same token, any political party has a right to include Mr. Falwell and his supporters, just as any politician has a right to make a political alliance with Mr. Falwell.

But if you choose to make common cause with religious extremists, you are accepting some responsibility for their extremism. By welcoming Mr. Falwell and people like him as members of their party, Republicans are saying that it's O.K. — not necessarily correct, but O.K. — to declare that 9/11 was America's punishment for its tolerance of abortion and homosexuality, that Islam is a terrorist religion, and that Jews can't go to heaven. And voters should judge the Republican Party accordingly.

As for Mr. McCain: his denunciation of Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson six years ago helped give him a reputation as a moderate on social issues. Now that he has made up with Mr. Falwell and endorsed South Dakota's ban on abortion even in the case of rape or incest, only two conclusions are possible: either he isn't a social moderate after all, or he's a cynical political opportunist.
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LOCAL (KC)

Subject: Another Legal Victory for Stem Cell Initiative Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 12:09:16 -0500
Learn more:www.MissouriCures.com

March 29, 2006
Coalition Update
BREAKING NEWS – Another Legal Victory for Stem Cell Initiative

Stem cell opponents were again defeated in their challenge to the fairness and accuracy of the official ballot summary of our Initiative prepared by the Secretary of State. Yesterday, the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District upheld the January 19 decision by Cole County Circuit Judge Byron Kinder that the ballot summary was “fair and accurate.” In the affirming opinion, Judge Victor C. Howard wrote, “The summary states that the initiative bans human cloning and, by its very terms, the
initiative does that.”

“Missouri courts have twice rejected our opponents’ attack on the Stem Cell Initiative,” said Coalition Chair Donn Rubin. ”It’s now time to move out of the courtroom and into the court of public opinion where Missouri voters can voice their support for the Stem Cell Initiative.”

Below are excerpts from the Associated Press story about yesterday’s court ruling.

Associated Press
March 28, 2006

Stem cell ballot language upheld a state appeals court on Tuesday affirmed a lower court's ruling upholding the language of a ballot proposal to protect stem cell research.

Opponents of the proposed amendment argue the language could lead voters to be deceived into approving human cloning for research purposes.

Supporters counter that the language summarizing the initiative accurately explains that the amendment would ban human cloning. They say the amendment would guarantee that all stem cell research allowed by the federal government could occur in Missouri.

The appeals court found that while opponents who challenged the ballot summary argued it was unfair, they agreed that the summary matches the ballot language.

As such, the court said, they can take issue with the ballot proposal's definition of human cloning, but not with the secretary of state's summary of it.

"While appellants may disagree with the initiative's definition of human cloning, that alone does not make the summary inaccurate," according to the appeals court opinion written by Judge Victor Howard. "... In effect, appellants want us to revise the summary to highlight the underlying controversy surrounding the merits of the initiative. Resolution of that controversy must be left to the political process."

The Alliance Defense Fund, which represented residents who challenged the ballot summary language, said it was considering whether to appeal to the state Supreme Court or to wait and challenge the proposal once it gets on the ballot.

The Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures said it was pleased with the ruling and that its signature-gathering efforts are going well.

"What's important is that there's a summary that fairly captures what is in the Missouri stem cell initiative because we know that most Missourians support what the initiative will do, which is ensure that Missouri patients and Missouri institutions will be treated equally," chairman Donn Rubin said.

Coalition Membership Keeps Growing

Our Coalition continues to grow daily. More than 600 Missouri physicians have now joined as individual members. Among the new patient and medical organization members of our Coalition are the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, National Brain Tumor Foundation, Mound City Medical Forum and American Liver Foundation Missouri Chapter. To see an updated list, please visit the “Who We Are” section of our Coalition website.

Setting the Record Straight on Adult Stem Cell Cures

In an attempt to make people think early stem (ES) cell research isn’t worthwhile, opponents are claiming that adult stem cells already provide cures for 65 diseases. This is false. The claim is apparently based on a list created by an opponent of ES cell research named David Prentice. Amazingly, there are a number of medical conditions included on his list – such as Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injury – that are currently incurable with any form of treatment, including adult stem
cells. Moreover, no existing FDA-approved adult stem cell treatments are available for the majority of the other medical conditions on the Prentice list.

The truth is, there are currently approved adult stem cell treatments for about 10 medical conditions. Adult stem cells from bone marrow are also used to ameliorate the side effects caused by drug or radiation treatments used to treat some types of cancer and other diseases. However, the supposed list of “65 adult stem cell treatments” touted by opponents of ES cell research is a cynical distortion of the facts that is cruelly misleading to patients and unethically misleading to voters.

