Video shows dead Afghan children after US raid
By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 8 minutes ago
Two videos that appear to show the bodies of at least 10 children and many more adults covered in blankets and white shrouds lend weight to Afghan and U.N. allegations that a U.S.-led raid killed scores of civilians last month.
One video, obtained by The Associated Press on Monday and apparently taken by a cell phone, is grainy and details such as a precise body count are difficult to make out. But it appears that several dozen bodies, all covered by blankets, are lined up one next to another in a mosque.
Wailing Afghan women and men occasionally lift the blankets to show dead children or the disfigured faces of men.
A second video shows three young children wrapped in white shrouds. A fourth child has gruesome head wounds. In total, the bodies of at least 10 children can be seen.
The two videos, both obtained by The Associated Press, give weight to Afghan and U.N. findings that scores of civilians, including 60 children and 15 women, died in the Aug. 22 U.S.-led raid in the village of Azizabad. U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos carried out the operation.
A U.S. investigation found that only seven civilians died, as well as up to 35 militants, but the U.S. on Sunday said it would reopen the investigation because of emerging new evidence, an apparent reference to the videos, which have been in the possession of Afghan intelligence and the U.N. but have leaked to media outlets.
The new evidence that prompted the review is "some imagery evidence" that came to the attention of Gen. David D. McKiernan, who is the commander of the NATO-led force here, over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday.
He declined to say whether it was the cell phone video or something else.
"There is some evidence that suggests that the evidence that the U.S. military used in ... its investigation may not have been complete," Whitman said.
He said the general to be sent to Afghanistan by Central Command will review the initial investigation and how it was done.
But it is also possible that there will be a new investigation of the raid in Azizabad itself — this time by Central Command — said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the command in Tampa., Fla.
The grainy cell phone video, shot by an unnamed Afghan aid official and handed over to the United Nations mission in Kabul, shows two long rows of people apparently killed during the raid, laid on the mosque floor before burial.
As Afghan women and a young boy sob over some of the bodies, bearded and turbaned men walk around, lifting some of the scarfs and blankets covering the dead.
At least eight children can be identified in the two videos. Two of them look as though they are asleep. One child has half of a skull blown off.
It was impossible to verify conclusively that the videos showed the aftermath of the Azizabad attack, but the contents of the video matched claims by Afghan and U.N. officials that the videos showed the U.S. operation killed far more civilians than the military has admitted to.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has for years now warned the U.S. and NATO that it must stop killing civilians in its bombing runs, saying such deaths undermine his government and the international mission. But the Azizabad incident could finally push Karzai to take action.
Shortly after the Azizabad attack, he ordered a review of whether the U.S. and NATO should be allowed to use airstrikes or carry out raids in villages. He also called for an updated "status of force" agreement between the Afghan government and foreign militaries. That review has not yet been completed.
Nek Mohammad Ishaq, a provincial council member in Herat and a member of the Afghan investigating commission, has said photographs and video taken of the victims are with Afghanistan's secretive intelligence service.
Afghan officials say U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos raided the village while hundreds of people were gathered in a large compound for a memorial service honoring a tribal leader, Timor Shah, who was killed eight months ago by a rival, Nader Tawakal.
The U.S. investigative report released Tuesday said American and Afghan forces took fire from militants while approaching Azizabad and that "justified use of well-aimed small-arms fire and close air support to defend the combined force."
The report said investigators discovered evidence that the militants planned to attack a nearby coalition base. Evidence collected included weapons, explosives, intelligence materials and an access badge to the base, as well as photographs from inside and outside the base.
But Afghan officials say Reza and other members of his family provided security and reconstruction work for the nearby U.S. base, and were not Taliban.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post (September 8, 2008)
McCain's Convenient Untruth
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 8, 2008; A17
When it comes to fighting wars, John McCain stands up and calls for sacrifice. "We never hide from history; we make history," he declared in his convention speech. But when it comes to taxes, McCain is unwilling to demand even a teensy bit of sacrifice. In a McCain administration, Americans would not have to surrender a dime more of their money to a cause larger than themselves.
Why this bipolar attitude toward sacrifice? Start with the answer that McCain himself provides. "My tax cuts will create jobs. His tax increases will eliminate them," he said at the convention, offering one of the speech's few policy contrasts between Obama's platform and his own. In other words, McCain is not calling for tax sacrifice because he believes it would be counterproductive. On taxes, he is saying, you can selfishly avoid sacrifice -- and serve the public good.
This, unfortunately, is a convenient untruth. Tax hikes taken to an extreme can indeed backfire, harming growth and job creation. But it's a stretch to assert that Barack Obama's tax plan would do that. And it's downright scandalous to pretend that the economy can be strengthened in anything other than the short run by unaffordable tax cuts.
Obama is not proposing to raise taxes for most Americans. To the contrary, he would triple the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners, increasing work incentives at the bottom. He would cut taxes on people in the middle -- indeed, he would do so more aggressively than McCain would. It is only the wealthiest Americans who would face higher tax bills under Obama. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would require the richest 1 percent of Americans to sacrifice a modest 1.5 percent of their after-tax income in 2012. By contrast, no-sacrifice McCain would award America's elite a 9.5 percent increase.
How might this impact jobs and the economy? Under Obama's plan, top earners would pay a marginal federal tax rate of maybe 46.5 percent (that includes the Medicare tax and Obama's proposed hike in Social Security taxes), considerably more than the 37.9 percent they would pay under McCain. There's no doubt that Obama's higher tax rates would mean weaker incentives to work, take risks and innovate; and stronger incentives to waste time and effort on avoiding the tax man.
But those bad effects must be weighed against a good one: Higher tax rates mean a lower budget deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan. Less government borrowing ultimately means lower interest rates and more private investment. This positive effect may well outweigh the blow to growth and jobs from weaker work incentives.
Tax hikes, in other words, are not automatic job destroyers. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, a top expert on this subject, says bluntly, "There is no compelling evidence that a low-tax strategy is better for the economy over the medium or long run." Just look at the Clinton era. In 1993, the top marginal rate (income tax plus Medicare) was raised to 42.5 percent -- the same rate that Obama proposes but minus the candidate's proposed increase in the payroll tax. During the rest of the Clinton period, the economy generated millions of new jobs, and careful academic postmortems find that the 1993 tax hike caused little to no damage to the incentives of top earners.
So McCain's swipe at Obama's tax plan was something other than straight talk. As a share of the economy, Obama's plan would create an overall tax burden similar to the one that existed in Ronald Reagan's time. It would not choke off job creation; rather, it would slow the growth of the deficit and soften inequality. But the really depressing thing is that McCain himself once knew that. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before he supported them, saying that they would deepen inequality. But now he touts a tax reduction that is larger and more radical than even President Bush proposed, and he slams his opponent for holding the view that he himself held until recently.
McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 8, 2008; A17
When it comes to fighting wars, John McCain stands up and calls for sacrifice. "We never hide from history; we make history," he declared in his convention speech. But when it comes to taxes, McCain is unwilling to demand even a teensy bit of sacrifice. In a McCain administration, Americans would not have to surrender a dime more of their money to a cause larger than themselves.
Why this bipolar attitude toward sacrifice? Start with the answer that McCain himself provides. "My tax cuts will create jobs. His tax increases will eliminate them," he said at the convention, offering one of the speech's few policy contrasts between Obama's platform and his own. In other words, McCain is not calling for tax sacrifice because he believes it would be counterproductive. On taxes, he is saying, you can selfishly avoid sacrifice -- and serve the public good.
This, unfortunately, is a convenient untruth. Tax hikes taken to an extreme can indeed backfire, harming growth and job creation. But it's a stretch to assert that Barack Obama's tax plan would do that. And it's downright scandalous to pretend that the economy can be strengthened in anything other than the short run by unaffordable tax cuts.
Obama is not proposing to raise taxes for most Americans. To the contrary, he would triple the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners, increasing work incentives at the bottom. He would cut taxes on people in the middle -- indeed, he would do so more aggressively than McCain would. It is only the wealthiest Americans who would face higher tax bills under Obama. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would require the richest 1 percent of Americans to sacrifice a modest 1.5 percent of their after-tax income in 2012. By contrast, no-sacrifice McCain would award America's elite a 9.5 percent increase.
How might this impact jobs and the economy? Under Obama's plan, top earners would pay a marginal federal tax rate of maybe 46.5 percent (that includes the Medicare tax and Obama's proposed hike in Social Security taxes), considerably more than the 37.9 percent they would pay under McCain. There's no doubt that Obama's higher tax rates would mean weaker incentives to work, take risks and innovate; and stronger incentives to waste time and effort on avoiding the tax man.
But those bad effects must be weighed against a good one: Higher tax rates mean a lower budget deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan. Less government borrowing ultimately means lower interest rates and more private investment. This positive effect may well outweigh the blow to growth and jobs from weaker work incentives.
Tax hikes, in other words, are not automatic job destroyers. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, a top expert on this subject, says bluntly, "There is no compelling evidence that a low-tax strategy is better for the economy over the medium or long run." Just look at the Clinton era. In 1993, the top marginal rate (income tax plus Medicare) was raised to 42.5 percent -- the same rate that Obama proposes but minus the candidate's proposed increase in the payroll tax. During the rest of the Clinton period, the economy generated millions of new jobs, and careful academic postmortems find that the 1993 tax hike caused little to no damage to the incentives of top earners.