Coalition Speakers Sharing the Facts on the Initiative

Our Speakers Bureau continues to make great strides in providing the facts on the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative to voters throughout the state. In just a few months, our speakers have made nearly 80 presentations and another 40 Speakers Bureau presentations are already on the schedule. If you are involved with a group that would like to hear the facts on the Stem Cell Initiative, please contact us at 800-829-4133.


Thank you for your continuing support. We encourage you to forward this email to your friends to help us spread the word about the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative.

See the latest news and information about the Coalition and the Stem Cell Initiative on our website at www.MissouriCures.com.
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Your Democratic Party News:

TRUMAN DAYS 2006 Invitation Attached. Please pass on and forward on to any and all Democrats!!

The most cost efficient (and cheapest) way for you to express your dedication to the Democratic Party is to be a "Truman Days Democratic Booster." For only $10.00, your name will be published in the commemorative Truman Days booklet on the Democratic Boosters Page. Send your $10.00 today to:
Tedi Rowland, Treasurer, Jackson Co. Democratic Party
14401 Covington Rd, Independence, MO 64055. Democrats from across the country will be listed on this elite Democratic list. Don't be left out!!
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Attached is the February 2006 copy of the Missouri House Democratic Caucus Newsletter. The Democratic Caucus is working to keep us informed on their work to move Missouri forward. Your leaders in Jefferson City would appreciate any feedback you might have regarding the attachment. If you have any input, please contact Staff Assistant Kristin Perrin at kristin.perrin@house.mo.gov. Look for another issue next month.
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You have been waiting for your opportunity to help Claire McCaskill in her effort to unseat Jim Talent and here it is.
Please Join Claire and her special guest Mark Warner of Virginia for a special breakfast program on Saturday, April 8, 2006 from 9:30 am to 11:00 am at the Downtown KC Marriott in the Count Basie Ballroom, 200 W. 12th St., Kansas City, Missouri. Event prices are $100 for General Seating, $250 for Patron, & $500 for Sponsor.

For those of you that have that extra Democratic generosity for the most important race this year, Claire has asked me to invite people to be Event Co-Chairs to raise or give $2,500 or Event Hosts to give or raise $1,000. For all of the Co-Chairs and Event Hosts there will be a pre-breakfast Private Reception with Governor Warner. Please RSVP by Wednesday April 5th. For more information please contact Brook Balentine at 816-960-6678 or by email at brook@claireonline.com.

Claire recently had an outstanding fundraiser in St. Louis with Senator Obama, so let's show Claire that the even though we love our friends in eastern Missouri, the folks in western Missouri are as dedicated to her campaign as them........if not more!!
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Add these to events to your calendar:

April 8, 2006: Breakfast with our next US Senator Claire McCaskill & Governor Mark Warner at 9:30 am at the KC Marriott. Event Hosts and Co-Chair opportunities available and general tickets as low as $100. Invitation attached to this e-mail. For more information please contact Brook Balentine at 816-960-6678 or by email at brook@claireonline.com.

MAY 5 & 6: TRUMAN DAYS 2006 Jackson County's annual premier Democratic Celebration. Details to come. You won't want to miss it! SEE ATTACHED invitation AND PASS IT ON!!
Call 816-821-8531 or plevota@yahoo.com with questions.

May 25, 2006: The Committee for County Progress End of the Legislative Session Wrap Reception will be held at the home of Dale Youngs at 525 Emanuel Cleaver Blvd (near the Nelson Atkins Museum) and will run from 5:30 till 7:00. This fundraiser is a CCP tradition and your local state reps and senators will report on the recent legislative session. For only $25, you can join the CCP members in hearing the latest about Missouri state government. For information contact Steve Bough at 816-221-8443 or StephenBough@henningbough.com.
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There's the news. Here's the rant!

From the DNC:
On the weekend Republicans gathered in Memphis to coronate their standard bearer for the 2008 presidential election, the GOP is coming apart at the seams. A party that once stood for respectable conservative principles has become a mere parody of itself. The party that once stood for fiscal sanity has run up the largest deficits in American history. The party that once campaigned on a strong national defense has weakened our security because of complete ineptitude in their prosecution of the war in Iraq, and was willing to hand t! he keys to our ports over to a foreign, state-owned company with ties to Al-Qaeda.