So McCain's swipe at Obama's tax plan was something other than straight talk. As a share of the economy, Obama's plan would create an overall tax burden similar to the one that existed in Ronald Reagan's time. It would not choke off job creation; rather, it would slow the growth of the deficit and soften inequality. But the really depressing thing is that McCain himself once knew that. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before he supported them, saying that they would deepen inequality. But now he touts a tax reduction that is larger and more radical than even President Bush proposed, and he slams his opponent for holding the view that he himself held until recently.
McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.
Truthout.org (Sept. 5, 2008)
Nearly 600,000 Subject to Possible Caging in Ohio
Friday 05 September 2008
by: David Rosenfeld, Miller-McCune
How many voter-registration mass mailers are "returned to sender" in the run-up to Election Day may determine how many Ohio residents are eligible to vote.
Ohio election officials are sending out a mass mailer stamped "do not forward" to all registered voters today (Sept. 5) with an absentee ballot application and other important notices for Nov. 4.
What's important here is not so much what's going out as what's being returned to sender.
Unbeknownst to the would-be recipients, the same mailer - just 60 days before the election - has the potential to determine their eligibility to vote, challenged not by election officials but by partisan opposition.
A similar mailer in March netted nondeliverable mail from almost 600,000 registered voters in just five Ohio counties who could now have their ballots thrown out for voting under the wrong address.
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.
The law doesn't, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day - known as voter caging - based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.
In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting "ballot security programs" that focus on minority voters.
No evidence so far suggests Republicans - vote caging is essentially a GOP sport - have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn't rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.
A challenged voter will likely cast a provisional ballot, which often requires voters to return to election divisions to prove their identity and address. Nearly a third of all 1.6 million provisional ballots cast in 2004 were thrown out.
Voting-rights groups don't oppose voter-roll housekeeping, but they cite the federal law as evidence that executing it so close to the actual election isn't fair.
The fraud that voter caging purportedly roots out is relatively rare, although vote solicitors working for the liberal group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in 2004 and again this year were accused of submitting false registration forms. Ohio is one of five states where ACORN employees have been investigated and, in some instances, jailed over submitting false voter registration forms.
Unrelated to ACORN, the Web site GOP.com cites two voting-fraud court cases in Ohio, both focused on individuals casting a second ballot intentionally.
On Nov. 1, 2004, voter-rights groups reacted and challenged the partisan caging in Ohio all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in just two days but lost in a final-hour appeal. This year, they want to be as proactive as possible, said Donita Judge, Ohio staff attorney for the nonprofit Advancement Project.
"A single returned piece of mail is not a reliable basis for challenging the right to vote," Judge said. "Mail may be returned for many reasons, including errors in the database from which the mailing is derived, errors in the mailing labels, failure to include an apartment number or poor matching criteria."
Since 2005, Ohio state law has required a non-forwarded mailer 60 days before each federal election. The suspicious part about the law, Judge said, is that it's set to expire after the November election.
But it's not all about throwing votes out. Another aspect of Ohio's reformed election law is that it opens a window between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6 when voters can register one minute and cast a ballot the next.
That's generally seen as a benefit for Democrats this year since the new registrations refer mainly to 400,000 or so resident college students in Ohio. Obama holds a 2-to-1 lead over McCain among 18- to 34-year-olds, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month.
Following a statewide mailer similar to the one going out today, before the Ohio primary in March, the Advancement Project obtained the lists of returned notices through simple public records requests. The organization requested records from five urban Ohio counties - Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Summit.
The total came to 600,000 names out of 3 million voters, amounting to 19.7 percent of all registered voters.
Sally Krisel, director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said the high percentage was misleading because the mailer in her county included those on the inactive voter roll. Considering only active registered voters, the county received about 5 percent returned in March, she said.
Inactive voters, tagged for possible removal, are given two years to cast a ballot before they can be removed from the rolls. None of the returned, 60-day notices are used for that purpose, Krisel said.
"We have not purged anybody this year," she said. "In big counties, we're often carrying a lot of inactive voters."
In Franklin County, the March mailer went to all registered voters as well. Out of 780,000, more than 150,000 notices were returned. Those voters are now excluded from receiving another notice this week, said Ben Piscitelli, spokesman for the Franklin County Board of Elections. The only public records request for the list so far came from the Obama campaign, Piscitelli said.
Meanwhile, the sweeping Ohio election law loosens the rules around challenging voters. It also strips much of the ability of voters to know they are being challenged and defend their right to vote before an election judge.
Friday 05 September 2008
by: David Rosenfeld, Miller-McCune
How many voter-registration mass mailers are "returned to sender" in the run-up to Election Day may determine how many Ohio residents are eligible to vote.
Ohio election officials are sending out a mass mailer stamped "do not forward" to all registered voters today (Sept. 5) with an absentee ballot application and other important notices for Nov. 4.
What's important here is not so much what's going out as what's being returned to sender.
Unbeknownst to the would-be recipients, the same mailer - just 60 days before the election - has the potential to determine their eligibility to vote, challenged not by election officials but by partisan opposition.
A similar mailer in March netted nondeliverable mail from almost 600,000 registered voters in just five Ohio counties who could now have their ballots thrown out for voting under the wrong address.
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.
The law doesn't, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day - known as voter caging - based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.
In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting "ballot security programs" that focus on minority voters.
No evidence so far suggests Republicans - vote caging is essentially a GOP sport - have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn't rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.
A challenged voter will likely cast a provisional ballot, which often requires voters to return to election divisions to prove their identity and address. Nearly a third of all 1.6 million provisional ballots cast in 2004 were thrown out.
Voting-rights groups don't oppose voter-roll housekeeping, but they cite the federal law as evidence that executing it so close to the actual election isn't fair.
The fraud that voter caging purportedly roots out is relatively rare, although vote solicitors working for the liberal group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in 2004 and again this year were accused of submitting false registration forms. Ohio is one of five states where ACORN employees have been investigated and, in some instances, jailed over submitting false voter registration forms.
Unrelated to ACORN, the Web site GOP.com cites two voting-fraud court cases in Ohio, both focused on individuals casting a second ballot intentionally.
On Nov. 1, 2004, voter-rights groups reacted and challenged the partisan caging in Ohio all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in just two days but lost in a final-hour appeal. This year, they want to be as proactive as possible, said Donita Judge, Ohio staff attorney for the nonprofit Advancement Project.
"A single returned piece of mail is not a reliable basis for challenging the right to vote," Judge said. "Mail may be returned for many reasons, including errors in the database from which the mailing is derived, errors in the mailing labels, failure to include an apartment number or poor matching criteria."
Since 2005, Ohio state law has required a non-forwarded mailer 60 days before each federal election. The suspicious part about the law, Judge said, is that it's set to expire after the November election.
But it's not all about throwing votes out. Another aspect of Ohio's reformed election law is that it opens a window between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6 when voters can register one minute and cast a ballot the next.
That's generally seen as a benefit for Democrats this year since the new registrations refer mainly to 400,000 or so resident college students in Ohio. Obama holds a 2-to-1 lead over McCain among 18- to 34-year-olds, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month.
Following a statewide mailer similar to the one going out today, before the Ohio primary in March, the Advancement Project obtained the lists of returned notices through simple public records requests. The organization requested records from five urban Ohio counties - Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Summit.
The total came to 600,000 names out of 3 million voters, amounting to 19.7 percent of all registered voters.
Sally Krisel, director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said the high percentage was misleading because the mailer in her county included those on the inactive voter roll. Considering only active registered voters, the county received about 5 percent returned in March, she said.
Inactive voters, tagged for possible removal, are given two years to cast a ballot before they can be removed from the rolls. None of the returned, 60-day notices are used for that purpose, Krisel said.
"We have not purged anybody this year," she said. "In big counties, we're often carrying a lot of inactive voters."
In Franklin County, the March mailer went to all registered voters as well. Out of 780,000, more than 150,000 notices were returned. Those voters are now excluded from receiving another notice this week, said Ben Piscitelli, spokesman for the Franklin County Board of Elections. The only public records request for the list so far came from the Obama campaign, Piscitelli said.
Meanwhile, the sweeping Ohio election law loosens the rules around challenging voters. It also strips much of the ability of voters to know they are being challenged and defend their right to vote before an election judge.
Frank Rich - N.Y. Times (Sept. 7, 2008)
September 7, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage
By FRANK RICH
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.
She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.
We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.
That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.
Op-Ed Columnist
Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage
By FRANK RICH
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.
She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.
We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.
That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.
N.Y. Times (Sept. 8, 2008)
September 8, 2008
Editorial
Shrouded Homecomings
One measure of the Bush administration’s efforts to hide the human toll of the war in Iraq is a recent news photograph of commercial airline passengers peering down from their windows as a flag-draped coffin unexpectedly emerges from the cargo bay. Their faces register surprise and grave wariness at this encounter with war’s ultimate price.
The Pentagon has worked hard to make sure that such moments of truth are rare.
During the Vietnam War, photographs of the coffins of military casualties were routinely permitted when the dead arrived home. But a photo ban was imposed during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and the Bush administration has aggressively extended it.
The result is that the return of more than 4,000 dead Americans from Iraq and Afghanistan has been treated as a virtual state secret. Rare photographs of arrival ceremonies have emerged only though lawsuits and drawn-out freedom-of-information struggles.
A worthy proposal that would lift the veil is drawing bipartisan support in the House. It would require the Pentagon to allow accredited journalists access to commemoration services and, most pointedly, the arrival ceremonies for flag-draped coffins coming home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The measure in no way interferes with the right of grieving families to bar news coverage of interments at national cemeteries. The sponsor, Representative Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, focuses instead on the graphic moment of homecoming and honor that has been foolishly denied the nation’s notice.
“I hope that anyone who sees a flag-draped coffin will remember this individual gave his or her life for this country and respect and revere that sacrifice,” he explained this month. Congress should approve his bill.
As the debate over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, the dead keep journeying home. Proper attention and reverence should be paid, in plain sight.
Editorial
Shrouded Homecomings
One measure of the Bush administration’s efforts to hide the human toll of the war in Iraq is a recent news photograph of commercial airline passengers peering down from their windows as a flag-draped coffin unexpectedly emerges from the cargo bay. Their faces register surprise and grave wariness at this encounter with war’s ultimate price.
The Pentagon has worked hard to make sure that such moments of truth are rare.
During the Vietnam War, photographs of the coffins of military casualties were routinely permitted when the dead arrived home. But a photo ban was imposed during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and the Bush administration has aggressively extended it.
The result is that the return of more than 4,000 dead Americans from Iraq and Afghanistan has been treated as a virtual state secret. Rare photographs of arrival ceremonies have emerged only though lawsuits and drawn-out freedom-of-information struggles.
A worthy proposal that would lift the veil is drawing bipartisan support in the House. It would require the Pentagon to allow accredited journalists access to commemoration services and, most pointedly, the arrival ceremonies for flag-draped coffins coming home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The measure in no way interferes with the right of grieving families to bar news coverage of interments at national cemeteries. The sponsor, Representative Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, focuses instead on the graphic moment of homecoming and honor that has been foolishly denied the nation’s notice.
“I hope that anyone who sees a flag-draped coffin will remember this individual gave his or her life for this country and respect and revere that sacrifice,” he explained this month. Congress should approve his bill.
As the debate over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, the dead keep journeying home. Proper attention and reverence should be paid, in plain sight.
Roger Cohen - N.Y. Times (Sept. 8, 2008)
September 8, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Real Wars and the U.S. Culture War
By ROGER COHEN
The culture-war surge in the U.S election campaign has come at the expense of meaningful debate about the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s dangerous because they stand at critical junctures.
We’ve had Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention setting a new low for foreign policy with her attempt to mock Barack Obama’s approach to international terrorists: “He’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
I’m sorry, Ms. Palin, but out there in Alaska, between moose shoots, did you hear about Bagram, Abu Ghraib, renditions, waterboarding, Guantánamo and the rest?
John McCain knows what happens when those rights disappear. He described his Vietnamese nightmare the next night: “They worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.”
A man remembers getting broken: that’s why McCain fought the use of torture by the Bush administration. His condoning of those words from his vice-presidential candidate is appalling. Foreign policy be damned if you can score a God-fearing-macho-versus-liberal-constitutionalist point.
But the bloody wars, seven years after 9/11, have not paused for this sterile U.S. cultural battle. With some 180,000 troops in the two theaters, U.S. reserve capacity is stretched to the limit — something Iran knows when it keeps the centrifuges turning and Russia knows when it grabs Georgia.
In Afghanistan, a Taliban-led insurgency is growing in reach and effectiveness. There’s talk of a mini-surge in U.S. troops there — now about 34,000 — to counter the threat, but little serious reflection on what precise end perhaps 12,000 additional forces would serve. Until that’s clarified, I’m against the mini-surge.
France, which just mini-surged in Afghanistan, is now embroiled in an agonizing debate over the slaying of 10 soldiers, mostly paratroopers, east of Kabul on Aug. 18. At least one had his throat slit. Photos in Paris Match of Taliban forces with uniforms of the Frenchmen have enflamed the national mood.
Hervé Morin, the Defense Minister, has called for “national unity” in fighting a threat “from the Middle Ages.” But polls suggest a majority of the French favor withdrawal. A furor is building over suggestions the paratroopers were abandoned.
These French rumblings are a reminder that the NATO coalition in Afghanistan is fragile and that sending more forces is no remedy in itself.
Obama has been right to say Iraq exacted a price on the Afghan campaign — something McCain airily denies. But his calls to send “at least two additional combat brigades” to Afghanistan and his promise in Denver to “finish the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan” are rash.
After 30 years of war, the Afghan struggle won’t be finished for another 30. It’s a weak country, sandwiched between Iran and Pakistan, two far stronger ones that do not wish it well. The Afghan-Pakistani border cannot be sealed, although it can be better policed; the jihadi traffic across it will continue.
None of this means the United States is condemned to having tens of thousands of troops there for decades — although I’d say that’s more likely than victory in four years.
On the day the French were attacked, a large American military base — Camp Salerno in eastern Khost province — came under sustained Taliban assault. I spoke to a U.S. official who’s just ended an 18-month assignment in Khost.
He sees the exclusive focus on more troops as wrong-headed. The priority must be “an Afghan surge.” Get the Afghan national army to 120,000 troops as a priority, from about half that level today. If more U.S. troops do go, training Afghans should be their first task. Only Afghans can win this.
Pour money into Afghan army salaries (now about $100 a month). Keep buying loyalty with US cash in the provinces, where it counts. Make a big push on human capital — “engineering minds is becoming far more important these days than engineering more roads.” If the best brains leave, the country’s lost.
Rethink policy toward schools. Getting madrassahs registered with the government — and so gaining some control over curricula — is smarter than stigmatizing them and pushing students over the border into Waziri zealotry. Get serious about the national reconciliation program, designed to bring ex-Taliban moderates into politics. Focus on Pakistan.
Absent such cornerstones of a strategy — and absent realistic expectations — surging in Afghanistan is a mistake.
As for Iraq, gains are real but fragile. I don’t see how Obama’s “responsible” withdrawal squares with his 16-month time frame for it. If we don’t want Sunni Iraq to remarry Al Qaeda — and that’s a paramount strategic aim — we’re going to have to play buffer against the dominant Shia for several years. That won’t require the current 146,000 troops, but will require many tens of thousands through the next presidency.
Two intractable wars should preclude the culture war McCain has just so shamelessly embraced. He loves the word “fight.” So fight on the issues — and let the people decide.
Op-Ed Columnist
Real Wars and the U.S. Culture War
By ROGER COHEN
The culture-war surge in the U.S election campaign has come at the expense of meaningful debate about the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s dangerous because they stand at critical junctures.
We’ve had Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention setting a new low for foreign policy with her attempt to mock Barack Obama’s approach to international terrorists: “He’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
I’m sorry, Ms. Palin, but out there in Alaska, between moose shoots, did you hear about Bagram, Abu Ghraib, renditions, waterboarding, Guantánamo and the rest?
John McCain knows what happens when those rights disappear. He described his Vietnamese nightmare the next night: “They worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.”
A man remembers getting broken: that’s why McCain fought the use of torture by the Bush administration. His condoning of those words from his vice-presidential candidate is appalling. Foreign policy be damned if you can score a God-fearing-macho-versus-liberal-constitutionalist point.
But the bloody wars, seven years after 9/11, have not paused for this sterile U.S. cultural battle. With some 180,000 troops in the two theaters, U.S. reserve capacity is stretched to the limit — something Iran knows when it keeps the centrifuges turning and Russia knows when it grabs Georgia.
In Afghanistan, a Taliban-led insurgency is growing in reach and effectiveness. There’s talk of a mini-surge in U.S. troops there — now about 34,000 — to counter the threat, but little serious reflection on what precise end perhaps 12,000 additional forces would serve. Until that’s clarified, I’m against the mini-surge.
France, which just mini-surged in Afghanistan, is now embroiled in an agonizing debate over the slaying of 10 soldiers, mostly paratroopers, east of Kabul on Aug. 18. At least one had his throat slit. Photos in Paris Match of Taliban forces with uniforms of the Frenchmen have enflamed the national mood.
Hervé Morin, the Defense Minister, has called for “national unity” in fighting a threat “from the Middle Ages.” But polls suggest a majority of the French favor withdrawal. A furor is building over suggestions the paratroopers were abandoned.
These French rumblings are a reminder that the NATO coalition in Afghanistan is fragile and that sending more forces is no remedy in itself.
Obama has been right to say Iraq exacted a price on the Afghan campaign — something McCain airily denies. But his calls to send “at least two additional combat brigades” to Afghanistan and his promise in Denver to “finish the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan” are rash.
After 30 years of war, the Afghan struggle won’t be finished for another 30. It’s a weak country, sandwiched between Iran and Pakistan, two far stronger ones that do not wish it well. The Afghan-Pakistani border cannot be sealed, although it can be better policed; the jihadi traffic across it will continue.