The party that once stood for minimal government intrusion is protecting a full-scale domestic spying program and increasingly looks to take up residence in the bedrooms and doctor's offices of Americans across the country. It's no longer the Grand Ol' Party, it's become the Grand Ol' Parody.

It's no wonder the American people are flocking in droves to the Democratic Party in time for the 2006 election. As the latest AP poll showed, Americans overwhelmingly prefer a Democratic Congress to serve as a check on an executive branch running completely afoul of the Constitution. The Republican controlled congress has thoroughly laid waste to the system of checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution.

The American people want a party that represents a message of inclusion, a united party with a plan. And they have just that in the Democratic Party:
1. American jobs that will stay in America, using energy independence to generate those jobs.
2. A strong national defense based on telling the truth to our citizens, our soldiers and our allies.
3. Honesty and integrity to be restored to government.
4. A health care system that works for everybody just like they have in 36 other countries.
5. A strong public education system so we can have optimism and opportunity back in America.
I know you hear all the time, "What do Democrats stand for?."
Well there's our top 5!

Phil LeVota
Chairman
Jackson County Democratic Committee
Visit our website: www.jacksoncountydemocrats.org
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Join us for True Blue Women’s General Membership Meeting on April 10. The meeting will feature a panel of experts who will address the critical issues in Education facing Kansas schoolchildren, as well as suggest ways for us to impact the upcoming KS School Board and legislative races. The speakers represent key groups involved in True Blue’s issues of concern including: the recent science standards vote by the school board, issues surrounding school funding legislation, opt-out vs. opt-in sex education, and book censorship. The panelists are:

· Moderator: Janis McMillen, League of Women Voters
· Kathy Cook, Kansas Families United for Public Education
· Lisa Elliott, KNEA
· Boo Tyson, MAINStream Coalition
· Dick Morrissey, Kansas Alliance for Education

Please join us on April 10, and bring a friend who shares your interest in advocating for change and protecting progressive values in education for all Kansas schoolchildren!

Monday, April 10 at 7:00pm
Asbury Methodist Church, Northeast corner of 75th and Nall, Prairie Village
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Wow! Hasn't it been SO exciting to see the momentum for positive changes to our immigration laws sweep the country, from massive and peaceful rallies in Chicago, California, Arizona, and Colorado, to Cardinals speaking from the pulpit, to dozens of phone calls each day to our Senators' offices, to spontaneous actions right here in Kansas City? The media, the public, and our own immigrant communities are taking notice, and we know that THE TIME IS NOW for us to push for the changes we've worked and waited for for so long!

As part of these efforts, Kansas City will be part of the National Day of Action on comprehensive immigration reform, Monday, April 10th, 2006, with a rally from 5-6:30PM in Kansas City, Missouri. This is an important step for us, in that it will be the first gathering in years on the Missouri side focused on our shared struggle for fair and humane immigration laws and also that it is designed to coincide with expected Senate floor action on immigration. We will know by the end of this week, most likely, the shape of a Senate Judiciary Committee bill hoped to be the foundation for that debate, and our actions on April 10th will serve to keep our community and interested persons informed about the rapidly-changing environment in Washington, DC as well as to demonstrate the ongoing commitment to comprehensive reforms.

Please note: This is not an economic boycott or 'work stoppage' day, but rather a community event to continue the wave of support for commonsense, realistic, and humane reforms. Please make plans to join us that afternoon--families are welcome, and we'll have some carpooling locations around the city as well as public transportation to make the trip downtown easier. Flyers are attached, and please share them with others who may be interested in being a part of this historic national event. Please call if you have questions.

El 10 de Abril, 2006, será el Día Nacional de Acción sobre la reforma migratoria. Tendremos una movilización en Kansas City, MO a las 5-6:30PM, para proveer información sobre los cambios y el debate en el Congreso y demostrar nuestro apoyo para una reforma humana y justa (no es un paro de trabajo o boicoteo, pero un evento familiar para continuar el movimiento pro-inmigrante en nuestra comunidad). Favor de compartir la información mandada con este mensaje, y de llamar si tiene alguna pregunta. Queremos seguir con esta lucha hasta una victoria, y sabemos que AHORA ES EL MOMENTO!

Melinda K. Lewis, LMSW
Director of Policy Advocacy and Research
El Centro, Inc.
650 Minnesota Avenue
Kansas City, KS 66101
913-677-0100
mlewis@elcentroinc.com
www.elcentroinc.com
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This is from Ira Harritt, who spoke to us at our last Blue Hearts meeting. I hope some Blue Hearts were able to participate (those of you not on spring break!) K

Dear Friends

I want to thanks all who volunteered, attended or otherwise supported the 3rd Anniversary Mass Peace Gathering and helped make it a great success. It took all of us working together in many many long meetings, taking care of details, and hours of set up and clean up to make the event a success.