None of this means the United States is condemned to having tens of thousands of troops there for decades — although I’d say that’s more likely than victory in four years.
On the day the French were attacked, a large American military base — Camp Salerno in eastern Khost province — came under sustained Taliban assault. I spoke to a U.S. official who’s just ended an 18-month assignment in Khost.
He sees the exclusive focus on more troops as wrong-headed. The priority must be “an Afghan surge.” Get the Afghan national army to 120,000 troops as a priority, from about half that level today. If more U.S. troops do go, training Afghans should be their first task. Only Afghans can win this.
Pour money into Afghan army salaries (now about $100 a month). Keep buying loyalty with US cash in the provinces, where it counts. Make a big push on human capital — “engineering minds is becoming far more important these days than engineering more roads.” If the best brains leave, the country’s lost.
Rethink policy toward schools. Getting madrassahs registered with the government — and so gaining some control over curricula — is smarter than stigmatizing them and pushing students over the border into Waziri zealotry. Get serious about the national reconciliation program, designed to bring ex-Taliban moderates into politics. Focus on Pakistan.
Absent such cornerstones of a strategy — and absent realistic expectations — surging in Afghanistan is a mistake.
As for Iraq, gains are real but fragile. I don’t see how Obama’s “responsible” withdrawal squares with his 16-month time frame for it. If we don’t want Sunni Iraq to remarry Al Qaeda — and that’s a paramount strategic aim — we’re going to have to play buffer against the dominant Shia for several years. That won’t require the current 146,000 troops, but will require many tens of thousands through the next presidency.
Two intractable wars should preclude the culture war McCain has just so shamelessly embraced. He loves the word “fight.” So fight on the issues — and let the people decide.
Chris Hedges - Truthdig.com (Sept. 8, 2008)
Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention
Posted on Sep 8, 2008
By Chris Hedges
St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, “people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail.” It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, “people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized.” It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
The rise of the corporate state means the rise of the surveillance state. The Janus-like face of America swings from packaged and canned spectacles, from nationalist slogans, from seas of flags and Christian crosses, from professions of faith and patriotism, to widespread surveillance, illegal mass detentions, informants, provocateurs and crude acts of repression and violence. We barrel toward a world filled with stupendous lies and blood.
What difference is there between the crowds of flag-waving Republicans and the apparatchiks I covered as a reporter in the old East German Communist Party? These Republican delegates, like the fat and compromised party functionaries in East Berlin, all fawned on cue over an inept and corrupt party hierarchy. They all purported to champion workers’ rights and freedom while they systematically fleeced, disempowered and impoverished the workers they lauded. They all celebrated the virtue of a state that was morally bankrupt. And while they played this con game, one that gave them special privileges, power and wealth, they unleashed their goons and thugs on all who dared to challenge them. We are not East Germany, but we are well on our way. An economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a war with Iran, and we could easily swing into an authoritarian model that would look very familiar to anyone who lived in the former communist East bloc.
A few of those arrested in St. Paul, including eight leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee—one of the groups organizing protests at the GOP convention in St. Paul—now face terrorism-related charges. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector could get up to seven and a half years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge, which allows for a 50 percent increase in the maximum penalty. This is the first time criminal charges have been filed under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act, which was put in place as much to silence domestic opposition as to ferret out real terrorists, has largely lain dormant. It has authorized the government to monitor our phone conversations, e-mails, meetings and political opinions. It has authorized the government to shut down anti-war groups and lock up innocents as terrorists. It has abolished habeas corpus. But until now we have not grasped its full implications for our open society. We catch glimpses, as in St. Paul or in our offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees, of its awful destructive power.
The commercial media told us that what was important in St. Paul was happening inside the convention hall. The vapid interviews, the ridiculous soap opera sagas about Sarah Palin’s daughter and the debate about whether John McCain or Barack Obama has proprietary rights to “Change” divert us from the truth of who we have become. You had to search out “Democracy Now!,” TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness, along with a few other independent outlets, to see, hear or read real journalism from St. Paul.
It does not matter that the RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself as an “anarchist/anti-authoritarian” organization. We don’t have to embrace a political agenda to protect the right to be heard. Shut down free speech and radicals only burrow deeper underground, splitting ossified political systems into fractured extremes. We may well end up with the Christian right on one side, with politicians like Sarah Palin providing an ideological veneer to a Christian fascism, and embittered leftist radicals who turn to violence on the other.
St. Paul was not ultimately about selecting a presidential candidate. It was about the power of the corporate state to carry out pre-emptive searches, seizures and arrests. It was about squads of police in high-tech riot gear, many with drawn semiautomatic weapons, bursting into houses. It was about seized computers, journals and political literature. It was about shutting down independent journalism, even at gunpoint. It was about charging protesters with “conspiracy to commit riot,” a rarely used statute that criminalizes legal dissent. It was about 500 people held in open-air detention centers. It was about the rising Orwellian state that has hollowed out the insides of America, cast away all that was good and vital, and donned its skin to shackle us all.
Posted on Sep 8, 2008
By Chris Hedges
St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, “people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail.” It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, “people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized.” It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
The rise of the corporate state means the rise of the surveillance state. The Janus-like face of America swings from packaged and canned spectacles, from nationalist slogans, from seas of flags and Christian crosses, from professions of faith and patriotism, to widespread surveillance, illegal mass detentions, informants, provocateurs and crude acts of repression and violence. We barrel toward a world filled with stupendous lies and blood.
What difference is there between the crowds of flag-waving Republicans and the apparatchiks I covered as a reporter in the old East German Communist Party? These Republican delegates, like the fat and compromised party functionaries in East Berlin, all fawned on cue over an inept and corrupt party hierarchy. They all purported to champion workers’ rights and freedom while they systematically fleeced, disempowered and impoverished the workers they lauded. They all celebrated the virtue of a state that was morally bankrupt. And while they played this con game, one that gave them special privileges, power and wealth, they unleashed their goons and thugs on all who dared to challenge them. We are not East Germany, but we are well on our way. An economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a war with Iran, and we could easily swing into an authoritarian model that would look very familiar to anyone who lived in the former communist East bloc.
A few of those arrested in St. Paul, including eight leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee—one of the groups organizing protests at the GOP convention in St. Paul—now face terrorism-related charges. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector could get up to seven and a half years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge, which allows for a 50 percent increase in the maximum penalty. This is the first time criminal charges have been filed under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act, which was put in place as much to silence domestic opposition as to ferret out real terrorists, has largely lain dormant. It has authorized the government to monitor our phone conversations, e-mails, meetings and political opinions. It has authorized the government to shut down anti-war groups and lock up innocents as terrorists. It has abolished habeas corpus. But until now we have not grasped its full implications for our open society. We catch glimpses, as in St. Paul or in our offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees, of its awful destructive power.
The commercial media told us that what was important in St. Paul was happening inside the convention hall. The vapid interviews, the ridiculous soap opera sagas about Sarah Palin’s daughter and the debate about whether John McCain or Barack Obama has proprietary rights to “Change” divert us from the truth of who we have become. You had to search out “Democracy Now!,” TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness, along with a few other independent outlets, to see, hear or read real journalism from St. Paul.
It does not matter that the RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself as an “anarchist/anti-authoritarian” organization. We don’t have to embrace a political agenda to protect the right to be heard. Shut down free speech and radicals only burrow deeper underground, splitting ossified political systems into fractured extremes. We may well end up with the Christian right on one side, with politicians like Sarah Palin providing an ideological veneer to a Christian fascism, and embittered leftist radicals who turn to violence on the other.
St. Paul was not ultimately about selecting a presidential candidate. It was about the power of the corporate state to carry out pre-emptive searches, seizures and arrests. It was about squads of police in high-tech riot gear, many with drawn semiautomatic weapons, bursting into houses. It was about seized computers, journals and political literature. It was about shutting down independent journalism, even at gunpoint. It was about charging protesters with “conspiracy to commit riot,” a rarely used statute that criminalizes legal dissent. It was about 500 people held in open-air detention centers. It was about the rising Orwellian state that has hollowed out the insides of America, cast away all that was good and vital, and donned its skin to shackle us all.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Associated Press (Sept. 2, 2008)
Palin Faces Laundry List of Complications
Tuesday 02 September 2008
by: Matt Apuzzo, The Associated Press
Washington - GOP vice presidential pick Sarah Palin accepted at least $4,500 in campaign contributions in the same fundraising scheme at the center of a public corruption scandal that led to the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens.
The contributions, made during Palin's failed 2002 bid to become Alaska's lieutenant governor, were not illegal for her to accept. But they show how Palin, a self-proclaimed reformer who has bucked Stevens and his allies, is nonetheless a product of a political system in Alaska now under the cloud of an ongoing FBI investigation.
It's the latest in a string of revelations that have forced John McCain's campaign to defend his choice and the thoroughness of the background check of Palin, 44, a little-known governor who is new to the national stage. Palin stunned delegates at the GOP convention Monday when she announced through the McCain campaign that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant.
With the convention still abuzz, the list of potentially embarrassing details grew Tuesday:
# Palin sought pork-barrel projects for her city and state, contrary to her reformist image.
# Her husband once belonged to a fringe political group in Alaska with some members supporting secession from the United States.
# A private attorney has been authorized to spend $95,000 to defend her against accusations of abuse of power.
# She has acknowledged smoking marijuana in the past.
And this: Bristol Palin's boyfriend, Levi Johnston, plans to join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the GOP convention, the boy's mother said. He left Alaska on Tuesday morning to join the Palin family in St. Paul, Minn.
Defending his choice and the team that helped pick her, McCain said Tuesday that "the vetting process was completely thorough." Campaign advisers at the convention in St. Paul, Minn., said Palin filled out a survey with 70 questions, including: Have you ever paid for sex? Have you been faithful in your marriage? Have you ever used or purchased drugs? Have you ever downloaded pornography?
McCain's aides maintained that Palin was a finalist from the start
But a senior Republican familiar with the search, who requested anonymity when speaking without authorization, said Palin had all but fallen from the radar until late in the summer when McCain - apparently unsatisfied with his working list - asked for more alternatives. Suddenly, she was a finalist.
When she was introduced as McCain's running mate last week, Palin portrayed herself as a political maverick in McCain's mold: "I've stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies and the 'good old boy' network,"' she said.
But Alaska's first female governor has at times benefited from Alaska's entrenched political system.
As Palin campaigned unsuccessfully in 2002 to become lieutenant governor, she received contributions from executives at VECO Corp., a powerful Alaska oil field services company. Company founder Bill Allen has admitted the company steers its donations through a "special bonus program" in which executives received money and the company instructed them to donate it to favored politicians.
Allen pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption charges. He admitted the program violated federal tax laws and said it was used to keep his political allies flush with cash.
"If they're working with the oil industry, I'd like to help with their campaigns," Allen testified last year in the corruption trial of a former state lawmaker.
Since Palin's nomination last week, these issues also are raising eyebrows:
# In her earlier career as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin hired a lobbyist to help the tiny town secure at least 14 earmarks, worth $27 million between 2000-2003. McCain has touted Palin as a force in his long battle against earmarks.
# Her husband, Todd, twice registered as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a fierce states' rights group that wants to turn all federal lands in Alaska back to the state. Sarah Palin herself never registered as a member of the party, according to state officials, though party members said she attended a 1994 convention with her husband.
# The state legislature is investigating whether she had Alaska's public safety commissioner fired after he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had divorced Palin's sister. Lawyer Thomas Van Flein said he is representing Palin both personally and in her official capacity as governor. He can bill the state up to $95,000.
# Palin opposed the U.S. government's listing of a variety of animals as endangered, including the polar bear and the beluga whale, both of which inhabit areas also rich in oil and natural gas.
# Palin previously acknowledged she smoked marijuana but said in a 2006 interview she no longer used the drug. "I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled," she said.
# Palin's management style has come under scrutiny. When taking over as mayor of Wasilla, she asked top officials to submit resignation letters, resulting in several departures, including that of the police chief. The chief claimed it was because he supported her opponent in the mayor's race.
# Under her leadership this year, Alaska asked for almost $300 per person in requests for pet projects from Stevens, one of McCain's top adversaries. That's more than any other state received, per person, from Congress.
Palin has had her share of run-ins with Stevens, including a dustup earlier this year in which Stevens accused Palin of not being enthusiastic enough about his efforts to bring federal earmark money to Alaska. She has also called on Stevens' son, Ben, to resign as national committeeman for the state party.
She was among the first Alaska Republicans to urge Stevens to answer questions about the FBI investigation.
In the fundraising corruption probe, VECO founder Allen is cooperating with an FBI investigation that has already sent several state political figures to prison. He is expected to be the Justice Department's star witness at Stevens' trial later this month when he testifies about home renovations and other gifts he provided the longtime senator - gifts Stevens is charged with concealing on Senate documents.
Palin received $500, the maximum amount allowed by law, from Allen and VECO vice president Rick Smith. Several other VECO managers, including Pete Leathard, who came up with the idea for the special bonus program, also donated the maximum. Allen's son, a VECO employee, also donated $500. All the checks were donated the same day, except for Leathard's, which was dated two days after the rest.
John Cramer, one of Palin's treasurers for her 2002 campaign, said he doesn't remember any indications that the money came from a special company program.
The donations aren't evidence of corruption, and Palin is not among the lawmakers under investigation in the VECO case. But they undermine arguments that Palin has broken from Alaska's Republican machine, including Stevens.
"If you can take on Ted Stevens and that crowd in Alaska, you can handle the Russians," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C, told ABC News this week.
But Palin didn't reach the governor's office picking fights with the Senate's longest-serving Republican. She was a director for a nonprofit group Stevens set up to increase the number of Republican women in government. Stevens also campaigned for Palin in 2006 and appeared in a political advertisement for her.
Palin has had her share of run-ins with Stevens, including a dustup earlier this year in which Stevens accused Palin of not being enthusiastic enough about his efforts to bring federal earmark money to Alaska. She has also called on Stevens' son, Ben, to resign as national committeeman for the state party.
She was among the first Alaska Republicans to urge Stevens to answer questions about the FBI investigation. But she did not urge him to resign after his indictment, as she did after a state lawmaker was indicted. She said Stevens "has dedicated his life to the betterment of the state."
--------
Associated Press writers Sharon Theimer contributed to this story from Washington and Ron Fournier contributed from St. Paul, Minn.
Tuesday 02 September 2008
by: Matt Apuzzo, The Associated Press
Washington - GOP vice presidential pick Sarah Palin accepted at least $4,500 in campaign contributions in the same fundraising scheme at the center of a public corruption scandal that led to the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens.
The contributions, made during Palin's failed 2002 bid to become Alaska's lieutenant governor, were not illegal for her to accept. But they show how Palin, a self-proclaimed reformer who has bucked Stevens and his allies, is nonetheless a product of a political system in Alaska now under the cloud of an ongoing FBI investigation.
It's the latest in a string of revelations that have forced John McCain's campaign to defend his choice and the thoroughness of the background check of Palin, 44, a little-known governor who is new to the national stage. Palin stunned delegates at the GOP convention Monday when she announced through the McCain campaign that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant.
With the convention still abuzz, the list of potentially embarrassing details grew Tuesday:
# Palin sought pork-barrel projects for her city and state, contrary to her reformist image.
# Her husband once belonged to a fringe political group in Alaska with some members supporting secession from the United States.
# A private attorney has been authorized to spend $95,000 to defend her against accusations of abuse of power.
# She has acknowledged smoking marijuana in the past.
And this: Bristol Palin's boyfriend, Levi Johnston, plans to join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the GOP convention, the boy's mother said. He left Alaska on Tuesday morning to join the Palin family in St. Paul, Minn.
Defending his choice and the team that helped pick her, McCain said Tuesday that "the vetting process was completely thorough." Campaign advisers at the convention in St. Paul, Minn., said Palin filled out a survey with 70 questions, including: Have you ever paid for sex? Have you been faithful in your marriage? Have you ever used or purchased drugs? Have you ever downloaded pornography?
McCain's aides maintained that Palin was a finalist from the start
But a senior Republican familiar with the search, who requested anonymity when speaking without authorization, said Palin had all but fallen from the radar until late in the summer when McCain - apparently unsatisfied with his working list - asked for more alternatives. Suddenly, she was a finalist.
When she was introduced as McCain's running mate last week, Palin portrayed herself as a political maverick in McCain's mold: "I've stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies and the 'good old boy' network,"' she said.
But Alaska's first female governor has at times benefited from Alaska's entrenched political system.
As Palin campaigned unsuccessfully in 2002 to become lieutenant governor, she received contributions from executives at VECO Corp., a powerful Alaska oil field services company. Company founder Bill Allen has admitted the company steers its donations through a "special bonus program" in which executives received money and the company instructed them to donate it to favored politicians.
Allen pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption charges. He admitted the program violated federal tax laws and said it was used to keep his political allies flush with cash.
"If they're working with the oil industry, I'd like to help with their campaigns," Allen testified last year in the corruption trial of a former state lawmaker.
Since Palin's nomination last week, these issues also are raising eyebrows:
# In her earlier career as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin hired a lobbyist to help the tiny town secure at least 14 earmarks, worth $27 million between 2000-2003. McCain has touted Palin as a force in his long battle against earmarks.
# Her husband, Todd, twice registered as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a fierce states' rights group that wants to turn all federal lands in Alaska back to the state. Sarah Palin herself never registered as a member of the party, according to state officials, though party members said she attended a 1994 convention with her husband.
# The state legislature is investigating whether she had Alaska's public safety commissioner fired after he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had divorced Palin's sister. Lawyer Thomas Van Flein said he is representing Palin both personally and in her official capacity as governor. He can bill the state up to $95,000.
# Palin opposed the U.S. government's listing of a variety of animals as endangered, including the polar bear and the beluga whale, both of which inhabit areas also rich in oil and natural gas.
# Palin previously acknowledged she smoked marijuana but said in a 2006 interview she no longer used the drug. "I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled," she said.