Even in the face of ominous weather forecasts and blustery chill winds we had over 1,200 people attend sending a strong message to the public and to our elected officials that it is time to end the war and bring the troops home.

We received news coverage from TV channels 4 (Fox), 9 (ABC) and 41 (NBC), the KC Star, live interviews on KKFI radio and other stories are yet to be printed.

And more than that we involved new people in speaking out and getting involved.

But as you know there is still much to do to increase the number of voices calling for an end to this war and to aggressive pre-emptive war-making policies; more to do to keep the pressure up and to mobilize people into a political force.

Again thanks for your hard work! Thank you for standing for peace!

Sincerely,
Ira Harritt
Call 816 931-5256 for more information

We will continue to collect post cards

We will be continuing to collect post cards with messages to elected officials which will be hand delivered by a KC Iraq Task Force delegation. The cards, one for Missouri and another for Kansas legislators, have the pictures, names and hometowns of the MO and KS military persons who have been killed in Iraq on the front with the back blank for personal messages to officials. Would you like to organize your group to write more post cards which we can include in the batch we deliver? They will be down loadable from the KC Iraq Task Force website in the near future or you can call the AFSC office at 816 931-5256 for some copies.

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Three Years – A Reflection from a Woman Blogger in Baghdad
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#114264288537634165
By: Riverbend

It has been three years since the beginning of the war that marked the end of Iraq’s independence. Three years of occupation and bloodshed.

Spring should be about renewal and rebirth. For Iraqis, spring has been about reliving painful memories and preparing for future disasters. In many ways, this year is like 2003 prior to the war when we were stocking up on fuel, water, food and first aid supplies and medications. We're doing it again this year but now we don't discuss what we're stocking up for. Bombs and B-52's are so much easier to face than other possibilities.

I don’t think anyone imagined three years ago that things could be quite this bad today. The last few weeks have been ridden with tension. I’m so tired of it all- we’re all tired.

Three years and the electricity is worse than ever. The security situation has gone from bad to worse. The country feels like it’s on the brink of chaos once more- but a pre-planned, pre-fabricated chaos being led by religious militias and zealots.

School, college and work have been on again, off again affairs. It seems for every two days of work/school, there are five days of sitting at home waiting for the situation to improve. Right now college and school are on hold because the “arba3eeniya” or the “40th Day” is coming up - more black and green flags, mobs of men in black and latmiyas. We were told the children should try going back to school next Wednesday. I say “try” because prior to the much-awaited parliamentary meeting a couple of days ago, schools were out. After the Samarra mosque bombing, schools were out. The children have been at home this year more than they’ve been in school.

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EVERY Sunday: Iraq Peace Vigil, 4pm, JC Nichols Fountain, 47th & Main, Streets, Kansas City, MO http://www.kciraqtaskforce.org/

EVERY TUESDAY: Join this Peace Demonstration Every Tuesday between 5PM - 6 PM in the median strip on the south corner of the intersection at 63rd & Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Mo. For more information email '63rd Street Patriots' - Bob Rowe (exgman47@yahoo.com) or Carol (schwartzkatz@mail.carrollsweb.com).

10 Reasons Why the U.S. Must Leave Iraq
http://www.afsc.org/iraq/activism/10-reasons.htm

New web spot -- http://peaceandjusticecoffeehouse.blogspot.com/

Peace and Justice Teach-Ins are supported by: the Alliance for Democracy, American Friends Service Committee, Greens of Greater Kansas City, Holy Family Catholic Worker House ... and others. This support does not necessarily imply endorsement of the views of any speaker or presentation.

Peace and Justice Teach-Ins are meant to be a free speech forum for progressive thought. "Peace and Justice Teach-Ins" neither advocates nor endorses violent or illegal acts. For more information or to make corrections, or to suggest speakers, call (816) 931-5256.

The information and events described in AFSC Peace and Justice Alerts are intended to educate and assist members of our community in becoming active in working for a more just and peaceful world. Inclusion of a listing does not necessarily imply that AFSC KC agrees with all points of view that will be represented at the event.