# Palin's management style has come under scrutiny. When taking over as mayor of Wasilla, she asked top officials to submit resignation letters, resulting in several departures, including that of the police chief. The chief claimed it was because he supported her opponent in the mayor's race.
# Under her leadership this year, Alaska asked for almost $300 per person in requests for pet projects from Stevens, one of McCain's top adversaries. That's more than any other state received, per person, from Congress.
Palin has had her share of run-ins with Stevens, including a dustup earlier this year in which Stevens accused Palin of not being enthusiastic enough about his efforts to bring federal earmark money to Alaska. She has also called on Stevens' son, Ben, to resign as national committeeman for the state party.
She was among the first Alaska Republicans to urge Stevens to answer questions about the FBI investigation.
In the fundraising corruption probe, VECO founder Allen is cooperating with an FBI investigation that has already sent several state political figures to prison. He is expected to be the Justice Department's star witness at Stevens' trial later this month when he testifies about home renovations and other gifts he provided the longtime senator - gifts Stevens is charged with concealing on Senate documents.
Palin received $500, the maximum amount allowed by law, from Allen and VECO vice president Rick Smith. Several other VECO managers, including Pete Leathard, who came up with the idea for the special bonus program, also donated the maximum. Allen's son, a VECO employee, also donated $500. All the checks were donated the same day, except for Leathard's, which was dated two days after the rest.
John Cramer, one of Palin's treasurers for her 2002 campaign, said he doesn't remember any indications that the money came from a special company program.
The donations aren't evidence of corruption, and Palin is not among the lawmakers under investigation in the VECO case. But they undermine arguments that Palin has broken from Alaska's Republican machine, including Stevens.
"If you can take on Ted Stevens and that crowd in Alaska, you can handle the Russians," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C, told ABC News this week.
But Palin didn't reach the governor's office picking fights with the Senate's longest-serving Republican. She was a director for a nonprofit group Stevens set up to increase the number of Republican women in government. Stevens also campaigned for Palin in 2006 and appeared in a political advertisement for her.
Palin has had her share of run-ins with Stevens, including a dustup earlier this year in which Stevens accused Palin of not being enthusiastic enough about his efforts to bring federal earmark money to Alaska. She has also called on Stevens' son, Ben, to resign as national committeeman for the state party.
She was among the first Alaska Republicans to urge Stevens to answer questions about the FBI investigation. But she did not urge him to resign after his indictment, as she did after a state lawmaker was indicted. She said Stevens "has dedicated his life to the betterment of the state."
--------
Associated Press writers Sharon Theimer contributed to this story from Washington and Ron Fournier contributed from St. Paul, Minn.
N.Y. Times (Sept. 3, 2008)
September 3, 2008
Candidate McCain’s Big Decision
More often than not, the role of a vice president is a minor one, unless some tragedy occurs. But a presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate is vitally important. It is his first executive decision and offers an important insight into how that nominee would lead the nation.
If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
Mr. McCain’s supporters are valiantly trying to argue that the selection was a bold stroke that shows their candidate is a risk-taking maverick who — we can believe — will change Washington. (Mr. Obama’s call for change — now “the change we need” — has become all the rage in St. Paul.)
To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.
As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology.
If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate, there are a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.
Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost three years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.
Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.
Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.
Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.
The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.
Mr. McCain will make his acceptance speech on Thursday, and Ms. Palin will speak on Wednesday. Those two appearances will go a long way to forming voters’ views of this Republican ticket.
As Senator Graham noted, Mr. McCain has to reach out beyond the party’s loyal base. “We’re going to have to win this thing,” he said. “This is not our race to lose.”
Mr. McCain’s hurdles are substantial. To start, he has to overcome Mr. Bush’s record of failures. (The president addressed the convention Tuesday night and now, McCain strategists fervently hope, will retire quietly to the Rose Garden.) That record includes the disastrous war in Iraq, a ballooning deficit, the mortgage crisis — and the list goes on.
To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.
Candidate McCain’s Big Decision
More often than not, the role of a vice president is a minor one, unless some tragedy occurs. But a presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate is vitally important. It is his first executive decision and offers an important insight into how that nominee would lead the nation.
If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
Mr. McCain’s supporters are valiantly trying to argue that the selection was a bold stroke that shows their candidate is a risk-taking maverick who — we can believe — will change Washington. (Mr. Obama’s call for change — now “the change we need” — has become all the rage in St. Paul.)
To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.
As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology.
If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate, there are a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.
Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost three years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.
Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.
Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.
Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.
The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.
Mr. McCain will make his acceptance speech on Thursday, and Ms. Palin will speak on Wednesday. Those two appearances will go a long way to forming voters’ views of this Republican ticket.
As Senator Graham noted, Mr. McCain has to reach out beyond the party’s loyal base. “We’re going to have to win this thing,” he said. “This is not our race to lose.”
Mr. McCain’s hurdles are substantial. To start, he has to overcome Mr. Bush’s record of failures. (The president addressed the convention Tuesday night and now, McCain strategists fervently hope, will retire quietly to the Rose Garden.) That record includes the disastrous war in Iraq, a ballooning deficit, the mortgage crisis — and the list goes on.
To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.
Andrewsullivan.com (Sept. 3, 2008)
Bush: "McCain Wasn't 'Tortured'"
I checked the transcript this morning and the biggest bombshell in this campaign so far, in my opinion, is the following section of Bush's speech:
John McCain's life is a story of service above self. Forty years ago, in an enemy prison camp, Lieutenant Commander McCain was offered release ahead of others who had been held longer.
His wounds were so severe that anyone would have understood if he had accepted.
John refused. For that selfless decision, he suffered nearly five more years of beatings and isolation. When he was released, his arms had been broken, but not his honor.
Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.
Now have you ever heard someone recount what was done to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and not use the word "torture"? I haven't. "Beatings and isolation" is a bizarre phrase to use to describe the torture that was done to John McCain. I'm sure McCain thinks so.
Am I being persnickety? As with the Trig story, there's a very easy way to find out - if the press will simply do its job. A White House reporter needs to ask the president, quite simply, if he believes that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. Just ask. Use that specific word. See if he can answer.
The reason he put it this way, I infer, is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
I repeat: The reason he put it this way is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
Now prove me wrong. Please prove me wrong.
I checked the transcript this morning and the biggest bombshell in this campaign so far, in my opinion, is the following section of Bush's speech:
John McCain's life is a story of service above self. Forty years ago, in an enemy prison camp, Lieutenant Commander McCain was offered release ahead of others who had been held longer.
His wounds were so severe that anyone would have understood if he had accepted.
John refused. For that selfless decision, he suffered nearly five more years of beatings and isolation. When he was released, his arms had been broken, but not his honor.
Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.
Now have you ever heard someone recount what was done to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and not use the word "torture"? I haven't. "Beatings and isolation" is a bizarre phrase to use to describe the torture that was done to John McCain. I'm sure McCain thinks so.
Am I being persnickety? As with the Trig story, there's a very easy way to find out - if the press will simply do its job. A White House reporter needs to ask the president, quite simply, if he believes that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. Just ask. Use that specific word. See if he can answer.
The reason he put it this way, I infer, is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
I repeat: The reason he put it this way is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
Now prove me wrong. Please prove me wrong.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Katrina vanden Heuvel - The Nation (Sept. 1, 2008)
When the GOP Met Gustav
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 09/01/2008
The campaign website of Senator John McCain declares that the arrival of Hurricane Gustav is a moment for "Serving a Cause Greater". (Whatever that means.) The GOP--which for eight years demonstrated what columnist Paul Krugman described as "an ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good" --has now reshuffled its convention, talked of fundraisers, phonathons, and volunteers--and told America it's above partisan politics and is putting the country first.
On Monday, the McCain campaign website ran a quote from the candidate himself smack-dab on the homepage: "I pledge that tomorrow night and if necessary throughout our convention, we will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."
Darn right--you better not act like Republicans if you want to help America.
As Christopher Hayes wrote in his excellent post today, "Volunteers and fundraising isn't the solution for the Gulf, competent government is, and John McCain has hardly lifted a finger to make that happen." Hayes points out that McCain warned against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims; voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the response to Katrina in mid-September 2005; voted against allowing up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane; and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.
McCain's newfound "concern" for the plight of disaster victims is as cynical as some of his recent campaign moves (think, Palin). Consider that in a visit to New Orleans in April McCain said he wasn't sure whether the Lower 9th Ward should be rebuilt:
We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.
On the same visit, he wouldn't comment on the disparity in funding for the War in Iraq versus funding for Gulf Coast rebuilding. (Senator James Webb said in 2007, "If we're putting all of this money into Iraq and ignoring New Orleans, then we're doing something wrong.") New Orleans and natural disaster preparedness aren't even mentioned as issues on his campaign website.
In contrast, Senator Barack Obama has a five-page plan on Gulf Coast rebuilding and preventing future catastrophes here. He introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income and special needs hurricane victims. He has spoken out on the need to streamline the reconstruction process--authorized monies have been slow to arrive as "Louisiana officials have had to fill out more than five million forms to get reconstruction money from FEMA."
ABC News reported Monday, "Just one-third of the levees have been repaired in the last three years and an additional 350 miles of embankments still need to be fixed. Eighteen pump stations along the levees have been repaired, but 12 more have not been improved." Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal--once on McCain's shortlist for VP before the selection of Governor Sarah Palin--told the Wall Street Journal that the Army Corps of Engineers "is not nearly done with levee work that was supposed to have been done."
No matter what happens with Gustav, the GOP response to Hurricane Katrina continues to be an epic failure.
When Obama was speaking out about levee rebuilding that was "piecemeal and disorganized," and "major sections of the city remain nearly as vulnerable as they were before the storm," where were McCain and the Republicans? Or, when he was writing to Donald Powell, the Federal Coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding, describing the severe mental health implications of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast children--urging more resources to help those suffering and a coordinated plan that addresses children's mental health needs for future disaster response and recovery--where were the Republicans then? Beyond Katrina, where have the Republicans been as Democrats pushed for a focus on infrastructure improvements and the US became "the only major industrial society that is not...renewing and expanding its public infrastructure."
The GOP was MIA, as the lead editorial in this week's Nation argues, "they were scorning the very government they were elected to lead."
So McCain can mosey on down to the Gulf region for a photo op as he views emergency preparations (Obama felt his entourage would be a disruption and opted to speak to officials by phone), and Republicans can try to whitewash eight years of failing the American people with a song and dance about shaking up their convention for a higher cause. But the American people won't be fooled. "Not this time," Obama might say.
This is a defining moment. It's going to take a lot more than Gustav to blow away eight years of Republican neglect.
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 09/01/2008
The campaign website of Senator John McCain declares that the arrival of Hurricane Gustav is a moment for "Serving a Cause Greater". (Whatever that means.) The GOP--which for eight years demonstrated what columnist Paul Krugman described as "an ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good" --has now reshuffled its convention, talked of fundraisers, phonathons, and volunteers--and told America it's above partisan politics and is putting the country first.
On Monday, the McCain campaign website ran a quote from the candidate himself smack-dab on the homepage: "I pledge that tomorrow night and if necessary throughout our convention, we will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."
Darn right--you better not act like Republicans if you want to help America.
As Christopher Hayes wrote in his excellent post today, "Volunteers and fundraising isn't the solution for the Gulf, competent government is, and John McCain has hardly lifted a finger to make that happen." Hayes points out that McCain warned against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims; voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the response to Katrina in mid-September 2005; voted against allowing up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane; and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.
McCain's newfound "concern" for the plight of disaster victims is as cynical as some of his recent campaign moves (think, Palin). Consider that in a visit to New Orleans in April McCain said he wasn't sure whether the Lower 9th Ward should be rebuilt:
We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.
On the same visit, he wouldn't comment on the disparity in funding for the War in Iraq versus funding for Gulf Coast rebuilding. (Senator James Webb said in 2007, "If we're putting all of this money into Iraq and ignoring New Orleans, then we're doing something wrong.") New Orleans and natural disaster preparedness aren't even mentioned as issues on his campaign website.
In contrast, Senator Barack Obama has a five-page plan on Gulf Coast rebuilding and preventing future catastrophes here. He introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income and special needs hurricane victims. He has spoken out on the need to streamline the reconstruction process--authorized monies have been slow to arrive as "Louisiana officials have had to fill out more than five million forms to get reconstruction money from FEMA."
ABC News reported Monday, "Just one-third of the levees have been repaired in the last three years and an additional 350 miles of embankments still need to be fixed. Eighteen pump stations along the levees have been repaired, but 12 more have not been improved." Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal--once on McCain's shortlist for VP before the selection of Governor Sarah Palin--told the Wall Street Journal that the Army Corps of Engineers "is not nearly done with levee work that was supposed to have been done."
No matter what happens with Gustav, the GOP response to Hurricane Katrina continues to be an epic failure.
When Obama was speaking out about levee rebuilding that was "piecemeal and disorganized," and "major sections of the city remain nearly as vulnerable as they were before the storm," where were McCain and the Republicans? Or, when he was writing to Donald Powell, the Federal Coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding, describing the severe mental health implications of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast children--urging more resources to help those suffering and a coordinated plan that addresses children's mental health needs for future disaster response and recovery--where were the Republicans then? Beyond Katrina, where have the Republicans been as Democrats pushed for a focus on infrastructure improvements and the US became "the only major industrial society that is not...renewing and expanding its public infrastructure."
The GOP was MIA, as the lead editorial in this week's Nation argues, "they were scorning the very government they were elected to lead."
So McCain can mosey on down to the Gulf region for a photo op as he views emergency preparations (Obama felt his entourage would be a disruption and opted to speak to officials by phone), and Republicans can try to whitewash eight years of failing the American people with a song and dance about shaking up their convention for a higher cause. But the American people won't be fooled. "Not this time," Obama might say.
This is a defining moment. It's going to take a lot more than Gustav to blow away eight years of Republican neglect.
Eugene Robinson - Washington Post (Sept. 2, 2008)
So Much for ‘Country First’
Posted on Sep 2, 2008
By Eugene Robinson
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin’s central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the “bridge to nowhere”—a $398-million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And just two years ago as a candidate for governor, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.
I know, we’re not supposed to pay attention to such inconvenient details. We’re supposed to be dazzled by how unaffected she is, how plain-spoken, how “genuine.”
Indeed, if you don’t get hung up on her actual record, Palin simply is who she is. It’s not her fault that she’s a former Miss Wasilla with a campy “Northern Exposure” vibe, doctrinaire social-conservative views and no discernible qualifications for being vice president. It’s undeniable that people in Alaska apparently like her well enough, though they seem to have been even more shocked than the rest of us when she was named to the Republican ticket. In any event, she’s not the one who created this farcical situation.
We learned last week that John McCain is not who he is—not, at least, who he claims to be. The steady, straight-talking, country-first statesman his campaign has been selling is a fictional character. The real McCain is either alarmingly cynical or dangerously reckless.
You will recall that McCain gave the same prime criterion for choosing a running mate that every presidential candidate gives: someone who is ready to step in as president if, heaven forbid, the need arises. Barack Obama echoed those words before picking Joe Biden, who is about as prepared as a vice presidential candidate could ever be.
You will also recall that McCain and his supporters have been lecturing us about the grave and urgent dangers our country faces—Islamic fundamentalism, the resurgence of Russia and other geopolitical threats. In a menacing world, McCain says, he will keep America safe.
So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let’s face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn’t count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.
At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it’s different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida.
McCain’s political calculation in choosing Palin is obvious. Social conservatives, who had been unexcited by his candidacy, are ecstatic that he has picked a running mate who staunchly opposes abortion, favors the teaching of “intelligent design” in the public schools and generally embraces the agenda of the religious right.
I have my doubts about the other objective of McCain’s gambit: to win the votes of blue-collar women who supported Hillary Clinton. For one thing, these voters disagree sharply with Palin on most of the issues. For another, initial indications are that many women were insulted at the notion that they would automatically swoon over any candidate who happened to have two X chromosomes. Republicans tend to have a comically simplistic view of how “identity politics” works. They should recall how African-Americans reacted when Clarence Thomas was named to the Supreme Court.
Whatever the political impact, so much for the John McCain we thought we knew. In choosing Palin, he cynically did what his party is always accusing Democrats of doing: He selected a running mate based on her potential ability to appeal to targeted segments of the electorate, rather than for her honestly assessed ability to lead the nation should the occasion arise.
The other thing we learned about McCain is that he is willing to take an enormous gamble based on limited information. He met Palin only once before summoning her for a final interview. He realized he needed to shake up the presidential race, and that’s what he did. But we are reminded, if we did not realize it before, that the three things not to expect from a McCain presidency are caution, prudence and a willingness to always put the nation’s interests above his own.
Posted on Sep 2, 2008
By Eugene Robinson
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin’s central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the “bridge to nowhere”—a $398-million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And just two years ago as a candidate for governor, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.
I know, we’re not supposed to pay attention to such inconvenient details. We’re supposed to be dazzled by how unaffected she is, how plain-spoken, how “genuine.”
Indeed, if you don’t get hung up on her actual record, Palin simply is who she is. It’s not her fault that she’s a former Miss Wasilla with a campy “Northern Exposure” vibe, doctrinaire social-conservative views and no discernible qualifications for being vice president. It’s undeniable that people in Alaska apparently like her well enough, though they seem to have been even more shocked than the rest of us when she was named to the Republican ticket. In any event, she’s not the one who created this farcical situation.
We learned last week that John McCain is not who he is—not, at least, who he claims to be. The steady, straight-talking, country-first statesman his campaign has been selling is a fictional character. The real McCain is either alarmingly cynical or dangerously reckless.
You will recall that McCain gave the same prime criterion for choosing a running mate that every presidential candidate gives: someone who is ready to step in as president if, heaven forbid, the need arises. Barack Obama echoed those words before picking Joe Biden, who is about as prepared as a vice presidential candidate could ever be.
You will also recall that McCain and his supporters have been lecturing us about the grave and urgent dangers our country faces—Islamic fundamentalism, the resurgence of Russia and other geopolitical threats. In a menacing world, McCain says, he will keep America safe.