The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace, and humanitarian service. Its work is based on the Quaker belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice

We need your support to keep our life affirming peacemaking work alive. Contribute. Volunteer. Spread the word! Contact us and mail your tax deductible contribution to:
American Friends Service Committee
4405 Gillham Rd., KCMO 64110
(816) 931-5256

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From the….
Friends of Bob Johnson

Are you looking for a public policy leader who can offer a point of view that is clear and compelling without being strident and extreme? Do you wonder where the moderate Republicans have gone? In today’s political climate, they are hard to find.

One of the few and the brave is our friend, Missouri Representative Bob Johnson, one of less than a handful of moderate Republican voices left in the Missouri legislature. He represents eastern Jackson County, with over 20 years experience in both the House and the Senate.

Bob combines smart business policy with strong support for stem cell research—both vital to good health policy and a vibrant research community in Kansas City.

But moderate Republican voices like Bob’s are rare. The senate seat covering Bob’s district is currently occupied by far-right Republican Matt Bartle, who, among other things, is dead wrong on stem cell research. Bartle’s ideological views are clearly out of step with his district’s constituents and the best interests of the Kansas City metropolitan area.

You can make a difference in the advancement of lifesaving cures by supporting a candidate who understands how critical stem cell research is to the health of our families and our community. But Bob’s state senate election campaign is about far more than a single issue. We want you to learn more.

Please join us to meet Bob Johnson—the candidate who offers us a strong moderate voice for Missouri and a clear vision of a community that can become an even better place where all of us can live.

Although the event has passed, feel free to mail a donation to Sharon Hoffman. She can get it to Bob Johnson. Thanks. K

Sharon and John Hoffman
210 west 5th Street

Suggested Donation: $650, $300, $150
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Hi guys. Here is a recap since you could not come to the rally. Feel free to send this on to anyone you think might give two cents. Your money is so well spent on THIS MAN and THIS ELECTION!

The event last night was great. We had about 150 attendees. Mark Parkinson and Paul Morrison both spoke a bit about their Republican backgrounds, and how they have migrated to the Democratic Party because the conservative right wing leanings of the Republican Party no longer represents their moderate positions. (I am paraphrasing).

They both spoke a lot about Phill Kline and his political aspirations and abuse of the office of AG. Interestingly enough, Phil Kline has NEVER tried a case. He has NEVER practiced law. He is a career politician. Before holding office he had a radio show. In contrast, Morrison has personally argued 120 jury cases, with a 98% conviction rate. These cases were not cherry picked (as some DA’s tend to do). He has been Johnson County DA for 17 years (elected to 4 consecutive terms) and was assistant DA for 9. The man is a proven lawman. He is also bipartisan and has no political agenda. He drove this home by making a bit of a joke by saying, “How often have you heard someone say they are going to prosecute a sexual predator in a “Republican” way or a “Democratic” way?”

As Paul indicated, the office of top law enforcer in the state is not about personal political callings. It’s about a respect for law and order; a capacity to carry out genuine law enforcement and prosecutorial know how. He drove home that Phill Kline should not be using the Attorney General’s office to diminish our right to privacy (accessing our medical records) but rather to ensure that our most private information (medical records) is protected.

So please, send you $$$$. I am impassioned!!!!!!!!

Send to: Paul Morrison Committee, PO Box 4028, Topeka, KS 66604-0028
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Church and state
Keep them separate

Christians make up 75 percent to 80 percent of the adult population in the United States. And that percentage has increased over the last decade and a half.

That’s what makes a resolution passed last month by a committee in the Missouri House so puzzling.

The disturbing resolution endorses prayer in public schools and religious displays on government property. It asserts the right for the state legislature to officially recognize the Christian roots of this country in a way that would be offensive to many people.

The Constitution allows individual members of the legislature to express their religious beliefs. But the state legislature or any other public body is not the place to do so. Time and again, courts have said so. The resolution also flies in the face of court decisions that prohibit religious displays on government property.

Supporters of the resolution note the religious beliefs of the nation’s founders. But these founders actually had a variety of different views on religion. And they wisely built a constitutional wall between faith and politics, fearing the institution of a state-controlled religion.

The Missouri resolution is another in a series of challenges from some Christians to the separation of church and state in recent years, but the system has worked well for more than 200 years — while many other nations have continued to suffer terrible consequences because they lack such separation. Why change now?

These challenges to American tradition seem to be built around the baseless fear that somehow America is losing its Christian roots. They are a slap in the face to the millions of Americans who choose another faith or no faith at all — as well as Christians who understand why government needs to stay away from religion.

The country doesn’t need the Missouri House to officially recognize its Christian roots. The full House should respect the separation of church and state and quickly put the resolution aside.

© 2006 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.kansascity.com