So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let’s face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn’t count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.
At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it’s different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida.
McCain’s political calculation in choosing Palin is obvious. Social conservatives, who had been unexcited by his candidacy, are ecstatic that he has picked a running mate who staunchly opposes abortion, favors the teaching of “intelligent design” in the public schools and generally embraces the agenda of the religious right.
I have my doubts about the other objective of McCain’s gambit: to win the votes of blue-collar women who supported Hillary Clinton. For one thing, these voters disagree sharply with Palin on most of the issues. For another, initial indications are that many women were insulted at the notion that they would automatically swoon over any candidate who happened to have two X chromosomes. Republicans tend to have a comically simplistic view of how “identity politics” works. They should recall how African-Americans reacted when Clarence Thomas was named to the Supreme Court.
Whatever the political impact, so much for the John McCain we thought we knew. In choosing Palin, he cynically did what his party is always accusing Democrats of doing: He selected a running mate based on her potential ability to appeal to targeted segments of the electorate, rather than for her honestly assessed ability to lead the nation should the occasion arise.
The other thing we learned about McCain is that he is willing to take an enormous gamble based on limited information. He met Palin only once before summoning her for a final interview. He realized he needed to shake up the presidential race, and that’s what he did. But we are reminded, if we did not realize it before, that the three things not to expect from a McCain presidency are caution, prudence and a willingness to always put the nation’s interests above his own.
Truthdig.com (Sept. 1, 2008)
Iraq From the Inside
Iraqi journalist Huda Ahmed, now a refugee, looks back on more than five years of war and occupation from an Iraqi perspective.
Full article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080901_iraq_inside_transcript/
Iraqi journalist Huda Ahmed, now a refugee, looks back on more than five years of war and occupation from an Iraqi perspective.
Full article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080901_iraq_inside_transcript/
N.Y. Times (August 31, 2008)
August 31, 2008
Economic View
Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?
By ALAN S. BLINDER
CLEARLY, there are major differences between the economic policies of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. Mr. McCain wants more tax cuts for the rich; Mr. Obama wants tax cuts for the poor and middle class. The two men also disagree on health care, energy and many other topics.
Such differences are hardly surprising. Democrats and Republicans have followed different approaches to the economy for as long as there have been Democrats and Republicans. Longer, actually. Remember Hamilton versus Jefferson?
Many Americans know that there are characteristic policy differences between the two parties. But few are aware of two important facts about the post-World War II era, both of which are brilliantly delineated in a new book, “Unequal Democracy,” by Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton. Understanding them might help voters see what could be at stake, economically speaking, in November.
I call the first fact the Great Partisan Growth Divide. Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.
That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.
Such a large historical gap in economic performance between the two parties is rather surprising, because presidents have limited leverage over the nation’s economy. Most economists will tell you that Federal Reserve policy and oil prices, to name just two influences, are far more powerful than fiscal policy. Furthermore, as those mutual fund prospectuses constantly warn us, past results are no guarantee of future performance. But statistical regularities, like facts, are stubborn things. You bet against them at your peril.
The second big historical fact, which might be called the Great Partisan Inequality Divide, is the focus of Professor Bartels’s work.
It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now — an unsettling development that has finally touched the public consciousness. But Professor Bartels unearths a stunning statistical regularity: Over the entire 60-year period, income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all. And the bad news for America’s poor is that Republicans have won five of the seven elections going back to 1980.
The Great Partisan Inequality Divide is not limited to the poor. To get a more granular look, Professor Bartels studied the postwar history of income gains at five different places in the income distribution.
The 20th percentile is the income level at which 20 percent of all families have less income and 80 percent have more. It is thus a plausible dividing line between the poor and the nonpoor. Similarly, the 40th percentile is the income level at which 40 percent of the families are poorer and 60 percent are richer. And similarly for the 60th, 80th, and 95th percentiles. The 95th percentile is the best dividing line between the rich and the nonrich that the data permitted Professor Bartels to study. (That dividing line, by the way, is well below the $5 million threshold John McCain has jokingly used for defining the rich. It’s closer to $180,000.)
The accompanying table, which is adapted from the book, tells a remarkably consistent story. It shows that when Democrats were in the White House, lower-income families experienced slightly faster income growth than higher-income families — which means that incomes were equalizing. In stark contrast, it also shows much faster income growth for the better-off when Republicans were in the White House — thus widening the gap in income.
The table also shows that families at the 95th percentile fared almost as well under Republican presidents as under Democrats (1.90 percent growth per year, versus 2.12 percent), giving them little stake, economically, in election outcomes. But the stakes were enormous for the less well-to-do. Families at the 20th percentile fared much worse under Republicans than under Democrats (0.43 percent versus 2.64 percent). Eight years of growth at an annual rate of 0.43 percent increases a family’s income by just 3.5 percent, while eight years of growth at 2.64 percent raises it by 23.2 percent.
The sources of such large differences make for a slightly complicated story. In the early part of the period — say, the pre-Reagan years — the Great Partisan Growth Divide accounted for most of the Great Partisan Inequality divide, because the poor do relatively better in a high-growth economy.
Beginning with the Reagan presidency, however, growth differences are smaller and tax and transfer policies have played a larger role. We know, for example, that Republicans have typically favored large tax cuts for upper-income groups while Democrats have opposed them. In addition, Democrats have been more willing to raise the minimum wage, and Republicans have been more hostile toward unions.
The two Great Partisan Divides combine to suggest that, if history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality. Which part of the Obama menu don’t you like?
Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He has advised many Democratic politicians.
Economic View
Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?
By ALAN S. BLINDER
CLEARLY, there are major differences between the economic policies of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. Mr. McCain wants more tax cuts for the rich; Mr. Obama wants tax cuts for the poor and middle class. The two men also disagree on health care, energy and many other topics.
Such differences are hardly surprising. Democrats and Republicans have followed different approaches to the economy for as long as there have been Democrats and Republicans. Longer, actually. Remember Hamilton versus Jefferson?
Many Americans know that there are characteristic policy differences between the two parties. But few are aware of two important facts about the post-World War II era, both of which are brilliantly delineated in a new book, “Unequal Democracy,” by Larry M. Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton. Understanding them might help voters see what could be at stake, economically speaking, in November.
I call the first fact the Great Partisan Growth Divide. Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.
That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.
Such a large historical gap in economic performance between the two parties is rather surprising, because presidents have limited leverage over the nation’s economy. Most economists will tell you that Federal Reserve policy and oil prices, to name just two influences, are far more powerful than fiscal policy. Furthermore, as those mutual fund prospectuses constantly warn us, past results are no guarantee of future performance. But statistical regularities, like facts, are stubborn things. You bet against them at your peril.
The second big historical fact, which might be called the Great Partisan Inequality Divide, is the focus of Professor Bartels’s work.
It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now — an unsettling development that has finally touched the public consciousness. But Professor Bartels unearths a stunning statistical regularity: Over the entire 60-year period, income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all. And the bad news for America’s poor is that Republicans have won five of the seven elections going back to 1980.
The Great Partisan Inequality Divide is not limited to the poor. To get a more granular look, Professor Bartels studied the postwar history of income gains at five different places in the income distribution.
The 20th percentile is the income level at which 20 percent of all families have less income and 80 percent have more. It is thus a plausible dividing line between the poor and the nonpoor. Similarly, the 40th percentile is the income level at which 40 percent of the families are poorer and 60 percent are richer. And similarly for the 60th, 80th, and 95th percentiles. The 95th percentile is the best dividing line between the rich and the nonrich that the data permitted Professor Bartels to study. (That dividing line, by the way, is well below the $5 million threshold John McCain has jokingly used for defining the rich. It’s closer to $180,000.)
The accompanying table, which is adapted from the book, tells a remarkably consistent story. It shows that when Democrats were in the White House, lower-income families experienced slightly faster income growth than higher-income families — which means that incomes were equalizing. In stark contrast, it also shows much faster income growth for the better-off when Republicans were in the White House — thus widening the gap in income.
The table also shows that families at the 95th percentile fared almost as well under Republican presidents as under Democrats (1.90 percent growth per year, versus 2.12 percent), giving them little stake, economically, in election outcomes. But the stakes were enormous for the less well-to-do. Families at the 20th percentile fared much worse under Republicans than under Democrats (0.43 percent versus 2.64 percent). Eight years of growth at an annual rate of 0.43 percent increases a family’s income by just 3.5 percent, while eight years of growth at 2.64 percent raises it by 23.2 percent.
The sources of such large differences make for a slightly complicated story. In the early part of the period — say, the pre-Reagan years — the Great Partisan Growth Divide accounted for most of the Great Partisan Inequality divide, because the poor do relatively better in a high-growth economy.
Beginning with the Reagan presidency, however, growth differences are smaller and tax and transfer policies have played a larger role. We know, for example, that Republicans have typically favored large tax cuts for upper-income groups while Democrats have opposed them. In addition, Democrats have been more willing to raise the minimum wage, and Republicans have been more hostile toward unions.
The two Great Partisan Divides combine to suggest that, if history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality. Which part of the Obama menu don’t you like?
Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He has advised many Democratic politicians.
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